Page 20 of Captive

He looked down at the words, then nodded absently.

Novikke twirled the stick in her fingers as she thought, then wrote again. “I’m not a spy, or a fighter, but I wanted to be.” She looked up to see if he was still watching. He was. She added, “They wouldn’t let me.”

She’d expected him to tire of the dialogue before it had even begun, but he looked curious. He took the stick from her.

“Ardanians don’t allow women to fight,” he wrote.

His information was outdated, but not by that long. “They do, as of forty or so years ago.”

He rolled his eyes. Novikke had heard that when their city, Vondh Rav, was first founded, it was entirely female-ruled. She did not know if that practice was still in place, but about half of their fighters were female, from what she’d heard. It seemed that no part of society was off-limits to Varai women.

“That thing that happened to me at the river—” she wrote, then sheepishly glanced up at him to see if he took her meaning. “And back on the road,” she added. “It happens often.”

She hesitated. She didn’t know how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t take hours to write. Aruna watched her, one eyebrow lifted.

They’d run out of room, so she groomed the dirt into a smooth plane again before starting anew. “I have a head sickness. Since I was a teenager. I get so afraid that I can’t think or move.”

When she was younger, she’d never have admitted it if she could help it. She’d lost some of her shame over time. It was just the way she was. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

“When I joined the army, I tried to hide it. I failed. They said I wasn’t fit to fight.”

Aruna looked at the words and frowned in a way that she couldn’t quite interpret. He looked up at her and shrugged as if to ask, Why tell me this?

She was telling him because she thought that sane, honest people were likely to have a harder time killing someone they knew. And Aruna appeared sane and honest to her, for a night elf. The more he knew about her, the more he’d be forced to think of her as a real person.

“Why did you want to be a soldier so badly?” he wrote. Novikke sensed judgement in the question. It had been so long that it took her a moment to remember why she’d wanted to join the army in the first place.

“I wanted to help people.”

She looked at the words for a few seconds, then scoffed softly. It sounded stupid when she wrote it down for someone else to see. And it sounded stupid when she said it to a night elf, who undoubtedly did not see Ardanian forces as helpful. She watched for his reaction, but she couldn’t tell what he thought of what she’d written.

“My parents were both fighters with the army,” she wrote. “That was before the war with Ysura. Back then, they mostly did things like chasing down brigands and werewolves.”

“Have you helped people?” he wrote. “Or have you only hurt people?”

He certainly knew how to cut to the quick. “I’m not important enough to make a difference one way or another,” she wrote bitterly.

They’d run out of space to write again, and the time it took to write was wearing on her. She dropped the stick. This time, as she stood, she caught him looking sideways at her, tracing her bare skin with his eyes. When she met his gaze, he cleared his throat and looked away. Her first reaction was to feel more pleased than was practical or proper. And then she came to her senses and just felt frustrated again.

As she rounded the fire back to her place opposite him, her eyes lingered on his weapons, still sheathed on his belt on the ground at his side. It was the first time she’d seen them not attached to him.

Still too close to him for her to reach them before he did, though.

She looked up and realized he was watching her watching the blades. His eyes narrowed at her. She narrowed hers back.

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