She was so beautiful in that moment, so bright and fresh and wonderful to look at, that he was pleased beyond words to be forgiven, even if he didn’t think for a moment he needed it. “I was just worried about you.”
“Just hold that thought. I might have need of it later. Do we have anything to eat?”
They didn’t, of course. They had eaten the last of their food the night before and drunk all but the last few swallows of their water. Until now, it hadn’t seemed all that important. But their hunger was real and pressing, and suddenly they could think of little else. Bereft of breakfast and anxious to do something about it, they packed up the last of their things in preparation for setting out. There would be little chance for food until they got back inside the valley, and nothing that happened before then was going to make things any easier.
They began walking once more, still heading in the same general direction they had been going earlier, still looking for an end to the lichen-and-moss-shrouded forest. The sun rose above the eastern horizon, but the day remained overcast and gray while the air grew thick and sultry. Around them, the trees formed the walls of a maze that hemmed them in and held them prisoner. They could tell themselves there was an end to this, a way out, but it didn’t feel like it.
Neither of them spoke for a long time as they traveled, lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Pan didn’t know what was wrong, but something definitely was. Still clinging to the tattered remnants of his euphoria and anxious to share what he was feeling, he finally grew impatient. “What were you thinking about back there, sitting off by yourself?”
She glanced over. “Maybe I was thinking about you. Would you like it if I was?”
He grinned in spite of his uncertainty. “You know the answer to that.”
“I know the answer. But it isn’t what I was doing. I was thinking about something else.”
When she didn’t offer an explanation, he said, “Tell me.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. Tell me.”
“You don’t have to know everything about me.”
“I have to know this. Tell me.”
She shrugged. “I was thinking about choices and how we make them. About how some are so easy and some so hard. I was thinking how we make some because we want to and some because we have to. Does that help?”
He smiled. “Well, I hope last night’s choice was one you wanted to make and not one you felt you had to.”
“Actually, it was both.”
“Because it was something you’d been thinking about and …”
She wheeled on him suddenly, bringing them both to a stop. “Pan, let it go. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
He could hear the irritation in her voice, and he was suddenly confused and hurt.
“Don’t talk about it? What does that mean? I thought …”
“Last night was last night, and it’s over with. Don’t try to make more of it than what it was.”
“Don’t make more …” He glared at her. “That’s a little difficult at this point. Besides, didn’t you tell me you loved me? Are you saying I shouldn’t make anything of that?”
She studied him a moment, biting her lip. “That’s not what I said. I said, ‘I think I love you.’ There’s a big difference. Besides, there are other things that …” She left the sentence hanging and sighed. “Let’s walk while we discuss this.”
Side by side, they went on. Pan stared at the ground in front of him, caught up in a whirl of emotions, chief of which was a mounting sense of doubt that only moments ago hadn’t been there.
“When you lose a father and a grandmother, and they are the last of your family, you see things a little differently,” Phryne said finally. Her voice was softer now. “You think about how fragile life is, about how quickly it goes by, how quickly things become lost.
You take life for granted most of the time. You live it in the moment and you don’t think a lot about the future because the future seems a long way off. But when people you love die, suddenly the future seems a whole lot closer and very uncertain.”
She glanced at him quickly and looked away again. “But it’s everything, really. The Drouj threatening to invade our home, my stepmother murdering my father so that she could be Queen, being imprisoned and escaping and going down into the tombs of the Gotrins to find my grandmother, being given the Elfstones to use to protect the Elves when I don’t really know how to do that …”
She trailed off, shaking her head.
“It’s not so different with me,” he interjected quickly, trying to find common ground.
“Losing Sider, losing Prue and then getting her back only partially whole, being hunted by this demon I didn’t even know existed, and now running away with you. It’s not so different.”
“Then you should understand what I’m feeling. Time is something precious, especially now. We might not have all that much of it. So there is a temptation to do things because you don’t want to lose the chance. You don’t want to let those things slip away and never know what they might have been like.”
“Last night,” he said.
“Last night,” she agreed.