"I am no idiot," Mort chastised Ardonne. "Fear keeps you alive." Ardonne cocked her head slightly, chewing on the inside of her cheek in thought. She got the distinct impression that Mort wasn't too keen on having a conversation but...she had plenty to ask. Her gaze flickered away from him and back to her book. Her brow furrowed. She clenched her jaw and said nothing, and for a while left him to crane this way and that anxiously. Her fingers gently pressed into the smaller prints of her younger self left in the corners of the pages of her field guide. Her mouth formed the syllables of a two hundred page prayer that she knew cover to cover, bound tight, kept safe. For now, she settled into her comforting routine. "Something's coming," Mort hissed. Ardonne lacked the keenness of her companions but she felt it before she saw it. A peculiar wrongness that plucked at her nerves, made her alert. She raised her gaze beyond the scruff of a man to scan the horizon, not quite catching the shadow due to her own foolhardiness. She didn't want to come off as jumpy and...in a way, even she couldn't deny the superiority of everyone else gathered around her. When her eyes did adjust to the gloom she calmed somewhat. A goat or, more likely, a deer coming out to nibble the grasses. It had what appeared to be lace lichen across its antlers. Strange though, since that herb didn't grow anywhere near the province. "It's just a deer," Ardonne dismissed it but never took her eyes off it as it approached. It grinned at her. She grinned back. A whole cacophony of emotions hit Ardonne at once with such severity that her breath caught and released in a breathy chuckle of incredulity. She was elated to finally meet the murderer of her father, eager to get close, excited to toy with him long enough to be a memorable way to go...but fear overwhelmed her. She had a stubbornly powerful survival instinct and, to her credit, a sliver of common sense that she often chose to ignore unless something triggered her fight or flight response. Several theories ran through her head in tandem, a thundering mass of noise that occupied her consciousness enough to prevent her from running headlong into the beast and getting gored across the grass. First, Ardonne didn't want to die [I]here[/I]. In fact, it had to be somewhere beautiful and far away from the province so they can't recover her body. Second, the beast didn't attack beyond the borders of his domain - at least, she thought he didn't. He must be incredibly bored and lonely in his woods. He probably wants to play with his food. Scaring it back into the valley would be counterintuitive. But then again... maybe he didn't care. Maybe he'd go so far as to attack in the night and drag everyone into the treeline. She just didn't know - it frightened her. It made her grin. This was going to be an exciting way out of a very boring decade of imprisonment! Ardonne carefully chose to ignore the smaller, more genuine voice - her own, rattling in the back of her head - telling her she was a fool and a hotheaded little brat trying to make a statement that nobody would care about when she passed. She was mesmerized by the beast but didn't make any move for her weapon. All she did was put away her field guide so it would rest comfortably next to her thigh when the beast decided to make a move.