At The Heart of Tale Kingdoms (COMPLETED)

7.2 ELIA

In the next few days, Nine showed Elia the different places in Yth's white stone city. In the beginning, all the buildings looked uniform and joined with a few high ones close to the center. They were all arranged like a tower cake with floor levels gradually increasing towards the center. The similarity of the houses made it hard for her to know the function of the building until she entered it.

All homes had stone flat roofs with at least one room in every house having an open roof. Nine joked that there is where horses that rode on clouds came to pick them up. Elia had slapped him in the back for daring to offer such a ridiculous reason.
The city was always quiet, Elia rarely saw anyone walking the streets of the old and clean city. In the beginning the occupants stared when they saw her. She was the only one that looked different with black hair and dark green eyes. Few bothered to greet her, and those who did, looked like they were sorry to her for some unknown misfortune.
While living with Nine, Elia came to discover that all the houses were actually joint to one another through the kitchen door or a secret passage in one of the rooms. A few were visibly joint but the one that she and Nine resided in had two underground passages to the next houses. The house on the left served as a horse shed and the other on the right as a faith house. When she asked Nine what was the religion in Yth, he told her they didn't have a religion. Yet he still called their neighbor building a faith house.
Nine and her spent all of the mornings cleaning the horse shed and the horses. Nine insisted that the animals had to be cleaned and brushed everyday which Elia found unnecessary.

Nine was pleasant yet persistent and observant. He didn't seem bothered when Elia complained about the shed being too much work or when she insisted that the horses were still clean from the day before. All he did was make sure they started and finished the task every day.
Unlike Elia's red moody steed, Nine's horse was a grey sweet mare with black neck and tail hair. She noticed he spent most of his time in the shed whispering to Stone, brushing her three times a day or watching her feed every night. Elia even joked about Nine having an emotional attachment to the animal and the boy had taken it like a praise.
When they were done cleaning the horses, they went for a ride. Nine taught her how to ride without reins and sometimes without a saddle. He showed her how to stand on the saddle of a moving horse and how to control the mare with only her legs to the sides, incase her hands were occupied.

Elia believed she was learning quickly but Nine only offered nodding silent approval. He always insisted there was room for her to improve. When he tried to teach her how to jump from a racing horse, Elia warned him of his alternative scheme to kill her which he laughed off.
Elia grew to like Nine's presence but there were still times when she felt like a cow awaiting slaughter. Even with his sincere smile, she was afraid it was all a performed trick to later cast her away.

One strange day, their neighbor, twenty-second who oversaw the house of faith, came to visit them. She was the first guest to come to Nine's home since Elia arrived in Yth-Ird.

Elia had seen the girl around, she was one of the few in Yth who bothered to greet her when she passed the alleys of the Zyc city.

The Yth lived in humble homes, so Elia had been able to see Nine from the kitchen when he opened the door for Twenty-second. He looked visibly nervous as he welcomed her in. Their guest had come right before their horse shed washing routine that they had opted to do in the evening that day.

Elia knew Nine had people that he would talk to when they were roaming the fields or training the horses. But she had never seen him with one person often enough to mark him as a friend especially one that would visit him at his home. More peculiar, Twenty- second who though took time to greet Elia never bothered to acknowledge Nine's presence.