Kitalia wasn’t happy.
That’s far too much of an understatement. Kitalia was furious.
She wouldn’t ever admit that she enjoyed traveling with Kre, but she did finally, albeit grudgingly tell the blue-eyed witch that she felt responsible for him ever since the events at the cabin when she had first met him.
In her mind, it was her that introduced him to the wild world and it was her that left him to flounder on his own out here without fully understanding the consequences. She also knew that the people already in Kre’s life, such as the woman sitting across the fire from her, were more dangerous than Kre realized.
“The stew is done,” Lady Bel said with that damnably cheerful smile on her face.
Without a glance at the food, Kitalia shook her head. “It needs another minute, or the root vegetables will not have broken down sufficiently.”
Bel shrugged, still smiling, as if she couldn’t care less about the food. She gazed off into the distance, her blue eyes going slightly misty.
She did this often, Kitalia had noticed, but she couldn’t tell exactly what it was she was doing or thinking when the strange, yet obviously powerful woman lost herself to her thoughts. Odder yet was the fact that Bel seemed to stay fully aware of her surroundings, as Kitalia found out to her chagrin.
It was after about the third or fourth time that Bel was daydreaming when Kitalia muttered something under her breath about how the lady never seemed to clean up. Bel’s response was immediate and eerie, as her distant gaze never wavered and only her lips moved, “My apologies dear, I thought you would be too particular about how things are cleaned to allow me to muck it up.”
That only grated Kitalia’s nerves even more. Always ‘dear’ this and ‘child’ that… and yes, Kitalia did always prefer to clean things herself because of how particular she was about the cleanliness, but that doesn’t mean others shouldn’t at least offer. At least Kre would always offer.
‘Kre,’ she seethed in her head, ‘you idiot.’
She glared over at her companion as she pulled the small stew pot from the fire. As she ladled it out into the two wooden bowls that Bel had somehow conjured up from her satchel, she noted that it was slightly charred.
Kitalia knew that Bel could tell the stew was somewhat burnt, but the lady had the grace and sense not to say anything about it. She didn’t have to, really.
Unlike the Tehynshins, the Ylveryan people knew dragons for what they truly were. Selfish, power-hungry immortals that toyed with the lives of the ‘lesser races’ as they considered them. A dragon never did anything out of compassion or a sense of altruism. Rather, they were known to be cruel and sinister in their dealings. At least, that’s how the Ylveryans saw dragons. The Tehynshins seemed to have their own concept of what dragons were and were not, even to the point of forming an entire branch of a military service around their partnership with these secretive and sadistic creatures.
Though Bel had not shown any of those traits to either Kre or Kitalia thus far, the Ylveryan girl was convinced that the blue-eyed dragon was simply playing with them in a very long game, and it irked Kitalia to no end that she couldn’t even get a glimpse of the board.