4.
Everett is shaking as she helps him slide on the gauntlets. He's fifteen and his eyes are huge and afraid for what's to come. It's his first mission and Anira doesn't know how to reassure him when she's just as scared. Mordred disappeared almost a year ago, lost to the wilderness and the Woads, Shy returning to the fort minus his rider. Percival died last month, twenty four and still sweet faced. She had cried for the loss of both of them when they burned Percival's body, but those tears could not match the ones she cried when Kay told her that Everett was joining them on the mission to clear the villagers from a hamlet north of the wall.
The commander, Arthur, had avoided her successfully for two days before she caught him walking along the top of the wall. Though she was eighteen, she wasn't above screaming at the Roman till her voice got hoarse. He apologized over and over again and he looked so genuinely sorry that she almost left him there. But her little brother was going off to face death at the hands of vicious natives and that drove her onwards. She remembered slamming her forearm into the side of his head and getting off a few solid slaps before arms pulled her back and held her close. Lancelot checked Arthur's face, which she was sad to notice she had not bruised, while she felt her captor chuckle.
Whiskers tickled her neck as Gawain chided, "Now, now. Violence solves nothing."
Wrenching her arms free, she ran away, noticing for the first time that she had been crying. She would have run to the stable to throw her arms around Fury and find solace in the warm strength of the horse had she not slipped on the cobblestones underfoot and tripped on her long coarse skirt. Sitting up, she brushes the dirt from her face and tries to stand. Dampness on her leg alerts her to the long slice that one of the slate stones caused and she begins the limp back to her room.
She hears the footsteps pounding behind her and the man out of breath that seems to have caught up to her, but she does not look back to see who that might be. He doesn't give her long to limp in silence.
"You bleeding?" Gawain asks and she flashes him the slice up her thigh, but keeps walking.
"Let me help you."
"No."
"Anira, just let me bind it up, you don't have to actually talk to me." She looks at him then, seeing the real concern in those blue eyes that still seem to make her burn somehow. She's exhausted so the decision to reach for him comes out of nowhere and somehow him picking her up astonishes her in the same way.
He takes her to the stable and uses the bandages he keeps in his saddlebag while she wipes her tears and watches him. Seated on a bale of hay with him crouched in front of her, she studies the way his hair is now long enough for sloppy Sarmatian braids and how his beard now covers his whole jaw. The other women talk constantly about his good looks but she doesn't think of him as handsome until he looks up at her and says, "It's going to be alright."
And when she's helped her little brother onto his horse and sees Gawain mounting his speckled stallion Rill, she smiles at him. And when he mouths it to her again before they ride out, the heat that fills her then is something new and wonderful.