Love and Bounty

Chapter Eleven: Blood Troubles

Those cat-like pupils pierced Hrolf's very soul.

But while he was merely perturbed by the sight, Deeja was frozen in utter terror. Her eyes were wide and glistening in the candlelight. Not a single sound escaped her parted maw. All she could do was stare, even as the cat-eyed man padded with a determined gait toward them.

His every step resounded against the tiled floor, leather soles clop-thudding closer as Hrolf's very esophagus wriggled and bunched up in his throat. He dared not move. He dared not speak. The man's strange and otherworldly aura hung with the weight of broken minds, both aligning with and betraying his apparent physical sickness like dissonant moons.

He was close now. Too close.

"Pardon me," he said. "The door."

Hrolf stepped aside, but something resisted: Deeja's tail. It was coiled tight around his leg.

And without another word, walking with the wind that billowed through the city streets, the door thundered shut behind the cat-eyed man. He was gone.

As soon as he was, Endarie breathed a heavy sigh of relief. "Thank the gods he's gone," she huffed. "I thought he'd never leave."

"You look tired, sister," the other Altmer woman behind the counter said. "I can take these next two customers."

Endarie looked at Deeja and Hrolf like she never realized they were there in the first place, and her brow twitched with the arrival of what must have been a killer headache. "Gods, not him again... Fine. Just make sure they don't touch anything without buying. I'll be upstairs."

The weary Altmer tailor took her leave, vanishing behind a gaudy metal-etched door as her sister, Taarie, took her place at the counter.

"Feel free to come in!" she called out. "We'll see what we can do about your... lackluster attire."

Deeja's tail squeezed around Hrolf's leg, sending waves of crushing agony up through his hips.

"Deeja—!" he hissed with a wince. "Your tail!"

Without so much as a turn of her head, her gaze fell to Hrolf's leg, ensnared by her very own tail. As the realization set in, her features contorted with the final trickles of dread and the ensuing onslaught of a flushed fluster. She let go of him, and while relief washed over his abused lower quads, she cleared her throat and prodded Hrolf with an elbow—some "polite" encouragement for him to go ahead.

"We're not here for clothes," Hrolf said, approaching his side of the counter. Deeja's footsteps tapped closer behind him. "You deal in some jewelry, right?"

"We do," Taarie replied. "Are you sure you're not interested in a new tunic?"

Hrolf frowned. "You helped me pick this out."

"It's a little plain, is all."

He reached back toward Deeja, and she passed off the bag of translucent orange stones to him. They rattled in the bag like glass as he eased it down onto the counter. "Could you make something of these?"

Taarie's brow furrowed with trepidation. "Ah... Well... I can give it a look."

She gingerly pulled the hem of the bag open and peered inside, plucking out a mostly rounded piece of the hardened tangerine material. Rolling it between her finger and thumb and holding it in the light only compounded her bewildered expression.

"Where'd you find these?" she asked.

Hrolf was quick to produce a lie. "In the wilderness. They were scattered on the ground, but they looked valuable."