There is no satisfaction as words roll over her like water. Dalmatia is no more than a pebble in a stream to Ruth, and she does not care to be anything more than that. What she had thought to obtain was something more useful than the vague answers from a fool-headed girl. Her frown does not waver, nor does her demeanor try to morph itself into something more appealing. The pegasus does not care to be appealing or likeable. There is no use in that. After all, Ruth might as well be made of the stone she claims she was molded from.
A smile will not change that.
“He is a dead man walking,” she answers softly. Hers is the voice of a blade sharpened her entire night for one purpose. Every day she’d trained and trained and trained to be a soldier. Molding herself into the machine that Terrastella wanted. Her King watched as Solin raged his war within his country and did nothing. They kept to themselves and they prepared. Should he have spilled blood onto Dusk soil, corrupting the ground they prospered on, the Halcyon would have been dispatched, still recovering as they were, to deal with enemy fire.
They trained her to be a blade that would press between ribs. Her father helped raised her to be the thing that ends a life.
She will cut Cicero down like a stalk of wheat at harvest.
Dalmatia looks to the people as her stony companion does, but she recognizes so few faces. The House Ieshan is heard of in Terrastella, of course it is having been money itself, but its children are all foreign to her eyes.
She may not know them, but she knows it is those who are silent and watchful that know the most. Ruth, for all her silence, may know everything or nothing at all. Perhaps, were this a different time, Dalmatia may have even, begrudgingly, liked her.
But this is not a different time.
And she does not like Ruth or her silence.
“Everyone has an event. What is yours? Certainly not stories to entertain and awe your guests.”
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
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