Rory
But this wasn't about something like that. This was about their festival, and the horde of people drifting between their lanterns, like moths drawn to the flames. Rory tried, to see the best in them, to see only the curiosity, the desire to learn, and to not feel like a foreign object to be studied; his lanterns did not hang there for their amusement. His hands, without a pony's mane to work themselves into, kept moving, always. His fingers wound around each other, or picked at the edges of his worn coat, but aside from their ceaseless movements and the groove between his eyebrows nothing else gave his anxiety away.
"There's not a whole lot we can do about them," he responded in a low voice; another note of anxiety threaded its way through the words. Short of outright trying to slaughter them, there just wasn't any way to get rid of them, and at most other times, Rory liked some of them far too much to want to off them all. He just didn't want them among their lanterns. He didn't want them at a Festival they did not understand. He wanted them to go away and become a problem for another day.
But Wessex looked vicious in the firelight.
Fortunately, the limping approach of one of the interlopers seemed to stall her. She still looked wild and indomitable, a predator hiding her teeth in the middle of an unsuspecting flock, but not quite coiled to spring at them anymore.
The stranger headed straight for them, and though his smile was brief his voice seemed genuine enough, if a bit disused. "Evening," Rory responded, pleasantly surprised that Wessex spoke her own gruff greeting rather than beheading the man. "You are hurt?" It was half-question, half-statement, directed at
