Hello, lovelies. ;)

So I don't really have much to say. :P Thanks for the reviews! They make my day, and I honestly love hearing from everyone. :) I wish I could reply to everyone, but that would take up a lot of reading room on this, haha.

But anyway, I thank each and every person who takes the time to read this. All a writer can ask for is people to read their work, and you all make that possible for me. :D

"You frequent the safest place to hide. Long nights filled with your most obvious weakness. You start shaking at the thought. You are everything I want 'cause you are everything I'm not. And we lay, we lay together, just not too close, too close. How close is close enough? We lay, we lay together, just not too close, too close. I just wanna break you down so badly. While I trip over everything you say, I just wanna break you down so badly, in the worst way."-Taking Back Sunday

*+*Aderyn*+*

When I walked back in the house, Tristan was glaring at me with a ferocity I hadn't expected.

"Who the hell was that?" he snapped.

My thoughts were already weighed down with everything Drenna just told me, so his anger caught me off guard. "That was a friend of mine."

"It sounded like a Woad," he growled. I sighed, sitting down heavily in front of him.

"She is a Woad," I said quietly. His eyes widened, and I added, "Her name is Drenna, and she raised me."

"You were not only raised by Woads," he said furiously, "the people that have killed off nearly all of the men I've ever fought with, but you were raised by one of their most powerful leaders. Is that right?"

I scowled. "You make it sound so much worse when you put it that way."

"I am not making it sound worse!" he spat. "It is as bad as it sounds!"

"You act like you are innocent in all of this!" I responded heatedly. "You have killed Woads! You make them sound like murdering machines with no other thought beside blood-spilling."

"That is what they are!" he shouted back.

I was on my feet in an instant. "I was raised by Drenna, as you so relished in pointing out! She is the military leader as well, as you probably know, and her strategy has never been to just kill as many as possible! They fight with reason, to take back the land from your precious Rome!"

"I have no allegiance to Rome! Get your facts straight before you point fingers! Although I would swear my fealty to them before I would ever surrender to the Woads. They are savages!"

"Then what are you?" I shrieked, my voice getting higher pitched the angrier I got. "You have no loyalty to Rome, yet you kill people for them! Drenna has a bigger heart than you could ever comprehend! She saved my life when my family died, and she taught me everything I know! When she found me I was half-dead! I would have wasted away if it weren't for her! She had no reason or ulterior motives for saving me, but she did! Do not speak to me of savages, Tristan, when you know naught of what you say!"

It became incredibly silent. The wind seemed to halt, as if it too was waiting for his response. My chest was heaving, and angry tears had pooled at the bottoms of my eyes. He was studying me, the rage in his eyes had receded somewhat, but his sneer remained. He continued to keep his lips sealed, so I spoke instead.

"It does not matter anyway," I said quietly. I folded my legs beneath me, and returned to the ground.

"Why not?" he questioned.

"Because we will never see eye to eye," I pointed out. "There is no way to win a fight of opinion. For years I have watched the woman I think of as a mother become distraught over your people killing hers, and you have seen Drenna's people killing the ones close to you. We will both always hold onto our resentment. The only resolve I see is to simply keep our opinions to ourselves for the rest of the time you are here. Deal?"

I held out my hand to him, waiting for him to shake it. He regarded me curiously, like he thought I may be joking. I stared back seriously, waiting for him to take my hand. He finally did, shaking it quickly. His hands were shockingly warm and even more calloused than mine, and my hand was practically swallowed in his much larger one.

"Deal," he responded gruffly, taking his hand back. I smiled.

"Good."

"I'm going to guess that she does not know I am in here," he said.

"No, and it will stay that way," I replied. "She would string me up on a tree out there if she knew I had you smuggled in here."

One side of his lips quirked up. "Are you sure I'm not the one she would string up?"

"We would probably end up swinging from the same branch," I responded casually. He chuckled, and my stomach flipped strangely. It was deep and almost coarse, but the sound of it was oddly intimate.

"Why don't you laugh more?" I blurted, blushing instantly after it was said. I hadn't meant to actually ask him.

He leaned his head back against the wall, and closed his eyes. "When you have seen as much carnage as I have seen, you will find that there are few reasons left to laugh."

His tone was calm but his words sounded tortured, and I wondered what vile images danced beneath his eyelids as he said it. It was true that he had seen much more than me, as he was a soldier, but I was jealous of that, not wary. I wanted to see more than just the four walls of my cottage and the dead leaves and trees of my forest.

"Have you ever seen the ocean?" I asked him.

His eyes opened, and he nodded. "I lived near the Black Sea."

I couldn't help but feel like a starry-eyed child as I gaped at him. "What is it like?"

He considered his answer carefully. "Wild."

I found the thread I'd noticed on my tunic earlier, and started to tug at it. "I would like to see the ocean. Drenna said it was beautiful, but I know she will never take me. She fears for me too much."

"The sea is far from here," he replied.

"I know, but I am determined," I said firmly. "I will see it before I die."

When I looked up he had moved his head slightly so that the remnants of his unbraided hair concealed his eyes. I considered him silently, but I couldn't tell if he was looking back. I got my answer soon enough.

"You have a habit of staring," he said lowly.

I flushed. "No, I don't. You just do not say what you are thinking, so I try to guess."

"So what am I thinking now?" he asked mockingly.

I cocked my head to the side, and smiled slightly. "I believe you are thinking you cannot wait to leave here so that you can stop talking so often and go back to brooding constantly."

He shook his head. "Wrong."

I shrugged. "Just a guess. What were you thinking then?"

"Just…trying to tie up loose ends."

"Meaning?"

"This a good-sized house, yet you have boarded up three extra rooms. You say your family is dead, but you never speak of them unless asked. You don't like to be stared at. You scream in your sleep, and hate crying. I am just wondering what happened to you that caused all of this," he said simply. My face flushed furiously at his correct observations of me, and I looked at the floor.

"You can wonder all you want," I said after a long pause. "But you will ever know."

I turned to go, but he spoke just before I left. "I doubt that is the truth," he said so quietly that I barely caught it. I didn't stop or give any indication that I heard. Instead I walked right out, running from my problems, which was what I had always done best.

/\/\/\/\/\

For the rest of that day we didn't talk to each other. He stayed in that same spot mostly, and I noticed that he'd taken out that lump of wood he'd been whittling the other day, and continued to do so. He still had my favorite dagger, but I didn't ask for it back. Whenever I would walk back in, he would only glance up to acknowledge my presence. I was okay with that.

With him seeming content to just sit there for the moment, I was able to go back to a semblance of my old routine. I finished sorting herbs, uprooted the weeds in my garden, sharpened my sword, cleaned the horse stall, and set up traps for rabbits. I felt rather accomplished, and went to sleep that night feeling less stressed than I had in awhile.

My dreams were even worse than usual. It started the same, with me being dangled over the heads of my family by the leader of their murderers, but when he dropped me I landed in the clearing in front of my cottage instead. Drenna approached, her eye sockets empty and black.

She repeated to me the fortune she had seen in my palm, but only in the Woad language this time. I backed away, finally running into something solid that had hands that clamped around my arms. I whirled around to attack my captor, only to stop, gasping. The normal gray fog that shrouded my dreams lifted, and sunlight was suddenly pouring in heavily through the cover of trees. The sense of dreaded terror I felt was gone instantly, and I stared into a pair of the most beautiful eyes I'd ever seen. They were nearly gold in color, and shimmered at me enticingly.

Tristan was smiling at me like he never had before, and I reached up and moved one of the plaits from his face. He leaned forward, and my eyes closed an instant before his lips touched mine.

The vision vanished the second he kissed me, but I didn't wake right up like I normally did. Instead I came into awareness slowly, my eyes staying closed. I wasn't sweaty or afraid like I normally was when I woke up. I felt almost relieved, and a little confused. My arms reached out blindly, trying to find Tristan, whom I knew would be right next to me. When my hands touched nothing but air, my eyes opened.

I was lying on the ground, not in my comfortable bed. I blinked rapidly, sitting up. Very weak sunlight was filtering beneath the door, so it must have been dawn. I could just see the top of Tristan's head but that was all I needed to come crashing back down from cloud nine.

I dreamt I kissed him! Even worse: I'd enjoyed it, and woken up thinking he should have been lying next to me! I recoiled into myself, pulling my knees up to my chest for protection. The rabbit I ate last night must have had rabies. That was the only explanation for these insane dreams.

Yet I could not deny that that dream was much better than the norm. Just his presence had chased away the fog and the darkness, and he'd seemed so much friendlier in the dream.

I stood up, and tiptoed over to him. I stared at his face while he slept. He was undeniably attractive. I'd never seen a man so…beautiful. It was the only adjective that could possibly describe his level of appeal. He was not "handsome" and he certainly wasn't "cute" or "pretty". He was beautiful in a way that I knew only he could be. When I was starting to give into the urge to touch his face, I walked out of the room. Attachment could never end well. He would leave soon, and I would stay here. That was the end of it.

I hated how upset that made me.

*+*Arthur*+*

I didn't tell the men about seeing Drenna go to the place she'd forbid us from. I knew it would only cause problems, and I was trying to avoid that at all costs as of right now. Unfortunately, the lack of argument could not stop the awkward silence that drifted over our camp like the plague.

We all sat around the fire Lancelot had started, silently eating the small portions of food we'd all been given. Galahad had been hunting again, but his face was sour when he got back. Normally Tristan did the hunting. The youngest knight obviously didn't want to. I wanted to scream at them. They said Tristan was dead, but when they were forced to pick up the slack, they complained. My nerves were fraying thinner and thinner by the day.

"What do you think he would have done?" Bors said suddenly. All heads turned to him.

"What are you blabbering about?" Lancelot asked rudely.

"Tristan," he said. I tensed up. "Do you think he planned to go back to Sarmatia with the rest of us?"

"I don't know," Gawain replied. "No one does except him. He was never the type of man to waste breath speaking."

"I think he meant to," Galahad said suddenly. "When I went to his room to see if he was ready to leave, most of his stuff was packed."

"His stuff was always like that," Dagonet added quietly. "He was always prepared to leave."

The quiet fell again, but I greeted it with open arms this time. I wasn't ready to deal with this yet, talking about him like he only had a place in our pasts. He was alive.

"Do you remember when he beheaded those three men with one swing?" Lancelot suddenly asked, smiling at the memory. "He didn't even blink at it, just kept going."

Dagonet nodded fondly. "He was a great fighter…probably the best of us."

"I wouldn't even know how to use a bow if it were not for him," Galahad stated. "Remember how bad I was? He taught me almost all I know about archery."

"Vanora liked him," Bors said with a tone of finality, as if Vanora's approval was what made him a good person.

"Doesn't matter now," Gawain said, interrupting their pleasant reminiscence. "He is dead now."

"You do not know that," I said instantly. The awkwardness was back with a new vitality, and Gawain was glaring at me.

"Why are you so adamant about this, Arthur?" he sighed. "Even if he did survive battle, he would have died without resources by now."

"I just know," I spat, hackles raising. I pulled my cloak tighter around me, and glared into the bright orange flames.

"Do you know what I think?" the blond knight continued heatedly. "I think he is alive too."

The men's expressions morphed to various levels of surprise, and they all stared at Gawain, who didn't seem to notice. He only stared at me, gauging my reaction.

"Is that so?" I said slowly.

He nodded once. "Yes," he said, tone clipped with irritation. "But not for much longer. Haven't you wondered why that Woad woman will not let us into that little glade?"

I could feel everyone exchanging glances around me, but I kept my eyes firmly on Gawain. "What are you suggesting?"

"I am suggesting that he is captured down there," he replied evenly. "I think they have had him all along, making fools of us while we tramp through the foliage yelling like buffoons. I don't know what they want from him; maybe military strategy or weak points in our defenses. But I think he's being held prisoner. We all know Tristan. There is no other excuse for the disappearance of not only him, but his horse and weapons too. There haven't even been any damn tracks!"

He stood suddenly, letting the emotions he'd trapped go free. He dropped his bowl and spoon with a loud clatter, and glared at me through tight blue eyes.

"I say we forget the treaty. I want to know what is in that precious forbidden area of theirs."

There is a reason why I'm making Gawain the asshole rebel in this. You know how, in the movie, when they're in the tavern after they found out they have one more mission, and Arthur says, "And you, Gawain?" Well, his glare made me think that there was something behind it. He wasn't nearly as angry with it when he asked the other knights. So I put meaning behind it: Arthur was daring Gawain to defy him again, like he did when they were looking for Tristan in my little fic. ;)

I hope that's a good enough reason to make Gawain so douchey.

Five reviews, beautiful people? :3 Pretty please and many thanks! Hope all of your weeks started off well, and continue to be so!