Vash gets even

“What is this place?” Kraaia asked uneasily.

Vash lifted his head to turn it towards her in annoyance, but his eyes stopped fast at the sight of other faces glaring out of the wall.

Over certain curves their stony skin still held its mirror-​​like polish after all these thousand-​​thousand winters, and their cheeks and brows were gilded by the guttering light of the fire. They might have been beautiful even now, but the moving shadows of their sockets and hollows made them squint and scowl, and Lir’s mouth seemed to be spluttering in silent outrage.

Vash’s tart reply fizzled on his tongue.

“It is an ancient place,” he said gently. “We should not make a fire here, but the weather is too dangerous to allow me to take you elsewhere. They will understand,” he added, so softly it might have been himself he was attempting to reassure.

“Are they your gods?” Kraaia asked.

Vash grunted and poked at the fire with a stick, spoiling his tidy arrangement of the tinder in his desire to not talk.

“Is this an elf temple?” she asked.

She took a shuffling step nearer him, putting one foot forward and only timidly dragging the second up to meet it.

“I didn’t know it was a temple or anything!” she cried, in booming contrast to the shyness of her feet. “I swear I didn’t do anything to profane it!”

“You needn’t shout,” Vash said roughly.

He was tempted to taunt her with the reminder that his ears could hear even her heart beat, but in her sudden silence they did hear it, and it was pounding. She was frightened, he reminded himself. If she had to shout to make herself feel big, it was because she felt very small.

He stabbed his stick at the fire until it sparked. “Let us say it is a church,” he muttered, “and then you will know how to behave in it.”

“I guess we shouldn’t make a fire in it, then,” she admitted, “except in an emergency.” 

Vash leaned forward to blow across the kindling.

“Sometimes people take shelter in churches,” she continued shakily. “Or if the law’s after them. I don’t think your gods will be angry. Not that I believe in them, since I’m a Christian.”

She seemed to be babbling to distract him or his gods from her shuffling feet. She moved in a perfect arc around the fire, coming no nearer, but at least putting herself out of the cold shadow of his body and the glare of Lir’s shadowed face.

“Are you sore at me because I stabbed you?” she asked meekly.

Vash sighed and rubbed his shoulder. “No, I’m simply sore.”

“I didn’t mean to do it, honest. I never stabbed anybody before. I didn’t think my hand would just… do it. But you must admit,” she added with boyish matter-​​of-​​factness, “you did have me backed into a corner. And I didn’t know it was you.”

He saw that he was stalling now, and he wondered at himself. The fire was crackling away, and he found nothing better to do with his stick than balance it upon his knee.

“I told you my name,” he said wearily.

“I know, but what did you expect me to do – swoon? ‘I’m Vash!’” she crooned breathily. “No, sir! I wouldn’t know you from Adam. And you told me you were Paul’s friend, and that’s just what that elf said to Cat to trick her into coming with him. And you know how that turned out.”

Vash left his stick posed on his knee and looked up at the wall. Even without the pain in his shoulder, he did not think he could have turned his head to look at this girl. To her – for the space of a few seconds – he had been Lar.

“I didn’t know you knew the whole story.”

“Egelric told me. I suppose so I would be scared and not run away. But I just can’t help it. But I would never go with anyone. And anyway I’m sorry I stabbed you,” she blurted in conclusion.

Vash steadied his dangling arm with the other and stood up. His stick slid off his knee and into the fire forevermore.

“I do not blame you, if you thought I was… about to hurt you. I would have stabbed me too.”

She stood on one foot and cocked her head like a little bird, trying to see the rent or the stain in his heavy cloak. “Shus can fix it, can’t he?”

“Yes, I am certain he can,” he sighed. “But if I know Shus he will leave a little scar so I never forget the lesson.”

“Don’t sneak up on strange girls in the dark!” she proposed.

“And if I do, don’t assume they will swoon!”

She laughed aloud, open-​​mouthed and openly as a baby. Vash could not help but laugh with her, and nor could he take his eyes from her for as long as she laughed.

She was pinker and whiter and brighter, more golden, more graceful, and as he tried to make sense of the sudden glamour of her form, it occurred to him that it was the only time apart from her moment of squealing terror that he had seen all her body – voice and eyes and face and limbs – expressing the same pure sentiment. The girl was a jarring kaleidoscope of shattered glass, reflecting a dozen different Kraaias, but when the pieces came together she was a bright prism and a lens.

“So, I suppose we’re even,” she announced as her laughter trailed off.

“We are what?”

“Even. You scared me, I stabbed you, and so we’re quits.”

She flashed such a candid smile that Vash was reminded she had not been entirely candid with him. He felt his own brief buoyancy sinking away.

“If that is so,” he said gravely, “perhaps you will do me the kindness of telling me the truth now.”

“About what?”

“About today. About where Rua is.”

Her smile soured into a frown. “I did tell you: I… don’t… know.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“I told you: this… morning!”

She spoke with painful slowness, as if to a child or an idiot, and between her impudent words and the cringing way she twisted her arms together, Vash was flustered and enraged. He acted on the enraged.

“And now you shall tell… me… the… truth!” he bellowed.

“Oh oh oh! You needn’t shout!” she shouted, scolding him with his own words.

“Did you run away from her?” he demanded.

“I told you what happened – ”

“You told me a lie! I know you didn’t find this cave on your own, so tell me – ”

“I did so!” she snarled, suddenly vicious. “And don’t you dare call me a liar! You don’t know me!”

“I have heard enough about you to know that you are not the most trustworthy little girl.”

“Well I never lied to you in my entire life, so you’re not allowed to call me a liar till I do. Never once! Cross my heart!” 

She defiantly drew a cross over her breast and spat on the floor, but when she lifted her head again she saw the scowling faces on the wall – and then Vash’s own. She flushed and mumbled, “Oh, sorry…”

He said coldly, “Then you may tell me who showed you this place, if Rua did not.”

“No one did!” she groaned. “I found it myself. It wasn’t hard – it was a big black hole in the snow!”

“And that is how I know you are lying, Kraaia. This place is protected by a sort of magic. You could not have found it on your own.”

“Well, so much for your magic, because I did.” Her impudence sputtered off suddenly into shyness, and she folded her arms over her breast and pouted at the floor.

“And the fawn?” Vash demanded. “There are no fawns at this time of winter.”

“Well, so much for that, because there was.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed wearily as if he were the stubborn, childish one of the two, and she were generously giving in.

“Listen, I shall tell you exactly what happened, and I don’t care if you think I’m a liar, because it’s the plain truth. Cat and Flann and Lena left me and Rua alone at home to go see some new silversmith – which they were not supposed to do – and then Rua called me downstairs to see this fawn that was in the side yard, and she told me she was going to go out and find its mother, and I had to stay in my room. So that was two mistakes right there. And I watched her follow it across the road and into the field, and then I got dressed and ran up to Osh’s house. And I was not going to run away. I only wanted to see Frost. But she wasn’t there, so I did.”

“You ran away… because Frost wasn’t there?” Vash gasped.

She shrank away from him suddenly, like a fern curling into itself.

“Well…” she mumbled, “mostly because I didn’t know when I would ever have another chance to do it.”

She glanced defiantly up at him through her pale lashes, but the rest of her body looked miserable, from her pouting lips to the thin arms she wrapped so tightly around her body that her elbows jutted straight at him like a bossed shield.

Still, this skulking, tortoise-​​like dejection was nothing beside the raw anguish he had seen on Osh’s face that day, and Vash knew that this thoughtless girl had been responsible for at least some part of it.

“You ran away… because you could?” he demanded.

“I didn’t know whether I was going to like it there,” she admitted. “Better safe than sorry.”

Vash spun on his heel and looked pointedly all around the cave.

“Not that kind of safe,” she muttered. “I can take care of myself for that kind of safe.”

Vash could not fathom what other kind of “safe” she meant. He did not know what he could say to this cringing, scuffling, scowling, pouting, glaring little girl – he did not even know which of the several little girls he ought to address.

“Have you eaten anything today?” he asked gruffly, for he supposed that all little girls were eventually required to eat.

“I took a cheese out of Osh’s cellar,” she admitted. “But that’s all they have down there so far. And – I stole a pie,” she blurted.

Then she looked down and crossed her arms over her stomach.

“But I already ate the pie,” she added softly.

For an instant she was her perfect prism again, but a gray, lusterless sort, all empty and ingrown like the lightless, crystalline heart of a geode. He had struck her hollow loneliness, and it rang like his.

He had meant to ask her whether she would only run away again if he went out for a rabbit–because she could!–but the words died unmourned upon his tongue. This girl could provoke him all out of his usual bounteous patience with children, but with a glance – with a glance she was too timid even to turn on him – she could make him melt with an unfamiliar tenderness.

He could almost see her, crouching alone in some cold shed or beneath a snowy tree or in this very cave, shivering and sniffling and eating her stolen pie with her bare blue hands. The image would haunt him as few sights he had seen with his own eyes.

“I do not know much about pies, Kraaia,” he said softly, “but I believe they are meant to be shared.”

“If I’d known I was going to meet you, I would have saved it and eaten the cheese instead.”

“I don’t mind, as I like cheese better than pie. If you will share your cheese with me, I will share my food with you, no? How did you say… We will be even then?”