“Gadaí! Wonderful.”
The satyr did something approaching a curtsey. “Treorai.”
Rianaire watched the display with a face that likely seemed more insulting than she’d intended.
“I… I am practicing. Learning.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Learning?”
“Your ways.”
“Well…” Rianaire was unsure of what to say. “Inney and I are escaping. Rather, going away from places where one needs to curtsey. Would you join us?”
“I should not…”
“Oh, bah. You’re worried you’ll cause a fuss?” Rianaire began to walk, reaching up to grab Gadaí’s hand as she went. The skin was rough and the fingerprints ridged more strongly than she’d ever felt, to say nothing of the size of the hand itself. “A fuss is the best sort of thing to cause, I’ve found.”
The stares began in the courtyard of the Bastion and became whispers when they came to the South Road. Gadaí had tensed. Her eyes darted and she shifted nervously, clenching her fist over and over. Her attention whipped to Rianaire as she began to talk.
“Comfort is a strange thing, Gadaí.” She did not look up at the satyr, only kept moving along the street casually. “It exists with so many tiny subtle meanings. A soft bed. Or a hard one. A chair that catches you just the way it should. Calm, for some. A place to spend one’s nervous nature until you run empty. The blank void of an unbusied mind.” She stopped in front of an alehouse. The noise from inside already leaked out. The Little Bastion, it was called. “My mother’d have killed them for daring such a name, you know? The elf who named the place… tremendously talented, Sisters know. Likely he’s bedding them now if there’s anything beyond the dark. Oh, but I forget myself. Comfort.” She turned to Gadaí finally and looked up. “Everything has a beginning. Comfort, true comfort, begins at familiar, welcome. You must find the first before you can have the other. And so…”
She swept her hand toward the alehouse door.
Gadaí croaked a curious reply. “You… mean to have me drink?”
“No, no, no. Sisters, what a horrible idea.” She looked to Inney and back to Gadaí. “I mean to have us drink.”
She took Gadaí’s hand again, it shook just the slightest bit. Even a satyr could know fear, she thought, amused. Inney saw to the door and Gadaí ducked as she went through it. A cheer started as they saw Rianaire but died when Gadaí showed behind her. Still with Gadaí’s hand in her own, she climbed the nearest table and stomped on it.
“Such quiet in my Little Bastion! Why?” She looked quite obviously at Gadaí. “This one? Is that all? Oh what brave elves you were until a moment ago.” She laughed and then she shouted. “My drink! Now!” There was a scramble behind the bar as an ale was hastily put into a mug. “The horsefolk are strange to us, sure as fish breathe water. But this one.” The mug came, but the elf edged it to her as far from Gadaí as she could manage. She took a large drink and slung the cup out wide. “This one! She’s saved me more than once. She’s saved more of you than you can count. Killed her own for our lives. And you’d look at her with such eyes? At this woman? My friend?” She took another drink and put her hand on Gadaí’s shoulder. “Well? I’ve said my piece. Tell me what you think of her.”
There was quiet for a moment. A voice from the back. “Fine lookin’ for a horsegirl.”
Another near as soon as the other had finished. “Aye, I’d not mind to be found with my cock in that and a hoof mark on my arse!”
A roar of laughter filled the room, turning to cheers and the raising of mugs. Gadaí blushed at the words. A bashful woman inside her somewhere. Rianaire could not help but smile at that. She raised her mug again and stomped at the table. The room quieted.
“Good! I’d not have stood for anything less. Now drink until you’re drunk and leave the coin to me!”
The room cheered again and the noise fell to where it had been, elves shouting over elves.
She sat with Gadaí and Inney, sharing drinks and asking meaningless questions. What foods she preferred, what she thought of their cities. It was Inney who asked the question that changed Gadaí’s face from something approaching at-ease to serious.
“What do you miss?”
Gadaí was quiet for a while. There was no need in rushing her or changing the subject. Rianaire was curious. At Gadaí’s coming answer and at Inney having asked the question.
“None of it.” She finally said. “There is something inside. In me. It wants an answer to a question, like you. But it does not like words. It… that thing… it wants the words and their substance both. I could not answer that thing among the hordes. It would never be allowed. The question was not allowed.”
“Question?” Rianaire drank from her mug, asking casually to have Gadaí give her more.
“To have a reason.”
Inney scoffed at the answer. “Is a reason not something you give yourself, in every meaning?”
Gadaí thought on this for a moment. “It… is. And at once is not.”
“She will not understand with only that. And no doubt she’s near drunk now. She’ll not let you off so easy.”
Inney nodded sternly and clapped her mug on the table, her mask shifting just the slightest as she did, in a way only Rianaire was like to notice.
Gadaí thought again. She looked desperate for the words in a tongue that was not her own. “If I am hungry—”
“I am hungry.” Inney repeated the words.
“Come now, Inney. You’ve asked, you must let her answer in her own time.” She groaned and leaned into Rianaire.
“If I am hungry… I can tell my stomach that I have two fish… I can even believe it in my mind, as truth. But the hunger will not fade. So it is with my
