“No! Do you eat it in your kingdom?”
He smiles and shakes his head no. “But I guarantee you, it is going to taste incredible. Fresh meat on an empty stomach is always a pleasure.”
He hurries off, leaving me alone in the shelter.
A while later, he returns with his arms laden with wood, several different-sized strips of leather tucked into his belt, and his leather pants cut off above his knees, leaving his boots covering the lower half of his calves and the rest of his calves bare. Seeing a grown man’s legs is almost as scandalous as seeing a man without his shirt on, and despite the fact that my legs have been bare for days, I blush and look away.
“Here.” Golmarr holds two thin, sharpened sticks and the two snake carcasses out to me. “Thread the snakes onto the sticks like you’re sewing stitches into cloth,” he instructs.
I take the snakes and sticks, and before I have time to become squeamish, my mind and body know exactly what to do. Without even thinking about it, my nimble hands stab the stick through the snake flesh, loop beneath it, and pull it back out again, just like I am sewing. In less than a minute, the entire length of the snake is skewered. I do it with the other snake, and when I look up, Golmarr is staring at me.
“You’ve obviously done that before,” he says.
I shake my head. “No, I have never touched raw meat before.” I look at my hands in awe. “It is as if my fingers knew exactly what to do.”
Golmarr studies me for a drawn-out minute. Finally, he says, “Like when you fought the Mayanchi in the cave.”
“Yes, like that.”
“I wonder what else you can do.” He takes his unstrung bow from his back and a long string of leather from his belt, and then measures the leather where the bowstring should go, leaving a lot of slack. He ties a knot into each end of the leather and strings the bow with it. Next, he puts a dry, flat piece of pine bark on the ground and uses his foot to hold it in place. Last, he loops a stick through the loose leather bowstring and places the end of it on the bark. Holding the stick loosely in place, he starts sawing back and forth with his bow, making the stick spin quickly on top of the bark. Back and forth, back and forth he pulls the bow. The faster he does it, the hotter the spinning stick grows where it is pressed to the bark. After a few short minutes, smoke rises from the point where stick and bark meet. A moment later, a small orange flame jumps to life.
Golmarr sets the bow aside and deftly places a stack of brittle brown pine needles on the flame. For a minute, I think the fire has gone out. And then the needles burst with warm light as the fire devours them.
Golmarr lays the smallest sticks he’s gathered onto the fire, and after they’ve been taken with flame, he places big, thick boughs atop it. When it has burned down a bit, I hold the skewered snakes close to the coals, and the mouthwatering aroma of cooking meat fills the shelter. When the snakes are browned and sizzling, I pass the bigger one to Golmarr, but he shakes his head and takes the smaller one for himself.
I hesitate for only a moment before biting into the bigger snake. Sinking my teeth into the hot meat, I pull the flesh from the bones and swallow without chewing more than twice.
“Good?” Golmarr asks.
“Yes. Very. Snake is my new favorite food.” When nothing more than a long, narrow trail of vertebrae remains attached to the stick, I toss it into the fire.
Outside the shelter, full dark has settled over the land, and with it the air has grown uncomfortably cold. Golmarr steps out into the darkness and comes back with an armful of pine boughs, which he uses to block the triangular entrance to our small shelter.
He sits down beside me and we both stare at the fire. “I would like to ask you something,” he says.
I hug my legs to my chest and rest my head on my knees so I am looking at him. “What do you want to ask me?”
His brows pull together, and his face loses all of its mischief. “This morning, you told me that the thought of kissing me is improper and disgraceful. Is it because I am Antharian? A barbarian?”
I open my mouth to tell him no, but he presses his fingers over my lips.