THE HEART IS STRONG,
AS IF NEVER SORROWED;
She’s happy that he laughs. The feeling is entirely unexpected — O, despite her young age, is not necessarily the easiest to impress — but something about the excitement of the island makes her feel a little more generous, a little easier to get along with. At least the man has a sense of humor. More than once O’s tight grip on her axe has been taken as a threat that couldn’t be rescinded, steering strangers away with less than a single word.
Not this one. It would be foolish around someone else, but not her.
“It’s definitely not… normal,” she says of the weather, and turns her head up toward the sky. It is a roiling, tumultuous sea in shades of gray, navy and black; the rain is unceasing, beating down a loud, musical pattern on the glossy leaves and on O’s skin, plastering her hair to her forehead and her tail to her hindquarters. The atmosphere is rife with the cool, clean smell of dirt turning to mud and roots spreading through the mulch. It’s a bizarre turn from the way spring spreads over the rest of Novus — warm and only slightly wet — and especially from the dry, arid heat of the Solterran deserts where her family spends most of their time.
O holds back a barrage of questions — where are you from, who do you know, why are you not scared — but holds them back with a bit lip and a flick of her ear. (She tries not to think too hard about how close he would have been in age to her father, if he was alive. How they might have known each other in the right place and time. How they both find, or found, it easy to smile at her.) “Right,” she says. “Not like there’s anything more interesting catching people’s attention.” A pause, then, as she grasps on to the way he says inhabitants like he’s not one of them. “So you’re not from here.”
