“Are you not?” he said. “Why is it, then, you think, that you high elves have all the choicest bits of land in the country? Why is it that you farm in the plains and live in the balmy south and you have driven all of us up here to the rocky soil of the mountains, where we fight the storms and the cold? Why do you think that is?”
She furrowed her brow. “Are you arguing youarelower than me?”
“No,” he said, sighing heavily. “I suppose I’m arguing we aren’t friends, and we can’t be friends, and it’s because of that, whatever it is, the things that separate us. I’m nothing, of course. I’m not even a low elf. What is it Celedin calls me, a creature?”
“You’re not a creature,” she said. “And whatever the case, we can still all be good to each other. Don’t the gods command us to love each other, after all?”
“Some of them do,” he said. “Some of them command us to grind the bones of our enemies to dust. So, it’s a bit of a mixed message.”
She was taken aback.
He let out a little laugh, and she realized it had been a joke, and she laughed, too.
When the laughter faded, she said, “I want us to be friends.”
“It’s impossible,” he said.
“Why?” she said.
“Because you will make all these assumptions, little things, here and there, over and over, about how I am inferior to you, how it is my nature and duty to serve you. And I will go along with it, on account of how your blond hair curls.”
“What?” she said.
He laughed again. He leaned in. “Oh, are we going to pretend, then? Why have we been watching each other for hours on end every day for months, little fair elf? Because we don’t like the look of each other?”
She swallowed.
He leaned in even closer. “Not going to say anything? Not going to protest you couldn’t find something like me appealing because I am a brute?”
“You are… strong,” she said, breathless. “So very, very strong.”
“And you are a little slip of a fair thing, all curls and grace and clean and gleaming, and I think often about getting my filth on you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“No?” he said. “Still not running from me?”
She met his gaze. “I won’t do that. Run from you. I do want us to be friends.”
“You don’t want us to be friends,” he said. “You want something else.”
“I… don’t.”
“All right, I want it, then,” he said. “I would be a fool to discourage you from sneaking out in the middle of the night to find me where I’m sleeping. Perhaps you’re cold, little fair elf? Would you like to share the blankets with me, huddle up against my bare skin?”
She backed away, then. “You don’t have to make it… like that.”
“So, that was the line, then?” he said.
She halted, looking at him.
“All right,” he breathed. “I won’t cross it again. You can stay. Don’t worry. I would never make a half-breed creature like me on any woman, let alone would I sully something like you. You can trust that I won’t ever touch you.”
She regarded him, wary. “I’m not… you don’t…” She crawled closer. “You know how men get babes on women?”
He laughed. “By the dark of the shadows, you’re still an innocent child yet, aren’t you?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m only a year younger than you.”
