Work Text:
“It’s not like you to lose track of a herd,” Talanah says, trying to mask both concern and mild annoyance with the passivity of simple observation.
Crouching to one knee and allowing a frown of concentration to creep onto her face, she squints at the forest floor—grass, ferns, fecund soil. Rich and teeming, despite the way they must wait until the Sun graces through the foliage-gaps overhead to be drenched in the light they need. Its glow dapples there now, across the greenery and the hand she uses to prod through it. But the illumination doesn’t save Talanah’s careful effort from being wasted. The undergrowth betrays absolutely nothing. No machine-trace. No breakage, no heavy footmarks, no signs of upturn.
No trail.
There’s no trail, and this trek into the Jewel has already taken them past midday. Talanah grits her teeth against the urge to sigh, reluctantly reminded of the twelve contracts awaiting her review and inscription back at the Lodge.
“Really, Aloy,” she goes on, casting a glance over her shoulder, “it doesn’t look like a single Charger has come through here.”
She straightens and turns towards Aloy’s casual approach, brushing her hands on the front of her thighs to rid them of the damp earth. Her frown of concentration turns into one of curiosity, because Aloy looks utterly indifferent. There might even be thin amusement in her expression, where Talanah would expect veiled frustration.
Aloy is a brilliant tracker. Beyond brilliant. Thorough and intent and sharp, easily pointing out the tiniest signs that would take Talanah thrice as long to discover.
She also doesn’t make mistakes—and this is looking more and more like one. Because while Aloy constantly makes meaning and pulls cues out of what looks like nothing, Talanah is a great tracker too. Every machine leaves its mark, eventually giving itself away.
And, here in this humid patch of jungle, there really is nothing.
Aloy just nods, though, pale cheeks flushed and sheened with the air’s sticky heat. Her mouth twists into a smirk as she says, “You’re right.”
Concentration to curiosity to downright confusion, the frown deepens.
“I don’t understand. You asked if I could lend a hand harvesting Blaze.”
A nonchalant shrug. “I might have bluffed. I can gather my own Blaze. But I knew promising a hunt would be the only thing to drag you out from under all of your Lodge business. You need to get out more,” Aloy comments. “Your sacred tan is starting to fade.”
Talanah narrows her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest. Both empty gestures. The buzzing annoyance should settle in further, but doesn’t—a contrary lightness washes through in its place.
“So you think if you had come to me and said, Talanah, would you like to take a break and enjoy a nice walk in the Sun with me, I would’ve refused the offer?”
“Well…” Aloy raises her eyebrows and counts her points on her fingers for both indication and emphasis. “First of all, that’s a weak impression of me and you can do better.” (Talanah rolls her eyes; she hadn’t even been trying.) “Second, yes, I do think you would’ve declined. Graciously and with apologies for being busy, but still.” (For the record, she absolutely wouldn’t have—at least, Talanah thinks she wouldn’t have, unless she was wildly occupied. But it’s not worth it to start an argument.) “And third, we’re not here for Blaze or for a walk.”
“Then I'm clearly at a loss. Fill me in, please?”
“I want to talk about your spear,” Aloy tells her.
“My spear?” Instantly Talanah becomes aware of its weight on her back, strapped there with her bow, where they both rest when setting out. “What about it? And what was keeping us from talking about it at the Lodge?”
Aloy ignores the second question, nodding at the weapon. “You always carry it, but I’ve barely seen you use it. You’re exceptional with your bow. Your arrows are always true...but even in close combat, you favor them. Heavily. Nothing about that makes sense, and it’s something you should realize.”
It costs her an instant of restraint not to bristle at Aloy’s suggestion of a fault in her hunting style. “You prefer your bow too.”
“You’re right, I do. But I use it from an appropriate range. I show my spear when closeness makes it necessary. You don’t do the same.”
Somewhere in the distance, a Longleg lets out a shrill cry. Talanah hitches her voice to its protest.
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
“I’ve watched you engage hostiles. Obviously it was one thing with the Glinthawks at Lone Light. But...I won’t tell anyone the number of times you got tossed at the Alight, or by Redmaw, for that matter, when you got too close with just your bow. And don’t even get me started on how those outlanders had you pinned.”
This time, Talanah does bristle, just in the slightest way—enough to pinch her voice. “There were nine of them! Of course I was overwhelmed. That was the whole point of Ahsis’s scheme.”
“With the way I saw you fight, three would have done the same.” And here Aloy looks askance, with less sureness in her words, hands on her hips, fingertips drumming. Another heave of her shoulders. “There’s no denying your skill. You’re agile, you’re tenacious and sharp. Your title wasn’t falsely earned. But after seeing you shoved up against that rock, and thinking about what might have happened if I had shown up when I did…” She sighs. “I didn’t like it, Talanah. And while I hope your days of tangling with mercenaries are long past, I still don’t like it.”
All around, birdsong and insect-drone, and the distant metal-quake of the Spearshafts Tallneck’s steady rumbling course. But between the two of them, abrupt and hesitant hush. Their gazes rove for a moment until they meet, latching, lingering. A shared fluttering unruliness, fleeting through the space between their bodies, carrying tendrils of new nebulous tension along with it. It sinks in unwieldy and unaddressed. Softly insistent, insistently soft. An unfamiliar attempt at substance, but not altogether uncomfortable. The Sun above, sweltering its way into shared awareness—saturated jungle air, and sweat clinging silk to skin. It all blossoms over them the same.
Talanah chances a small grin, daring force in the thrumming silence, seeing how far the bough will bend before the looming snap.
“Been worrying about me while you’re off adventuring?”
“Worrying isn’t the word.” Aloy shakes her head, demeanor untouched by Talanah’s smirk. “Wondering. Contemplating. Considering. But not worrying.”
“So you’ve been thinking of me,” Talanah says with a playful twitch of her eyebrows.
“That a surprise?” Just a quick quip, moved through with haste. “Really, now. Your spear. Who taught you how to wield it?”
And here Talanah lets out a quiet huff, disarmed by Aloy’s uncanny ability to dig down to blunt truth. “When I was young, Carja women didn’t take up weapons. But my father taught me some things in spite of that, with both bow and spear. After the Liberation, Tarkas built upon the foundation he laid.” Her chin tilts upward with her conclusion. “I learned the hunt, during the hunt, from the best of hunters.”
“Makes sense. Carja-style hunting. Effective against machines, technical without fault, but mostly just flash and show. From what I’ve seen of it, at least—no offense,” Aloy says, all biting candor wrapped in silk. Adding the qualifier is small progress, but progress nonetheless. “It was different for me. I’d seen six summers when Rost started teaching me to fight like a Nora brave.”
For a few heartbeats Talanah thinks of Aloy, much smaller than she is now. Tiny wildness, energy of a fast-catching flame—clashing spears with the man who raised her, a man whose deeds Talanah only knows in part, but still better than she can ever know his face. It’s interest and wistfulness and fondness and ache for Aloy, all at once, burning in her throat.
“Are the methods really so different from one another?”
“Yes,” Aloy responds with utter directness and a piercing gaze. “There’s plenty of slag in the way the Nora deal with things, but combat isn’t among it. It’s formidable and thorough. Braves-to-be spend their young lives learning the point of the spear. How to contend with aggressive machines and humans alike, to defend the Sacred Land from any threat.”
Defend it from foreign invaders, Talanah knows she means. The Red Raids, and all of their horror. A blighted past that still stands between the two tribes, sure as the Daytower. And though neither of them had any part in the cruelty, and it doesn’t stand between them— it still lashes hard with the unfathomability of how it could have.
Aloy snaps her wrist back almost in boredom, giving her own spear an effortless roll. “Trading blows with another person is different from hunting a machine,” she continues. “In combat, machines don’t make mistakes. This makes them lethal and efficient. But also predictable. People, though, make plenty. And their blunders are what make them dangerous in their own way. Maybe even more so. It’s difficult to learn a person the way you can learn a machine.”
It sounds like nonsense, the idea of machines being more easily-understood than people. But then Talanah remembers that Aloy is the one saying it, and she says it with such convincing inflection that Talanah finds herself nodding in agreement despite her doubt. It’s an effect she’s still not accustomed to. There’s the potential that the inclination could become problematic. For now, though, it simply carries a shock of warmth.
“So was it your plan to lead me into the Jewel to give me a spear-fighting lesson?” An impulsive addition, then—mostly jest, maybe a wispy hint of indignation: “Or to find a secluded spot and chide me about the way I hunt?”
“I didn’t want to assume anything.” Aloy shrugs, letting her spear rest on her shoulder. Its blade catches the Sun’s gleaming and glints fiercely, like a clever demand for perception. “But if I offered—and yes, I am offering—and you accepted, I figured you’d want to practice far away from prying eyes. You’re the Sunhawk. You deserve to be. I’m just trying to help.”
Talanah gives her a tight smile. Aloy always shows clear care in these uncustomary ways. But as she takes in the ease with which Aloy handles her spear—and feels her own, like a rigid imposition against her shoulder blades—something else unravels beneath it. That sense that skirts the delicate line between admiration and envy. An unwelcome feeling, here. Casual and gracious deflection emerges to cover it up before it can take root and set the conversation’s pace.
“Aloy. I appreciate the offer, and your concern,” she says. “But. Before I sponsored you, I needed to trust that you could handle yourself. Now I need you to extend that same trust to me. I’m fine. Worry about your own spear before you worry about mine?”
And now it’s Aloy’s turn to smile, lopsided and delighted and cocky. A familiar self-certainty flashes in her eyes—the same flare that filled them the first time she approached Talanah at the Hunters Lodge, all but demanding sponsorship. Except now, she’s more than earned the right to show it.
“That’s just it: I don’t worry about mine, at all. I have no reason to.” She gives her weapon a deft little flip that’s equal parts graceful and impressive and infuriating and…by the Sun, fine, sure, Talanah will admit it within the private confines of her thoughts: profoundly attractive. Aloy’s lingering smirk, the mischievousness it shows, only gives it strength. “If you don’t either, show me. Raise your spear, Sunhawk.”
But at this, Talanah balks. “You want to...duel with me?”
“Just a little friendly sparring match,” Aloy says. “There’s no one here but us. So there’s no chance of me embarrassing you.”
“‘I’m not worried about an audience.” At least her words deliver more confidence than her thoughts, her spine. Because Aloy’s breezy manner of handling only makes her more formidable. And—another silent and begrudging admission—Talanah knows spear-wielding is a categorical hole in her proficiency. Aloy notices so much that others do not. Talanah usually benefits from it.
Not this time.
“Come on, then.” Aloy gives the base of her spear a tap with her instep, flicking it into her free hand, and steps back into a poised combat stance. Right hand, right foot forward, blade-tip menacing right between her eyes. Brow creasing, she adds, “I’ll even let you make the first move, if you’re feeling intimidated.”
“Hardly.” It’s a lie straight through her teeth, but she’s too deep into this exchange and carries a sliver too much pride, even just playfully, to back out now. She sighs. “Alright. Let’s do this. I don’t think you’ll take no for an answer.”
Talanah swears she can feel Aloy’s gaze flood with satisfied glee as she grasps the shaft of her spear, pulling from its binding at her back, and shrugs off her bow. Prowess and security, left lying there in the lush ferns. Cursing under her breath, swallowing her heartbeat down, knowing she might regret this and soon, Talanah brandishes the weapon with less finesse than Aloy had—assuming the same stance as her Thrush, but stiffer, with taut conscientiousness in place of whetted instinct.
And then, stillness. Neither hazards a move, or tries to provoke, grips solid, fist-at-hip. In the reel-strung stasis, it’s sweltering. There’s already sweat beading on Talanah’s brow, rolling down from under her headpiece, threatening her eyes. She doesn’t dare to blink it away. A muggy breeze passing across their standoff offers no relief from the heat. It does manage to catch Aloy’s braids—flame sent scattering in the wind. The look of it seizes the center of Talanah’s attention as her salt-burning eyes follow the barrel of her spear to stare at Aloy, to observe her, pure intent. Pure focus. Aloy’s pupils have widened and her breathing’s changed. The rushing acuity of frisson renders subtleties blatant. She catches a glimpse of faded scars across Aloy’s knuckles. There’s sunburn on her face, too, skin kissed with pink under abundant freckles. Captivating. Talanah latches on.
Edged with nerve and mettle, the blood dances in her veins at all of it: at Aloy, at the habit of preparing for the sacred hunt. Talanah is the hunt; Aloy is the fight. A collision becomes inevitable. And she knows with certainty that Aloy is swept up in the same thrill—there are two pulses, not just one, rattling in the anticipation streaked bold between them.
Unseen birds call out, and Talanah hopes their song is not one of mockery.
Aloy’s tongue darts out across her lips. “Don’t hold back on me,” she murmurs, and Talanah thrusts with both hands, slinging into their private fray, lurching with her whole weight behind it.
And like her onrush had been absolutely nothing, Aloy blocks it with a one-handed inward sweep of her own weapon.
The cracking impact is singularly jolting. Its vibrations clatter straight into Talanah’s bones, hard enough to make her fight to keep her hold. For that instant of contact, it’s unfathomable how Aloy’s swift block was more forceful than her attack. Recovering quickly (she has no other choice), Talanah halts the cast-off momentum and reverses it before her spear can go over her shoulder, slashing down at Aloy, trying to regain her center line. But Aloy evades, moving like limber smoke—she barely needs to touch Talanah’s weapon to use its own inertia against it, whacking the tip to the ground.
She gently tags Talanah’s exposed flank with the flat of her own. Then grins.
“Hey, don’t get frustrated already. You’re just kind of predictable.”
“I thought machines are predictable,” Talanah says, squaring her shoulders to reset position, trying not to let chagrin infiltrate her tone. “That it’s harder to know a person than a machine.”
“Well, I guess I know you.” Aloy shrugs with a nimble bounce to and fro. Weightless on her feet, all dynamic tactical acumen. Talanah whispers another curse. “Try again?”
Shedding off hesitation, hissing through her teeth, Talanah does. Tries to remember both the desperation and the pride of learning from Tarkas, from her father. Lunges to Aloy’s closed side this time, ducking low, belly in, trying to trust her hard-earned agility. Her eyes stay trained on her target— the soft spot just under where Aloy’s lowest rib meets her spine—and she commits to a single-armed jab, emphatic but controlled, ready to pull back before she grazes flesh.
But before restraint is even needed, her attempt catches empty air instead. Aloy spins, swoops, parries, each motion fluid, each elegant, compelling Talanah to block low. Another brutal collision. Aloy’s not taking it easy. Though its brunt still shudders through her, Talanah’s more prepared for this one, maintaining enough heed to glimpse an opening for a counter on Aloy’s left.
Talanah darts in for it, but Aloy deflects the blow with a damned bracer like she’s swatting away a pesky bug.
They trade one, two, three more clean clashes before Aloy directs another strike to rap against Talanah’s knuckles. Talanah lets out a clipped cry, mostly in startlement, but also definitely in a blurred shade of pain—grip made useless by the sharp blow, her spear falls to the grass with an anticlimactic thud.
“Disarmed,” Aloy points out, quite unnecessarily.
Talanah looks down at her hand, at the angry red bruise already blooming under her skin. No need to wonder where those scars came from, now. Flexing her fingers, testing their bend and how the joints throb, she says, “Pretty sure that was uncalled for.”
“I didn’t know there were rules. Besides, you’re fine. You’re tough! A little bump on the hand is nothing for the Sunhawk, right?” Aloy’s eyebrows quirk as she nudges the dropped spear with her foot. “Come on, again. We’re just getting warmed up.”
There’s an amount of surprising truth in that. Every following bout of toil grows a bit longer. Talanah feels herself start to loosen up and recognize patterns in Aloy’s technique as they circle one another and plunge in, over and over. Each burst of contact helps her begin to hold her own—blocking high, juking oblique to a side-shot, properly timing a parry or counter-thrust. Still, in all of the blows traded, Aloy manages to come out with some baffling upper-hand maneuver; Talanah always ends up with an assertive blade hovering imminent to her navel, her jugular, her spine, her face.
But for all of it, there’s a rhythm. Their arcing swings and their vigor ignite this small stretch of the Jewel, marking it with spear-clatter and grunts of effort. It replaces the birdsong, the distant machine-bray—this place is theirs, only theirs, for now, shrouded by tree-canopy and stark concentration. Even pitted against one another, a synergy emerges from the creases of their flowing motion. And though she’s bested every time, Talanah anticipates, reacts, watches, coveting this stirring consonance and the way it sinks heavy-sweet in her chest.
Watching is exactly what puts her right on her back.
Talanah watches Aloy’s spear and her footwork. Watches her eyes, her expression. Takes in the enthralling subtlety of the way her upper lip curls and her nostrils flare before she strikes. The way it scrunches her face, fierce, endearing. She watches Aloy’s hands and how her nimble fingers help her manipulate her grip, her concussive power, and in watching Talanah feels herself want.
She clenches her jaw and swings at her instead.
Blocked, of course.
It’s impossible to quantify the amount of time they’ve been at it, but they’re both breathless with exertion. They’ve both broken a sweat. It’s becoming oppressive. Aloy steps back from the stalemate to negotiate a re-approach. Her lean-hewn shoulders, left exposed by her sleeveless Blazon armor, flex and ripple as she raises her spear. Tendons cord, veins declare their presence under a sheen of perspiration. Talanah, unblinking, stays in step with her, eyes sinking to the visible hint of her ribs, to the sinew lines etched across her bare midriff. Shadow take her where she stands, she’s glistening. Everywhere. It’s distracting, and hardly anything distracts her. Aloy’s body is distracting. Talanah is distracted. Talanah is distracted and she doesn’t realize it until it’s too late.
Aloy bounds towards her in a way she isn’t prepared for.
Before there’s a chance to form a coherent thought about much of anything, she’s gone from gawking at her Thrush—to blinking in confused shock at patched sky through the canopy far overhead, with her wind mercilessly stolen.
A few ragged half-breaths, and Aloy’s bemused face eclipses her vision. Irreverent punctuation for an irreverent moment, then: she pokes Talanah in the cheek with the butt of her spear.
Swept legs, Talanah comprehends, far delayed.
And then Talanah deadpans as she lies there, trying to remain dignified around the sound of her lungs straining without air to show for the ordeal, wondering how long it would take for her body to be swallowed up by the ferns and forgotten entirely.
(Too long. She wants to groan aloud. Thank the Sun for empty lungs.)
“Here’s a hint: it’s easier to fight if you avoid getting knocked on your ass.”
Aloy offers Talanah her hand. The cunning, crooked smile and the way their palms grope together, fingers curl around, do nothing to subdue the troublesome fluster. It needs a conscious smothering. Talanah stamps it down with no lack of toil as Aloy helps her get her feet back underneath her.
“Your wisdom runs me pale, Thrush,” Talanah says, sarcasm lost in the sullen croak of her voice. But she raises her weapon again, even though her ribs and neck ache and protest, because she’d rather choke without air than capitulate on her back.
Limned by the Sun, Aloy beams with the total rarity of crinkle-cornered eyes. (Damn it all, that breath’s not coming back without a battle.)
Lunge, evade, clash. Aloy is steadfast but Talanah keeps pressing. Feint, deflect, resurge. There’s adamant affinity in the way they slip into and back out of the other’s space. Knock, shield, swipe. Her quickened pulse melds with the rhythm of her Thrush’s, beheld through the way their weapons collide and clatter, fathomed in the rawness of their fixed eye contact.
Struggle twists them in close. Spears crossed, held out from chests, unyielding, arms trembling in strain. Intentions tangled—unweaving then will take guile, utter dexterity, if unweaving them was even desired. Faces looming in the angled space created by their deadlock, a surge forward is persuasion, is revelation. Colliding there, too, would be a giddy release, would be a moment of reckless simplicity, all of the tension shattered into formless nonsense as they would crash, mouths, bodies. Aloy’s teeth are bared, brow seamed in livid focus, eyes intense and alight and serrated with temptation. She is praiseful skill, she is whipped up in stormful ferocity. She is unbridled, she is gorgeous.
To the sore-knuckled hilt, she is disarming.
“Talanah,” she demands, panting, each syllable a growl throbbing through her tight jaw and down Talanah’s spine, “disarm me.”
The words bring a shower of sparks. Overcome, half-crazed but focused and responsive, Talanah snarls and finds the last-second strength to shove Aloy away. Aloy mirrors the action, snarling louder, and the mutual clamor drives them both further back. In a burst of riled instinct, Talanah charges. Aloy averts the strike but loses a step. Talanah overtakes it, encroaching on her space without mercy. White-fringed vision, fury in her lungs, pulse in her ears, she sees an opening, wants it, takes it, back hand lifting from her hip with blind abandon—
—and she feels the sickening thud of bone-splintering impact as the butt of her spear wallops Aloy across the jaw.
Aloy’s spear hits the ground; Talanah spirals back into her senses. In slow-motion she sees the strike spin Aloy by the chin, hurtled around by its ruthless force. And then she crumples, bent at the waist, hunched over in rigid guard.
And Talanah seethes headlong into frantic, guilty dismay.
“By the Sun!” Talanah abandons her weapon, forgetting about the blazing in her lungs and the perspiration dripping from her chin. She all but leaps for Aloy, nervous hands hovering over her bowed shoulders. Aloy stays frozen, holding her face, hiding it from her Hawk, obviously left reeling from the blow. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry! I didn’t mean it. I have no idea what came over me.”
Aloy doesn’t remove her hands but her shoulders twitch once, convulsively, and then begin to shake, to heave, like wracking with erratic bursts of silent sobs.
“Please. How bad is it? Let me see.” The statement is choked—seeing the damage she let herself cause will be like being split from neck to groin—but also a necessary request. This would contend as the worst possible time to abandon her Thrush: after knocking her senseless with a smack from her damned spear during a mock fight. Sun above, it makes her guts curdle. “Aloy, let me help you.”
The wordless response is either a nod or a reticent flinch. Talanah can’t tell. But either way, she takes it as permission to lay hands on her: one at her back, the other gingerly grasping a wrist and guiding her to stand.
Aloy, eyes squeezed shut, allows her palm to be pried from her mouth and jaw, and Talanah hears two brand-new noises break the air.
The first: a tiny snort.
The second: genuine, unabashed laughter.
The first peals of it clatter into Talanah’s bones with more might than any of their spears’ collisions, through each of her ribs, down her spine, washing her in relief and surprise and affection that prickles at her skin.
The sound is riveting. Something significant, something for her, elicited by her. It’d be enough to bask in if she was given the chance.
“You’re…not hurt?” she sputters, incredulous. “You’re laughing?”
“Oh, it hurt. I promise. But don’t worry. Not to wound your pride, but I’ve had worse,” Aloy replies, rubbing her jaw, once the laughter lets her. “And of course I’m laughing. It’s funny, Talanah. I told you to disarm me and…damn. You really did. I’m just glad it wasn’t the other end. Then we’d have problems.”
It’s ridiculous. It’s exasperating. It’s Aloy, and Talanah can’t help but follow suit with a weary smile of her own.
Taken by reflex and the plummet of comedown, Talanah reaches for her. Self-awareness and self-restraint both wilt as she gently touches Aloy’s jaw. Her fingertips give a callow tremble, with careful mind to discomfort in both flesh and deeper still—Aloy winces, but half-nods in some semblance of willingness. A more daring adjustment, then: palm to cheek, skin hot with Sun and striving and bloodrush. Calm touch, with the delicate hope to soothe. Creatures call out but neither of them pays them any mind.
And maybe it’s a trick of the light—the Sun allowing Talanah to see what she wants instead of what’s really there—but Aloy’s smile realigns as an elusive urge, something that glows, something that buzzes and ricochets. Talanah feels its corner-curve press into her hand and wonders if that’s a hallucination, too.
“I’m still sorry,” Talanah says.
“Don’t be. You showed me you have it in you after all. Interested in taking all of that and refining it, with me?”
Talanah lets out a huff of quitclaim, drawing her hand from Aloy’s cheek letting it come to rest on her hip. “Maybe accepting some pointers would be worth it.” She meets Aloy’s eyes, smiles. “Shall we begin now?”
Aloy, never keeping still even with a battered and clearly-smarting jaw, is already turning away and retrieving her spear as she answers.
“I think that’s enough for today. Don’t want to face the Sunhawk’s rage again.” A joke delivered dry, with no pause for reaction. She rests her fingers on the device by her ear and squints into the distance. Talanah traces her gaze and, of course, sees nothing but dense, Sun-slivered foliage. “Besides, I promised you a hunt. There’s a triad of Bellowbacks stomping around in a clearing beyond the next stream. Follow?”
And without a second’s repose, Aloy marches away, boundless and steady persistence, weapon gripped at her side. Talanah scrabbles for hers, too, reaffixing them at her back as she calls after her.
“Hey. I thought the Hawk was supposed to lead?”
Without stopping, Aloy casts that lopsided smirk over her shoulder. Synergy, warmly bestowed and brimming over.
“Hawk and Thrush,” she corrects. “Let’s go.”
With a soft and sighing laugh, Talanah shakes her head, palm-heel pressed to her forehead—then trots ahead, worn out but still as light as air, to draw up alongside her.