Ryn paced his room.

It was a nice room, to be fair, the nicest he had stayed in for…well, maybe ever. It was even nicer than his bedroom had been at home. But that had been different, more special, because that had been where he had lived with his…Mother. Father. Hometown.

But he wasn’t really interested in the niceness of his room right now. What he was interested in was the next part of the sequence of words that were forever running through his head. That had changed recently, though the last bit had remained the same:

Find the Jewels. Save the world. Bring them back. Stay with Nuthea.

“Stay with Nuthea,” he whispered to himself. But what was the point of staying with Nuthea if all he was to her was just a traveling companion, or a fellow-Jewel-hunting-party-member, or even a friend?

Ok, being her friend was a big deal, to be fair–she was a lightning-wielding crown-princess from a faraway land, after all. But, Ryn had realised again, especially after he had forgiven her and Vorr for what had happened to his hometown, that he didn’t just want to be her friend. He wanted to be more than her friend.

Was he deluding himself in wondering if he ever could be more than friends with her? He had been seventeen when he had met her, but he was fairly sure that his birthday had passed sometime since he had been traveling with her, even if he had lost track of the months a while ago. That meant he was now eighteen–the age that boys traditionally came of age in Efstan and became men.

Nuthea was a bit older than him, he reckoned, but probably not much older. She was probably in her early twenties, Ryn reckoned–unless Manolians had some strange ability to look much younger than they actually were, which for all he knew could be a thing, though he hoped to the One that it wasn’t.

If she was in her early twenties, she wasn’t too much older than him.

Was she?

That was an acceptable age-gap for a romantic involvement.

Wasn’t it?

He felt about her the same way he had felt about Carlotia, his most recent crush from Cleasor. Only not exactly the same way. She had been beautiful too, though nowhere near as beautiful as Nuthea. But she had been someone he viewed from far off, glimpsed across the classroom, and occasionally exchanged pleasantries with, which had given him fuel for the fire of his boyish, immature fantasies.

This was different. He knew Nuthea; he had lived and traveled and fought alongside her for the past however many months, and grown with her too, and although some things about her irritated part of him no end–like the way she always spoke down to everyone and loved to lecture people–bizarrely at the same time he found them weirdly endearing.

And he now found that not only could he not imagine never being with Nuthea, he was finding it very hard not to imagine being with her in a romantic way. It wasn’t even that he was hopelessly attracted to her–he didn’t even think of her in that way (most of the time…). Damn it, but he actually wanted to ‘court’ her. To give himself up for her. Perhaps even to…marry her?

The problem was, she was a lightning-wielding crown-princess from a faraway land, and he was a…a what? What had Sagar called him that one time? A ‘naive greenhorn pussywillow farmboy’. What did ‘pussywillow’ even mean, in that context? It didn’t even make sense; it just sounded vaguely insulting. Stupid Sagar.

Ryn was just the son of a reasonably wealthy farm-owner in Cleasor, a backwater town of Efstan, a northern Dokanese island that nobody cared about all that much.

“No,” he said to himself, turning to take yet another lap of his well-furnished room. I’m more than that. I’m Ruby-touched. I have the Gift of Fire. I’m capable of great things. In fact, I’ve done some great things already: I escaped from an Imperial skyship. I rescued Nuthea when Vish poisoned her. I defeated General Vorrr, for goodness’ sake.

The more troublesome problem, however, was that even though he had done all those things, he still felt like…like a scared, traumatised orphan boy who still often woke up from nightmares of his parents being murdered and his hometown being destroyed and who was still plagued by intrusive images at all hours of the day.

Which is also what I am, he thought.

And, when he thought of what he was presently trying to summon up the courage to go and do, butterflies fluttered in his stomach, his mouth went dry, and a strong pressure in his groin area told him he needed to piss, even though he hadn’t drunk anything in a while.

There was only one thing for it.

He was going to pray.

Correction. He was going to try to pray.

“One God,” he said very quietly, staring at the gray stone of the room’s wall and feeling very foolish, hoping and trying to believe there was some ‘One’ out there listening to him, “please help me. Please give me the courage to speak to Nuthea and invite her to go and visit an inn with me.”

He fell silent, still staring at the wall.

Was something meant to happen now?

He didn’t feel any different.

He didn’t feel anything.

No voice from the sky. No emotional impression. No quivers in his liver. Nothing.

The only difference was, now he left the room and went to go and talk to Nuthea.

Perhaps the One helps those who help themselves, Ryn thought as he walked down the corridor to the stairs.

His booted feet felt heavy as he took the steps one at a time, as if his body was trying to hold him back and prevent him from doing what he was doing. But he took the steps all the same.

When he got to the upper floor, someone was already standing outside the first door, stood facing it as if waiting for an answer from within.

“Sagar!” Ryn said. “What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like, pup?” Sagar said with a sneer. “I’m here to talk to the princess.”

“No you’re not. I’m here to talk to the princess!”

“Well I was here first. I beat you to it. Bad luck. Now run along.”

Heat rose in Ryn’s chest. He weighed his chances. He liked them. He had bested Sagar in a fight before, after all, as apparently Sagar’s air alignment was weak to fire. The pirate had got there first, to be fair, but why should that matter?

“Sagar? Ryn? What are you doing here?”

Ryn spun on his heel.

Nuthea.