Duskfall Read Free

rare commodity for her. She suspected it was the same for every tiellan. Humans cheated you, betrayed you, and would take everything you owned if you let them. Some tiellans would do the same. If she was honest, Winter only trusted a few people: herself, and her father, certainly. Gord, Darrin and Eranda, and Lian, too. Knot… Knot was not yet close enough to count.
    They sat in silence for a moment. The others’ chatter seemed distant in the background.
    Winter knew what was coming. “Please don’t ask me again,” she pleaded. She wasn’t sure she could take it. Not today.
    “Still haven’t given me a straight answer,” Lian said. “I’ll keep askin’ ’til you do.”
    “The advantages are clear. Any tiellan who marries a human is better off, no matter who that human is.”
    “Even if that particular human has no idea who he is or where he came from?”
    Winter frowned. She hated this conversation for a reason. Part of her agreed with Lian; what she was doing was difficult to justify. And yet, if Knot could take her away from Pranna, Winter might have a chance to really
live
—not just waste away in a dying town. Even if Knot wasn’t the man she imagined, she could cope if it meant getting away. She was a tiellan, after all. She could endure, if she had to.
    And, perhaps, if she left, she might find somewhere she belonged.
    “D’you remember that time you nearly drowned?” Lian must have grown weary of her silence. “That summer, when we were young.”
    Winter blinked at the question, but couldn’t stop her lips twitching into a grin, however slight. “Which one?” she asked.
    Lian smirked. “I suppose nearly drowning was pretty common for us back then.” He looked into her eyes. “You know the time I mean.”
    Winter did know. She had only been eight or nine, playing on the dock with an earring of her mother’s, taken from her father’s room without his knowledge. The earring had slipped through Winter’s fingers, between the boards of the dock, and into the water below.
    Winter remembered not thinking about what she did next. She just did it. She jumped into the water and started searching for the earring. She remembered diving in, coming up for air, diving down again. There hadn’t been much daylight left, the water was murky, and Winter had hardly been able to see anything. Each time she went down her hands dug into the mud at the bottom, but came up with nothing. She didn’t know how long she surfaced and dived again, but she remembered the panicked constriction in her chest, and the tears mixing with seawater on her face.
    The sun set, the water grew colder, but still she continued, even when her muscles began to cramp. Looking back, Winter couldn’t say what had come over her. In that moment, all she knew was the
need
to find the earring. There had been nothing else.
    Lian finally found her, shivering and spluttering, about to dive once more. To this day, Lian swore it would have been her last dive. He jumped in just as she went down. He took hold of her, and pulled her to the surface.
    Clutched in her hand had been her mother’s earring.
    She looked at Lian. “Are you angling for another thank you?”
    He laughed. “No. Just wanted you to remember. Sometimes you think you need a thing, you fixate on it, and you don’t know when to give up. But that’s the best thing you can do, sometimes—let a thing go. Just wish you knew when to do it.”
    “Me too,” Winter whispered.
    Then suddenly Lian reached out, brushing a strand of hair from her face.
    Her hand snapped up, gripping his.
    “Don’t.” Winter lowered their hands, his in hers, gently. Friendly affection was one thing, but this was her Doting, for Canta’s sake. And the touch reminded her of a time she wasn’t interested in revisiting.
    “Sorry,” he mumbled, and seemed to mean it.
    “So am I,” she said, but knew she didn’t.
    * * *
    The Doting went as well as Winter could have expected. The small cottage smelled