efri's various friends and their entries in her word-book (alternatively: all the pale weirdos people said might kill her BUT THEY DIDN'T)
we have, in order: the giant mammoth-herder that efri sometimes saw when she was out with the goats (her name is finlog, but efri doesn't know that). they never spoke (NOT because efri was intimidated, she was just far away) but they were on nodding terms. after efri left her entire herd to go feral in a cave finlog found them and, with some concern for the fate of the tiny goatherd, started caring for them herself. then solveig, the first vampire efri met in fellglow keep and her favourite, though meeting her prompted a lot of ethical philosophising. solveig thought this was funny. then whistle, one of the falmer she met in mzulft. he let her pat the chaurus he's a caretaker of so he's one of her favourite people ever (she has a lot of favourite people ever)
After another failure in adventuring leaves Efri Stroud penniless, she decides to chase her dreams of becoming a famous musician rather than trying to fight goblins in caves.
I’ve been running a legacy and 100 baby challenge on my own because of the quarantine, but I wanted a new family in my library so that my towns aren’t full of people only related to each other haha. So I saw the Forgotten Realms Legacy Challenge by @anxiousmoodlet and got REALLY excited! I’m not sure how much I’ll post about it, I guess depending on how many people would be interested? But I love how Efri turned out, she was my first dnd character I ever created and felt it was appropriate for such a challenge!
a few pages of efri's word-book :) it was originally a fabric-scrap gift from urag in which he carefully wrote and illustrated the kinds of words that seem normal for a kid to start learning to read with. efri dutifully copied all of these out and then immediately went off the deep end with as many syllables as she could find. it quickly became one part learning-to-write exercise to two parts weird diary - you can trace a lot of what she's thinking about in there, and she starts including more little thoughts and notes as she gets more comfortable with writing
Efri knocks on the door, which she doesn’t normally do. It’s so ridiculously loud it feels counterintuitive – she takes a full minute and a fair bit of banging around to shove it open, so he can already hear her, no need for anything else. But this time she knocks.
This time is different. This time is a bit weird, because the Archmage invited her to visit.
Normally, she just barges in when she feels like it, whenever she’s got an hour or so to spare. To look at his magic-grown garden, mostly; it’s a good garden, bright and beautiful and impossible without whatever weird spellcraft set it in place, all kinds of plants with all different needs. Grapes that only grow in the Eastmarch Aalto, mushrooms that only grow in the belly of the earth, flowers that only grow in snow and lichen that only grow in swamps. It shouldn’t be able to all grow together, and yet it does. It’s fascinating. And nice to look at.
So Efri comes to look at it. And sometimes – when the Archmage isn’t being too withdrawn and sulky – he tells her about it, about the care each plant needs, how he has to prune the bushes and pull the fjell’s weave out before it sprawls to take up all the space in the soil. He has gardening gloves, not soft wool like hers but dark leather with dirt streaking the seams. She’s seen him wear them three times.
Sometimes he’s not in the mood, and she looks in silence, and he pretends like she’s not there, and she pretends like he’s doing a good job at that. (He often looks over at her – she can feel his bleeding-red eyes on her back – and sighs, like the weird tired old man he is. She doesn’t acknowledge it.)
But this time he asked for her. Which, unless he’s got a new plant (unlikely) she can’t think of any reason for him to do. It isn’t as though they ever talk about anything else. But Mirabelle found her in the laundry room, pressing soap through Sissel’s favourite blanket because they’d used it for long enough it had started to smell funny, and she told her that Archmage Aren wanted to see her, and she wasn’t going to say no. She was curious. And besides, they’re a sort of friends, she thinks – even if he’s weird and sullen and almost two hundred years old, he still lets her wander into his room when she’s at a loose end, rifling through his things like a careless wind and peering wide-eyed at his garden. He still sits down and talks to her about it, sometimes. So Efri knocks, and waits, uncomfortably, to hear a response.
There’s a faint, “Mirabelle?” through the heavy wooden door. Efri sighs, because she knows he can’t hear her.
“Efri,” she calls back.
A pause. Then, “Ah,” a little louder, and he’s pulling the door open, which is a nice change. That thing is enormous. Hurts her arms to shove at.
Still weird, though.
The Archmage stands, a hand on the door’s fancy-looking knob, wearing his hood again. There’s no rhyme or reason as to when and where he wears that thing, it seems. He took it off on the ramparts, out in Winterhold’s eternal blizzard; he’s put it on now, in his own too-lavish room, where he sits and reads and looks at his plants.
He doesn’t say hello.
“Hi,” Efri says, because she is polite; she ducks under his arm and stands in his little entrance hall, on his nice smooth blue rug. “What did you want?”
“What did I –” the Archmage says; there’s a brief flash of the eyes as he turns, the glow of the mage-lit sconces reflecting off his irises. “Ah. Nothing in particular. Do you mind if I go tend to the garden?”
Efri squints at him. (He’s being strange. In a different way to usual.) Suspiciously, she replies, “All right.”
So he turns and goes. His quarters – spacious and lavish like a jarl’s longhouse – don’t punch the breath out of her like they did the first few times she saw them, but they’re still a lot. The magic lights, the near-glow of the threads of the rugs, the smooth beautiful wood of the furniture. It’s more’n two times the size of Efri’s old house, and that’s before the dragon burnt it down. It’s all full of books and knick-knacks in a way that makes her almost envious. And of course it has the garden; there’s not words for how wonderful the garden is.
The Archmage crosses the floor with neat, steady steps, one hand tugging on the hood of his mantle. His gardening gloves lay creased on a little red-wood desk; he pulls them on and marches over to the garden without so much of a glance.
He shakes, a little, as he crouches down on the edge of the stone steps so he can reach the dirt. Maybe he’s a bit cold – it’s never quite warm in here no matter how the fire burns. Or maybe his knees are aching and weak. Efri understands that old people get that, sometimes.
(She still doesn’t know why he called her here; doesn’t know why he’s not telling her. She doesn’t believe it’s nothing; he’s never done it before, usually seems vaguely put out by her presence, even if it’s in a way she can tell isn’t entirely genuine. If it was something silly, like wanting someone to talk to about a problem with the plants, he’d either wait for her to visit on her own time or just say so.)
(But she often doesn’t understand quite why he does the things he does. So she doesn’t know.)
He stays quiet, and Efri thinks she recognises this quiet – if she talked at all right now, he wouldn’t hear it. Lost inside his own head. She squints at him for a moment, looks around the room; her eyes fall, after a moment, on the polished surface of the desk. It’s cluttered with inkpots and paper and all manner of little mage things; laying open is a book.
Efri takes a step off the rug and onto the stone with a leather-booted foot. She isn’t quiet about it; the Archmage doesn’t notice.
She goes to look at the book.
It’s quite old, she thinks, though not as old as some of the texts in the Arcaeneum; the pages yellowed and wrinkled with time, the leather she can see of the cover soft and supple. The page it’s opened to is covered over with sparse text; handwritten, too, and rather messily. It takes some effort but Efri is able to make out a few words.
Only because they’re familiar, though; only because she’s spent the last few days peering over Sissel’s shoulder as she pores over volumes that might give them the information they need (while still being succinct enough as to be comprehensible). Chapters of histories of the magical institutions of the world with only the vaguest descriptions of the ideas and practices of the Psijic Order; old College record-books that say nothing about an Augur.
On this wrinkled page Efri’s eyes, skimming over the small collections of words in a crisp, crabbed hand, lock onto the familiar shapes of Artaeum – of Psijic – of Winterhold. There are a few other capitalised words that look like names, though none of them mean much of anything to her. Deneth. Antilion.
Efri glances back at the Archmage, who is still crouching on the edge of the garden patch. His arms are limp by his sides, hands spread out on the stone.
She takes the book. (It might be relevant! She’ll give it back later!) She’s got no pockets big enough to put it in, so she hurries back over to the little entrance area and slips it under a dresser. She’ll take it out on her way out – have Sissel help her look through it for anything about the Augur they’re supposed to find or the strange mages they’ve been contacted by – and bring it back, later. No harm done.
The Archmage is still staring at the garden like it’s telling him secrets. She pads over to him on her toes, quiet as a mouse. Even when she’s standing over him, practically looming, her skirt definitely in position to be within the edges of his vision, he doesn’t turn. He’s like this, sometimes. Makes it easier to look through all his stuff without him complaining; makes it harder to talk, if Efri’s in a chatty mood, or to figure out what it is he wants.
Efri waits a few seconds – just to make sure – before she nudges him with her foot.
He startles, whole body twitching under the loose grey cloth of his robe. He looks up.
Efri says, “Are you going to tend the plants?”
The Archmage blinks. “Of course,” he says; his tone is somewhere between curt and bemused. “I was waiting for you to come over here.”
His eyes are fixed on some point on the ceiling, or on the shift of Efri’s mantle. Efri eyes him askance. “Well, I’m here now,” she tells him, like it’s not obvious, and kicks him gently one more time for good measure.
“Don’t,” he says. He doesn’t snap – still talks soft. Efri looks at him even more askance, but he’s already looking away, over his mage-lit bed of plants. They look good, as neat and cared-for as ever, though one of the hardy little bushes is growing more arms than it really needs and the gnarling rock-roots are beginning to drown out the little flowers – the ones that look like goatweed. A garden like this – miraculous, impossible, meddling – takes a lot of maintenance, especially when you’re not a plant-wizard, which, Efri has learned, is a real thing; there’s a surprising amount of plant-based spells, and in Morrowind the wizards actually grow big mushrooms to live in. But neither she nor the Archmage are much good at plant-spells; they have to do it all manual.
Mostly manual. The Archmage raises a hand; Efri watches as ice gathers in the air before his fingers, glittering in the magelight like a sharp-cut diamond (or like the ink-print drawings of them; Efri’s never seen one in real life). With a flick of his wrist he sends it scattering in jewel-bright drops over the patch.
(Efri would have had to get a watering can. Or rig up some complex irrigation scheme. Doing it with magic feels like cheating.)
But it is pretty. “Pretty,” she comments, because if she doesn’t, she is mostly sure the Archmage will forget she’s there.
His fingers curl. “Thank you,” he says. Frost begins creeping over his palm, piling itself on like a gentle drift of snow. After several seconds of him casting in silence and her watching in silence, he speaks again. “That was… a strange incident, the other day. Very strange indeed.”
Ah. The incident.
(The unfamiliar mage that appeared out of nowhere – offering no explanations, would speak to nobody – demanding to see the College’s youngest, newest member. A mage from some important society, no less; magical societies are hardly Efri’s area of expertise, but from the way that both the Archmage and his Advisor were falling over themselves to accommodate his bizarre requests it must be really important. And then they’d messed it all up by insisting that Efri and Kazari go as well as Sissel, even though he only asked for Sissel; and then he stopped time to talk to them and vanished into thin air as soon as he was done. And Kazari said they shouldn’t tell anyone about it.)
(That incident.)
“Mm,” Efri says in vague agreement. (Kazari said she shouldn’t tell anyone about it. And they made fair points. If the not-ghost had wanted the Archmage to know he would have brought him into the fold; Efri and her friends don’t even know what they’re doing, much less who they can trust about it.)
“Very strange,” the Archmage repeats. He curls his hand into a fist and the gathered snow seeps out of it. “And after all these years – he just leaves.” He looks back, the lines of his face stark in the glow of the magelight and the shadow of his hood, his eyes apple-red, and asks, “Do you think we offended him?”
Normally, the Archmage talks kind of blank. Dispassionate. Borderline lofty, borderline lordly, sometimes. This is not that.
(Efri can’t place what it is instead, but it’s not that. She bites the inside of her cheek.)
Affecting a shrug, Efri says, “How should I know? I didn’t talk to him.”
“Hm,” the Archmage replies, and turns back to the garden, a grey silhouette against the colourful shock of the plants.
“He seemed weird,” Efri offers, which is true. (Both versions of events make him seem weird: his cryptic warnings and his cryptic-er silence.)
The Archmage, shoulders slumped, repeats, “Hm.” There is a quiet moment. He says, “Would you like me to show you how to prune the canis root?”
Efri says, “Sure.”
So the Archmage steps into the garden, bare-footed on the sparse patches of free, damp soil. His toes must be very cold. He crouches down, knees clicking as he does – moves to the side of the plant growing sharp and sprawling out of the rock so Efri can see what he’s doing – and unsheathes a wicked little blade that winks in the magelight. He sets a hand on one of the dry, quavering roots (no, Efri notices – the root is still, it’s his hand that trembles) and positions the knife.
A quick, neat slice, right below the bud, to keep the root small and contained, else it might crawl over the rocks and strangle out everything else in the garden. The pruned-off root rests in the Archmage’s palm. He curls his fingers around it; Efri can see the leather of his gloves crease.
“Efri,” he says, sudden. Magelight runs like waterfall rapids down the grey wool of his back, the heavy fold of his hood. “Be careful.”
She’s not the one with the knife. She doesn’t know what he means. But the tremor in his hand is rattling his whole arm up to the shoulder, now, and he still sounds strange. A hundred years younger, maybe. Or much, much older.
“I know you think you’re on the edge of something great,” he goes on, that strange quality to his voice. He sounds like the pruning knife, like ocean storms, like old stone. “You’re curious. You want to know.”
Oh.
“You want to know, too,” Efri says, hand fisting in the pilling warm wool of her skirt. She feels defensive, though she’s not entirely sure of what. “And it’s important. It –”
His shape against the blossoming garden shifts. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe it is. Maybe you are.”
He turns, then; his face stark blue-grey as the ancient stones, and Efri is suddenly, deeply certain that he has been in the College for aeons. He has never left this room. For a moment, all its luxury feels gossamer-frail; the air is heavy as ash and she is choking on it. She can make out nothing in the lines of the Archmage’s face. “Your great discovery,” he says, and it’s like a recitation. “Think about what it’s worth. Think about what it isn’t.”
In the main hall of the College, far below, the Eye of Magnus rests atop a streaming blue-light font. It spins, and spins, and spins.
“You’re being weird,” Efri tells the Archmage of Winterhold, and his lips flatten.
“Think about it,” he repeats with the distant finality of a bell’s toll, and he slices through another grown-out root, sap sticking bloodily to his blade.
tagged by the inimitable @lemon-embalmer tagging back @wispstalk @jiubilant @everybodyknows-everybodydies @ghoulsbeard :) here's part of a rewrite I've been working on of a piece in which efri has a screaming fight with faralda and a normal sibling reunion. might post it soon so that I don't forget about it and leave it in the drafts for two years until it's too old and incongruous with my current writing style to post like I did with its predecessor
A woman pauses over the wares sold by the Khajiiti merchants camped outside Danstrar to ask with no small amount of perturbation, “Whose children are those?”
Efri glances up to check she’s talking about them – as if there’s a whole host of other children around she might be referring to. The woman is standing over the rug Tsradaro’s laid out their most intriguing trinkets on – she has one clawed hand on the lid of a little palm-sized casket, one of the boxes of pretty-smelling oils. (If the strange woman is getting to buy one, then Efri’s jealous. She doesn’t have any money, and she’s not allowed to use those sorts of things for free, no matter how nice the perfume smells. Normally she doesn’t care about rules like that, but the caravan is being very nice and the things they sell are their livelihood, so she follows them without much complaining.)
The woman is looking at her and Sissel, clustered with Khasir around the firepit. Efri and Sissel are hunched over the steaming-hot fish on a dish, away from the pan of spitting butter. Efri says brightly, “We’re our own children.”
“We found them in the wilderness,” Taz puts in quietly, fingers running up and down the handle of the axe laying at eir side on the blanket, and Efri nods in agreement. (She likes Taz, even if ey talks barely more than Kazari or Shirri-la. A lot less if you count all the things Kazari and Shirri-la say that the others translate for her. Ey’s calm and quiet and has let Efri touch eir axe, so ey’s good in her books.)
“Exactly,” she says. The woman looks no less perplexed or concerned. Efri squints and tells her, “I like your beads.”
(She does. The woman’s got a string of them, pretty coloured glass, stretched across her breast between her hangerok brooches. Most of them are a fiery orange-red, the same colour as her hair.)
The woman looks down at the beads she wears as if she forgot about them. “Oh,” she says. “Thank you.”
Efri abandons the fish – not like she can do anything with it, it’s too hot to touch still – to shuffle across the laid-out rugs and join Tsradaro at her display. “Are you going to buy any fabrics?” she asks the woman, and then before there’s really time to answer she turns to Tsradaro. “Did you show her them? We’ve got some really pretty silks and things. Nice patterns. I wanted to make a dress with them but Tsradaro said no, they’re for selling.”
The woman’s eyebrows – bright-bead-red – meet in the middle of her forehead. “Do you… help sell things here?”
“She is a born patterer, that one,” Tsradaro says smoothly. Her whiskers twitch. “And yes, they’re for selling – and yes, Tsradaro already gave you money for the dress you have, she isn’t going to give you fabric for a new one. She is not quite so open-handed.”
Efri curls up her fingers to rub the stitching of her sleeve. “Fair enough,” she acknowledges. “And it’s nice. But that green one is so pretty.”
“Hm.” Tsradaro is grinning with her eyes a bit; she hides it fiddling with the display of the wares on the rug in front of her. “If there is a bolt-end left over, you can have it for a scarf. Now shoo. You are distracting the customers.”
“And you’ve abandoned the fish!” Khasir calls. When he grins, it’s with all his teeth, sharp-edged and sparkling. “This one cannot do it all on their own.”
There’s only one customer, and the fish is still steaming, but Efri gets the hint, so she blinks her thanks and hurries back over to the fire.
“We’re doing all three?” she checks, looking at the numerous pots and pans Khasir’s rigged up over the flames. (She bought three cod with the money they gave her for dinner. That’s certainly not a fish she and Sissel and Kazari ever caught from their tundra creek – they’re so much bigger than she could have imagined, and it took all her strength to haul them back to the camp. She had to carry one of them in her arms because it didn’t all fit in the little sack she brought.)
“Yes,” they say emphatically, poking at something in one of the pots. “So hurry up.”
Because she’s helpful, Efri does. She squats down next to Sissel, next to the dish, and takes up the knife. She cuts off the head – it takes a fair bit of hacking – and the tail, because Sissel hates that bit, and cuts the fins out as well. She cracks some of the bones there by accident; Sissel picks them out with her fingers. Then, sticking her tongue out in concentration, she runs the knife right down the middle, jerking the blade through the bones. It isn’t going right through the bottom like it did with the fish they learned to butcher from the stream, but she more or less gets it eventually; cuts away the chunks of bone, and is left with two beautiful fillets.
Well. Beautiful might be a bit generous. But they’re edible – surely that’s the most important thing.
“Told you I knew how to debone a fish,” Efri says triumphantly.
Khasir glances up over the flour they’re tipping into a hanging pan. “You do,” he agrees amiably, and for a moment Efri thinks he’s being nice, but then he cracks another smug little grin. “But not well. The pin bones are still in.”
Efri frowns. She can’t see any bones. It’s filleted fine.
“Let me,” Sissel says, and peels the knife out of her hand. Efri frowns again, harder, but lets her.
Her irritation is only compounded when Khasir finds nothing to tease about in the way Sissel carefully slices the bones away and strips the skin of with a few neat, if unpractised, cuts. “That’s not fair,” she complains, mulish. “Sissel’s basically a genius, of course she’ll get it right.”
“I’m not a genius,” Sissel says, “I’m just better at this than you,” and she smiles when Efri giggles despite herself, a quick flash of teeth.
Khasir has Sissel do the rest of the fillets. They let Efri watch the way they fry up the batter – just flour in a pan of spitting butter and sizzling herbs, a little bit of egg put in to help it all bond. When it’s cooked all golden, smelling delicious, he levers it quick as a wink off the flat pan and into the covered dish he’s keeping them warm in while they wait for the rest of it all to be done. Efri asks to cook a griddle-cake herself; Khasir laughs at her.
They’re a bit of a bastard.
They do let her stir the sauce for the fish, though – hung a little bit higher than everything else so it can simmer with lower heat. It smells nice too. Sissel’s almost done with the third fish by this time. (She’s a lot faster than Efri was; it’s probably for the best that she do most of the filleting.)
Efri looks up and across the camp. There’s two different people now at Tsradaro’s display – one standing, one kneeling to get a better look at all the things. Shirri-la has come out of the tent, and she’s sitting with her tail curled around her feet on her cushion next to the wares. Kazari’s still in the tent, Efri thinks. They’re tired – helped carry most things as they travelled this last stretch of journey to Danstrar in order to give the nag a break, so now they’re resting. It’s only fair. In a week or so they’ll all split off from the caravan, strike out across the frozen terrain for Winterhold, and they’ll really need the energy then.
Just a bit further away, the red-haired woman is standing. Efri’s not sure if she bought something or not; she doesn’t look like she’s looking to buy anything now.
“That lady’s looking at us,” Efri tells Khasir, her brow furrowing.
Khasir glances over so quick Efri’s not even sure if she saw it right; they make a guttural tutting sound over the batter in the pan. Tch. “People do that,” he replies, deliberately nonchalant.
Efri bites her tongue. “They shouldn’t,” she complains. It’s uncomfortable, to be stared at. It’s rude, to stare.
(She feels a bit bad, even though she didn’t do anything wrong; because the woman seemed uncomfortable with Efri and Sissel being with the caravan, and maybe if they weren’t, Khasir wouldn’t have to be stared at while they cook dinner.)
“Perhaps,” Khasir says. He flips the batter. “But they do.”
“Done,” Sissel says, holding up a dish full of neatly filleted fish.
(Efri says, “How.” Both Khasir and Sissel ignore her.)
“Chop it up small,” Khasir tells her. The jewellery in his nose glitters as he shifts over the fire. “Then – Efri, mix it in with the sauce. No, not – smaller than that, dran khrassa! So all can eat.”
Sissel slices the fish into little bits. (Efri would have cut them into tiny strips, to get back at Khasir for being bossy, but Sissel is more forgiving.) Efri takes the dish, tips it into the saucepan, begins to stir.
“If we were in Elsweyr, Khajiit would stare at you,” Khasir says. He takes the flat-cake off the pan. “They would say, who let these bald children run around unsupervised?”
Efri chuckles, but she feels pensive. Her face screws up. “But if we were in Elsweyr,” she says, “even if they stared at us, they’d still let us buy from their shops and all.”
Khasir sighs, long and low. They lift the lid off the dish. “Efri,” they say, with unexpected patience; “This one understands that you are a child who has just discovered injustice. This is new to you. It is not new to us. Khasir knew before he travelled here that he would be treated poorly.”
“But it’s not fair,” Efri replies, agitated, her fingers bony and twitching on the handle of her spoon. “It’s not fair to do both. They can keep you out or they can stare, they can’t keep you where they can’t even see you and then still come to look anyway.” She keeps looking, without quite meaning to, in the direction of the red-haired woman. She keeps glaring. She hopes it scares her off.
“Mm,” Khasir says, unimpressed – but faintly amused, she thinks, which is kind of annoying but also kind of good? “Well, you can tell the people who make the laws so, have them forbid wrongful staring.”
Efri, mixing, considers this. “Sissel,” she asks, “can you write a message to a jarl?”
Khasir cackles. Sissel scrunches up her face. “Well, you can. I doubt they’d read it.”
That’s one idea gone, Efri supposes. She’ll have to keep thinking.
Khasir does not allow her time to keep thinking. “Another few minutes and that will be perfect,” they say, nodding to the pot she’s stirring, and they take their griddle-pan off the fire. Then they pause, look at Efri out of the edges of their bright greeny-gold eyes. “This one will own, it has been much easier with you as companions. We did not have to wait for the grocers and fishmongers to come out to trade on their own time, or forage for ourselves if they did not.”
“You just don’t want to do your job,” Efri says. Tsradaro said Khasir hunted but he’s barely hunted at all while they’ve known him, only just at the beginning.
Khasir barks a laugh, tipping his head in acknowledgement. With the air of one conferring a great and shameful secret, he replies, “This one does not like deer stalking in the snow.”
Fair enough; Efri nods seriously. She’s never hunted deer but it’s probably difficult, especially in the snow. She stirs the sauce, the lumps of fish buffeted by the flat of her spoon, the smell making her mouth water.
She glances up at the cloud-blanketed sky. She asks, “When we’re in Winterhold, can we write a message to you?”
Khasir tilts their head further. “You can try,” they say. “But Khajiit may be too fast for the couriers. It may never arrive.”
“We’ll try,” Efri decides; when she glances as Sissel, she sees her nod. “We’ll figure out a way. I want to hear about where you go after!”
“About what other strays we find on the road?” Khasir jokes, but his smile is wide and shiny, nose scrunched up with it so whiskers flicker over his eyes. He leans over, takes Efri’s pot off the fire. “Good.”
Efri grins, even though they’re not looking and can’t see it.
“Go get Kazari,” they command, lifting the lid of the dish and moving one of the still-hot flat-cakes to a plate with their fingers. “This one will get a plate ready. He has to take over for Tsradaro, so he’ll eat quickly.”
Efri salutes (a habit she picked up from an Imperial courier they traded with on the road – she thinks it’s funny) and marches towards the tent.
tagged by @lemon-embalmer to share the last line I wrote! tagging back @wispstalk and @creaking-skull :)
Efri pulls her back up as straight as it will go, and she tips her head back so she can look in his face, and in a voice so full of loathing that she thinks it should by rights kill him on the spot, she asks, “Can I have some flour?”
