Cress suggests an idea that had not ever crossed Maude’s mind. Instead, it smacks her flat in the face, like a branch let go by the leader too soon, and it resounds with such clarity that she wonders why she’d not thought of it herself.
"Why, Cress! You’re a genius! Of course it is!" cheerfully laughs and praises the maiden, the idea of a kingdom appearing out of no where not as strange to her as it might have been before she’d watched an entire realm disappear into nothing. Smiling at the winged girl alongside her, Maude shrugs at the mention of adventures. "I wouldn’t call them that, really. The only thing worth a song at all so far has been winding up here in the first place, and I don’t remember it well enough to tell anyone else what happened. I think I was sleeping, or maybe I fell… How’d you get here?"
As the conversation diverts towards the tower she’d seen, the girl’s smile falls away slightly, replaced with an expression of contemplation. Of course, her initial desire had been to just barge in, too, but a small part of herself had warned her that maybe it wasn’t so smart to just walk into other people’s houses. What if the Dusk Emperor (she hadn’t a clue who ruled what in Novus, at least not yet) was like a bear and the tower was like his winter cave? Maude would rather not risk it.
"I don’t know," she says, "it didn’t look like too many people were there when I went, but I didn’t go in, either. Besides, you’d beat me there by hours."
Her laughter is easy, the sort that casually accepts the natural unfairness of life – at least in this instance.
"I don’t have wings like you do," grins the antlered maiden, the first to admit that it would be awful cool if she did.
|
