Returning to Khorjin’s ger, Julian found his soon-to-be wife sitting on a stool, milking a brown and white goat. She stole a glance at him and then returned to her work, seemingly unbothered. But she must be bothered. I killed her husband. It made him uncomfortable to be around her, to have to sit in her home and have her feed him. He could not imagine a greater dishonour or humiliation.

  Pushing through the flaps, he found two young boys staring at him with curious looks, sitting amidst their furs. The older one must have been 8 years old at least, whereas the younger was still a toddler. They both had their mother’s jade serpentine eyes. The younger one pointed at Julian and mumbled some words to him, yanking on his brother’s furs. But the older one sat still, stoic and quiet.

  Behind them, near the totem of Zaghatai at the back, was a dishevelled Lucy.

  “Julian!” she gasped when he pushed through the flaps. Her white shirt was covered in so much muck that it was basically brown. Holes marked her tights from the snow leopard's claws. He also noticed that her watch and jewelry were missing. She pushed herself up. “We have to get out of here. One of those brutes tried to undress me!”

  Tulgutai… Julian thought. The man who tried to claim her, and he has already tried to lay with her. The thought sent a cold rage through him even though they weren’t involved romantically. He was still incredibly jealous of people around her. There would likely be a reckoning with this Tulgutai, Julian thought. At least I have my bow in this world, and I can kill anyone who tries to touch her. He couldn’t do that in the office when one of his co-workers made her laugh, as much as he’d fantasized about it.

  “You’re fine now, don’t worry.” Julian knelt by her. “Are you hurt?”

  Lucy shook her head, though her trembling hands told a different story. “We’re not fine. Far from it. And those fuckers stole my watch! Use that bow and get us out of here. There aren't that many of them.”

  “Calm down,” Julian said, placing his hands on her shoulders to stop her shaking. “We’re not prisoners, we’re guests. I just spoke with the chieftain here, they call him Targan. He wants us to learn his ways.”

  Her eyes widened with horror. “What!” she yelped, shaking her head. “No, no. Learn what ways? Look at these people! They’re savages, they’ll have me cooking and cleaning for one of these brutes. Milking some goat and wiping a baby’s shit from its arse! I was about to be a project manager at Sterling & Crowe for Christ’s sake!”

  Khorjin rushed into the tent, likely prompted by Lucy’s screaming. She quickly went and hugged her boys, herding them outside, and then turned to Julian with a flash of fire in her eyes. Raising a finger, she yelled in the strange language they spoke here, her voice cracking like a whip, oddly reminding him of his step mother Cassandra, which immediately started irritating him. Then she pointed at Lucy while still yelling at Julian.

  “I can’t understand you!” Julian snapped, the anger rising because he couldn’t handle the pair of them being hysterical in both his ears. “Jesus Christ.” He was already beginning to understand why a lot of people he knew avoided marriage like the plague.

  Khorjin kept yapping, then shoved some utensils in front of Lucy, pointing at her and then pointing at them. She stormed out after that.

  Julian sighed. “Bloody hell, what was that all about?”

  “Look,” Lucy yelled, shoving the wooden bowl in Julian's face as her green eyes became glossy. “She wants me to cook! The most complicated thing I’ve ever cooked is a microwaved lasagne.”

  “No shit,” Julian said, oddly finding that amusing. “We shall have to invent microwaves here.”

  The way her face twisted into a grimace, he knew he overstepped. “Is this a fucking joke to you!”

  He sighed. “Chill out. If you’d let me explain. We’re stuck here whether we like it or not, and we won’t be returning back home for a while…” Possibly forever. “But I convinced the targan to take you away from that man, and brought you here to me.”

  Creases formed over her brow. “You ‘convinced’ him? How? You have the charisma of a lobster. How did they even speak with you?”

  “Thanks for that, Lucy.” Julian laughed. “Well, there was a condition…” He scratched the back of his head, avoiding her gaze. “How to say this… Well… I told the targan that you are my wife.” He cringed as the words left his mouth, already knowing this would not go down well.

  “YOU DID WHAT!” she screamed like a volcano exploding. She looked frantically toward the bowls and utensils on the ground, at the dwindling fire at the center of the ger. “Is that… Is that why she wants me to cook? For you! Ha! I won’t be your little maid, if that's what you think. And I certainly won’t be consummating this marriage. I couldn’t marry a spreadsheet monkey.”

  Of course you couldn’t. That insult, reminding him of how beneath her she thought Julian was, felt like a sword through the heart, though he tried not to show it. She always wanted some big investment banker or doctor. He rolled his eyes. “You’ll be marrying the Arahkin now, which seems to be important to these people.”

  “I’ll snap anything you try to put in there…” she warned him with a harsh glare. This new information seemed to make Lucy even more repulsed by his presence.

  Julian just laughed, thinking her to be overreacting. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not going to force myself on you, nor would I expect you to clean for me or whatever. I only told the targan that to save you from Tulgutai, the man who claimed you.”

  That seemed to calm her down, though she still looked at him with suspicion. “Right…”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  He frowned. “Now you say thank you.”

  “I don’t exactly have a lot to thank you for. The best I can hope for is to be your wife. Lucky me.”

  Julian shook his head and sat in his little corner with the furs, which he assumed was his bed. “Well, if you haven’t noticed, Lucy, we are among a primitive society. No more policemen or courts or laws to protect you, right? I’m going to take a wild guess that women here do all of the house work, and men do all of the fighting and hunting. You think that's a walk in the park for me, as well? I’ve never hunted shit, and I used to spend most of my time rotting in front of a computer screen. I suspect I’ll have to murder a lot more men if we are to survive here, and it’ll probably start with the man who’s would-be-wife I just reclaimed, which is a meeting I don’t look forward to. So how about you drop that pretentious demeanor and show some bloody gratitude for saving your life twice in the space of two days?”

  His chest pulsated slowly, his breathing heavy. That anger seemed to erupt out of nowhere, but she pissed him off.

  Lucy glared at him, her lips quivering, but for once, it seemed she had nothing to say. After a moment of silence, she brushed her messy ginger hair to the side to try and regain a bit of dignity. “Sorry, Julian. And thank you. I’m just… I’m just upset.” A tear fell from her eye. She wiped it away and sniffled.

  Julian went to her and gave her a hug. She embraced him back, her slender arms wrapping around him which sent a warm feeling through his chest. “I’ll be the first man in this village to have two wives who despise him, I think.”

  She frowned, leaning back against the totem. “Two?”

  Julian nudged his head toward the outside of the ger. “The woman whose house we’re in. I’m ‘honourbound’ to take her as my wife, too, because I killed her husband. So I must now protect her and help raise her children.”

  Lucy’s jaw dropped. “Fucking hell. I’d rather slit my wrists than marry a man who killed my husband.”

  “I’m not that ugly, surely,” Julian quipped.

  A quick laugh escaped Lucy, the first time he’d seen her somewhat smile since they got here. “You know what I mean.”

  “I suppose that’s a first world privilege,” Julian remarked. “This is a steppe culture. Life here will be brutal. I’m sure the kidnapping of wives is a normal occurrence. The will to survive and raise the next generation will trump any notion of pride here.”

  “Ugh…” Lucy moaned. “This is too much to take in right now.”

  “I agree,” Julian said, going to the corner where his clothes were folded up. The targan may have taken his nice coat, but they didn’t take his blazer. In the little breast pocket, he found his packet of cigarettes and his lighter. “Fancy a cig?”

  Lucy eyed the packet. He knew she didn’t smoke, but she said yes without hesitation. He grinned, and they walked out of the ger. “Let’s take a walk. The last thing I need is getting these people addicted to nicotine, or worse, stealing my cigs.”

  Outside, Khorjin’s younger son helped her with the milking of the goat. The older son was in the process of skinning a small rodent-like creature. It looked a bit like a rat but was larger and brown, with a strange head. Khorjin saw them walking off and stood up, yelling some words at Julian.

  “We’re just going for a walk,” he said, but obviously she just stared at him in confusion. “A walk!” He moved his two fingers in the way a pair of legs move, trying to sign his meaning, but she just replied with more words he didn’t understand. “We’ll be back soon, okay? I’m just walking.” He turned to Lucy. “Come on, before we draw more attention to ourselves.”

  In the distance, other boys of the village rode horses, and some as young as 10 years old practiced with bows on horseback. Julian was amazed at their accuracy in hitting straw targets while the horses galloped past at an impressive speed. He was reminded of a time when he was that age and struggled to ride a donkey during a holiday in Spain once.

  Lucy watched with equal fascination as the horses trotted past with their young riders. “They train them to kill so young…”

  “Mhm.” Julian nodded as they strolled through the little village, walking up a rocky hill with a lovely view of the stream below. “I don’t imagine many of them live very long.”

  Further along, the hammer of the blacksmith sang a song of ringing steel. The crouched man bashed a crude, sharp arrowhead still glowing orange from the heat of the forge. Some younger boys close by stretched some dry animal hides. Likely for saddles, Julian imagined.

  They both watched this small, primitive economy with great awe.

  “Do you think they have shops here?” Lucy asked as they walked by a shepherd guiding a small herd of long haired yaks through the village. She jumped when one of them made a strange sound at her.

  “Probably not the way you imagine.” Julian shrugged. “I’m sure they rely on barter for everyday transactions.”

  “That’s so weird,” she remarked, reeling back when a hunter with a stunning, large hawk perched on his leather gauntlet walked past. The raptor tried to nip her as they passed each other, but the man calmed it down while regarding the pair with a strange glance.

  “What’s weird about it?” Julian asked, finding it to be quite interesting. “Imagine a world where everyone’s life didn’t revolve around money. Doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

  She scoffed, brushing a lock of hair past her ear. “Well I’m glad one of us is settling in…”

  They perched themselves on a moss-covered rock and watched the village below. Some of the men, along with the younger boys, wrestled on a patch of clear grass not far from the gers, and a few others sparred with wooden training swords. The hollow clacking echoed across the plains.

  Julian took a cigarette from his pack and lit it, taking a long draw, holding it for a moment, and exhaled slowly. “Ahh…” he sighed, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “That cig is gorgeous.”

  “Don’t hog it,” Lucy snapped and pinched it from his fingers. “I’ve always hated smoking, but under the circumstances, I’ll make this exception.” She smoked it like a natural, the blue smoke twirling into the breeze as the burning ember etched its way down the cigarette, leaving ash in its wake. She must have tried them at parties or something, as most people usually did. “We really are stuck here, aren’t we?”

  He flexed his palm, staring at the eerie eye tattoo which looked back up at him. It made him ponder his new destiny here. She passed Julian the burning cigarette. “Yes.” He took a toke, blowing out another cloud of smoke. “Look, I know you don’t want to hear it, but at some point we will have to make it seem like we are husband and wife. I don’t want to think about what they will do to the pair of us if they realise I lied to them, and robbed one of their warriors of a new bride.”

  Lucy’s face went pale, and she huddled to herself, bringing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “That’s a poor attempt at trying to get into my pants, you know? Pass that cig.”

  He passed it, laughing. “I didn’t mean it like that. But whether you like it or not, you are going to have to take up some household duties and help with chores. These are not the sort of people who tolerate useless mouths, I’ll tell you that now. About, well… sex… I don’t know. Khorjin will likely find it weird that we won’t be doing that, but I don’t know. We can make something up. I’ll just say it's part of our culture to be modest, or we only do it in private, away from prying eyes.” He shrugged.

  “Will they buy that?” She flicked the ash off the dying cigarette burning away into a stub.

  Julian finished off the cigarette, nipping the bud on the rock. “I guess we’ll find out.”