Love Over Gold
Derek felt a little seasick.
There were guardsmen, or men who had once been guards, pressed around him. Their voices were a mix of boisterous aggression and curious surprise, but the greatest sense their leader got from them was the sense that they were anxious to go home. Derek had not the heart to explain that their ranks would likely not be waiting for them.
He wedged through the group, breaking free of their unprincely gathering to pick out glimpses of other parts of the island people. He could see a group of riders and cast a gaze over them, looking for dark eyes and height. J'lor was not among them.
"Hey, hey. So we're going, are we?"
It was one of the timbermen. He and his buddy flanked Derek out of nowhere and started walking. Derek walked along.
"Going soon, by the sounds of it," said the buddy. "Going to be quite a trip, all of us. Maybe need two trips, huh?"
Derek shook his head once. The timbermen kept on grinning and walking.
"So you put him up to it, old man?"
The 'old man' turned a sidelong glance, steely and beady, on the speaker, and for a moment said nothing.
"Oh, oh, don't tell me he pulled - " That was the man on his right, taking Derek's silence for disapproval.
"I did," Derek said then. It was the only thing he could say.
The timbermen's hands fell on Derek's shoulders almost simultaneously, their laughter thunderous, their smug certainty prime. They clapped his back repeatedly, and through the rush of the ocean's distant ebb and flow, or maybe the whisper of his own blood racing in his veins, the island king could not make out their words. He didn't need to. They were pleased. It was good enough.
In a few paces they broke off from him and set out at a hearty run to rejoin their comrades. The news would spread at least among his loyal, and then to their wives and children. Some of them would believe it. It wouldn't be hard to believe. Derek kept his secrets well; why not J'lor's, too?
He kept walking, farther from the gathering clearing. He paid little mind to where his bare feet took him, and was somewhat surprised in a while to find himself up the grassy slope by the stream, where a worn overhang on a curve of the water's course provided access for bathing, washing, water-gathering and everything else they used the stream for.
There would be women here, soon, to gather water for the next day's needs. Derek considered, for a moment, waiting for them. He considered slipping up into a tree or off into the brush, making himself at home, and listening. He considered staying by the water's edge and offering his help, if only to see them stare at him a moment, and then the braver of them burst into laughter while the rest happened to take their work a little farther from him, lest his man's hands, leader's hands, upend their efforts.
He considered, then, the chance that Nera would be among them.
Derek looked down at the water. The current was slow beneath the overhang and the surface was flat and glossy. He hadn't changed much. The age was there, in lines around his eyes and a few stray white hairs over his ears, almost lost among the black. He didn't mind it. At least all his hair had come back in after the trials.
It would be hard for the two of them, he knew. They were nothing. That was their common bond, the thing that set them apart from the third point of the triumvirate: their nothinghood. Their nobodyness. Back on the mainland, it would be all too easy for them to fade into the shadows of so-called greater men. Of politicians and dragonriders.
He wondered how Nera saw him. If he'd changed, to her eyes.
Evidently, he had not changed much in J'lor's.
Derek left the water's edge, setting out through the untamed trees for a guard path he knew was half a mile south. He was not ready to ask. Not yet.
And here's one of the old soundtrack songs, Love Over Gold, which I felt worked again for this piece - maybe better than the one I attached it to before.