He asks if they aren’t already equals and she grins in return. She knows she’d not been entire open about her identity on her first trip here, but she also hadn’t ever lied – or even hidden the truth. She comfortable with that (she’d have been equally comfortable even if she had twisted the truth), and doesn’t seem at all put off by what she interprets as his reluctance to wholeheartedly accept her proposal.
Well, she supposes, getting rid of responsibility seems to be more difficult than she’d anticipated.
Still, this could all be good for Sylva, and watching over the forest had been what she’d promised to do. So rather than disappear into the mountains as she frequently contemplates, she stays. Ruan speaks of great change in Taiga, but murmurs of what that change might be has not yet reached the rest of Beqanna. Not a change in leadership, she assumes, because Ruan still speaks as though he leads the Taiga just as he had the last time they’d spoken.
“Please do,” she says when he asks if she has offered them a chance to visit Sylva. “Bring whomever you’d like.”
As he pauses, Djinni does as well. Her pale gaze flickers over the forest and she feels a dull ache in her udder, a reminder that she needs to find her son. He is nearly old enough to leave her side (which he does, frequently, but not yet forever), and sometime in the months since his birth her desire to keep Sylva safe has become a need to protect it for his sake, to hold a sanctuary from the dangers of the outside world. She’s not yet conscious of that, of course, and when Ruan asks for suggestions she does not linger on her family.
“Perhaps not Pangea,” she says with a wry grin, “Unless you’d like to meet the self-proclaimed ‘big bads’ of Beqanna”. Knowing the enemy is good, she knows, but they’ve also yet to try anything especially bad. “Sylva is allied with Nerine – the new amazons – and we have good relations with Tephra. Beyond that, Sylva tends to stay within its borders.”