A New Hero

Promise

By the time it was light's out, Gavin was content to stretch out upon his pallet. Well, he would if he weren't so damn tall. Best he could manage was scrunching up with his knees tucked near his chest or else his feet were left exposed to the mud below them. His tentmate on the other hand was free to stretch as wide as he wanted. But Snowy wasn't in the mood to sleep. Even while their Knights paced back and forth through the small campsite shouting for everyone to get to sleep, Snowy refused to stop talking.

"So, fur making..."

"It's not really fur making," Gavin sighed. He was getting exhausted from everyone's surprised looks. It wasn't that difficult to figure out. There was a book on it. There were books on a lot of things. "I don't exactly grow the fur."

His roomie snickered at that. "Right, you'd look a right pillock if you sprouted fur all over your face." Pausing a moment, Snowy sighed, "No, knowing you, somehow a thick coat of black fur would send even more girls chasing after you."

"What?" He was flabbergasted, and more than a bit confused. He couldn't even get anything other than a sliver of hair to sprout upon his upper lip. Fur everywhere seemed...confusingly impossible.

Snowy turned onto his side, his hard eyes traveling up and down Gavin's form. "Aye, add a fluffy tail and you'd be in business."

"I...I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Ain't you lucky," he flopped back over a hand across his eyes. "Got me a sis that's not afraid of sharing stuff we all really don't want to hear about. And big into drawing." Snowy shuddered deeper into his thin mat as if trying to burrow through the earth.

Gavin twisted up, about to ask a question when he caught Daryan's lantern light swinging past. As the arc of the yellow circle drifted further onward, he whispered, "You have a sister?"

"Yup, and another two after that, and three brothers."

"Maker's breath," Gavin gasped. "That's a lot of...people to be related to."

Snowy snorted out the side of his nose. He'd shattered it once, which caused the side to heal wrong. Whenever he laughed a blast of air would shoot from the single nostril like a bolt out of a crossbow. "Way you talking I'm guessing you've got...what, one sister?"

"Uh," Gavin glanced at the ground, his fingers stirring up the dirt he'd tried to stay out of. "N...no, it's just me."

"Only babe. Ain't seen one of them in awhile. Ah shit, don't tell me, miracle baby. Nah nah, it totally fits. Older famous dad sends his only son out into the world. Shit, yer even a farm boy too."

"I am not a farm boy, regardless of what Cal claims," Gavin sneered. He was growing exhausted with the incessant assumptions about his past. Everyone just decided what he was without daring to ask him. "If anything I'm an abbey boy."

"So the chaste, deny all the best bits about living type?" Snowy rolled the words around in his mouth like he was sampling them. "If yer smart, you'll stick with farm boy. Gives you a good salt of the earth thing going on. The girls'll eat that stuff up."

His roommate was never far from that subject. Somehow Snowy could turn the most innocuous subject back to romance. It was growing tiresome. "Your name, Snowy, does it have any special significance?" he scrambled to change to anything other than girls and the art of getting one to give you the time of day.

"Why?" the dwarf fully rolled over now, his eyed piercing through the darkness to strike at Gavin. Slivers of the bonfirelight reached through the thin canvas, granting them twisted shadows. "It's a name. Got to have a name. All people do. What about you? Gavin. Keep expecting you to wear a plaid skirt and shout how there can only be one!"