@morebooks-pls, @wildbeautifuldreamer, @ninavrye, @whydoyoucareaboutmyusername (and all my other Witchlanders who’s tumblr names I don’t know)— Reblog to share with a friend
Red cheeks and puffing didn’t bother him as they came up the hill. Aeduan understood the limitations of normal people, or at least he’d grown to tolerate some of the limitation of some of the normal people. He could have carried on for hours moving at the same pace and matching his steps to the rhythm of her breath. He could have, until she paused and began shedding clothes.
“Perhaps we stop for a rest?” he said.
Quickly, he diverted to his left and down a game trail towards the water. Still, she pulled the long wool dress up and over her head and slung it over her shoulder before following. While she had no blood scent she flavored the air as she dove past him. Instinctively, he pinched his eyes shut and turned, pretending to survey their surroundings. He heard her splash into the water. Rivulets of chilled spring water cast through the air with her splashing splattering onto Aeduan and forcing him to cock his head back towards her.
He flinched away. The white of her skin blurred with the white of what she wore. He called on his magic to keep his pulse at bay.
“I didn’t know you were so prudish,” she called from the banks.
Called to action, and with his blood steadily under his control, he looked her way proving he wasn’t. Only to see that Iseult wore a white under-dress of light linen that covered her from ankle to wrist just as thoroughly as the dark blue wool.
He growled, “I normally don’t care for modesty, but I didn’t want to hear the whining all the way to Carrtorra,” he growled.
Then he joined her on the banks checking the air, asking about threads, filling his flask.
“Aren’t you hot under all that clothing?” She began pulling the wool dress back over her head layering at least ten pounds of dripping wet fabric on her frame.
“A monk does not complain about looking like a monk.”
Iseult sat on a broad, flat rock and stretched her legs out so her feet stayed in the water and looked up the canyon walls.
“I don’t like it here. An ambush could find us at any corner.”
“I’d smell them. You’d sense their threads. Do you feel an ambush?”
“I can’t see your threads and you can’t smell my blood. Are you sure there aren’t more like us?” she challenged.
“We should stop for the night. Let you rest your legs, eat some food.”
“Stop? Here? In a canyon, of all places?”
“We are more than three leagues from the mouth and this part has a broad basin. We can stay off the path and get rest. Or, we can walk all through the night and I leave you where you fall.”
“Do you cook?”
Aeduan spared her a rolling glance before his strong strides took him back up the game path to the trail and then past it, into the thicket of shrubs and thorns. He made a path, a small one, as the little cuts and piercings healed as quickly as he acquired them. Between the scrub oak and a spindly cottonwood, he motioned for Iseult to set her things.
From their packs they each pulled provisions and Iseult pulled a blanket that she sat on to keep from making mud in the weave of her dress. With the sun-baked rock on three sides, they baked despite the spreading shadows.
High above, Aeduan tracked the sun dropping closer to and then falling behind the lip of the canyon wall. Darkness fell without the respite from the warmth, for that they had hours to wait and then, Iseult would regret her wet wool. With a whole host of new sounds cluttering the air around them, Aeduan shut his eyes and set to picking out the individual grasshoppers in the grasses nearby.
“Look fireflies!”
Iseult’s voice carried more cheer in it than appropriate for a threadwitch. Were it not so oddly joyful, he probably would have kept his eyes shut. But the tone, opposing so much of her usual tenor, had him sitting up in seconds.
“Safi always said fireflies could grant you wishes,” Iseult said, her head turning to follow the bugs.
Aeduan watched a firefly light and fizzle then lost it in the dark before another, or maybe the same, lit back up.
“What kind of wishes?” Aeduan asked–to kill the silence, of course.
“Only the truest desires of the hearth. Wishes maybe you wouldn’t even know you had.” Thed she added, whistfully, still watching the fireflies, “Have you ever wanted something so much that you convinced yourself that you didn’t?”
Aeduan grunted. The paradox grated his nerves and struck home while he had his eyes on Iseult. That thought skimming his consciousness threw him back into tracking the bugs for himself.
