Maret hated when people looked at her like they knew something was wrong. Like they were counting the uneven beats of her heart, or the way things shook in her grasp, or the way the pains sometimes came and took her breath away.She knew it was wrong, of course; that others didn’t tremble without fear like she did. But she knew, too, that she was more than her illness. She was a poet, and she had gods’ blood in her veins, and royalty too (if her father’s stories were to be believed and of course, little girls always believed their fathers.) But most people could not see beyond her two-toned eyes, let alone the waver of her voice.
So when the other girl does, when a smile rises forth at last and brightens her features like sunlight flooding a shuttered room for the first time, Maret’s fickle heart begins to feel something like relief.
“Of course,” she agrees, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “It’s very nice to meet you, Furfur.” Truth be told, she had not met many people with Bondeds in Delumine. The king, she knew, was rumored to have one - a new one, the rumors said, new implying it was not his first - and her father had told her once of a golden hare that loved him as much as he loved it.
And yet, hearing these things was not the same as seeing it for herself, and a bit of envy crept into her spine. She smiled again, to let the sunlight back in; and the jealousy crept away again like frost in the late morning.
She wants to ask her how she rescued him, and when, and from what, and where she had found a wolf like him, and what her sister’s name was and if her wolf was also a Bonded. She wants to ask a thousand things, and she doesn’t want the small, polite questions that people always gave when they thought they were talking too much about themselves. Maret wants to hear everything, to know everything, so she could write about everything.
And when she was so often stuck indoors, staring at people living the lives she would never get to live herself from behind a plane of glass - most days Maret felt most alive when a stranger brought her a new story, because to hear the story was to live vicariously through it.
She hoped people might one day live vicariously through her stories, too.
It’s while she’s deciding on which question to ask first (which is more likely to lead into a second, and a third, and on and on without annoying her new friend into deciding perhaps she didn’t want to be her friend, after all), that Aspara catches her off guard with her own compliment. This time the smile she offers is shy, slow to spread; nevertheless, it warms her belly from the inside out. She wishes she could tell her what it meant for someone with few friends to be called pretty, but suddenly all the words that had been racing to be first to her tongue fall silent.
Thankfully, the other girl doesn’t seem to notice her awkwardness at accepting compliments; and Maret is grateful that she dives immediately into a new question. This she understands better: this exchange of questions flows more naturally than their exchange of compliments, reigniting that hunger for knowing from before.
”The Dawn Court,” she answers with equal eagerness. ”My father is - was - a Champion there. Where is your home?”
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