Despite those steaming ashes of anger, vexation, and disappointment from the revelation days prior, Kristen could not help but to feel the kinship of commiseration with
Edric then. Her sheltered and pampered life within
House Pirian had been fragile--possibly even more so
after her kidnapping. And when she came to the Academy, that first day, that first week, that first month--by
Aionus, who was she kidding?--that first
year had been an awakening.
She remembered it clearly, that day, standing in formation when Proctor Pallatrix had called them all to it, watching Proctor D'Amour fight and best Vance. She remembered it clearly, a thought she had, right then, as if her good senses had finally caught up with her after the whirlwind of being dropped into a world wholly unfamiliar and terribly,
terribly fast-paced.
She had no idea.
It was the precise moment when she knew
just enough about the world of
Dreadlords to know how little she actually knew, and realized it.
"In this way, we are kindred spirits of a kind," she said, eyes dropping, voice low like an admission of guilt.
"We couldn't be more different, you and I. Yet, I feel, as we look to the metaphorical islands upon which the other dwells, that we share the same sense of being overwhelmed by all the things which we have never known. And it is daunting, frightening even, to cross that dividing sea."
A sudden feeling, bursting into her mind with an urgency reminiscent of a messenger delivering a missive which could turn the tide of a war. Now was the time. Now was the time to say sorry. To apologize for upsetting him in the wheat field, for uttering those two little words in the galley of the
Kammerund. Her
empathy in that moment was the brief window for it before her heart sealed back up. It was now, or...or mayhap never.
She looked back up. Lips parted. Words prepared in her throat. She made to speak.
And only a half-formed utterance came forth, more a stifled gasp than anything. Her lips closed, and with them, she knew, the chance to apologize. She couldn't bring herself to say it. To say sorry for the wheat field and for the galley.
Because deep down she knew that it would be a lie.
That she wasn't sorry for what she had said in either incident.
And while her very Pirian blood seemed to chastise her for this, running cold in her veins, her mind, sharpened as it had become in the year spent in the Academy, held within itself a quiet contentment for this.
A serenity.
Edric