An awful hunger springs to life within her eyes. He sees himself reflected there in miniature, and behind that he sees a color sister to the hue of fire, endlessly devouring. And why? His long, silver face falls a hair’s breadth to one side. None have ever looked upon Caneo this way – as if some worth might be found in the naked gleam of his fraying skin, the too-sharp angles of his bones. He knows the warmth of good cheer like he knows the kiss of warm spring rain, but her – she moves infected by something else.

        “No.”

        Her voice breaks the silence with a grinding like the grinding of old steel on steel, like heavy wheels and shattered blades. It matches, he thinks, the torn and tattered canvas of her skin. On her very person she carries a history of violence; he studies this as his ears strain forward to capture the tarnished edges of her voice. She must know suffering; he understands this. Perhaps he can never understand the essence of her roots, but for a brief time he thinks she must be lonely, as well, and perhaps she has come to the cave seeking as he has, and her heart beats hollow as his does. Maybe that’s the answer to the hunger in her eyes.

        It should unnerve him; he feels questions welling up instead.

        The silence hangs over them again, stretching from their meeting place and the air between them to the distant, washed-out horizon. It is a lifeless place, weary in the deep bones of the earth. It was brightened in the past by conversation but he lets the silence come now, and patiently he wonders if she will explain, or if that single word was all she could manage to utter. Maybe she wishes for solitude; maybe, if he was kind, he would grant her that. But he is selfish also, and young, and he stands and waits and his eyes trace the scars etched into her skin, thinking perhaps of another creature with scars like that, with a lifetime of murder written irrefutably across the body. That creature had been kind to him, but also cruel; his thoughts shift like the tide back to that old place, to the glint of spears in the moonlight and the hush of the coming dawn.

        She is not that memory. When she moves, the action is deliberate. When she looks at him, she holds no animosity, no pride as the old man had worn it. Instead she topples down, her body falling the same way a mountainside falls: the action difficult to understand, at first. He wonders if she is weak, and his head falls with her, tracking the descent. Will she die? Is she sick? He sees nothing like fresh blood upon her hide; and then she speaks, and her voice is something else. “Young lord.” Her mane spills forward like a curtain, pooling on the barren, icy earth. And Caneo’s head begins to rise; he blinks down at her in surprise. Sharply, the too-thin curve of his neck twists and he peers at the open tundra behind, expecting to see another body, a lord.

        No one interrupts them.

        The orphan-child, who has never once been kneeled to, and so often seen hooves hurled in his direction, heard threats, skittered on the edges of that place he called his home, is baffled. He is not a soldier, not nobility – not any thing. An unkind, fluttering noise moves in his chest, quiet and graceful as the lilting sound of his voice. He laughs to see her kneeling there.

        You’re strange, he thinks, but without malice. The tension has left his body and instead he stands tall, peering down at her, and wondering how wretched she must be if she will bow to him. Perhaps those scars were never won in battle but some other way, earned at the unkind ends of whatever weapons her masters wielded. Perhaps they are not so different after all, these two lost creatures.

        But no.

        She stands, and muscle honed to rigid perfection shifts under her flesh. She stands, and the great slabs of her shoulders are like shields, and the bloodied spear piercing up from her brow is too proud, itself a violent crown, to ever name her less than him. Caneo strives to understand and fails. He takes in her words instead, his expression bemused even as she speaks again, this time stronger. This time a question.

        “I’m Caneo,” he tells her, ignoring for a moment the heart of the inquiry. Some small part of him wants never again to hear the word lord spilling from her mouth. He is merely himself; he wishes, maybe, that the hunger in her eyes burned for the truth of him and not whatever specter lingers in her mind. His thoughts shift, the wry, bemused expression lingering still on his features but fading until he appears more neutral. Where is he from? He might take that question as a riddle itself, but for now he decides on the easiest thing. “I live in the Aurora Basin,” even though his time spent there may be counted in minutes. “Don’t you live there, too?” Caneo takes the chance then to make an assumption, based on her appearance and her proximity to that place. He may be wrong; he does not particularly mind it if he is. After taking a moment to watch her again, he adds, smiling, “What should I call you?”