She opened her mouth, evidently prepared to protest his suggestion, and he hastened to add another inducement. “I am also certain that the exposure to this soap is a detriment to the healing of your hands. We would not want to thwart their progress.”
Her hands had been healing admirably, although he still took to wrapping clothes about her palms to prevent any recurrence of the initial injuries. He caught her looking down at them, a slight grimace as she must have recognised the delicate condition of her skin, the soap too abrasive to healing tissue.
“All right,” she sighed with defeat, a grimace turning to a smile as she caught him looking. “Thank you,” she murmured, coming forward with the pile not yet completed. “I am glad that I started with my smalls,” she admitted with a blush, adding the rest to his own pile, much smaller than hers now that he was nearly finished.
He did not particularly wish to think about her underthings, so he merely nodded, trying to keep a flush of embarrassment from his own cheeks.
“Could you...” she began, biting at her lip. “Could you close your eyes for a moment while I get in my cloak? I will tell you when to open them again.”
Every instinct told him to refuse, and not in order to gape at any milky flesh that was inevitably exposed. His primary task was still her protection, and he relied heavily on eyesight to assess their surroundings.
But there were other senses, and he nodded his head, doing as she asked, allowing his hearing to alert him to any danger. There was the splash of water as it slicked over Penryn and went back to the pool, the gentle pat of feet against moss as she walked over to their belongings, her cloak waiting for her there. The shift of cloth as it was picked up and draped over a form that he had no business imagining.
Better to think of the birds chattering above them, some near, some further up in the tangle of the trees. Training insisted that their presence was an encouragement as they felt bold enough to declare their presence so freely. If they had initially objected to the arrival of Penryn and himself, it was only enough for them to complain to one another rather than hide away in silence, fearful that the newcomers meant them harm.
As if one of his kind would ever harm a bird. Not kin, not in truth, but winged and to be treasured all the same.
“You can open your eyes,” Penryn called, and he did so with surprising reluctance. He was too aware of her even now, too consumed with the knowledge that most of her wardrobe was in a pile in front of him.
What was wrong with him?
His father had always told him that a time would come when a girl captured his interest. He had grown complacent as the years dragged on and such an event never took place, allowing him to foolishly believe he was beyond such temptation.
And resent it thoroughly that it should occur now.
He swallowed thickly when she came nearer, keeping his eyes away from her as she knelt down and picked up the finished garments to take them nearer to the fire.
“I am not certain this will be more efficient after all,” Penryn observed, and he finally looked in her direction as she stared up at the tree limbs he had intended to use as a makeshift drying line. What would have been easily accessible for him would have required a jump and a toss from her.
“Just leave it,” Grimult suggested, his voice strange to his own ears. Nearly pleading in its timbre. “Sit and keep me company awhile.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, most especially when there was hardly a time they were not together. But already he was imagining the return home, when she would not be there, to share either a silence or a thoughtful word depending on one another’s mood.
And while she could not know the turn of his thoughts, she must have seen something in his expression that gave pause to her arguments.
So instead she dragged her bedroll between the pond and the fire and sat facing him, a small smile on her face, her hair wet as it clung to her skin, rivulets of water leaving dark patches of black against the otherwise crimson cloak.
And though impulse bade him continue to stare, to etch her likeness into his memory to savour when inevitably she was gone...
He set himself to scrubbing instead.
Thirteen
Things were different between them. Not in the strained, awkward manner that would often accompany a quarrel. But there was a softness in the way she would look at him that he did not think had been there before.
At least she was not angry with him for speaking so, of imagining her station so greatly lowered than it was. They did not talk of such fantasies again, not when there was so little point in dwelling on it.
But the subject that plagued him endlessly was the manner in which she had been chosen at all. He had assumed for so long that the sages had known of her birth, of her presence returning to his people, and sought her out directly.
But how had they known?
She was not a wingless infant born to unsuspecting parents. She would have simply been a squalling, helpless little thing that wanted to suckle like any other.
Penryn would catch him in his pensive moods and ask him what troubled him, but he had yet to gather the courage to ask directly. For all of her hatred toward the sages themselves, she held their secrets all the same. He wondered even at that, as loyalty toward the old ways warred with his disillusionment when it came to her.
Especially when she touched
