This close she can almost smell the magic of him.
It’s even more than the soft glow and the way he catches the light.
There is something about the look of him that is almost supernatural. The shape of his face, the slant of his brow. It makes her nerves hum for reasons she doesn’t understand.
If only she knew how similar their blood was.
If only she knew that their one common ancestor wasn’t all that distant.
Perhaps she wouldn’t feel so awkward, plain in comparison.
But he mentions his home, thoroughly distracting her from her inadequacies, and she perks up. She has lived her whole life in the common lands – moving freely from the meadow to the forest and then onto the river and back again. Her mother had spoken of a place she had called home once, a place she’d left when Elodie’s father had disappeared. Her mother had spoken, too, of how she had never yearned for another home after that. The two of them had made themselves perfectly content in the meadow. Although Lilian had never confessed to her daughter that she’d stayed there simply because it had been where she’d lived with her father, too.
Elodie has been content but her world is only ever green in the spring and the summer and she wonders what a place that’s green all the time would be like.
She doesn’t know why she takes it personally to hear him say he doesn’t like the cold. Perhaps her brain, still so young, translates it into something that means he doesn’t like her home.
She is so easily distracted, though and she blinks at the seashells and the sound they make when he shakes them to and fro. She grins, closed-lipped, and glances between his face and a shell inches from her nose.
“Where did you get them?” she asks, hesitating before she finally takes a step backward. She can’t take his things. “Did your mother give them to you?”
e l o d i e
