The Hunt

“If you keep staring your eyes will fall out of your head,” Garrow said.

The Wordsmith blinked, as if he didn’t even realize he’d been staring. “I’m sorry,” he said.

The way the boy apologized was practically a reflex. Still, Garrow wasn’t going to complain. It had taken some serious sweet-talking to get the Authority to let the Wordsmith out of the Quire for the evening, and Garrow was going to enjoy every moment of it. He couldn’t tell if The Wordsmith was enjoying himself yet; his eyes were at least more alive, but he was as timid as ever, huddled in on himself and wary of anyone touching him, talking to him. Given what happened when people talked to him and touched him, Garrow couldn’t blame the kid.

Out in public The Wordsmith couldn’t go shirtless. Some more nagging with one of the older ladies in the Thrones had turned up some boxes of clothes that had to be a good sixty or seventy years old - button-down shirts, sweater-vests, ugly ties, baggy slacks - but anything fit The Wordsmith’s lanky frame, and so there they were, at Fahreed’s, Garrow dressed as sharp as he could be given the weapons he was required to carry at all times, The Wordsmith dressed like someone’s de-aged grandfather.

He was still staring at the bellydancers.

“Staring isn’t going to get you anywhere with one of them,” Garrow said.

“Where would I want to go with one of them?” The Wordsmith asked.

Garrow was seriously starting to believe that the kid had been left in the Rosenkreuz vault, brought out only to be used, before he was thrown back in again. Whatever he’d learned about the real world was secondhand, from all the books he’d absorbed.

“Look, if you want to make it with the ladies, you need a new mindset. It’s like a hunt - you’re the hunter, they’re the prey,” Garrow began.

“That metaphor was exhausted in several hundred sonnets,” The Wordsmith said.

“The hunt is what it’s all about - you’re a man,” Garrow said as blithely as possible.

The Quire Authority wasn’t even sure The Wordsmith was really a person. The Wordsmith must have caught his tone, because he cast Garrow a look. Then he turned his attention back to the dancers.

“They’ll get creeped out if you keep staring like that, and none of them will talk to you,” Garrow said. “The hunt is more subtle than that.”

“I know it is,” The Wordsmith said. “You don’t think those women aren’t hunting you right back?”

Garrow turned his attention to the stage where three women were shimmying distractingly. “Yeah right.”

The Wordsmith shrugged. “The hunt is like a dance for men; for the women the dance is the hunt.”

(461 words)