Happy MGM from writingamongthecoloredroses! What Disney movie is your OC(s) favorite? Is there a personal reason?
Oh boy, it’s been a hot minute since I posted something on this blog, I swear to christ I’m going to finish the novel, things have just been...a little pandemicky out here. Anyway!
Brenneth’s favorite Disney movie is Robin Hood, she likes the songs and she had Strong Gryffindor Energy even as a little kid, so the narrative appealed to her. Honorable mention to Fantasia, which she started watching after getting back from Alleirat the first time as an anxiety management technique. Sometimes she and Crispin watched it together and pretended they couldn’t see each other getting weepy during the Firebird Suite, because that’s what you do for your soulmate/mortal enemy/best friend sometimes.
Crispin’s favorite Disney movie when he was a kid was Mulan, he tried to convince his sister to help him dress up in Mulan’s matchmaker outfit for Halloween when he was six and their parents shut him down. It continues to be his favorite movie post-Alleirat (she reminds him of Brenneth) but also he can’t watch it anymore because the avalanche scene makes him shaky (she reminds him of she reminds him of Brenneth).
Shiko’s favorite Disney movie is actually not a Disney movie at all even though she argues that it counts because Disney distributed it, it’s Princess Mononoke. Brenneth gets a real kick out of watching Shiko argue with Crispin about it. In terms of actual Disney movies, she actually didn’t watch a whole ton of them growing up but she had a crush on Prince Eric when she was a kid, so, nominally the Little Mermaid.
Krei has never seen any movie, let alone Disney, but in any modern AU/if she ever had, her favorite would be Sleeping Beauty because she and Phillip are the same person.
does shiko get an epithet? like white wolf, fireheart
Spoilers ;)
But since I feel bad aboutthat answer, may I also recommend the absolute hell out of the song Medusaby Kailee Morgue for Shiko, as well as My Boy Builds Coffins byFlorence + the Machine and Work Song by Hozier.
oh dang I must have missed that one! New question then: What are some cool things Brenneth has made that she's proud of? Does she do a lot of personal projects on the side, or does she only make stuff she knows she can sell?
Oh, y’all, a fun fact I learned at the Met recently:armorers and weapons-smiths often made children’s toys! Brenneth makes children’s toys. They’re much more detail-oriented than mostof the things she makes—Brenneth specializes in weapons, although she’s beenknown to make some armor, usually as a collaborative effort—and she finds thefinicky little bits satisfying to work with. It also helps that she’s fully capable of grabbing red-hot iron with herbare hands if she feels like it, which makes finicky little bits much moreconvenient than if she needed to wear gloves. She takes requests and does not charge, which Crispin needles her about—herpayment scale is flexible to say the least and it gives him hives in aprofessionally mortified sort of way—but she refuses to budge. She’s not proud of those toys in a technicalsense (they’re…fine, they’re just fine, but they’re nowhere near herusual expectations for herself) but she likes to make them and she’s proud ofhow happy they make people, so she’s happy.
In terms of personal projects, Brenneth sometimes makesstuff for herself, or for Crispin, but she doesn’t really believe inmixing work and hobbies anymore than she already does (which is…a lot), so shetries to do non-metalwork for stress relief.
also also, in the hypothetical timeline where everything turns out fine and everyone lives happily ever after, do shiko and krei move in together? where? do they have pets? kids? houseplants that shiko makes endless jokes about?
In any “everything is okay” timeline, Shiko and Krei DO in factmove in together! Krei spends all herfree hours for the first month and a half in their new home putting up shelvesand buying pots to fill them, until every room is dripping with greenery andsmells sweetly of growth and fresh soil. They get a place with either big windows or lots ofwindows, so that Krei can grow flowers in the sunlight and weave them intoShiko’s hair. Shiko picks up books inAlleirai that start to fill their shelves, first children’s books—the Alleiraiversion of Have You Seen My Hat and Hop On Pop or whatever—and then,as her reading improves, books about religion and about history and about the arcane and about traditions of the dead. She’s fascinated by the idea of dead gods,gods who were and now are not, and by the idea of runic magic, and by the way funerals on Alleirat were shaped by civil war, and Krei is fascinated by the way Shiko tucksher hair irritably behind her ears as she talks about something she loves.
Shiko also picks up a cat, after a couple years. It is a non-traditional cat.
It’s dead, okay, she has a skeleton cat. It’s some extraordinarily advanced runicmagic that really wouldn’t work on anything larger or more complex than youraverage housepet, but binding the cat’s—something, Shiko says cats don’thave souls like people do but at that point Krei kind of tuned out—back intoits bones means it can operate a little more on its own impulses and keepmoving while Shiko is asleep. It takesKrei a little while to stop jumping every time the thing comes into the room,even if Shiko says that it doesn’t mind being alive again. Shiko did it mostly as a proof-of-concept, away to make her name as an arcane scholar, but once she had the cat,what was she going to do? Kill it again? Obviously not.
She did not tell Krei that she was bringing a dead cat home. This is because Shiko, while not actually a bad person, is a little bit of an asshole.
They do have children, I think—just one, a son with handsome darkskin toned with gold and hair as pin-straight as Shiko’s and eyes as emeraldgreen as Krei’s. He’s the onlybiological child among the four of them, and grows up much loved, into a scholarjust like his mother. Shiko always saysthat, when the other options were warrior, hero, and nightmare, he went withthe best option he had, and if that means her kid spent three years boring themall silly with his research about architectural styles in pre-Unification Obalin,that was fine by her.
Ok so I'm not sure if you were serious about this or not but, can we know what daemons the characters of Alleirat would have? Sorry for the bother dude.
“am i serious” OF COURSE I’M SERIOUS PULL UP SOME CARPET BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY ONE CHAIR IN MY ROOM
Okay in honesty I just threw that in the tags because it was the first thing that popped into my head, but I’ve given this exactly 0 thought, so bear with me here.
Brenneth
So the first thing that occurred to me for Brenneth was actually a wolf (pursuit predator), but instead what I think she ends up with is a mountain lion. Solitary, adaptable, and an excellent hunter. He settles when she and Crispin first arrive in Alleirat, so, fairly early (they’re ten), and for a long time it’s a mystery. Brenneth, as a teenaged blacksmith and sometime warrior, is friendly and reasonable, good with children and happy with her work, quick to cut to the heart of the problem but not excessively aggressive except when the situation calls for it. Not the type to make someone think apex predator, all things considered. Her daemon lies under a table in her forge and lets visiting kids’ daemons attack his tail and generally does a good impression of an extremely large and easy-going housecat.
Then Crispin becomes the White Wolf and everyone remembers that Brenneth’s lazy nine-foot housecat is also an exceptionally well designed killer. And there’s something mythic about it, the Fireheart standing there with her sword drawn and a cougar at her side.
There are statues. Both of them are horrified.
Crispin
Crispin’s daemon means something radically different in Alleirat than on Earth. Also, she’s not a wolf, she’s a golden eagle–he earned the epithet before his daemon was common knowledge. Crispin’s daemon settles a while after Brenneth’s does, upon hearing the prophecy about how Crispin is supposed to save Alleirat from some great evil. She’s big for a golden eagle, which is a big bird already (like, big enough to carry off a bear cub), and she and Crispin are Separated, to allow her to fly. After their return to Earth, she’s suddenly far too big for Crispin’s tiny ten-year-old shoulder. This presents a problem, as a bad mental day for the two of them means that Crispin can’t use his left arm and she can’t fly at all, so she becomes known for riding on his backpack during school.
On Earth, she’s a symbol of courage, of nobility and strength and honor.
On Alleirat, they pay much more attention to the fact that a golden eagle will eat anything from a rabbit to a small deer to another eagle–a killer of their own kind.
Additionally, she was caught in the lightning blast when Crispin killed his teachers and started his rampage. They’re not sure what happened, but now she’s an albino, and nothing seems to change that.
Krei
Krei is enough generations removed from her tree-folk heritage to have ended up with a daemon, although the rules are a little different. She’s almost a hundred before her daemon settles, after her mother dies attempting to evacuate a house fire. Her daemon settles as a dog unique to Alleirat, but most similar to a Bernese Mountain Dog. The breed is a little bigger, its fur is differently colored with a slightly different muzzle shape, but it was originally bred for very similar purposes, primarily for the defense of homes, livestock, and families. Dog daemons, on Alleirat as well as on Earth, are considered hallmarks of protective personalities and service professions, and his particular breed is known for loyalty and devotion. He’s almost big enough to be used as a small draft animal (Krei is 6′7″ and he passes her hip), and generally very friendly and easygoing most of the time, which serves both of them well training new recruits. On the other hand, he’s a dog the size of a small pony and he has the jaws to prove it–more than one person has been put on trial in Dase with a broken arm from Krei’s attack daemon.
She actually shares the dog daemon with her mother, although Torei’s daemon was a rangier, mutt-y sort of animal more like a wolfhound.
Shiko
Shiko’s daemon always identifies as male, even before she transitions, which contributes in no small part to the independent, self-sufficient way she tends to think. He settles as a red fox, small for his kind but about the right size to tuck himself around Shiko’s neck like a fur ruff. He’s not super into ghosts. He’s not super into zombies. He’s not super into magic at all, really. He has a lot of complaints about a lot of what’s going on here.
When they’re traveling through Alleirat, a number of reports come back that he lacks the classic white tips, but the truth is quite simple: he helps Shiko raise the dead, and he frequently ends up with grave dirt obscuring the tip of his tail and front of his throat.
Anyway I’m doing NaNo in an impulsive push to finish Worldwalker before I go grey, and the issue I’m running into is that I point my brain at a scene and go “let’s talk about Shiko and guilt” and my brain instead goes “let’s talk about Crispin and combat skill level and recklessness.”
An unkind person might say that plans and planning were never your strong suit,” Crispin observed. It was not, strictly speaking, untrue. I had always lacked the ambition to match Crispin when it came to planning—cutting a swathe of destruction wasn’t hard, but maintaining it for four years without being caught was a certain flavor of impressive. I’d always been all reaction, as subtle as a hammer and about as good at the long game. Crispin was the one who had a good sense of how to set goals and achieve them. I just saw problems and solved them, took commissions and finished them, usually with a lot of snap decisions in the mix.
Instead of saying any of that, I smiled at Crispin, broad and genuine, and said, “Lucky for me that you’re a kind person.
I am Consumed By Guilt about having basically dropped my novel for four months while I had a long and varied series of crises, which has definitely affected my productivity on it, however
I did cross the 100K mark on Worldwalker three days ago, so.
Are there some people who KNOW they have magic because they have an adara reaction, but never figure out WHAT KIND because it's too general/vague?
Yes! I talked a little in this post about how, for example, a flesh worker who specializes in bone might never actually figure that out, because they need to be touching the object of their magic in order to do magic, and live bone isn’t generally hanging out where people can get their hands on it. (Before anyone asks: teeth are not bones, teeth are teeth. Dentin is different enough from bone that magic treats it as a separate material when you get to this level of specificity, like iron and steel.) But that bone worker might still make people taste iron from the bone marrow! They’re just probably never going to get a sense of what they can do.
As a rule, the really general magic comes out by accident at some point--if you’re a water worker or a metal worker or something, eventually you’ll be in contact with that thing in a moment where you’re upset enough to use magic. Weather worker adaran effects can be pretty scattershot, but it’s weather. You’re in it always. Eventually you’ll use magic by accident. It’s the highly niche stuff that gets dicey. Like, say you’re from a poor farming family--when the hell are you going to be handling enough silk to realize that you can work magic in it?
“You and me, Crispin had said, clutching at her hands, just like Torei was now. There had been something terrible and aching in his face, something broken in the adara, the electricity that his magic always sent across her skin harsh and hurting. Just like always, ah?” what is this adara? you’ve mentioned it before I think, something about their magic?
RIGHT, so, the adara is a magical circuit that closes when two magic workers look into each others’ eyes. The adara is unique to each type of magic, and usually manifests as a smell or taste, although there are some people strong enough to throw a physical sensation in there--a plant worker like Krei might make people smell grass or blooming wildflowers, whereas a fire worker’s magic might taste like smoke and, if you’re Brenneth, make people feel a wave of heat like standing next to a bonfire. Crispin’s gaze makes magic users taste ozone and feel electricity across their skin, like touching one of those weird glowing static orbs. There is a mild-but-real societal rule (more than a courtesy but less than a taboo) against excessive eye contact in general Alleirai society as a response to the existence of the adara. It’s considered something of a privacy violation. It’s most common for people to look at the person they’re talking to while the other person is talking, and then look away while they’re talking, and so forth, or else to look slightly off from their eyes if watching them is important. Close relationships involve more eye contact. Eye contact is also sometimes employed by magic users to make a point or take control of a conversation, since the adara can be a bit of a jolt if you’re not ready for it.
Here are some rules about how the adara works.
First of all, the adara is a function of power level. The more powerful someone is, the harder the adara will hit you when you meet their eyes. A fire worker of average strength might be enough to make you smell candle-smoke, or a campfire, but not much more. Brenneth can hit people with such a strong wave of magic that a glance usually makes magic workers come out in a heat flush, and if she holds someone’s eyes for long enough, she can make them break out in a sweat like they’re standing in front of a furnace.
Second, only magic users can sense the adara. That’s about a quarter of the population, to some extent, but your average non-magical person can stare deeply into any eyes they please without any effect.
Third, although the broad strokes of the adara tend to be in common within a magical “type” (for example, most weather workers will make you smell/taste ozone or rain and maybe feel electricity, as the magic usually works in storms, and most thread workers will make you smell dyes or fibers of some kind), it’s still relatively specific to each person. Sort of like hair color. “Brown” is a broad sweep, but if your girlfriend has brown hair, you probably know that color even if you’re just seeing her from behind. However, someone’s specific adara can change if they suffer a major alteration of their core self, in some way. That’s what Brenneth is talking about with Crispin--as the White Wolf, his magic feels distinctly different to her, and she thinks of it as the adara being “broken.” It shifts back to more like what she’s familiar with eventually.
Finally, the critical issue with the adara in terms of tactically using it to know what you’re about to fight before you fight it is that it’s less effective for stronger magic workers. As a rule, the adara only allows people to sense magic that’s close to their own power level or stronger than their own. Brenneth and Crispin are, for all intents and purposes, nearly magic-numb, because their own power washes out any potential for another person to make an impression on them. A weak magic worker will always know what they’re dealing with, because the adara will tell them. A powerful magic worker is mostly flying blind.
so i've been doing that boycott thing and just got back, and the whole time i was sort of thinking about the part in the ladyhawke au where crispen introduces himself with brenneth's last name. i was wondering, in a normal au, would they get married? what would happen with last names? on a slightly different note, what are wedding traditions like in alleirat, and do either b or c want to or really not want to marry the other? what are their general attitudes on marriage? nice to see you back!
Crispin’s deepest most secret most denied desire is to marry Brenneth and has been since he was twelve years old send tweet
Brenneth doesn’t have any Emphatic feelings about marriage one way or the other, but Crispin wants nothing more than to be able to call himself Brenneth’s husband and, while he very much assumes for a majority of his life that it’s wildly out of the question, he doesn’t care about how it’s done, where it happens, or who’s in attendance. If Brenneth wandered up to him in her worst, rattiest clothes with soot on her face and ash in her hair and informed him that they were going to be sworn to each other in front of the gothed and five street urchins, he would be Absolutely Fine with that. They don’t legally have last names in Alleirat (worldwalkers are identified as “of Alleirat” rather than by family name or city of origin), but in another universe, Crispin would be more than glad to do whatever Brenneth wanted with their last names--probably leave them alone.
As for Brenneth, like I said, she’s not strongly invested in marriage as a concept, particularly not to Crispin. As far as she’s concerned, she’s more tightly bound to him than she ever could be to another living being, any ceremonial recognition of that fact is merely a formality. She’d propose if she knew he wanted it, though, once they’re together. (Someone eventually tips her off that he might enjoy being married properly--he’d never propose on his own time because he’s such a trainwreck of a person.)
Marriage in Alleirat is similar to marriage in, say, the 1300′s, by which I mean that there’s a distinction drawn between a legal status between two people which recognizes that their material possessions are being merged into a single unit (more common in the upper classes) and an emotional bond being recognized publicly (more common in middle and lower classes). Generally speaking, arranged marriages are done for business dealings, as nobility isn’t hereditary, but there have been cases of trying to keep a line of powerful magic workers “pure” by arranging marriages to the same class of worker over the generations. This does not always work--magic is generally loyal, but might occasionally decide to jump the tracks and give you a water worker after a hundred years of steel.
In terms of the wedding itself, attire and preferred season are heavily regionally dependent, largely because most Alleirai weddings happen outside--so, in the northern mountains, summer weddings are standard, whereas in the south only Bona Fide Idiots get married in the height of summer heat. Some rich folks or Politically Important Folks (like, for example, Brenneth and Crispin) might get married in a ballroom or even in the audience chamber of the gothkenla, the city center, but most of the time marriages happen outside. Weddings NEVER happen in temples--it’s considered bad luck to hold a wedding in a temple, for two reasons.
First, while most people pray predominantly to one or the other god, it’s usually viewed as tempting fate to so obviously favor one over the other as to hold a wedding in a temple. This general wariness is related to the fact that one time the gods got mad and fucking obliterated each other and also a whole continent.
Second, while upper class and political marriages follow slightly different rules, most people consider it bad luck to turn people away from a wedding! It’s widely believed to bring a marriage full of dissatisfaction and conflict if you actively turn someone away from an Alleirai wedding celebration. This doesn’t mean you need to invite the whole town, you invite whoever you invite, but if other people show up it’s expected that you welcome them, give them alcohol, feed them, the whole nine. While most people don’t bother to show up uninvited to a wedding for people they either don’t know or don’t like, this has led to the tendency to hold weddings outside where you don’t have a functional limit on space.
Most weddings are done by the town magistrate or some other person who is generally agreed to be a local social authority--a small enough town might have one of the local elders perform weddings, a large enough city generally has dedicated civil servants who act as officiants--although two especially devout people might have a priest of each god cooperatively perform the ceremony. At bare minimum there are two witnesses in addition to the officiant and the couple
There’s some variation in the ceremony itself, but there’s always a handfasting element in which the couple clasps their hands together and have some form of liquid poured over their hands. It’s usually water, although the extremely devout of the Wanderer sometimes use wine or even honey, and the extremely devout of the Lady of Stars will sometimes use silver ribbon or cord left to soak in cold water instead. This is because the Lady is traditionally offered an empty cup at meals and associated with permanence and death, thus something that can be kept, and the Wanderer is traditionally offered a full cup and associated with wildness and life, thus wine and honey. Gifts are sometimes exchanged after the handfasting, but it’s more common for the couple to be given garlands of flowers as a way to mark the end of the ceremony, and the couple usually gets some kind of matching indicator eventually (like rings or necklaces or tattoos or whatever), but it’s not strictly associated with the ceremony proper.
.....Brenneth decides that for once in their lives she will be the romantic one and gets proper gold rings to exchange during the ceremony, like they would have had if they got married on Earth. The only problem with this plan is that Crispin bought rings, like...literally the second Brenneth assured him she wasn’t joking. So they end up with two rings each.
#MMMMMMM THE GOOD CONTENT #worldwalker #except it’s ‘who dies at the other’s hands and who burns the world in grief and guilt’
(via @words-writ-in-starlight)
hey star your tags have made me EXTREMELY CONCERNED
Don’t you worry, all of the above are long since over. Now it’s all about the Trauma, and also the foreign emptiness of no longer having the scar from the blow that nearly killed you, and the feeling of looking out over the land you razed and seeing that it regrew without you.
so i'm being weird and rereading old posts, and i noticed that in your original post about worldwalker, you say that hair is a marking of status: the longer the hair, the higher the status. that struck me as interesting because crispin has long hair, and that makes sense, because he was raised as a scholar and whatnot. but then brenneth has long hair too? her whole life, i think. (forgive me if i'm wrong, my brain isn't great with details.) is there a reason for that? is she making a statement?
You’re correct! Brenneth has kept her hair long for a number of reasons, some of them more esoteric than others, but here’s a short rundown of the main ones.
She’s alianater, a worldwalker, and therefore holds some default status in Alleirat because of her formidable magical abilities, to the effect of Might Makes Nobility--when someone "got bored” of having a bellows in her forge and opted to casually use the kind of magic most people spend years developing to keep her fires hot instead, it’s a rare soul with the guts to roll up and say she’s getting uppity.
Crispin fought for her to be trained with him, and then later for her to hold a rank equal to him. This was unsuccessful, but won them both some goodwill, and as such the mutterings about Brenneth being above her station were mostly limited to behind their backs.
Brenneth never really wanted to be a hero, and that was true even when they first arrived and she was limping through Alleirai at a rate of a few words a minute. However. She also did not enjoy being written off as ‘irrelevant’ because she was a girl, and insisted on keeping her hair long, at first, because it was an indication of “girl-ness” on Earth, even if it wasn’t really the same thing on Alleirat.
Brenneth trained as a warrior as well as a blacksmith, which afforded her additional inherent status--warriors are considered of an inherently higher rank than craftsmen, a holdover from when Alleirat was determined to rip itself apart with wars and warriors were hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement. It’s not uncommon for warriors to wear their hair long enough to put up in a bun, because the “warrior’s spike” is a traditional hairpiece worn by warriors at formal events or in daily life to identify them. In old stories it’s a stiletto blade, more realistically it’s a single slender stick made of wood or bone (very occasionally metal) with a point on one end and some kind of carved ornament on the other, like a single hair stick. Since Brenneth showed a natural talent for combat nearly as good as her natural talent for metalworking, she was technically within her social rights to keep her hair long as soon as she was given her first spike by one of her teachers.
Brenneth likes wearing her hair long. Her hair is kind of her only vanity, she doesn’t like to think of cutting it off. It reminds her of when she liked herself and her world the best, and eventually gives her some hope of getting back there.
Finally: there are things attached to her hair--memories--that Brenneth can’t bring herself to get rid of. Before the White Wolf, she liked to have Crispin braid it for her.
I'd like to thank you for the Legend of the Sword au you promised in the tags of that Alleirat post, I may not be good at coming up with them but I sure do love them
LISTEN MY DUDE, YOU SAID “KING ARTHUR AU” IN YOUR REPLY TO THIS POST AND I IMMEDIATELY SMASHED MY NOVEL INTO MY FAVORITE MOVIE AND NOW WE ARE HERE.
Brenneth! Is! Arthur! Not a discussion! Obviously! Come on, people!
Hey uh have you Ladyhawke au’d Crispin/Brenneth because uh I know I know a fraction of what you know about these characters and thinking about it still makes me want to whisper ‘holy shit’
THIS IS SOME GALAXY BRAIN SHIT.
This is specifically from Shiko’s POV, because she seemed like the obvious candidate for Phillipe, so if you are in the market for just…thousands of words of angst about Brenneth and Crispin in those intervening fourteen years, I could also write that.
So.
It goes like this.
Shiko escapes from prison with no shoes and a reputation asa grave robber. She’s okay with thelatter—she is, after all, and honestly she figures it’s better to take from thedead than the living, who might still need their valuables—and would like toresolve the former. The thing is,though, she’s only the second person to ever escape from the dungeons ofAquila, except for those whose bodies made good their escape without them, in apine box.
So she’s a valuable prize, even though she’s a grave robberand only barely a pickpocket and not exactly on a level with the man who oncetried to kill the Bishop and cut his way through the city guard like a demonbefore he was finally brought to his knees.
Really, who sends out the entire city guard after a grave robber?
This is what she tells the guard who ties her hands, in thevillage a day’s flat-out sprint outside Aquila, and the man chokes back a snortlike he thinks Shiko’s a riot. The guardis tall and lithe, with muscles that are drawn with perfect clarity under themarbled white-and-brown skin, but his hands are surprisingly gentle as they tieShiko’s hands behind her back.
“You’d be surprised how many people agree with you,” theguard says. “My captain–” He breaks off, something hard to defineflickering behind his eyes, and he shakes her head and gives Shiko an apologeticshake. “Come on. The quieter you go, the better your chances.”
It’s about then that an arrow takes down a guard and thingsgo right back to chaos.
When the man on the white horse offers Shiko his hand, shetakes it without hesitating and lets him haul her up into the saddle, and sheclutches him around the waist as he boots his horse into a dead run.
“Your captain would be disappointed in you!” he shouts backover his shoulder, and Shiko hears the big guard shout something extremely rude in response. “Hold on tight,” the man says, like Shiko isn’talready clinging so tightly she’s probably in danger of breaking his ribs, andthe sprint shifts into a slower but still ground-eating gallop.
They come to a stop, far enough away and deep enough intothe woods that Shiko starts to wonder, just a little, what fire she’s justjumped into.
“Get off,” the man says shortly, but he helps her down andcuts her hands free when she’s on solid ground. Rubbing at her wrists, she looks up at him in the honey-toned late light. He’s handsome, narrow features and intense eyesunder hair the color of polished copper, and one hand is clad in a leatherglove like a falconer. He’s plainlydressed in dark brown hunting leathers and a white shirt, but the quality ofhis clothes is undeniable, especially after riding with her face pressed to hiscloak for God knows how long. There’s asword strapped to his saddle, but she hasn’t seen it leave the sheath yet, allthe guards in the village taken down with expert aim from the well-oiledrecurve bow slung over his shoulder. Shehas a bruise from where it pressed into her chest.
Something about his face, about the lines around his mouthand between his brows, looks sad beyond words.
