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“Ain’t nothing like it,” Tamria proclaimed through a mouthful of gamey rabbit, leaning back on the hand not waving around a haunch. “Fresh meat and dinner under the stars.”
The stars weren’t fully out yet — they still hid behind the curtain of dusk’s lingering sunlight, only the brightest winking down — but hey, they’d get hungry if they waited till nightfall, since it was summer.
Before joining up with Damond, Tamria’s city-slicker background had left her to beg or barter off travelers for her lunch, keeping to the main roads and paths between cities. But Damond’s keen rifle-eye and practice in hunting let them strike out directly for the horizon, taking shortcuts past the winding trade roads that kept to cartography that carts could handle.
Laeva Numen, ho!
“I don’t know why we ever developed agriculture,” Tamria continued. “Hunting gets us all we need!”
“You’re kinda romanticizing it,” Damond said. “Only reason this tastes so good is because of the spices you picked up. From a city.”
She waved him off. “Let me live my adventurous dreams, Damond.”
Unlike Tamria, who ate with the urgency of a street rat who might have a meal torn away at any moment, Damond somehow made eating a freshly roasted rabbit look delicate. He tore strips of golden flesh away with his knife, bringing it to his mouth with a fork, keeping a single drop of grease from getting on his fingers. He ate like he had something to prove. Tamria wondered if it had ever mattered.
“So,” she said. “I think it’s time you told me.”
“Hm?”
“Why you left.”
All she knew was that he was 19 and had been roaming for about a year when they met, and observation had taught her that he was from somewhere rural — and that he was painfully insistent on not seeming like a threat. Depressingly common for their people. Tamria, with the claws laced over her hand, co-opted the devilish reputation. Damond went the other way — emphasis on respectability.
He sighed. She was halfway through her meal. He’d barely started.
“Ain’t a particularly interesting story,” he said.
Alshain, the bright fast pinpoint of blue light, appeared on the edge of the sunset. It would cross the sky in barely ten minutes — the racing star, the homing bird. Useless for navigation. Tamria wondered what it really was. She’d never met an Astari. It wasn’t common knowledge what the sky looked like from the perspective of its people, and they all lived under lights of unknown nature.
“It was a long time coming,” he continued. “Hartford’s a place where it’s still news that an elf passed through in someone’s living memory. It’s a miracle a kid with twelve fingers and wings stuck around that long.” He grimaced. “Might’ve stuck around longer, if…”
“If?” Tamria pressed.
He muttered something. His speech was reluctant. He put on airs as if he didn’t want to say anything about his past, but Tamria knew he did. The past was like hot water in a geyser — it built up inside people, boiling and seething. It couldn’t be drained. It could only be depressurized for a time.
“Didn’t catch that.”
“Bit a guy’s finger off,” Damond mumbled slightly louder. He gazed down at his lap, but his eyes avoided the meat balanced on a wooden plate there. “And ate it.”
Tamria froze. Then she cackled, throwing her head back and raising her rabbit haunch in a toast to the starry eyes gazing down.
“Hell of a sendoff!” she cheered.
“It got infected,” Damond continued, disapproving of her enthusiasm. “He lost the entire hand.”
“Lemme guess, he deserved it?”
Damond flushed, cheeks darkening. His skin was bright red, but somehow his blushes were still noticeable. “I-I mean, he’d been giving me a hard time for a while, but…”
Hard time? Yeah, Tamria knew the drill. Damond was probably underplaying it. That now one-handed guy had likely made his life a living hell. Not only did that track with all Tamria had heard from other devil-children, but Damond didn’t seem the type to bite off a finger unprompted. Prompted? Sure, she’d seen fire in that kid’s eyes once or twice when they got harassed on the road. She’d been glad to have his back those times. She wasn’t used to not watching her own.
“Don’t sweat it,” Tamria said. She could tell Damond was, in fact, sweating it. Guilt weighed heavy on his shoulders. It had since the moment they met, really.
“I feel like they were right,” he said softly. “That’s not…that’s not a normal response to a little bit of bullying.”
“Monsters,” Tamria advised, “are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like you said, they were gonna kick you out eventually. But they knew deep down they were wrong. So they had to kick you till you bit.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“Well, not always firsthand, but I’ve talked to plenty of tieflings. Lots of overlap in our stories.”
“You’re the first other one I’ve really talked to,” Damond confessed.
“You must’ve been lonely as a kid.”
“Yeah,” Damond said, voice impossibly small.
She grinned and leaned forward across the fire, infernal skin protecting her arm from its licking heat as she slapped him on the shoulder.
“Good thing you ain’t gonna be anymore,” she said. “Bad news, little bat, you’re stuck with me.”
He gave her a fragile, hesitant smile.
“Reckon I am,” he said.