Becoming Her Knight

Chapter Nine

Finn and Adi continued talking quietly into the early morning hours, though the topics were significantly lighter than what they had started with. Finn learned that Adi had spent most of her time cooking and cleaning for the miners in her clan when they lived in the mines. As the daughter of the chief, she didn't have to, but she liked cooking and she loved her fellow clans people. She showed the faint lines on her ribs that were actually her gills, allowing her to breath underwater. She explained that she couldn't handle the pressure of great depths, but being able to breathe underwater helped her to traverse flooded caverns. Finn had nodded and pretended to understand what she meant by pressure.

Adi also told her about her favorite food (meat buns), her best friend (a snarky know it all named Teresa) and how her father would sit late into the night and recount every meeting he had with neighboring chiefs to his children. She was meant to be the next chief, since one brother had aspirations to join the court and advocate for kobolds and other lower fae from there and the other seemed to be constantly away on who knew what. Adi knew a lot of the goings on in court, even though she had never been and had no aspirations of ever going. Finn was impressed that the kobolds were so worldly despite their low status.

Finn tried to reciprocate as much as she could without giving too much away.

Finn told Adi that she didn't really have a favorite food, she liked to eat everything. Which was mostly true. She had to learn to eat whatever was in front of her if she wanted to make it in the barracks. She liked to try new food anyway and would often hang around the backs of the kitchens and try to charm leftovers out of the kitchen staff whenever a big important dinner or banquet happened. She was friends with most of the other guards, but never got super close with any of them. She didn't say that much of that was because Finn was the youngest person in the guard barracks until just a few years ago. Because of that, she ended up left behind eventually as all the guards she grew up with either got married and moved away or got promoted into other positions while she stayed stuck in the same place. She told Adi about how she and her brother would hide in the corners of the court and make up stories about visiting dignitaries, recounting some of the most entertaining ones, especially the rare times they turned out to be right.

They didn't have a lot in common, but their personalities seemed to mesh well.

After hours of talking, Finn's throat began to get dry, and she felt the urge to broach the subject of her past fumbling with other girls at court. She could bring it up naturally, since they were talking about their lives before the whole mess of being captured by humans. She could say, "No pressure, but hey, I like girls, you know?" and put the ball back in Adi's court.

Of course, that was when Finn spotted them. A small group of about four humans left the lodge below them in the faint glow of blue sunlight just peeking beyond the eastern horizon. They carried big heavy packs on their backs, bows slung over their shoulders and short hunting knives strapped onto their belts. They walked in an orderly line toward the path that Finn and Adi had used to find the lodge and then split into two groups heading in opposite directions. Smoke still rose from the chimney, but it wasn't as thick as it had been earlier in the night.

"Hey," Finn said sharply, pausing Adi mid story. Finn hadn't been listening while she watched the hunters anyway.

Adi quickly cottoned on to what Finn was seeing, her body going tense and alert against Finn's right side. "Shit," she whispered. "Do you think that is all of them?"

Finn shrugged and continued to carefully watch the quickly disappearing backs of the human hunting party. "We should wait a while to see if anyone else comes out," she whispered back, not taking her eyes from the clearing in front of the hunting lodge.