Vash tries to get even

Vash clasped his knife against his palm with his thumb and solemnly lifted the apple between his two hands. “Sórú. This is water.”

Kraaia leaned close and repeated, “Sórú” like a dutiful student, but she watched her teacher’s hands more closely than his lips.

He flicked the knife back into his grasp, and twice the blade crunched and squeaked crisply into the fruit, cutting out a neat sliver. Watching open-​​mouthed, Kraaia could almost taste its sweet spray on her tongue.

Rather than offer her a bite, however, he left the slice notched into the apple and laid it beside him on the skin, just as he had done with the slices of walnut and chunks of dried fenberries.

“How do you say ‘I’m hungry?’” she asked pointedly.

He turned his face away just in time to hide what she suspected was a smile, but his reply was of scholarly seriousness.

“Sólín.”

He picked up the one item in his pack she had not been able to identify: a small, flat brick neatly wrapped in leaves.

“If you want to be somewhat vulgar,” he added, “you may say, Séín a’shús.”

“Like Shus?” she squeaked.

“He would be honored,” Vash said dryly.

“Do you think I’ll ever meet him someday?”

He carefully peeled back the leaves in a layer, revealing a substance that looked alarmingly like what one might find if one scraped away the mat of dead leaves beneath an ancient tree.

“I suppose he may visit Osh from time to time…” he mused as he picked and peeled.

Fuming, she waited for the “But since you do not think you will like it there…” that would surely follow, but he said no more. Her preemptive anger had flickered out entirely by the time he lowered his hands to reveal his unwrapped lump in all its gray and greasy glory.

“What is it?” she asked meekly.

“Llakhúmín,” he proclaimed. “Earth.”

“Oh, I get it!” she gasped, forgetting her disgust in the delight of understanding. “One of each!”

He smiled, and one of his green eyes closed softly in what he might have meant for a wink. “Your first step on the road to becoming a cook for elves.”

He slipped the slice out of the apple and passed it over to the other hand lying limply on his knee.

“Every meal should have this balance, at the least,” he explained as he shaved off a curling lump of his muddy stuff with the edge of his knife. “If we want to be refined, we must seek it in every bite.”

Kraaia wondered briefly what Osh would say if she prepared him a meal with such a balance in every bite, without going deeply enough to wonder whether she would ever have the chance.

She watched in dismay as he smeared the gray stuff down the length of the apple slice.

“What is that?” she demanded.

“Llakhúmín,” he repeated. He pinched a few slivers of walnut and sprinkled them onto the paste.

“Llakhúmín, all right,” she said hastily, “but what is it?”

He topped it all with a pinch of fenberry shreds and held it out to her.

“Llakhúm is a paste made from the skins of boiled toads,” he explained. “It is one of my favorite foods.”

Kraaia’s mouth went suddenly wet and tangy with a faint nausea. “You eat boiled toads?” she demanded.

“You eat food made from the milk of animals,” he pointed out.

“But you like cheese!”

“And I think you will like toad skins. Try.”

He held the apple slice still higher, and Kraaia leaned back, letting it no closer to her face, until she was staring at it straight down her nose.

“Unless you are afraid to try elven food?” he taunted.

“Give me that!”

Kraaia snatched the slice out of his hand and took a crisp bite straight across the middle. The dry walnuts and fenberries prevented the toad-​​skin sludge from sticking to her palate, but her defiant chewing soon smeared it across her tongue. As it melted in the heat of her mouth, she identified a gamey greasiness like the fat that floated atop a rabbit stew, and the metallic bitterness of liver. She was hungry enough that her mouth watered, and she almost savored it before swallowing.

“Tastes like liver,” she huffed. “Or rabbit.”

Vash clapped his hand down on his knee and laughed. “Guessed it on your first bite!”

“You lied to me!” she cried.

“I was teasing you,” he corrected.

“You lied to me! I never lied to you!”

She shoved the second bite into her mouth and grabbed her cheese to clutch it protectively against her belly while she chewed.

“The cheese!” Vash wailed in feigned despair.

“No cheese for you,” she mumbled through crunchy, greasy chunks of apple. “You – you lied to me!” she choked. “I never lied to you.”

She could not understand why she was so upset, but if anything this failure of plain logic upset her more.

Vash stopped laughing and leaned forward until his eyes were level with hers. “Kraaia…”

To her horror she felt her eyes filling with tears. She banged her cheese against her belly in mute outrage and chewed faster.

“I believe you,” he said.

“No!” she sobbed and swallowed. “You lost your chance! You should have believed me before! And then you lied to me!”

He sat up and rubbed his hand nervously back through his hair. “I am sorry I disbelieved you. You may tell me a lie, and then we will be even.”

She hugged her cheese and glowered until she trusted her own voice enough to say “No.”

He bowed his head. “Then I am in your debt until you do.”

“I never will,” she growled, and then she grinned in wicked delight. “You shall be in my debt forevermore!”

He smiled sheepishly.

“Will you tell Shus?” she begged. “How I stabbed you and now I got you in my debt?”

“You seem quite interested in what Shus thinks of you.”

She scowled. “So?”

Vash said simply, “He will be honored,” but he was hasty enough to bring his hand up to rub his mouth that Kraaia suspected he was trying to stifle a laugh or hide a smile.

“Why did you try to trick me anyway?” she pouted. “What if I starved to death because I didn’t want to eat toad skins?”

“I would have told you the truth in time to save you,” he said tautly.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been necessary, as you saw. I can eat anything. I ate a whole worm once. Alive. And I had to chew it up and show it on my tongue before I swallowed it. On a dare.”

Vash picked up the apple and cut another slice with intense concentration. “Remarkable,” he offered.

“Why did you say toad skins anyway?” she asked suspiciously. “You think just because I’m a girl I don’t like toads.”

He laid his knife upon his lap and rubbed his hand over his mouth again, but slowly enough and softly enough now that she could see his lips were slack.

“I don’t know why I said that,” he murmured.

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Kraaia huffed. “I love toads. Now, if you had said it was something cute like kittens, I might have hesitated. But I love toads and snakes and things. I even kissed a toad once. On a dare.”

He picked up his knife and smeared a stripe of liver down the apple slice. “How was it?” he asked politely.

“It was not disagreeable in the least,” she said. “Better than kissing a boy. Toads are not slimy, you know. So long as they don’t pee in your hand, they’re quite congenial.”

Vash held the backs of his fingers against his face to hide his huffing laughter, and with the other hand held the piece of apple up almost to her lips. 

Kraaia took it at once and bit it cleanly in half while he was still watching. She wanted him to see how much she liked these elven things.

“He didn’t turn into a handsome prince, though,” she mused while she munched and he cut another slice. “But that was perfectly fine with me!” she sighed.

“Was he supposed to?”

“That’s how the fairy tales go. Handsome prince turned into a toad by evil wizard, only the kiss of a pure-​​hearted lady can save him, and wah wah wah.”

Suddenly she had a thought, and her arm fell limp, and her cheese flopped into her lap.

“Say, you’re a handsome prince,” she said shrewdly. “What happens if a pure-​​hearted lady kisses you? Do you turn into a toad?”

He rose onto one knee and turned away to poke at a fire that would never burn more brightly with a stick that was already aflame: sifting through ashes, lifting and stirring, to no apparent end.

His hair hid his face as far as his nose, but his breast rose and fell sharply as he breathed in short gasps, like a little mouse trying not to impale himself on the talon that was pressing painfully against his heart.

One swipe was all it would take, she knew. One cruel remark about Iylaine’s failure to kiss him or about the impurity of her heart, and Kraaia would be safe from him forever. Perhaps he would even storm out of the cave in disgust, and she could flee.

Suddenly he sat and held out another apple slice to her, startling her into a shuddering gasp. All that time she was not certain she had even breathed.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” she muttered warily.

“I try to stuff you so full of my food that you will give up your cheese.”

Kraaia laughed aloud and rolled her small wheel of cheese end-​​over-​​end across her lap until it flopped into his own. She was relieved to have been offered such a painless surrender.

“Here, have your animal-​​milk-​​food,” she taunted. “I like elven food myself.”

Vash got to work cutting himself a slice of cheese and shearing off the rind. “Shall I tell Shus that?”

“Will you?” she begged.

“He will ask me to introduce him to you. There’s nothing he likes more than eating.”

“Will you?” she pleaded.

She heard her own eagerness too late. She braced herself, brewing up a fit of temper, waiting only for him to say, “But since you don’t seem to like being around elves…”

He only said, “I shall tell him you called me handsome.”

She croaked in outrage. “What? Compared to a toad!”

“I shan’t tell him that part.”

“I shall! How do you say toad?”

“Khírrí dúm.”

“Are you lying to me?” she frowned.

“Oh, sorry. I forgot. Padín.”

“Earth!” she cried.

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I shall have to take care what I say around you.”

“I learn fast, na?” she said gleefully. “Ín is earth, rí is air, rú is water, and… what’s the other one?”

“Ím,” he said softly. “Fire.”

“Ím,” she repeated.

He handed her a slice of cheese. “Shísím.”

“Shísím.”

She took a bite and watched him while she chewed. His shoulders sagged, arching his body into a weary curve around his wounded chest. His head drooped over his lap, and his hair drooped over his face, and he carved the thin rind from a slice of cheese with such delicacy that it drooped across the back of his hand like a ribbon. She wanted to shake and wake him. She did not want him to wilt away.

“What does your name mean?” she asked. “Vash…rú?”

“Still, dark water,” he said slowly, as if he were the one learning a lesson.

Then he put down his knife and looked up at her, catching her in a moment of such deep, defenseless scrutiny that she was transfixed by the green of his eyes.

“Your name means crow,” he said.

“How did you know?” she gasped in delight. “Because I have crow nature?”

“No,” he said gravely. “Because Osh told me. ‘Please find my Crow-​​daughter,’ he said to me.”

Kraaia gasped again in shock and outrage and banged her fists down on her knees. “No!” she growled through clenched teeth. “He never said that! You’re lying!”

“I am not lying. I cannot afford to lie to you again.”

Kraaia hurled away her bit of cheese and scrambled up. Vash rose with her, as gracefully as a ribbon falling upwards.

“No! He’s not my father!” she snarled. “I never said he could be my father! My real father is probably alive and he probably would wish I were dead if he knew I was ever born! So no!”

“My real father is still alive,” Vash said softly, “but that never stopped Osh from loving me like a son.”

“Well, congratulations, but I never asked him to love me at all! So no!”

Vash murmured, “One does not ask to be loved like that – ”

“And who are you to be giving me lessons in love?” she sneered breathlessly. “Your own wife never loved you! I bet your own father probably never did! Vash Almighty! Ha ha ha! Has to go crying to stupid old Osh to get some pity!”

She had done it – as easily and as unexpectedly as she had stabbed him. Perhaps it was simply her way.

With one swipe, she knew, she had cut herself free from Vash forever. With all her clawing and scrabbling of the last miserable day, she had surely cut herself free of Osh too. She was free.

“Well, not me!” she crowed.

She spun on her heel and strode for the door. She was not a pet. She would not be adopted. She would die free.

“Kraaia!”

It was the voice of a prince. She stopped.

She knew he did not have to let her go. With one hand he could pick her up by the collar and hold her dangling above the ground. He could hold her down all night. He could carry her home.

But he only said, “Do me one kindness before you go.”

Where she stood, she already heard the fire crackling behind her no more clearly than the winter wind lowing outside the door. Still she thought Vash must have heard her heart beating. Osh’s ears could hear ashes fall.

“What?” she growled.

“Tell me you don’t care about Osh.”

“Why?” she laughed cruelly. “So you can tell him I said it?”

“So we will be even.”