Her eyes lit up and her smile grew wider.
Seeing this gripped his heart like nothing ever hadbefore. The softening, the same one he’d felt before, returned but this one had ten times the effect. It suddenly seemed so apparent that he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen it before.
She looked puzzled by the way he was staring at her. “Is something wrong... Thanred?” she asked, pausing before speaking his name.
He shook his head. “No, Royla.” He offered her a hand. “Everything is right.”
She took it and let him help her stand. She looked even more beautiful in the silver moonlight filtering through the trees overhead. “Then what is it?” she asked.
He gazed into her eyes. “Make a fire,” he said, but his voice was far softer than it had been before. It sounded more like a request than a command.
She smiled again and nodded. Then she set about building a little tent of sticks.
Meanwhile Thanred walked through the brush, his eyes wandering through the undergrowth. When he’d found what he was looking for he reached down, grasped the stalk of a massive branch with both hands, and broke it off like it was a twig. He dragged it back to what was now a flickering fire, flames licking at the darkness.
“What is that?” she asked, crouching next to the tiny blaze.
“For us. For sleep. So you will not be cold.”
Her smile at his words gave him that funny sick but happy feeling.
Once the fire was properly burning, he offered her the mushroom and the fruit. She ate slowly, savoring each bite. “I never knew you could eat these,” she said, turning the red fruit over in her hand before taking another bite.
Once she was finished eating, she sidled up next to him.
Thanred stiffened at first, not because he didn’t like her there but because of how foreign it felt. She seemed his equal. That was as strange as it was wonderful.
When she leaned her head against his shoulder, hisinsides quaked.
They sat quietly in the darkness until it was pitch black. The only sounds came from the bubbling of the brook and the crackling logs in the fire.
Thanred thought she’d fallen asleep and was about to lower her to the ground when Royla spoke. “The Dranark have no tribes?” she said.
“They have,” he replied, confused as to how she had come to this.
“Then where is yours?”
His insides tightened at the question. The urge to close up, to move away from her and tell her to go to sleep gripped him. But her voice was so sweet, the question so innocent and earnest he couldn’t bring himself to push her away. “I...”
She didn’t press him. She let the single word linger in the air as he collected his thoughts.
“I was cast out. Like you were.”
His words were met with a soft gasp.
For some reason the response gave him courage to continue. “We are fickle creatures, we Dranark. Allegiances are easily swayed. Dodlin... someone I thought had been a friend, he...” His throat tightened, along with his stomach. Anger threatened to flare back up again.
He wanted to stoke it. A part of him wanted to feel the rage again, to unleash his fury on the forest and cast it out of himself. But something had changed.
Try as he might, he could barely bring himself to care about all that. There was only one thing he could think of that mattered now. There was only one thing that concerned him.
Royla. Sweet, smiling Royla who had somehow pressed her way into him, into the very depths of him and lodged herself there.
All of that business with Dodlin was far behind him. Far behindthem. Now it was only Royla that mattered. “None of that matters now,” he said, lowering his eyes to theground, then up to hers. “Not as long as I am with you.”
Hearing himself say it turned his insides to hot liquid.
The surprise in her expression caught him off guard. But after just a moment she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, her lips parted.
