He stopped walking. "Are you serious? And you haven't said anything?"
She shrugged. "I thought you knew."
"How would I know that?"
"Don't you talk with anyone back home? Your father, mother, brother?"
"I do." He caught up to her. "But they didn't tell me. I'm glad that she made it through. How is she doing?"
"Great. She said something about her wound healing in thirty-something seconds, which is supposed to be a good time for a cut to heal. I don't really know what it means."
"The immortals time how long a cut takes to heal completely," Pavel said. "We don't heal nearly as fast."
"No, we don't. We also don't live forever."
"A thousand years is plenty. I don't want to live forever."
She frowned at him. "Are you saying that because there is nothing you can do about it or because you really believe it?"
"I believe it. I don't know how these immortals tolerate being alive for so long. It must get so boring."
"Most of them aren't older than a thousand." Drova kicked at a pebble. "Anandur is, and Annani and Toven are gods, and they are ancient. Kian is two thousand years old, and I bet he wishes his life could be a little boring. He has to deal with one crisis after another."
They reached a stretch of beach where the sand had been compacted into a low ridge by the previous high tide, and a few flat rocks were embedded in the ridge like steps. The largest of them was wide enough to sit on, and Drova made for it.
Pavel followed.
She sat down at one end, he sat down at the other, and there was about half a meter of rock between them.
"So," Pavel said. "Eleven days?"
"What?"
"Your mother told me that your birthday is in eleven days."
"Why would she tell you that? It's not like we celebrate birthdays."
"Eighteen is an important birthday."
She shrugged. "Eighteen has no special meaning to us."
Immortals considered seventeen the age of majority, and the Kra-ell had different ages of consent for males and females.
"We should celebrate it," he said.
"You'll be back in the village on my birthday, and I'm staying here."
"We could celebrate it before that."
"We are not human. We don't throw birthday parties."
"We live among them now, and some of their customs are worth adopting. Celebrating birthdays should be one of them."
She turned to look at him. He was watching the water, not her, and his profile was just as strikingly handsome as she knew it would be.
Secretly, she agreed with him, but she would never admit that.
After reading nearly a hundred silly romance novels depicting human lives, she admired their propensity to celebrate every little thing. Their lives weren't only about survival and honor like the lives of proper Kra-ell.
