plant as if it were his firstborn child. Still on his knees, he brushed each fuzzy leaf, pinching off the wilted ones lest they pass their weakness to the stem. With the tip of his little finger, he collected sticky, pale pollen from a fresh blossom and carefully poked it into the flower’s heart.
“Leave that for the bugs, my ham-handed friend. You haven’t got any talent for such sensitive things.”
Pavek looked around to see a luminously green Telhami shimmering in her own light some twenty paces behind him, where the verge became the lush grove. He looked at his dustweed again without acknowledging her, giving all his attention to the next blossom.
Telhami wouldn’t come closer. Her spirit was bound by the magic of the grove and the grove didn’t extend to the dustweed…
Not yet.
“You’re a sentimental fool, Just-Plain Pavek. You’ll be I talking to them next, and giving them names.”
He chuckled and kept working. Other than Telhami, only the half-elf, Ruari, and the human boy, Zvain, treated him anything like the man he’d always been. And Telhami was the only person, living or dead, who still used the name he claimed when he first sought refuge here. To the rest of Quraite he was Pavek, the glorious hero of the community’s desperate fight against High Templar Elabon Escrissar. In the moment of Quraite’s greatest need, when the community’s defenses were nearly overrun, when druid and farmer alike had conceded defeat in their hearts, Pavek had called on Hamanu the Lion-King of Urik. He surrendered his spirit to become the living instrument of a sorcerer-king’s deadly magic. Then, in a turn of events that seemed even more miraculous in the minds of the surviving Quraiters, Pavek had delivered the community from its deliverer.
Pavek hadn’t done any such thing, of course. King Hamanu came to Quraite for his own reasons and departed the same way. The Lion-King had ignored them since, which made a one-time templar’s heart skip a beat whenever he thought about it.
But there was no point in denying his heroism among the Quraiters or expecting them to call him Just-Plain Pavek again. He’d tried and they’d attributed his requests and denials to modesty, which had never been a templar’s virtue, or—worse—to holiness, pointing out that Telhami had, after all, bequeathed the high druid’s grove to him, not Akashia.
Until that fateful day when Hamanu walked into Quraite and out again, every farmer and druid would have sworn that Akashia was destined to be their next high druid. Pavek had expected it himself. Like Pavek, Akashia was an orphan, but she’d been born in Quraite and raised by Telhami. At eighteen, Kashi knew more about druidry than Pavek hoped to learn with the rest of his life, and though beauty was not important to druids or to Kashi herself, Pavek judged her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
And as for how Akashia judged him…
“You’re wasting time, Just-Plain Pavek. There’s work to be done. There’ll be no time for lessons if you stay there mooning over your triumphs.”
Pavek wanted his lessons, but he stayed where he was, staring at the dustweed and getting himself under control before he faced Telhami again. He didn’t know how much privacy his thoughts had from the grove’s manifest spirit; he didn’t ask. Telhami never mentioned Akashia directly, only needled him this way when he wandered down morose and hopeless paths.
If Pavek couldn’t deny that he’d become a hero to the Quraiters, then he shouldn’t deny, at least to himself, that right after the battle he’d hoped Kashi would accept him as her partner and lover. She had turned to him for solace while Telhami lay dying, and he’d laid his heart bare for her, as he’d never done—never been tempted to do—with anyone. Then, when Telhami made her decision, Kashi turned away from him completely. She wouldn’t speak with him privately or meet his eyes. If he approached, she retreated, until Pavek retreated as well, nursing a pain worse than any bleeding wound.
Pavek didn’t understand what he’d done wrong—except that it was probably his lack of understanding in the first place. Street-scum templars knew as much about solace as they knew about weeds.
These days, Kashi kept counsel and company strictly with herself. Quraite’s reconstruction had become her life, and for that she needed workers, not partners. As for love, well, if Akashia needed any man’s love, she kept her needs well hidden, and Pavek stayed out of her way. He spent one afternoon in four