He grinned right back at her, listening patiently; her excitement was infectious, and though he’d already thought he was as happy as he could possibly be at the mere thought of taking her somewhere new, the reality of having someone who matched his eagerness step for step was better than he ever could have imagined. “You look nice,” he told her cheerily, eyes drifting down to her white chest before flicking back up, everything about him calm and casual despite the nerves that sputtered in his chest at the words. It was so strange, to be in the early, giddy, self-conscious stages of maybe-dating after all but bypassing the courting stage; but at the same time, there was nothing that strange about it at all, because he and Eris fitted so well together that spending time with the little mad scientist was like throwing away the script he used with everyone else and just being able to speak, to breathe, to listen, to smile.

When she moved to set off, he fell in beside her; he hadn’t brought any supplies, nor had he told her to — as the middle child he’d mainly taken whatever scraps his brother and sister didn’t want from the moorland prey they accumulated around the campfire, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hunt. And half the fun of disappearing into the wilderness of the moors was living off the land — even if ‘living off the land’ often meant the rather sadistic, unfair practice of using his size to slip into rabbit warrens and carry off their squealing young. His siblings got the tough meat; he got the sweet stuff that melted in his mouth.

“I think the mountain air might even be good for your lungs,” he mused as they walked, leaving the gloomy forest behind and venturing out into the open fields beyond League territory; they had once been tilled, but now they lay as dreary ruins, the brittle grasses turned brown and dry by winter and clacking in the stormy breeze, half-reclaimed by the wild and covered in thorn bushes. “You never realise when you’re down in it, but the first thing I noticed when my family and I arrived was how terribly polluted everything around here is. The air is much fresher up there.”

As they left the field behind, the first hint of the Low Lands opened up: a bare, rocky hill, all brown heather and tough, wiry grass. Out here in the open, a gust of howling, icy wind thundered over them and almost blew them off their feet. “After you,” he called to her with a crooked, challenging little grin, stopping at the base and raising his voice over the howling gale as it buffeted his short fur.

Kier grinned at her reaction, looking utterly smitten. That grin only turned to a thin, crooked smile that pushed one of his eyes up slightly as he watched her leap this way and that after bugs and birds and skittering brown leaves. He padded along, his pace slow and steady while hers took her criss-crossing from side to side across the brown grass, moving from thing to thing impossibly quickly and with the same level of excitement every time; Kier never found anyone special, but she was, incredibly so — and adorable. I think it’s that city, dirty place. He loved the way she spoke, like she’d been raised by wolves, like she’d had no formal education beyond whatever words she picked up from her parents — weird grammatical errors, a complete lack of inflection, a seeming disregard for verbal pauses that punctuation allowed, her completely strange accent. And yet she was still so bright. Paired with his overly formal style, they contrasted so oddly, like a raggedy orphan and a fake-posh boy — and he loved it, truly and completely. She was the only cat in the world he respected, valued, adored. The only one he didn’t look down on. In some unexpected away, she’d become his equal, even if he wasn’t yet hers. And he didn’t regret it, this odd, enchanting power imbalance, for a second.

He blinked when she flickered his nose with her tail but didn’t draw back, grinning at her cackle. He loved how bull-headedly fearless she was. When she began the ascent, he watched her for a little bit, both to make sure she found her footing and to (maybe) ogle her from behind, before finally darting his eyes up to meet her smile and scrambling up after her. He was more at home on the moors and he caught up to her quickly, slinking along at her side beside a slight dip in the earth that shielded him slightly from the wind. “Over there,” he called to her against the wind, nodding to where a ruined stone wall overgrown with stinging nettles provided meagre shelter. When he dragged himself over to it, he sat back against the rough stones in a patch devoid of nettles; the wind howled against the other side, but here it felt strangely quiet, muffled, warm. His face tingled with the cold. “My family and I passed by here when we first came to the forest,” he told her, exhaling when he caught his breath. He could remember stopping against this same stretch of wall — him, younger and smaller and seethingly silent, his brother and sister bickering over something in loud, grating voices, his father bent over weakly. So much had changed now. He could hardly relate to the scared kit he’d been. “It was summer then, though,” he added with a laugh, turning to look at Eris with a crinkle-eyed smile.

Bracing himself for the onslaught of wind, he turned towards the end of the wall, drew in a breath, and told her cheerily, “on we go.” The second he stepped out from behind the wall, the wind almost swept him off his feet and he flattened his ears and hunched forward to stay upright. A good deal of the morning was spent this way: climbing steadily higher and higher, passing ruined crofts and cairns piled high on hilltops, picking their way along steep hillsides blanketed with dead heather taller than they were, startling grouse from the orange-brown grass, sheltering inside the crumbled skeletons of old stone farmhouses with their roofs long since ripped away by the wind — until, finally, they hauled themselves to the top of a towering hill swimming with dry, crackling bracken. Beyond them, the moors stretched out in all their raw, rugged beauty: Munros crowding either side of a long, vast glen, a stream with its banks burst shining white among all the brown and orange, icy lochs shimmering in the distance past mist turned dark by the gathering storm clouds. Far away, rain began to hiss down in a grey haze; just a few moments later, like switches were turning on all along the glen, it began to pour down over them.

“Welcome to the moors,” he purred to Eris, turning his head to smile at her proudly with rain dripping from his whiskers.

You left here to live in some miserable little mansion? Kier smiled, his eyes never leaving her as she looked around. Yes, the trade did seem rather lopsided from up here. Really, if Kier had been a little older when his father had one day announced they were setting off for a new home, no discussion, no explanation, he might have broken from his family and stayed where he was, out here in the wild. But as it was, he’d been exposed to the League precisely when he was most lost and most impressionable. And now, it felt like he could never leave with all his business unfinished, all these questions unanswered, all this anger half appeased. Without him even realising it, the world of the Clans had slunk around his throat and tied itself like string. It wasn’t going to end well; even he could feel that. And maybe it was a tragedy, that with all this wilderness out here, all his freedom, all this chance at healing and happiness, he was so addicted to everything in the dark, violent, hateful valley of the Clans that he would throw it all away to die down there, likely far too young and with far too much blood on his paws. “I left here to meet you,” he replied with a quiet purr and not a moment’s hesitation, touching his nose to the back of Eris’ ear and looking at her with a smile from along the back of her neck.

When she raced down the hillside, sending scree scuttling down with the water streaming across the brown heather, Kier watched her for a moment, grinning to himself in such a soft, exhilarated, uncharacteristic way, before throwing whatever little caution he had to the wind and hurling himself after her, as swept up in the high of new smells and new sights as she was. Near the bottom, when he was almost level with her, he suddenly lost his footing on a loose stretch of scree and flipped over inelegantly, landing on his back; the speed of it meant that he thumped down just before she cleared the hillside, so that if there’d been a finish line, his ears would have just won him the race. “Oh, anywhere and everywhere,” he replied casually, grinning up at her like he’d just given up and decided to lounge there, self-aware of his own embarrassment. As the rain lashed down, he rolled over and pushed himself to his paws, shaking himself off; his black fur was now smeared with dark mud, but the rain soon sent it running off in rivulets, leaving his pelt shining. He continued on at a more even pace along the loch, brushing through the heather and still having to raise his voice slightly to be heard over the downpour and over the delightfully excited pace of his companion. “My littermates and I were born in a barn, but we never had one singular home. Really, most of my life before the League was spent trying to reach the League — my father fell ill and after that, we lived on the road. Barns, the edges of twolegplaces, forests, these moors,” he nodded around demonstrably, “anywhere we could find a bit of shelter before my father inevitably collapsed. But the moors were always my favourite.” He smiled fondly, like he was back with an old familiar friend.

Really, he was speaking of his father remarkably casually given he’d just murdered him, but Kier was still in a state of cheerful denial and numbness. After the initial wailing, paw-trembling shock of it, stooped over his father’s body and begging him, shaking him, beating him to get up, get up, after the shell-shocked, wide-eyed sobbing, it had set in. And now, on such an enjoyable adventure that he’d so been looking forward to, he wasn’t going to let deeply repressed, soul-blackening trauma of two days ago spoil his time with Eris. Usually Kier was excellent at compartmentalising. This, though… It was much more thin, much more fragile and forceful and smiling, like if he just didn’t acknowledge it, it didn’t happen and he never had to accept the consequences. It was inevitably going to lead to only good things.

After travelling for most of the morning and afternoon, the short daylight hours of winter were closing in around them. It wouldn’t be long before the sun set and chilly, blustery darkness set in on the bleak moors. Quickening his pace, he caught up to Eris and tapped her on the flank with his healed tail-tip. “We should find cover for the night,” he suggested over the growing howl of the wind and rain. He angled his chin up to a ruined white croft crumbling halfway up the side of the hill ahead of them. “That looks as good a place to me as any, if you think.” For the first time in his life, Kier was sharing the decision making process with someone else, happy to have someone he at last considered his equal. Offering her a lingering, slightly lopsided smile, he turned and led the way up the slope. Inside the old, ruined cottage, the floor had given way to a mound of earth, the roof half caved in and the paint flaking off the bare stone walls; but in the corner where the roof was still intact, it was warm and shadowy and dry, the wind scratching and screaming harmlessly against the walls. Kier lingered uncertainly in the empty doorway, nervous and shy but trying to hide it and just look like he was assessing the situation; really, he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bed down with Eris the way he had the first night they’d spent together. It sapped his self-assured confidence and made him feel like a doubtful schoolboy with a crush. Were they just travelling companions? Should he take the rainy corner on the other side of the house like a gentleman was supposed to? Did she hold him in a different light than he held her? Had he misread things?

Kier ducked his head and laughed at Eris’ greeting to any rodents tucked away, the sound as soft and caught off guard and surprised as he was by everything she did. When he felt her walk past and saw her settle down out of the corner of his eye, he finally looked up, just looking at her with a wretched sort of uncertainty, his shoulders slightly hunched and his forepaws, pressed together where he stood, serving to make him look very small and very nervous.

But, finally, with his shoulders no less hunched and his face no less agonisingly timid, he unfroze himself and padded over tentatively, each paw step careful and almost pained, like he was giving her plenty of time to suddenly change her mind and turn away, like he was fully expecting that to happen. When it didn’t, it was almost more unsettling than it was a relief — really, he felt no relief at all, because he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the moment to snap, and the fact that it never came just meant that the tension kept building in a little knot in his chest, however senseless it might have been. It wasn’t as if Eris was the first she-cat he’d been close to — as surprising as it may have been, whatever sick charisma he had meant that he’d been the most successful of the siblings on their travels, less chatting up strangers at every stop and more just making a few disinterested, off-handed comments and reaping the benefits when they found his snideness alluring. But the difference was that they’d always been boring — stupid and fawning and plain, always asking if he was going to stick around while he gave them half-disgusted reassurances about how… pretty they were and hurried out the door. Eris, though, had him at her mercy. He was completely stupid around her. She was terrifying, and brilliant, and hungry for every scrap of knowledge and understanding; for the first time, Kier was falling in love, if he wasn’t there already, and the thought of losing it, of being nothing to her, was almost as intoxicating as the idea of it being them forever. She could treat him any way she wanted and he’d thank her.

At last, he reached her — and, eyeing her one final time to make sure it was okay, settled down along her back. At first, the contact was new and thrilling enough to make him shiver and tense; but after a moment the warmth of it consumed him, slowed his breathing, slowed his heart. The wind and rain continued to howl and lash against the walls, but it sounded muffled; in here, there was only silence and the quiet rasp of Eris’ breathing. Kier settled his throat and chin atop her soft shoulder, and for a long time he stayed like that, just blinking with hooded, slightly uneasy eyes at the opposite wall.

And then, finally, he shifted his head slightly to look at her, still resting on the warmth of her side. “Eris,” he ventured, and his voice was soft and quiet. Too unsettled to continue for a moment, he raised his head and briefly touched his muzzle to the back of her head, holding it there for a moment before finally snapping out of it enough to give her wet fur a distracted lick and resettling his chin on her side with more determined, anxious purposefulness. If he didn’t find the courage now, he never would. “I know it’s still early days of this strange relationship we have, but I… Well, I’m relatively good at knowing when something that comes along is right or not, and I’ve never felt more certain about anything in my life than I do about you. I don’t want to put a-a label on any of this, I don’t want to confine it like that, don’t want to confine you. I’m making a mess of this. What I mean to say is,” he looked up at her, “would you hate it terribly if I thought of you as my mate? You don’t have to think of me as the same by any means,” he hurried to add, now tumbling over his words with the awful question out of the way, “not now, not until you’re sure about me — or not ever. You can have other lovers and companions if you can find anyone you don’t completely loathe,” he laughed, looking down for a moment as the laugh sobered into a smile, then looked back up. “But for myself, in my own twisted, villainous mind,” he smiled, self-mocking and on the other side of nervous that felt slightly drunk on well, either way I’ve said it, tilting his head from side to side on each of the adjectives from where his chin was still resting upon her, “would you allow it?”

The second Eris spoke, Kier let out a gasping laugh, exhaling the petrified breath he’d been holding on to and collapsing against the side of her neck. A heartbeat later he raised his head again, grinning at her as lovingly as he ever had, almost tearful, as she continued. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so joyful, so relieved, like the world had given him everything he could ever have asked for. When she brushed her paw across his cheek, he didn’t move an inch, just kept smiling back at her; anything she could ever have wanted to do, he would have let her, a thousand times over. Does this mean you belong to me now? “Always,” he purred back quietly, and even though he knew she was only teasing, he meant it. Before her paw could slip away, he caught it against his cheek with his own paw and turned his head, pressing a light kiss to her scarred pad. Then, letting it drop, he turned back to her with a bigger grin that would have been more Kier if it weren’t still so high on joy, and finished with a lecherous, teasing purr, “Mousey.”

“Now,” rearranging himself slightly to lie more comfortably behind her, still drunkenly giddy from the moment but trying to make some hopeless, half-hearted show of getting back to business, he lay down flat on the ground and reached up his paw to tenderly pull her down after him. Their damp fur felt hot between them. “We should probably get some rest.”

That sombre, grown-up silence lasted for half a minute before Kier made a high, strangled little sound against the back of her neck, and then he was laughing — giggling, really. Close-mouthed, excited, childish laughter, like two kids at a sleepover. “Mates,” he keened, echoing her own disbelief after a delay, wrapping his paw around her to pull her tighter against him and wiggling excitedly. “Oh, Janus. What a turn of events. My siblings won’t believe I, little Kier, was the first to make it.” They were also out to murder him after their father’s untimely death, but that was beside the point. “Ohh.” It was with that laughter, growing increasingly quieter and sleepier, and with a wide, joyful grin on his face, that Kier eventually fell asleep, hugging Eris to him all the while.


(you can timeskip to the morning if you like c’; <33)

Kier had been dreaming of his father, of being a kit trying to curl up against his comforting warmth and being pushed away; he ran to catch up with Harley and his siblings, when in the distance his mother melted into view from the fog; he drew closer and her skin peeled away like tree bark, and beneath it was a fawn she-cat with one eye, giving him all the smiling approval Rhiannon never did. He awoke with a small start when he was shaken, eyes snapping open and functioning pupil dilating to match his faulty one, and for a second he didn’t know where he was, thought he still had his father’s stinking blood drowning his paws. Then, steadily, the repetitive dripping, the gentle wind rustling the grass growing atop the roof, and the fresh, cold smell of the sodden moors seeped in between the cracks of his nightmare and lifted him back down to the present.

He felt Eris beside him and turned his head to smile at her in soft greeting, the memories of last night washing over him; they were a greater comfort than anything his family could ever have done for him would have been. For a heartbeat he was afraid he’d dreamt it, but the warmth of her against him, a feeling that was gradually becoming familiar, like relief and stability made tangible, chased that away. It was real, and he was out here with her far away from the oppressive darkness of the Clans, and she was his mate.

He’d never get tired of hearing her say his name; he grinned, the last traces of sleep only evident in the quiet roughness of his voice. “Restless already? I was thinking we might just spend the day in here; the outside’s not going anywhere.” Toying with her impatience, he rolled over to face the weathered stone wall and, with a feigned yawn that quickly became real, his sharp teeth catching the pale morning light, closed his eyes.

Kier stayed where he was for a moment, eyes flicking up and down the wall in front of him with a teasingly fond little grin on his face as he listened to her stomp away, his tail tip twitching in patient anticipation; he let her get a little way away, counting in his head until he had to tilt his head slightly against the ground and strain his ears to hear her faint paw steps — and then, when she was far enough that she might have actually started to think he wasn’t coming, he scrambled to his paws and hared after her. He’d never gotten the chance to act like an excitable apprentice playing stupid games, and now, with the fresh air of the moor howling all around them and his mate among it all, he was happier and sillier and more in love with life than he’d ever been. He bounded up to her across the heather — every one of his thoughts that wasn’t on the damp splendour of the High Lands was on how only she, only Eris, could simultaneously look so small and so utterly monumental, fearless, powerful among the towering peaks, like she alone controlled the wind and the cold and the bracken where the deer grazed, the very world itself — and ran slightly ahead, just to skid dramatically to a stop in the slick of mud and trot back up to her. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.

“Of course I’m coming,” he panted, out of breath and grinning up at her from the slight slope. He’d had half a mind to run an excited lap around her just to get out some of this energy, and only at the last second had he convinced himself he had to save some of it; as it was, his paws and legs were still spattered with mud halfway up his knees. It was the only time he wasn’t obsessive about cleanliness; out here, in the wild, he seemed entirely different, joyful in the muck and unexpected surprises. He was still grinning, wide and happy and breathless, without any trace of his usual clever venom; he was just a young tom in love with the cat standing in front of him. “Besides,” his grin widened as he took a step up towards her, “I don’t think anything out here could hurt you as much as you could hurt it.” It was the purest form of worship he could give her.

Brushing his muzzle against hers in a gentle, intimate proper ‘good morning’, he swished around after the moment’s quiet to stand beside her, looking out over the rolling moors with an optimistic smile. “First thing’s first, nearest deer herd being days away yet, I think we should have breakfast.” He turned his head to grin at her. “You haven’t killed something till you’ve killed it out here. Neither of us are big on food, but everything here tastes a thousand times better — and, with all the wolves killed a century ago by those idiot humans,” he slipped into his mother and uncle’s lilting accent, his tongue rolling and the words guttural in his throat, “tha fios aig an luch nach ‘eil an cat a’s tigh.” He gave her a teasing, cat-caught-the-canary grin.

As if fate herself were listening, a mountain hare, white with winter, suddenly flashed across the heather in front of them, sprinting towards the grey, climbing slope to their right. Kier’s head whipped to the side to watch it. Ordinarily, it would be far too big for either of them to take down, and he would have no interest in such a chase — but out here in the mountains, with his new mate making him feel exhilarated and fearless and on top of the air itself, it just set his heart racing with excitement. “Come on, Mousey, first Highland kill,” he told her with an intoxicated, narrow-eyed grin, tilting his head towards the fleeing hare. He didn’t know which he felt more, his heart pounding at the prospect of spilling blood or the love for her that felt both calming, like he’d found the one thing in his life that mattered, that felt like closing his eyes and breathing out — and blood-curdlingly, dizzyingly, addictively savage. Heady. Electrifying. With that, slitted gaze lingering on her daringly for a second longer, Kier turned and raced after the hare, sprinting in a surprisingly fast arc to try and reach the animal’s side, panic it, and herd it back towards Eris. “You’re going to look so hot covered in its blood,” he called back to his mate, voice whipped away by the wind, before turning his attention back to the terrified hare and, with a sadistic grin, greeting, “hello, hare.”

As soon as the hare careened away from him, Kier slowed to a trot and, when he was sure it was heading back towards Eris, stopped entirely to watch from his vantage point further up the hill. As she chased after the desperate creature, a blur of brown and white against the dead, burned orange landscape, it began to drizzle in icy grey sheets; it was like a vicious choreographed dance, the way she changed directions in an instant like a murmuration of starlings every time the hare veered back on itself or darted to the side, that sick grin on her face all the time. And when she finally caught it, Kier’s claws dug unwittingly into the soft, wet earth. There was nothing — nothing — in the world more infuriatingly attractive than seeing his mate killing something.

For a few moments, as the hare’s blood flooded out over the frost-bitten grass and across Eris, Kier stayed where he was, frozen in place by the sight; he was no thoughts, head empty, just blaring static at the overwhelming, incomprehensible hotness of the scene. Then, at last, he rebooted and slipped slightly unsteadily down the slope to join her, his legs wobbly like jelly. When she raised her head to look at him as he padded towards her, looking so utterly wild and checked out and lost in the predatory afterglow that for a moment even he was afraid of her, Kier just grinned back at her, letting out a quiet, reverent breath of awed laughter through his teeth. “Told you,” he greeted shakily, that same grin still on his face as he circled around behind her and lay down at her side in the mess of the hare’s life. For a few, long seconds, all he could do was stare at her again, covered in so much blood that it dripped from her chin and collected on her whiskers, his mouth slightly open like he’d been planning to say something else and then had forgotten it at the sight; then, finally, he swallowed and looked down. “I think you’re even better suited to life out here than I am,” he laughed, still slightly choked up, his mouth dry; he could feel the hare’s blood soaking into his belly fur. “Maybe one day we’ll leave the miasma of the Clans behind and come live out here permanently.” Despite the tentative, self-conscious amusement of his tone, he wasn’t joking. It seemed an impossible screen of blackness, the future; he hadn’t yet told Eris about his appointment in NightClan, not because he was keeping it from her but because he had been waiting until this trip to do it, and even though he was certain, in the way he was certain of everything with them without needing to speak, that she would follow him if she wanted to, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had stepped out onto a stage that had a very dark ending.

But if he survived it, if they survived it, it would be nice… A quiet life, out here on the moors. No one else around for miles. All that violence and tyranny behind them, even if the tyranny was Kier’s own. But even then, the thought seemed like something he couldn’t dwell on, like it was forbidden, a finale that, to reach, he’d have had to take a very different branch in fate’s path to the one he’d chosen; a pipedream he was never going to reach.

But those were thoughts for another day. Smiling, Kier leaned over and rasped his tongue gently along her cheek as she came down from her high, licking up the blood; it tasted like love. “You really do look breathtaking covered in blood,” he breathed, a purr in his voice as he leaned back slightly to meet her eyes.

(SIMP)

Kier smiled when she leaned her head against him, subtly shifting himself into a position more comfortable for her; it didn’t matter if he was uncomfortable, if his back ached from the angle, if her bony elbow dug into his side — if she was happy, he’d put up with all the discomfort in the world, all the pain, all the inequality, just to lap up the feeling of her pleasure. “Well,” he purred quietly, the side of his muzzle against her cheek, “if you’re not going to eat, I am.” Shifting slightly again, he leaned forward and tore back a strip of the hare’s flank, deep into its flesh. Blood leaked fresh from the wound; its heart had stopped long ago, but not long enough. And, as always, cracking apart ribs and burrowing his muzzle in deep, he went straight for the heart, eating it with dark, silent bites that drew it straight back to his molars, right there in the chest cavity, not even pulling his head back out; it was a claustrophobic feeling, being trapped in there up to his eyes, unable to breathe around the suffocating press of organs and sinew or properly open his jaw against them, but it was also the closest thing to religion Kier knew, that hot, airless cavern. When he finally drew back, the ribcage empty and trails of sinew clinging to his chin, there was a black, gleeful, satiated look in his eyes and blood up past his cheekbones.

He tipped his head back and enjoyed the feeling of the wind turning the blood on his face cold, the unrepentant wilderness of it, for a long moment — before the learned restrictions of the Clans that still clung to him like an oppressive second skin, that felt like shame, settled over him once more and he began to clean it from his face, losing a small part of his genuine self as he tucked it away again. When he was decent, most of the blood gone, he turned back to Eris with a smile. “Shall we, my dear?” he asked cheerily. He slipped out from beneath her and, watching with that same smile, waited for her to follow.

As they set off across the bleak, brown-orange slopes that were rising higher and higher and growing stonier and stonier, they began to approach the point in the journey in which they would need help. The red deer herds, and with them the fawns that they might pick off just as Kier had that one night, came down into the glens in search of food in winter — but there were many glens, and they were only two cats. They’d already passed the odd lone stag, and once three twelve-pointers standing knee-deep in a brackish burn, but not a fawn in sight. So, when, far below along a lonely path through the glen, Kier spied a cat, he stopped and gave Eris a conspiratorial little grin. “Which Kier shall we have today?” he asked without explanation. “I think sweet and frightened. Wait here, Mousey.”

Scampering down the steep slope, over juts of rock and patches of wet heather, Kier got into character and, as soon as he darted out on the road in front of the cat, called out in a voice very unlike his own, “hello? Excuse me?” The stranger seemed perfectly, stupidly friendly, if wary, so Kier approached, all shy and nervous, head bowed and eyes harmless, and continued. Throughout the interaction his voice was a notch higher and breathier than usual, his words self-conscious and unsure, his eyes and tentative half-smile so admiring when the stranger furnished all the information he needed. When he had enough, Kier bowed his head repeatedly, thanking him profusely, and, with the cat waving his tail in farewell behind him, turned and ran back up the slope to Eris. As soon as he drew closer to her, his usual posture and grin returned, like his skin itself was peeling back and he was once again stepping out, a knife where there had before been a flower. “Another day’s journey to the north,” he told her with that breezy smile, “terrain gets steadily rougher, but that’s half the fun. Shall we off?” He smiled at her, bumping his hip against hers and running his tail down her own.