A faint footfall and light on his downcast eyes. He looked up, found the creature standing disdainfully over him, a knife of glass in its left hand, the right still cradled against its chest. “You touched me! You touched me! You filthy, sacrilegious…”
The knife glittered white shards of light into Joel’s aching head. He should force himself up. He’d defeated one knife fighter today already. Why not another? He should…
Inexplicably, suicidally, and desperately badly for his badass image, he put his head in his hands and started to cry.
Kjartan’s knife whispered to him. Just there, where the ear stood above the jawbone, there he could push in the point and a single curving cut would all but sever the impious creature’s head from its backbone. The blade’s voice sang under his fingers with a sweet, thin tone that rang around his aching head and seemed to boil his eyes in their sockets.
But for all the stories about humans, for all the warnings about their treacherous nature, their uncanny abilities, not even he could persuade himself that this one—crouched in a huddle on its knees before him with tears leaking out from behind its sheltering fingers—was honestly a danger to him.
The knife whined with disappointment as he slid it back into the sheath strapped to his arm, and that was hard enough. But when it fell silent, all his pains gave tongue, and the knowledge of agony went over him like a sheet of lightning. He staggered backwards and his knees collided with a soft sleeping platform. Sinking down to sit on it, he saw the stains where he’d lain, and the stench of human on the bedding was the same stink as that of the man before him.
He let you rest on his bed.
Kjartan groped for his knife again, fingers hard against the reassuring bump beneath his sleeve. There were two explanations for that, and one of them he liked very little. “What do you want from me, human? I warn you, I am a prince of my people. If you touch me again, uninvited, I will skin you and write satirical verses on the leather.”
The man choked on his tears and coughed the water out. Then the cough became a laugh, and the laugh became a spasm, his brown face flushing purple, his eyes shining out with a kind of fear. It persisted so long Kjartan became afraid that he was under some sort of paralytic spell. So painful to watch was it that he drew back his uninjured hand and slapped the man hard on his cheek.
Oh, how strange. He looked at his hand—the skin had felt rough as though it was covered all over with fine bristles. The laughing fit having stopped, the human now knelt, breathing hard, blinking its reddened eyes and watching him. Kjartan deemed it safe enough to shuffle forward and indulge his curiosity by peering at its face. It did! It had little black spikes all over its jaw that caught the light and glinted like jet. He reached out and touched them with exploratory fingertips. They were not made of stone, but apparently of coarse hair. They had a grain, like a dog’s hair, smooth if he stroked one way, resisting him if he pulled the other.
The creature looked up at him with a new kind of fear in its muddy brown eyes and a curiosity that matched his own. How strange to think that just as it was wondrous to him, so he was wondrous to it. A delightful thought.
He smiled, and it echoed the expression. It had not yet tried to kill him, or imprison him and put him on display, or overpower and ravish him, one of these three things having been what he expected when he woke to find it leaning over him. Now he wanted to know what it would do. If given its will and choice.
“Um…” it said, rubbing the heel of its hand across its eyes to dash away the tears. “So you speak English. That’s going to make things easier.”