Darin stood abruptly. She didn’t like this game. She didn’t like it all. For one thing Ridahne wasn’t playing right. Darin was more than willing to answer the questions the Elf posed as best she could. Ridahne seemed less inclined to return the favor. Darin already knew that her exile and the reasons for it were taboo. She had messed up when asking about the Elf’s culture, and now Ridahne didn’t even want to talk about what she had done with her life. Darin was starting to wonder if there were any safe questions to ask the Elf. Darin was starting to wonder if she even liked the Elf warrior at all.

Especially since she had said the one thought Darin had been purposely avoiding. Darin didn’t want to be The Gardener. She was still holding on to the hope that she would get to go back home after this; home to her mother, home to her farm, home to her normal, ordinary, boring life. Darin new it was a foolish hope. She knew it would never happen. She still held on to it with all she had. Astra was too big for Darin to try and understand. She wasn’t doing this for Astra. She had been truthful when she told Ridahne that she was on a mission for her mother. She was looking to plant The Seed for her, and she wanted to go back home to her. Maybe that made Darin a child. Maybe it made her a fool. Darin didn’t care. She didn’t want to think about being The Gardener, and now a woman she barely knew, and couldn’t seem to get to know, was thoughtlessly throwing it in her face while claiming that withholding information from her was disrespectful. The irony, or possibly hypocrisy, left a bad taste in the human’s mouth.

Without thinking, and in a colder tone that Darin hadn’t used since the last time the elders chided her, Darin spoke, “You know, humans have a saying. Trust is a two-way street.” Darin didn’t bother to explain what it meant, “Thomas and Milla told me they couldn’t tell me. I’m trusting there is a reason for that, and they are trusting me to plant The Seed.” She turned to flash an almost dangerous look at the Elf, “I will not have you disrespect the only two people in my life who have ever supported me no matter what I did!” Her volume increased with a shout, “Especially when you do not know them!”

Wasn’t that the truth? Even her own mother questioned why she couldn’t act more like a traditional girl? The elders were fond of chiding her for her actions. The grown men outright scorned her while the woman gossiped behind her back. Children her age and younger mocked her when she succeeded and laughed at her when she failed. Thomas, who was two years her senior, and Milla, three months her junior, had never once tried to make her fail. They never discouraged her. In fact, the first time Milla had seen her badly inflicted hair cut she had sat Darin down to fix it. Darin’s pants had all once been Thomas’s that he had snuck to her. They were the ones to convince Rolland to let Darin borrow Heath to plow her field that second planting season after her father had left. They traded just as much with as they did with others in their village. They had been the ones to promise to take care of her mother. They were the closest things to friends she had. The Seed-Bearer would not let them be slandered by a woman who wouldn’t even tell Darin what she had done for a living!

Darin’s next words were still cold, but were at a reasonable volume, “And I am not The Gardener, at least not yet, perhaps not ever. At most I am the Seed-Bearer.”

With those words Darin dropped her pack and walked straight out into the rain. It was childish and Darin would admit that she was running away. She didn’t care that she was soaked in a matter of moments. She just couldn’t stand to be in that enclosed space with Ridahne for any longer. She was done with the stupid game. She was done with trying to skirt around the things the Elf didn’t want to talk about. Darin had things she didn’t like to talk about, yet she still mentioned her father. The human supposed it wasn’t fair to expect Ridahne to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about, but the Elf was trying to get the human to trust her. She was doing a horrible job of it. There had been no two-way street in that stupid little game. To the human it felt that she was walking down a road until she ran into a brick wall that broken her nose. Well Darin was going to go nurse her metaphorically broken nose somewhere else. She was hoping Ridahne wouldn’t follow her. She was surprised that Talbot didn’t. What she didn’t know was that if the Elf had tried to go after her Talbot would stand in the way. He would not hesitate to kick the warrior or her animals if he needed to.