When the Exiles noticed, they commented on it to one another when they thought the Prince was out of earshot. He, of course, was very carefully not out of earshot, but he did what he hoped was a decent job of pretending to be.
“He’s being helpful,” rumbled Tomaz, “it’s… sure sign… changing.”
The Prince, even though his back was turned, allowed himself not even the hint of a smile as a thrill of triumph coursed through him. He could risk nothing.
“No,” he heard the girl respond savagely, “he’s… at worst, conspiring to kill or… in our sleep. At best… imitating us… trained monkey.”
The Prince almost faltered in the act of retying a saddlebag as anger, white hot and blinding, roared up into his throat at the insult.
Imitating them like a trained monkey, am I? I should strike her down—
No. He calmly tied the bag closed and finished going about the chores that needed doing in order to set up camp for the night, giving no sign that he had overheard a thing. Soon he had everything ready except the fire. He looked around for wood, but there was none, so he was forced to wait for the Exiles to finish talking.
“It‘s been too long since I‘ve had some fresh meat—I’m off to hunt,” Tomaz rumbled suddenly, breaking away from the girl. He reached into a pack tied to his charger and pulled out a sling. Before seeing the big man fight, the Prince would have found the sight of the small sling in the hands of the giant quite amusing. Now, he thought that a stone from that sling in the hands of that man could kill a full-grown ox at a hundred paces.
The girl nodded. “I’ll get the firewood,” she said. “There should be enough around here that I won’t have to go far. I’ll just tie up the princeling.”
A thought occurred to him then. A dangerous thought. One he probably should have let go lest he risk everything; but his anger at being insulted spurred him on.
“I’ll go with you,” he said to the girl, doing his best to make it a request and not a command.
The Exiles paused, Tomaz in the act of stretching his right arm, the girl in the act of crossing to the Prince in order to tie him to a tree again.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
“You sound like my Mother.”
A ringing silence descended as that comment, completely unplanned on the Prince’s part, fell with a thud into the middle of the small clearing. After a few days of learning how to banter with Tomaz, the words had just slipped out. There were several beats where no one said anything, and then, in a rumblingsnort like the sound a volcano must make before it erupts, Tomaz began to laugh. The snort turned into a full-throat guffaw, and then the giant was roaring so hard with laughter that he made the forest and mountainside almost ring with the sound, bright and clear and rich.
“TOMAZ!” the girl shouted. “Shut up! You’ll give away our position!”
“I’m surprised they can’t see your swollen pride from here,” the Prince said. The delivery was awkward and flat, and he was relatively sure it wasn’t a good joke, but it was at least effective enough that the girl turned a bright red and Tomaz doubled over, slapping his knee in mirth.
“Tomaz,” the girl repeated, growling his name deep in her throat. “I mean it.”
The giant gave a final trumpeting bellow and then was silent as he wiped a tear from his eye, though he still shook with aftershocks of laughter.
“Ah, well,” he said. “Sorry about that,eshendai. I haven’t had a good laugh in a long time.”
“I don’t care!” she replied. The Prince could tell that she was trying to be taken seriously, but the effect was ruined by the beet-red color that had spread over her cheeks. “We’re trying not to be followed, and we can’t sacrifice that because you feel like having a good laugh!”
Tomaz shrugged and looked at the Prince.
“Is there anyone nearby?”
After a brief moment of confusion, the Prince realized the giant was asking him to check the surrounding area for signs of life. He paused for only a second, and then realized there was no reason not to.
He reached out through the Talisman, as far as he could, and felt nothing aside from the strange static-like background that he was coming to recognize as the muted life of the trees and plants and the simplistic minds of the animals that lived in them.
He let the connection slip away and opened his eyes to find the big man looking at him. It was strange, being in the company of someonewho simply took what he could do as a matter of fact, not as something to be feared or worshiped.
“No one for at least a mile,” he replied. “Probably not beyond that either.”
“You can’t trust him,” the girl said angrily.
