“Not you specifically,” Victoria quickly clarified in response to Tybalt’s raised eyebrow. She let out a little laugh that betrayed some of her nervousness. “I wasn’t afraid of you or bitter toward you personally. I mean, not that it wasn’t annoying sometimes how Vidalia would talk about you. Like you were the greatest man to ever walk Abadd. She was obsessed with you. That was her choice of words, by the way. ‘Obsessed.’ But I meant to say that I felt bitter, angry, and afraid of humans in general. For the longest time, I was terrified of humans. If I saw a shadow of something that looked like it had human ears, I would jump.”

  I’m still afraid of humans, she thought quietly. I’m even a little afraid of you. But you’re clearly not like every other soldier who came looking to hurt us. It obviously helps that everything I’ve seen of you has been good. I’d have to be naive to set that aside. Maybe you will be as great as Vidalia says. I just don’t know.

  “If you were so afraid- and legitimately so- why were you willing to be courted by one, then? You have every reason to fear humans, and I’m more dangerous than most, that’s a fact. You knew nothing about me except for what Vidalia told you, which you clearly didn’t fully believe.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she admitted. “But then I saw you.” She swallowed before continuing, her voice thickening with emotion against her will. “You have to remember what I saw. You’re the… the hero who saved a village full of innocent people who had nothing to do with you. People who I happen to know well. I don’t know what it meant to you or Vidalia, her eyes are always on the big picture… but it meant something to me.” She tried to hide it from him as her eyes filled with tears. She remembered how she had felt leading up to the attack, how afraid she had been for the elderly people and children hiding near the village, despite all her sister’s reassurances as to their safety.

  “Even if Vidalia has been more demonstrative of her feelings… Don’t think my heart was unaffected by your deeds.” She looked very deliberately away from him as she spoke, unable to conceal her emotions on this subject. “You’re fearsome and strong and brave. You risked your life for all of us. Why wouldn’t I want to be courted by you? Any maiden with warm blood would feel something.” She recognized that she sounded almost defensive of her feelings, and a part of her wondered how he would receive her words, but she was too stuck in the emotions of that day at the village to think about his reaction very hard.

  Without you, my family would be dead or in hiding, waiting for them to come and kill us. Vida. Uncle E. My little cousin Hayden. All of us killed and… subjected to horrific indignities before we died.

  “You don’t give Andric any of the credit for that?” Tybalt asked.

  “I… I’m not going to talk about him with you,” Victoria said. “Please. I respect him. I don’t want to insult him or compare the two of you in any way. He is brave, and he led our defenders well. But I will answer that one question. I can’t give him as much credit as you… because he brought the attack upon us. The village was hidden where it was for years. Vidalia told the Council, she’s not great with people, but she was the most persuasive I’ve ever seen her, she told them- ” Victoria took a moment to calm herself, because she realized she was almost beginning to yell- “She told them that if we didn’t fight, if we just hid, your squad would never find us. Forgive me for saying it, but your people are blind and deaf. They only see what they want to see. Until Andric challenged them directly, we were invisible to them. They hadn’t tried to pursue us into the mountains in years. Then he bloodied their nose, and people started dying.”

  “I brought the attack on you, too,” Tybalt said after a moment. “The squad was after the necromancer as much as they were after beastfolk. They were empowered by War God Vika specifically to kill me and any other worshipers of Death God Mudo. So maybe you’re giving me too much credit.”

  His facial expression was almost one of guilt, and Victoria found herself annoyed by that for reasons that weren’t obvious even to her.

  You don’t get to say that, dummy. It’s nonsense. A silly explanation. Taking the blame for what a god wanted to achieve with the attack… It was obviously outside your control.

  She took another few deep breaths, made sure she was on the right path still- the necromancer was very distracting- and then spoke, looking him deliberately in the eyes.

  “You could have run away.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “They were after you, specifically, like you said. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to flee, right?”

  He waited a moment, then nodded and gave her a sheepish smile. “I was overconfident. I assumed I would win easily.”

  Is it hard for him to receive praise? I’m not going to keep repeating myself.

  “You need to get your story straight with your companion, then,” she replied sharply. “Mariella and I have spoken often, though more before you woke up. She told me that you were afraid something terrible would happen to the beastfolk, so you convinced her to betray the Army, and then you rushed here despite the danger. I know her now. She wouldn’t lie. She doesn’t have an ounce of guile in her. Why are you downplaying your own actions?”

  In the moment when it counted, you were more heroic than anyone I’ve ever seen before.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “That’s something I did,” he said after a moment. “It’s not who I am on a daily basis. I had my own selfish reasons for acting the way I did. It’s good that the villagers think it was heroic. That will help me seize power, which will benefit us when we organize to fight the Kingdom. But I don’t want you or Mariella or Vidalia to develop feelings for a false version of me.”

  It’s a little too late for that. The two of them are already worshiping you. And I… I…

  She shook her head stubbornly, dismissing her own thoughts as much as his words. “I saw how you nearly laid down your life for us. Actions don’t lie. Whatever motivation you went into the village with, you showed you were willing to die for our people. That’s what heroism is.”

  The words, In my eyes, remained unspoken, though Victoria wondered if they were obvious. She didn’t want to give any hint of feelings. He had still said nothing of why the foxgirls should marry him, what his plans for the future were, how he might help the rest of her family, or what married life with him would be like. This was a very non-traditional meeting in her eyes. She needed to get this conversation on track before it became more emotional.

  “If you fell in love with the version of me that you saw as a hero, you’d only be disappointed by the real me. You might even come to hate me once you understood me better. I don’t want to be loved for being someone, something, that I’m not.”

  “Out of all those who survived, there was no one who came closer to death than you,” she said quietly, still insistent. “I watched you fight for your life in the aftermath. Even if you’re a bad man deep down, you’re still a kind of hero.”

  Even as she argued with him, she was starting to understand what he meant, a little bit. It was a little like her experience of courtship. Men only approached Victoria if they were interested in Vidalia. That was the single factor that determined it. Because being married to the tribe’s seer was either a major hazard to avoid- it would thrust you into tribal politics and make for shaky power dynamics in the home- or it was a significant selling point, if you were someone ambitious like Andric.

  Being beautiful, hard-working, diplomatic, whatever else Tybalt had ascribed to Victoria, none of those were as significant as her being the sister of the dream seer.

  The truth was, she couldn’t remember a time when she had thought a man was interested in her purely for herself. And no one wanted to be loved for something or someone they were not.

  “Thankfully, someone administered a special health elixir to stop me from bleeding to death,” Tybalt replied, pulling her back to the present.

  Victoria blushed furiously but tried to control her expression.

  “Yes, someone did,” she managed after a moment.

  “I think I remember that person actually kissed me in my sleep,” Tybalt said. “I assumed it was Vidalia, but she said it wasn’t when I asked…”

  Victoria’s brain froze for a moment.

  “Um, we’re almost to our destination, Tybalt,” the foxgirl said as she recovered from the surprise. She recognized that she was being teased, so she deflected as best she could. “Start paying attention to your surroundings. You began this outing by asking me to take you somewhere beautiful, and then you switched to asking for me to take you somewhere that was special to me. This place is both, I hope.”

  I didn’t… kiss him. Did I? If I did, it was a complete accident. I can’t have had my first kiss with him when he was semi-conscious. Right? He’s just teasing me. Even if it was true, I was just carried away after witnessing the attack! He’s a jerk for bringing it up!

  Tybalt’s reaction as Victoria led him forward thankfully distracted her from that line of thought. He began inspecting the surroundings, and to Victoria’s satisfaction, she saw a pleased look dawn on his face.

  Just you wait, she thought.

  They were in the wooded part of the mountain now, but here and there were bushes with flowers growing and the odd wildflower. That was why she had chosen this area.

  “I like this place,” he said. “It’s very charming. I never imagined things like this could exist in the desert, but I guess we’re pretty far from the Salt Waste up here.”

  “Even roses can bloom in the desert, Tybalt,” she said, flicking her hair back.

  “I know it,” he said, tilting his head slightly and staring her in the eyes in a way that made her flush and avert her gaze. “You just have to take good care of them, right?”

  She nodded, then took him forward by the hand, accelerating toward their destination. They stepped through a gap in the trees, and she noticed his head dip. He had looked down at the place on the ground where she had cleared a couple of trees herself to make her access to this space easier.

  He certainly pays attention to his surroundings.

  They took another step forward, and he finally looked up again.

  “This is my garden,” Victoria said after a moment.

  You said to take you somewhere special to me. This is it.

  She wanted to look around at it herself- at the actual desert roses she had transplanted here, at the lavender that lovingly ringed the whole area, at the varied wildflowers that she had coaxed into growing in rows organized by species instead of their natural chaotic sprawl, at the view this space had that overlooked the desert itself and the open sky.

  She wanted to do that, but she was too curious- anxious?- about his reaction.

  How did I get so invested in this? she asked herself quietly. I just thought it would be funny at first to share with him, right? Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly it. I wouldn’t take someone here as a joke. No one else has seen it except Vida. I guess I was trying to make a good impression. This is the first time we’ve really been alone.

  As she tried to interrogate her own motives, her eyes were locked onto Tybalt’s face. A smile slowly spread across it, and her own lips turned up in response.

  “Do you- do you like it?” she asked, unable to keep a note of pride out of her voice.

  I tamed a little bit of the wilderness. In my free time. It’s stupid, considering I’m working on a plot of land all day, but it was something I wanted to do. Make something that was just mine. Something beautiful.