RORY
i told the stars about you
Okay: when not being her brother's awkward tag-along, it turned out she had a pretty sharp tongue in her mouth. "Ouch," he said, his face a mask of hurt, though a small smile lingered on his lips still. "That was low." Oh, he knew that Evie could rub many people the wrong way—she was opinionated and unafraid to speak her mind, and he wasn't an idiot. Not everyone found the idea of having their flaws pointed out in crisp detail appealing.But if you just gave her some time to settle in your company, you'd be treated to the real Evie, and he wasn't lying when he said it had taken him a couple of years to actually be over the whole thing.
When it became obvious that Maea was finding the aforementioned chair Rory stuck his inquisitive nose back in the basket, and with care fished out two baked apples, handing one to Maea as he listened.
Governance was an alien and foreign concept to Rory, a child who had grown up in a sort of well-functioning anarchy regulated by altruism and the collective annoyance that arose when someone was too far out of line. Lacking stories of proper governments, ruling of any kind (except for what he had been told of of Numeria), the whole thing was rather bizarre.
"It's more relevant now," he said with a sigh, licking some stickiness off his fingers. "I was pig-headed and didn't want to admit the fact that the barrier might fall, yet here we are." He chose not to think of Maea's part in it. "We're lucky that no grand army has ridden in to claim us, or something," he went on, bitterly. "I don't care much for the idea of a council to affect us, for we've been fine for three hundred years, haven't we? But you had a point about needing some form of united front towards the rest of the world."
Carefully, Rory bit into his baked apple, letting the still-warm, savory and sweet taste flood his mouth.
