Heir To The Iron Crown: Dyrith

39 - þrjátíu og Níu

The girl watched me curiously, looking at me like I was lost. I knew my eyes had caught her attention as well.

"Who are you?" she asked me.

"I'm Raynhildur Ylva," I replied, not knowing what to expect in return.

"Raynhildur? Rayn? Like these trees?" she said, spreading her arms wide while referring to the Rowan trees that surrounded us.

"Yes," I said. Gramma had told me what my name had meant.

"You do look like you belong here," she said thoughtfully, squinting her eyes at my own. I couldn't sense any hints of sarcasm in her tone, even though I'd expected it.

I'd grown up hearing the exact opposite of those words, and here, in this place that I'd never seen before, I was being told that I belonged?

"I'm Quil. Jonquil, actually, but everyone just calls me Quil," she said.

Everyone?

This entire forest seemed deserted and I couldn't hear anything apart from our voices and the rustle of the trees in the wind.

She was still looking at me a little skeptically, as if she couldn't figure me out. "I've never seen you around here before though, in the Austan forests. Did you come from Vestrid?"

A part of me registered her question, however, I couldn't help but ask my own.

"You're- you're of the forest folk?" I asked, still a little stunned to have finally found someone like me, but mostly shaking in anticipation to find out what she was.

"And you're not?" she asked me in return, her expression even more confused than before.

"I don't know, exactly. I think so, but I don't know for sure," I told her, but mostly to myself.

"Well of course you are. These eyes don't belong to Dwarves or Elves. Not even to other forest folk," she said, her eyes glinting in the sun that was slowly rising higher and higher.

"It's just us Dryads."

I looked at her soundlessly, wondering if she'd realized how important the words that just came out of her mouth were to me.

A Dryad?

I had the faintest, fleeting memory of learning about Dryads when studying the different creatures, but for the life of me I couldn't remember anything about them right now.

"You're a Dryad, I can tell. But something is still off about you," she said, now walking around me, taking in the details of my body, my face.

Analyzing me.

"I'm-" I began.

"You're a Dryad," she said firmly, cutting me off. But she wasn't talking to me. She was just confirming her own assumptions.

"I'm sorry but, I don't know what a Dryad is," I told her honestly.

She came to stop in front of me again, her beautiful face looking at me like I was crazy.

"You're a Dryad, and you don't know what a Dryad is?" she asked me, as if to look for an inkling of laughter in my eyes so she could confirm I was joking around, but when she didn't, she took a step back.

"I'm a Dyrith," I told her. "I'm half werewolf."

The girl, Quil, looked as if she couldn't believe a thing like me could exist. But she wasn't all too taken aback, so she probably knew what a Dyrith was.