F. Wilson - The Tery

We're all afraid.

"We're traveling with a group of Talents," Komak said, "the only survivors after Kitru slaughtered all the rest of our kind in the keep. We want you to join us. We number fifty-three now and need every Talent we can find."

"Why?" the woman asked.

"For safety, of course. Overlord Mekk will be visiting the keep, and Kitru has been scouring the forests for teries and Talents in preparation for his arrival."

The man shook his head. "We'll stay right here."

"That could be dangerous," Komak told him. "What's to prevent some of Kitru's men from coming through your village with a Finder and ferreting out your wife and child as we did? He'll show no mercy."

"We're isolated out here," he said. "Almost lost. I've been to the keep two or three times in my life and nobody there even knew this village existed. And no one here knows that my wife and son possess the Talent except me. I think we can risk staying where we are."

Adriel was disappointed to hear that — for their sake, and her own. At least with the husband around, she'd have someone to talk to.

"Very well," Komak said after a pause. "We'll be camped toward the sunset for a while should you change your minds."

"Thank you," the man said. "But the forest nomad life is not for us. We'll take our chances here."

He put one arm around his wife and the other around his son as the trio walked back to their hut.

"Isn't it rare for a psi to marry a non-psi?" Adriel asked her father as they returned to the forest.

"Very rare. The rapport between two lovers with the Talent is far and away more intimate than anything a non-psi can experience. But the woman and her son were the only psis around so it's possible she never had a lover with the Talent. She doesn't know what she's missing." His eyes seemed to glaze as if he no longer saw the forest around them.

"I wish them well," she said at last in an attempt to bring her father back from his reverie. "It must take a lot of courage to stay put in that little village and risk extermination."

"Or a lot of foolishness. The dividing line isn't always clear."

Four days after the ambush, Dennel returned. The tery had sensed his approach for some time before he appeared, but Adriel was the first of the humans to spy him. She ran up to him. The tery followed close behind.

"Dennel! You're back! How'd you find us?"

He did not meet her gaze. "I followed the mental chatter."

"Are you all right?"

"I think so." He seemed uncomfortable. "I…I have to find my tent. Excuse me."

"Poor fellow," Adriel said as she watched him walk away. "He's so ashamed."

The tery wondered if it might be something else, but he had little opportunity to find out. Dennel kept to himself for the next few days.

Adriel and the tery were fast becoming inseparable and took little notice of Dennel or anyone else. He let her "teach" him more words and she devoted most of her day to him, resting her hand on his back and chattering her heart out as they wandered side by side through the leafy glades near the camp.

They stopped and sat on a grassy knoll and watched the brightly colored tree-things go about their daily routines.

"I know you can't understand me," she said, speaking to him as if he could, "but at least I know your ears are for me alone. I know you aren't secretly carrying on a mental conversation with someone else while I'm talking to you."

The tery gathered that was something that had happened more than once.

"You're lucky, you know. Nothing holds you down. You can come and go as you please and you're at home with us or away from us. But me…I'm stuck here with a bunch of people who feel insulted if they have to use their tongues."

She fell silent for a while, then laughed.

"I thought I was going to be a fine lady once — can you believe that? A nobleman's son took a fancy to me and I thought I'd someday be living in the upper levels of the keep. Then Mekk went and issued his new decree and now I’m living like a savage."

The tery had come to think of Adriel as a wonderful creature — yet he pitied her. She was fresh, young, ready to burst into womanhood at any moment with only a fanged, barrel-chested beast at her side to share the experience. She wanted to love and be loved, to stop running. She longed for the stability she would have had had she not been born a Finder.

He desperately wished there was a way he could help her.

As the days went on, the tery became a substitute for everything she desired. A thousand tiny kindnesses were showered upon him. She would put extra time and effort into preparing the meat for his dinner, and she carved and painted a bowl from which he could eat it. She learned the use of the loom so that he wouldn't have to sleep on the bare ground.

The two were driven closer and closer together by the void of silence that separated them from the rest of the tribe. Life became an idyll for the tery, a series of sun-soaked days of easy companionship…

Until the morning by the river when he discovered a dark and frightening hunger lurking within him.

Adriel was modest by nature. Every morning she would retrieve a jug of water from the stream that passed not too far from the camp and sponge herself off in the privacy of her tent. This particular morning was an exception, however, for she left the jug empty and led the tery along the bank of the stream until it widened and emptied into a river.

Pushing through the brush, she stepped down the bank and up to her ankles in the water. The far shore was further than the tery could throw a small stone, but floating leaves moved by at a leisurely pace, indicating a gentle current.

"There," Adriel said with a self-satisfied air, "I knew we'd find a river eventually. This looks deep enough."

She pulled off her blouse and the knee-length pants she had recently made after deciding that a skirt was impractical in the forest. She wore nothing else.

Without the slightest hesitation she made a shallow dive into the clear water, then bobbed to the surface and turned to face the tery.

"Ohhhhh, that feels good!" She dunked her head again and came up gasping. "I thought I was never going to feel clean again!" She motioned to the tery. "Come on — jump in! It's only water!"

But he stayed behind the bushes lining the bank. That much water made him uneasy. He had often waded to his knees while fishing with his father, but the thought of immersing himself to his neck was frightening.

But he had another reason…

The brief glimpse of Adriel's nude form had stirred something within him, something pleasurable and yet uncomfortable. He stayed where he was.

Adriel splashed the water in front of her.

"Oh, come on in! You'll like it! Really!" But her pet made no move to join her. "Looks like I'm going to have to drag you in," she muttered and kicked her way closer to shore.

When she reached the shallows again, she stood and waded toward the bank. Her skin was white and smooth and glistened wetly. Water ran from her hair over her rounded, budding, pink-tipped breasts, down across her abdomen to the red-gold fuzz that covered her pubes.

The same pleasurable something washed over the tery again as he watched her, a warm something that seemed to be centered in his groin. She was completely out of the water now and climbing the bank in his direction. The warmth in his groin increased and the erratic fleshy part of him that usually hung awkwardly between his legs became large and stiff. His breathing was rapid as he tried to look away, but he could not.

This was wrong. He wanted to leap upon her, paw her, press the hungry distended flesh into her…

Wrong!

Adriel leaned over the bushes and extended her hand to him.