One look at Orell stretched beneath the sun and her worries diminished, a pleasant relief from the twists in her stomach and the restlessness in her mind. The name she’d grown more and more fond of was sweet to hear and it brought a smile to her lips, a happiness echoed in the stutter of her heart. “My hunter.”
She drew closer, not stopping until she could brush her fingers against his arm desperate for a touch to prove that he was here. The thought tainted the smile. A dark thought she wanted nothing of but one she was constantly plagued with. It was a terrible thing, to miss a love before they were even gone. “I keep imagining the day I’ll come here and you’ll be gone,” Ashlynn said, softly in that quiet murmur they were so fond of. “It makes it all the more sweeter to see you still here.”
But others were trying to leave, weren’t they? Unsuccessfully, if rumors were to be believed. Once, the woods were a sanctuary, but now something ominous brewed in the shade. Her hands drifted to the front of her tunic as if to soothe the fabric, and she swallowed the unease that tightened her throat. “You haven’t seen a young boy wandering through here, have you?”
A smile hinted at the edges of his mouth when he heard her greeting, gentle fingertips trailing down his arm. There she was, his girl, smiling in the sunlight; how he’d been seeing her since the Keep had fallen, no one with balls enough to comment when they were seen together, hunting or sharing quiet words.
And she reminded him then that he would be leaving, that familiar quiet voice carving into his chest. Gentle hands holding a steel-edged blade, digging it into his heart with love. He did smile then, humorless, and nodded. He reached for her, sliding his palm up along her arm, fingers locking carefully around her wrist and loosening as they smoothed over her forearm. All the understated touches they shared; everything they valued like gold and no one else would understand.
( Everything he’d remember when he was cold in the wide, snowy plains of the North. )
“I haven’t,” he replied, peering up at her. They both knew that if his eyes hadn’t caught it, then it hadn’t happened. A prickle of unease crept along the back of his neck at the thought of a child lost in the woods. “Why? Is there a lost child?”
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