Kavala studied Ronan, smiled slightly, and then hopped off the table. She fetched a fresh cooled bottle of wine for him and more kelp beer for her. She handed him the bottle, reversed and hopped back up on the table, and this time made no pretense about keeping distance. She just settled down comfortably beside him, her thigh and lower body touching him like two children, sitting together, conspiring. "We both haven't had enough to drink." She said softly, refilling her mug from the jug she'd brought along.
Kavala's Pavi was excellent. In fact, it flavored her common with a slight soft lilt to her accent. Pavi was comfortable to her, familiar, the language of her thinking. It was a language meant for drunken revelations and soft half-uttered truths.
"I'd drink wine, I like it better, but sometimes being Konti your body doesn't want anything except what comes from the sea. So Kelp Beer it is for me tonight, and it won't rebel too badly for the large quantities." She said, lifting the mug to her lips and drinking. She hadn't responded to what Ronan said because she needed time... just a little, to process it.
After her drink, she gently laid her head on his shoulder and stared out into the quickly falling night, almost counting stars as they winked into existence. A soft straight snowfall of white hair cascade down his shoulder as her warmth infused his right side. She was smaller than he was, delicate, but he could feel the muscles in her arms and thighs as they pressed against him. Small but strong, in more than just her own mind.
She breathed in his scent which reminded her of tall grass and summer sun. Kavala was used to warriors that smelled of leather and sword oil and the deep honest scent of a man working hard. Ronan was different than that, but not of any lesser value for it. He'd never be two hundred pounds of fighting strength or seven feet of lean muscle. He was what he was, a child of the Drykas, wandering lost because so many of them lived so hard and so fast. It was the price they paid for not having walls... one she knew well.
Kavala also knew he'd never look at her like the Akalak's did. They might not breed horses like the Drykas, but each and every female that stepped foot into Riverfall was a potential broodmare and sized up like that. She set the mug down, and found his hand again, coiling her scaled digits around his strong larger sun-kissed own. Ronan would never smooth his hands over her stomach and envision his offspring there, growing, and with it his rank and place in the city hierarchy. He'd never cup her breasts and weigh them in his hands, wondering if they were big enough to nourish his child appropriately in the first months of his life. He'd never demand a fully body inspection because it would never be his right to have her restrained and stripped so he could explore every part of her with his eyes and his hands all in the name of making a decision about his own future.
Her life was so different than his. And she'd been content with it, to a certain extent, until now. Now the rules seemed to harsh, the penalties to stiff, the freedom too illusional.
She opened her mouth and slowly, almost at a whisper, told him about her life. It was a quiet sort of confession, the kind a woman would whisper to a God and not to a mere mortal man. Kavala didn't seem to care though, and certainly didn't seem to think Ronan even less worth such a thing.
Kavala started with her childhood, reciting the happiness and fear, growing up with Vanator and Bolden, and all the trouble they'd gotten into. She talked about her sister who was a Konti as well and who loved blades more than life itself. She talked about the Denusk curse and how everyone in her pavilion fell in love and then lost the ones they loved the most. She told him about riding north to Mura, studying there for several years, becoming a true healer, and then riding back.
Slowly, into the magical stillness of the night, she told him about the fall from Windsong and the slavers that orchestrated it. She told him about life in the caravan, and how she became a non-person addicted to pain to feel alive. She showed him the tiny etchings on her skin, the ones a slaver had made on her to bring about reactions when forcing her no longer produced any sound from her. Silence, then had been a sort of death to her.
She moved on, telling him about her rescue and about being taken to Godiva's then the Oathmaster's Tower. Kavala softly went into detail there, telling him about the training, the rules, the Talvas' and what was expected of them. She told him about the narrow claustrophobic rooms with the manacles on the cots for women that ran away or did not obey.
Kavala kept speaking, kept passing her history on to him so he'd know just what he was saying and what he was doing. She paused only to take sips of the beer when her throat ran dry. She left nothing out, not the first contact with her first Talvas, nor the birth of Tasival. She spoke of Shayru's emergence as Tasival's second soul and of her rest period and then being put up for availability again.
She told him of negotiations with Cugacon's father and how she thought he was to be the one to own and use her. Then she told him of meeting Cugacon and falling from the roof in a rainstorm while she was trying to fix a leak. Kavala softly spilled the details of their first meeting, and then how she'd caught quickly and now carried his child. His twice daily visits, all negotiated for, were only for pleasure at this point.
When she was done, there was no secret left. He already knew her to be a Dreamwalker and about what she was building here in Sanctuary alongside the animals and healing. She offered up her entire soul to him, laid it bare, and let him see everything that she was in that small uninvited monolog.
And when she was finally done, she took a long drink of beer, set the mug aside once more, and studied him.
"I hear you Ronan. I hear so deeply what you have to say. And more importantly I think I understand what you are saying about home. But you need to know the dwelling you want to live in, Ronan. It's not a pavilion that will bend and sway with the wind able to uproot in a moments notice. It has solid earthen walls and a past that would bring pause to most men." There was such pain and joy mixed into her voice then. It was her real voice, not the strange factual recitation voice she'd used to tell him of her life. Her expression was guarded too, but softened as she reached across him and upwards, capturing his chin and tilting his head downward. She ran the pad of her thumb, the one not captured in his hand, across his lips, slowly and thoughtfully.
"His child is planted firmly inside me, growing and healthy, with no question at all to his parentage, and yet even now a kiss is forbidden." She said softly, her eyes meeting his, asking for one.
