“What do you mean? How could something so special hurt me? This isn’t a cold or a cut. It’s not an illness that would … would kill …” She trailed off for a moment, hand clenched in Morgan’s mane. “I have to do something.”
The fight, the stone, in Tea’s voice made Izzy flinch. “I’ve never heard you speak like that. That you wanted to fight.”
“It’s not a very ladylike thing to mention.”
“Bugger ladylike! We’re up to our elbows in sheep shit daily.”
“Izzy!”
Long shadows from the hills touched their feet. Yes, this was what she was good at. Izzy reached into the shadow, twisted it to her means. There. Anger taste. Whaiwhaiā burning too bright, too hard, too loud.
“Tea, show me your hands.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Take your gloves off.” Izzy had to take a deep breath. The shadow was squeezing her chest. “Please.”
Tea stripped off her leather riding gloves. “See. Dirty, from being up to our elbows—”
Izzy dropped the handful of grass she was using to brush Carmine and grabbed Tea’s hands. Tea flinched at the sudden touch.
“This is what I’m talking about.” Izzy squeezed Tea’s hands too hard, making knuckle grate painfully against knuckle.
The skin on Tea’s hands up to the tan line was darker than the rest of her. Not quite the oily taniwha skin of that incredible, terrible first night of discovery, but the scale ridges were showing.
Izzy continued. “If you’re not practised, if you’re not careful, things will start to show. Then you’ll really be in trouble. If you want to fight, you have to survive first. Do you know what they do to people like us? They call us mad. Lock us away in asylums. Put us in prison. And they don’t do it to protect us. They do it to protect themselves. They just don’t know from what.”
Tea stared at her hands, and the hands holding her. The war, inside and out, battled across her face.
“Concentrate,” Izzy said, weariness weighting her grip. “You have to learn to concentrate. Carry on. Chin up. Pay attention. All those things we hate to hear.”
Tea pulled away, rougher than she should have, her ragged nails scratching Izzy’s flesh lightly. In the moment it took her to turn back to attending Morgan, her features moved like heat against the hills. Her skin rougher, a shimmer of oily colour. Hair like tendrils. Her desires a halo. Then she was Tea again, rounded cheeks, pert, tired.
Izzy couldn’t bear the taut silence in which they set the fire, billy, and stew pot. Muttering something about checking the sheep, she drew space around her and paced the long line of the flock. Twilight and exuberant dogs danced around her as she tried to sort through the detritus of her thoughts. Had she pushed her friend too far?
Friend. She was thinking of Tea as a friend. But it was more, much more than that. Something people called unnatural. Something she had been far more afraid of than her canine flesh. Being a dog was easy. Being human, her type of human, was almost impossible.
She had to be careful there, too.
The day’s wariness and weariness settled into her bones and muscles. The fire was so inviting, but she didn’t want to encroach on Tea’s space and thoughts. Stars prickled overhead, the celestial shapes of her ancestors. Did Robbie look upon these same stars, too, and think of home?
Robbie. Was he holding a gun, driving a tank, building a bridge? What did a sapper do, anyway? She found it easier to imagine him building something rather than destroying, bringing death.
*
Tea massaged her right hand. How could she have been so careless, not even realising her eelskin was growing on her under her gloves? Another thing she had to learn now she was on her own. Robbie had always been the last one to see her leave the house, or she’d look in a mirror. She’d hated and loved her brother’s fussing, thought herself vain.
Released from saddle stance, the pain in her right arm grew, little spasms shivering her bicep, her elbow stabbing like it was full of hot glass. She clenched and opened her right hand, stretching her fingers wide, but nothing made the pain dissipate. It was like the creek hadn’t let her go, like it had wrapped its eel tails around her hand and was pulling, pulling …
“You alright there?” Izzy’s voice, out of the nearby dark.
“Uh. Don’t creep up like that. You scared me.” Tea hugged her upper arms, where goosebumps had replaced the almost-scales on her skin.
“Sorry. I thought you heard me.” Izzy’s face resolved into angles underlit by the fire.
“Mmm, no. Too lost in my thoughts again. Not being careful enough.”
“Tea, I need to apologise. I was too harsh—”
“No, you’re right. Maybe it was … instinct.”
“Preservation.”
“Yes.” Tea clenched her hand again, the hot stabs unrelenting. She tried to put a wan smile on her face. She hated Izzy being mad at her.
“Thattagirl. Hey, what’s up with your arm?”
“I don’t know. Saddle cramp, probably.”
“Let me look.”
The scent of Izzy’s skin being slightly wrong made Tea flinch back. “No! You’ve still got fur on you. And you changed when you told me not to!”
“So? No-one out here but us. And I don’t bite. Well, not hard.”
“But we were just talking about …”
“Yeah. I know. Sorry about that, mate. Maybe you should let your skin go, for a bit. Sometimes it’s nice to relax.”
Tea still didn’t give her hand over to Izzy’s investigations. “Are we mates?”
“Of course.” Izzy bit her lip, her eyes slipping away for a moment. “Look, I’m sorry for being so harsh. Really. That’s my preservation instinct. Things are … harder for us.” Izzy patted a dog that nuzzled her as if in agreement.
The heat now reached Tea’s eyes, and she knuckled away the dampness it created there. “Why is this happening to me?”
“What, the whaiwhaiā? It’s not happening to you, it’s your power. It’s what you do with it.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a gift or I’ll … ow!” A quake of resistance travelled up and down Tea’s arm.
“What did I say before? You’re trying too hard.”
“No. That wasn’t me. It’s like someone punched me in the arm.”
“Hmm. Like that time at the dinner table.”