Confused, Kre blinked slowly a few times. “Weren’t you?”
She laughed, and it was a clear sparkling kind of laugh. The kind of laugh that frees the soul in a dance of joy and merriment. “Oh, heh… oh, I cannot breathe… ha!” The laugh was infectious and Kre found himself laughing along without fully realizing why.
The rich laughter lasted for several seconds and they chuckled for longer as both tried to catch their breath.
“Wow. Okay,” she said finally, “I needed that.”
“We needed that,” she said, correcting herself after noticing the look of genuine happiness and relaxation on his face.
With her composure regained, she smiled at her companion. “I was not angry at being called an elf,” she explained, her smiling lips still twitching slightly as if the laugh were trying to make a sudden reappearance. “We are used to that term by now. It is actually more preferable than you Tehynshins butchering the pronunciation of Ylveryan.”
Kre tried to hear the difference between what she just said and how it sounded in his head, but he could not perceive how he was messing up the pronunciation. He determined to keep listening so that he could eventually say it right. That is, of course, if in fact he was saying it wrong, which he wasn’t yet convinced of.
Kitalia continued unhindered by Kre’s mental quandary. “I was upset because you called me ‘girl’.”
Now he was more confused then ever. In the back of his mind, he suddenly wondered if the whispered rumors that Ylveryan males acted more effeminate than Tehynshin ladies and a slight shudder ran down his spine, as if reminding him of some of the very personal thoughts he harbored about his traveling partner. Was Kitalia actually a man?
“I can assure you,” she continued, “that I am a female.” She gave him a sharp, knowing look and Kre wished that his feelings and unvoiced thoughts weren’t so visible to her. “But to call me a ‘girl’ in the manner that you did, or really in any context, is an insult for which I will not stand. I believe I have proven myself to be more capable than a mere child, and even quite probably more capable than you yourself. It would be akin to me calling you a mewling babe because I believe you to be too young and fragile to travel outside of your mother’s protection.”
He was taken aback by the verbal onslaught. If he had not been riding a horse, he might have stumbled as his legs would have given way from underneath him. He had not expected that kind of reaction from her and he felt ashamed that it was him that had made her feel that way.
“I am so terribly sorry,” he began to say before she cut him off with a sharp gesture.
“Please,” she said, with tight lips. “Gaining your sympathy was not the goal of my outburst. I will not have our relationship be built on pity and apologies. That is not the foundation upon which a strong friendship is built.”
“Friends?” Kre whispered to himself. “Is that what we are?”
They rode for a several minutes more, with Kre pondering all of the random thoughts floating through his head and Kitalia leading their course to the south. As the night wore on and Kre’s eyelids grew heavy, he wondered if she planned to push them through the night. It made sense to get as far away from the Rangers as they could before whatever drug she had used on them wore off.
The third time that his head lolled to the side and he nearly slid from the back of the horse, Kitalia finally pulled on her reins and called for a stop. “These horses are strong,” she commented with a pat to her horse’s neck, “but they cannot walk all night.”