Exile (Deridia #6)
Catherine Miller
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars
4.14
· Steam/Spice level: 3 of 5
Open door [?]
· 7 ratings · 454 pages · Published: 14 Nov 2021
Headstrong.
Selfish.
Arla knew many things. She knew how to keep a tidy workroom. How to infuriate her elder sister. How to put a smile on her mother’s face when there had been only tears. How to anger her father when she couldn’t seem to master her tongue or her temper.
She was supposed to want to be a wife someday. To smooth away the more difficult parts of herself until she was pliable and meek. Desirable.
But all Arla wanted was a friend. Someone that wasn’t sister, or mother, or father. Just a friend to call her own. And then she found... Him.
-x-
She could not decide what to make of him. This strange boy who seemed not to realise she was a girl. Who treated her like... She did not know what.
“What’s your name?” he asked, leaning toward her and nudging her lightly with his shoulder, as if to claim her attention once more.
“Arla,” she answered, realising too late she perhaps should have given him a false one.
He smiled softly. “A pretty name,” he declared, and a strange sort of warmth filled her belly to hear him say so. “I’m Osin,” he added, then wrinkled his brow a little. “Well, Osin’morn, but nobody really uses it.” She was staring at him again, and he darkened about his ears, and turned back to look at her. “What?”
“I...” she swallowed, and rubbed her hands along her skirt. “I’ve never been given a male’s name before,” she answered, feeling all jumbled to admit it. He should know that. Surely there were rules that he must learn as well. About not touching a girl on her shoulder. Of titles and half-names, and not looking one another in the eye and...
Oh.” He glanced toward the crumbling wall, his mouth turning downward ever so slightly. “I’m always doing things wrong,” he confessed. “Ahme tries to teach me manners, but she says they fall out just as quickly as she puts them in.” He huffs out a breath and leans his head against the trunk of her tree—not her tree—with enough force that she was certain it must have hurt him. “Why can’t you have my name?”
Arla opened her mouth. Closed it again. “I don’t know.” Cynestrine would know. She was always better at remembering, never felt to question every little custom that Ahme tried so hard to teach.
“I’d like you to have it,” Osin insisted, “Since you let me have yours.”
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