elif
The bull-horned man’s response to her is more biting than her own, but Elif does not mind too much; she had interrupted him, she supposed, both in ordering and in watching that silly gaggle of mares. She is about to say something kinder, something that he would know she means is an apology - but then another stranger arrives, one who automatically eclipses her interest in the first.
For he is black, and tall, and cruel-looking, and wears not just one pair of wings but two.
When he leans in, when her eye first catches him, her first instinct is to smile blandly, pleasantly. But when her leaf-green gaze sweeps over him, she almost drops her own hotcake. How tall he is, how cool his silver eyes, how dark-velvet his voice - it is not difficult for Elif to picture him with blood on his hands, except perhaps for how neat his appearance is. Suddenly her heart is a bird’s against her ribs, and the honey-sweet taste in her mouth is more like sand.
He speaks of the hunt, and the pale man of the cold, and ordinarily Elif would be able to tell how stiff and uncomfortable they each are. But she is lost in her own suspicion. “Solis will help us end it,” she says simply, and at least she is sure about that.
It is not Elif’s way to be tactful, or sly, or use clever words to learn things when blunt ones rise so quickly to her tongue. But both the stallions are huge, towering above her and casting her own shape in shadow, and the cakes are warm on her tongue and in her belly, and now is not the time to be strong-headed. (She can almost hear her mother in her head, admonishing her, though this does little to make her want to act a lady).
So she tries, when she speaks, to be friendly and nonchalant - maybe flirtatious, like the young mares who are now surely rethinking taking their leave, with two strangers so tall and handsome (never mind Elif caught between them like a stubborn burr). But all she wants to know is if the black stranger is Solterran, if he has been here long - long enough to be involved in the black market, long enough to murder her brother.
“Are you travelers that the blizzard has grounded here? I’ve not seen either of you before,” she says, and only just keeps it from sounding like an accusation instead of what she had intended.
Maybe another bite of the cake and the honey would sweeten her words, her voice, her suspicions - she tries it, just in case. But when she glances back at the black pegasus, her eyes still carry all the heat of summer grasses about to catch and burn.
@El Toro @Caine
The most awkward threesome ever
