Had he?
"Nothing specific, then. Has Alea heard any gossip you haven't?"
"No." Magnus turned to him with a frown. "Why should she?"
"Men aren't always privy to women's conversations— or interested enough to pay attention." Rod took a stick and reached out to stir the coals; flame licked up. "Then too, being new to Gramarye, she might notice some things that you and I would look right past."
"So used to them that we dismiss them." Magnus nodded thoughtfully, his gaze following Rod's stick back to the flames. "We talk constantly, and I'm sure she would have mentioned anything that seemed odd."
"She must be mentioning oddities every night."
"Well, yes." Magnus smiled, amused. "She's not used to elves, or to so many people with psionic talents. I do have to reassure her as to what's considered commonplace here."
"She certainly isn't."
"What? You mean being so tall that she seems a freak?" Magnus turned to him with a frown; it was a topic with which he was all too familiar.
"No, her perceptiveness and sensitivity." Rod put down the stick and looked up at his boy. "A very intelligent woman, son."
"Yes. She is that." Magnus allowed himself a small smile.
"Just a stray who followed you home?"
Magnus laughed.
Rod blinked in surprise at the rare sound, then smiled, thinking that Alea might be better for Magnus than he knew.
"A stray, perhaps," Magnus acknowledged. "Certainly a fugitive—but she scarcely followed me. In fact, she took quite a bit of reassuring and coaxing."
"Oh?" It was a side of Alea Rod hadn't seen. "What had made her skittish?"
"Her parents died," Magnus said, "and the neighbors she had thought were her friends turned away from her. On her home world of Midgard, the 'normal' people were reacting to the abnormalities of inbreeding by enslaving those they could and fighting those they couldn't—and she was too tall to count as normal."
"So they enslaved her?"
Magnus nodded. "Her parents' lands were given to their worst enemies, who proceeded to beat her or whip her for the slightest disobedience."
'Trying to break her spirit. They didn't succeed."
"No, but they might have, if she had stayed. The first night, though, the son made advances—if you can call assault an advance …"
"So she didn't stay around for a second night."
"She felt that a quick death was better than a lifetime of abuse," Magnus said, "so she took the chance to run and hoped she could escape the slave-catchers. She took her risks with the wild dog packs and the giants."
Rod shuddered. "Harrowing enough."
"Yes, but there's something more." Magnus frowned. "She has never spoken of it, but I'm sure there was a heartbreak there—and whoever broke her heart did it in the cruelest way possible."
Rod looked up at him. "Only a guess, though?"
"A guess, but the symptoms don't leave me much room to imagine anything else—unless it's something worse."
"So she took her chances with the forest's monsters instead of the human ones." Rod turned to gaze into the campfire. "Think she would have survived by herself?"
Magnus was still for a minute, thinking it over. Rod was surprised that his son didn't seem to have considered the issue before. "Not a relevant question?"
Magnus shrugged. "She met me before she met the wild-dog pack. I had to pretend to ignore her except to leave food where she could take it but still have a head start if I tried to attack."
Rod nodded. "She couldn't know you were safe, after all."
"She must have had some suspicion of the sort," Magnus said. "She travelled near me for the next few days until she plucked up the courage to talk with me—and I had to be very careful not to say or do the slightest thing that could even seem to be threatening."
"But you were a stranger, far too tall to be one of her own kind," Rod said, "and, I take it, too short to be a giant?"
"For once in my life, yes." Magnus smiled.
"So it must have taken a great deal of courage to trust you at all."
"Great courage indeed." Magnus nodded. "That was what I first admired in her—her bravery in facing the wilds by herself: the savage animals, the unknown, the unexpected …"
"Including you," Rod said. "How well could she survive by herself now?"
"Oh, very well," Magnus assured him. "She knows how to fight, bare-handed or with a staff, and knows how to find food in the woods. Then too, she turned out to have some psi talent—how much, I'm still not sure …"
"Which means it must be considerable."
"Exactly. She has learned how to use her powers enough to be formidable in her own right—and she's sharp-tongued enough to scare off any animal that can understand speech."
Rod glanced up quickly, looking for signs that Magnus had suffered the sharp edge of that tongue, but the young man's face was tranquil as he gazed into the fire, giving away nothing. "No chance she's an emotional basket-case?"
"Not once she recovered from the shock of betrayal and the two days' abuse that followed," Magnus said. "She grew up in a loving and supportive home—or so I'd judge from the odd comment she has made about her parents. Apparently she was devoted to them because they were devoted to her."
"Not because she was starved for approval?"
Magnus shook his head. "If anything, her parents made her feel so special that she had no idea how cruel the world could be."
Rod wondered if he and Gwen had been guilty of that, then remembered his own rages with greater guilt. Maybe it would have been better for them all if he had left—but no, he'd considered that at the time, even tried it for a while when the delusions hit. "Your opinion of her seems to have grown with time."
"Oh, it has." Surely it was the reflection of the fire that glowed in Magnus's eyes. "Herkimer dug up enough material on the healing process to give me some idea what to expect, so I was able to endure the months of anger and insult. Then on planet after planet, her courage showed clearly, then her loyalty and her willingness to try to understand the people we met, to learn what was best for them and work for it, and finally her aptitude for caring re-emerged, for trying to help other people. Sometimes I don't think she's even aware she's doing it."
Rod studied his son's impassive face, hoping for some sign of his feelings. "Added to which, she's a handsome woman."
"Once she recovered from abuse and exposure, yes. Once she was able to wash off the dirt and eat decently again." Magnus's voice sank low. "Very handsome indeed." Then quickly, as though he had revealed too much, "More importantly, she's a valiant shield-mate and fiercely loyal."
"Maybe that is more important." Rod's shield-mate had been beautiful as well as ferocious and fearsome. Then he realized that Magnus's was, too. "You can't really be thinking that she's only a travelling companion."
Magnus was quiet a moment, then turned to him with a frown. "I wouldn't say that a shield-mate was that small a thing to be."
"Agreed," Rod said. "But you must realize that you care about her much more deeply."
"I care about her immensely, of course," Magnus said, frowning, "but still only as the closest of my friends."
Rod studied his face and decided that he'd hit the point of diminishing returns. "Then you're planning to take her home."
"She doesn't want to go back to Midgard. She says that since her parents died, she has no home there."
"So you're planning to find her one here?"
Magnus turned away, shaken, and Rod saw that his son hadn't considered Alea's falling in love with someone else—but Magnus said gamely, "Of course."