elif
When he first responded, a laugh bubbled up in her throat and caught there, like a dandelion seed or a blocked well, something half-scoffing, half-frantic. Indeed, she might have said (but dryly), were she a more restrained sort of girl. Instead she tossed her head, and scuffed the earth with a black hoof, and tried not to roll her eyes. “Raum knows that,” she said. “It is why he’s doing the opposite.” The longer she stood here, telling him about the dictator who ruled them (far more cruelly than Zolin had, for Zolin had been foolish and selfish, and Raum was clever and cold and mad) the more ridiculous it seemed.
Why not fly away, then, back to the island, back to the mystery, and leave her sunburned, bleach-boned homeland behind? Oh, because she was of the sand and the canyons, and sunlight ran through her veins, and she was too proud to ever run away.
Her spring-green eyes caught him when Sol spoke again, and though they did not narrow her dark mouth turned down at the corners. Too often had she heard similar words directed at her, and she wondered now how and if he already knew her propensity for rashness. “I suppose,” she said sourly, the way she might have answered one of the older nobles before things had fallen into chaos.
It was easier, when the conversation shifted onto him. Easier to bend her head and drink again, and forget for a moment that this was one of the last water-sources not under guard in the desert (at least for now), or that smoke was billowing from a volcano off shore, or that the gods might return again, angrier than the last time. Hearing about other worlds - and himself - made her curious, and when she lifted her dripping muzzle again she no longer felt like bristling like a cat.
Now when she eyed him, she tried to imagine him violent. It wasn’t hard - he was so big - but she could sense no heat in his golden eyes now. “You should be at home here, then,” she said, and only felt a little guilty for it. When he said he was with Dawn, though, she really did laugh. “Some Solterrans call Dawn courters flower-pickers.” But not her, not anymore - the thought of Delumine only made her think of Mateo, now, and what he’d told her of his own court’s troubles. “But I hear they have a murderer of their own.” Gone was her laughter, and her shroud of arrogance - there was something strangely chilling, at the thought that nowhere in Novus might be safe and easy and good.
