Page 70 of Dark Chains: First Link
Yaaf was back.
Sullha felt him. It was as if the air compressed behind her, and if she doubted her senses, the startled and fearful expression on Feyla and Mahra's faces confirmed it.
Turning around, she saw him standing at the edge of the vegetable garden, silent and still like a statue.
A very handsome statue.
He looked tense, though. His shoulders were set higher than they'd been during his last visit, and there was a tightness around his jaw that hadn't been there when he'd crouched beside her in the dirt and made her laugh. He'd been softer then, more like the old Yaaf she remembered from before. Now he was back to being a stranger who seemed to be more machine than man.
She pushed to her feet and wiped her hands on her coveralls. "Hello, Yaaf."
"Hello."
"Third time in twelve days."
"Should I stop coming?"
"No."
He closed the distance between them in three long, purposeful strides, and even though she knew he meant her no harm, his size alone was intimidating, and she took a step back.
The other two women stilled.
Shifting her gaze from them back to Yaaf, she lifted her hand. "Don't move so fast. You're scaring them."
He halted no more than three feet away from her. "I'm just walking."
"You're striding, and they are not used to seeing soldiers here."
Understanding dawning on his face, Yaaf nodded.
The women's reactions weren't a comment on him personally. It was the accumulated weight of a lifetime of experience that had taught them that males were dangerous. Particularly the big ones like him.
He lowered himself slowly to the ground, not making any sudden movements, and crouched beside her in the dirt as he'd done before.
Was he making himself small so she wouldn't be intimidated?
It was a futile attempt because even in a crouched position, his head was almost level with hers.
Yaaf had always been tall, but back then he had been a scrawny boy with limbs that were too long for his body. Now, there wasnothing scrawny about him. He was all muscle, and he moved like a panther or a lion. Not that she had ever seen either in real life, but she'd watched nature documentaries with Tomek, and Yaaf had the same coiled strength, the same fluidity in his movements like those predators.
With a sigh, she returned to her crouched position and continued weeding.
The silence between them thickened. During his previous visits, conversation had come naturally enough, flowing from the shared territory of childhood memories. Today, he seemed distracted, troubled, hard. Intimidating.
Sullha felt compelled to fill the quiet.
"I've been reading a book," she said, reaching for a weed and yanking it out. "It's a family saga set in England. Three generations of a family living in a big house in the countryside. The grandmother hates her husband and drinks too much. The mother has an affair and gets ostracized by the community. The granddaughter runs away to London and ends up sleeping in doorways."
Yaaf's expression morphed from preoccupied to attentive. "Is it a good story?"
"I guess. It was probably allowed into the enclosure because it shows how terrible life is in the outside world." She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "The message is supposed to be that it's a cruel and dangerous world out there and that we should be grateful for the walls that protect us, but I can read between the lines."
She sat back and stopped weeding, even though it gave her hands something to do. She wanted to look at Yaaf's face whilethey talked, not the dirt or the weeds or the plants. He was so handsome when his jaw wasn't clenched, and his eyes were so blue against his tanned skin.
"And what did you find between those lines?" He followed her example and sat back.
"That the grandmother had the freedom to make her own choices, even if she chose badly. The mother loved someone she wasn't supposed to and suffered for it, but she loved. The granddaughter ran away, and even though she was sleeping in doorways, she was free. She could walk in any direction she wanted, and no one was telling her what she could and couldn't do. Even the worst life in that book was better than what we have here. Their circumstances might have been unfortunate, but it was all their doing, the result of choices they were free to make, and not one of them was helpless."
