 “Me?” he says, his voice a step away from scoffing. “I’ve never scared anything.” Probably he should be more guarded with his secrets, but they’ve been held tight for so long; here, in the first blush of morning beside the girl with blossoms in her hair, they push against his lips and beg to tumble out. It is a lucky thing, then, that she is as talkative as she is approachable, tugging the conversation on like a silver thread. At her joking rebuke (he assumes it is good-natured; he doesn’t want to believe otherwise, not so soon, not of her) he offers only a shy smile. It grows more shy still at her bold talk, sure of itself in a way he is familiar with, playful in a way he is not. The unicorn’s eyes widen, finding hers, an ear twitching sideways. “No!” he begins to protest, but onward her words go, a silver stream laughing out to sea. His guileless green eyes swing up from her smile to her eyes and he would blush before the intensity there, if he could. She’s just given him a wealth of information and his mind rushes to keep up with it, tucking away geography but snagging on one word in particular. “The - the lovers? What do you mean?” But she’s already away and he jogs to catch up to her, watching petals spin by like lilac snow. The thought crosses his mind, light as one of the flowers, that she is no horse but some sort of forest-nymph, like in Erol’s stories. It worries him that he cannot remember whether they are dangerous. But it’s enough work keeping up with her and her endless words, the most recent of which make his brow furrow and his gaze slide over to her. “The scholars aren’t chained there,” he says, the insistence in his voice as much to convince himself as her. “It’s just where all the information is gathered. In Delumine you can find anything you’d ever want to know! What are adventures when there’s no understanding?” Like a gull his voices rises, bright and intent, until the sound of metal halts him and his eyes drop down to the dagger around her throat. He hadn’t seen it before; he’d been too taken with the rest of her, and the coming dawn. Now, though, he stops, disregarding her comment on exploring. Charlemagne is doing his own searching, seizing on the point of the dagger, each glint of light on the metal, the way it sways so at home around her neck. “And what kind of healer,” he asks, a hind hoof dragging a nervous line in the sand, “carries such a weapon? I suppose that’s the necessary first step, is it, injuring something?” Oh, it is a lovely dagger, and a lovely girl, and he wonders how wrong he has been. Lucky thing he did not spill all his secrets. |
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