Below the Peak (Sola)(90)

He indeed picked a great spot for himself.

She swayed when the boat rocked lightly. She brought her eyes to him.

“Sorry” Calemir mumbled as he hunched over and worked on the fishing net. Part of threads seemed to have knotted tightly on a bolt. It took him a minute to get it sorted. Wanting to do something, Nara gathered the net and cast it into the water. Holding the rope of the net, she sat back on her spot. Nara stared at Calemir, his hands braced on either side of his lean hips with his head titled to the sky. Sun beams adorned his profile. Her eyes raked over the firm set of his jaw, down to the corded muscle of his neck and breadth of his shoulders. S

“You are staring” his throat worked as the words left his mouth.

‘Sorry” Nara mumbled, her cheeks flushing. She looked away from him.

“Say it.”

“Say what?” Nara asked. With a mind of their own, her eyes returned to his throat.

“Whatever is on your mind,” Calemir said.

Since he wasn’t looking at her, Nara decided to be honest. “If someone had told me at the beginning of the year that I would be boating with an elf, I would have laughed so hard and told them they had lost their damn mind.”

He glanced in her direction. “Do you hate us so much?”

Nara shifted her feet. Nerves chewing her stomach. “You must know your kind don’t have a good reputation to the outside world,” she said almost quietly. It was the truth.

“Hmm,” Calemir hummed, looking away from her face.

“But I don’t hate you now.” She blurted.

Calemir’s mouth twitched at the corners. “What changed your opinion?”

Nara swallowed, fumbling with words in her mind. The hate she had against them had dwindled, but it didn’t mean she loved them either. She hadn’t forgotten the atrocity they had done to her people. It’s just the fury of hatred that been burning was just a sleeping flame.

“I don’t know” is what she could come up with as an explanation.

“There are multiple sides of a story” Calemir cryptically said.

Brows knitting slightly, Nara was going to ask him to elaborate on that, tell his side of the story but he spoke again, changing the subject. “We should probably check the net.”

Nara stored her question at the back of her mind for a later time. Standing, she started pulling the net. It was a little heavy, a sign they might have caught some fish. Calemir moved to her side, his shoulders brushing against hers, closing both hands down the net, he began to pull.

“Wow,” Nara breathed. Oh, they indeed caught fish. However, more than she had anticipated. The net was almost full. The fish’s tails flapped from the holes of the net as they dragged it carefully into the boat. The fish weren’t tiny either, they were fat and healthy. Nara spread her legs a little wider to stabilize herself as the boat swayed from the weight and movement. “We cannot go back with all these,” she remarked as the fish kept on flapping and beating their tail against the wood.

“Then let’s take what we need and return the fellas back in.”

“Good idea. Hold this” Nara gave him the other end of the rope to hold. He opened and folded the net a little to give her room to insert her hands. Cautiously, Nara grabbed one oily fish, dragged it from the net and put it aside. “Is three enough?” she asked as she caught the second one.

“Yes.”

Nara grabbed the last one and set it aside again before straightening. She sat down to balance the weight as Calemir dragged the net to the edge of the boat then flipped it, releasing the fish back into the water. She watched as the water splashed and created a ripple. Calemir stepped back and sat on the other side. “Do you want to go back?”

“Let’s stay for a little while” Nara replied after a moment of thought.

Calemir nodded.

They sat there enjoying a silence that needed not be filled with words. Occasionally, their eyes met, and she would break first and look the other way.

“Look” Nara breathed, pointing to a hill on her left. Right there, a huge white elk with long antlers stood majestically on the hill. Nara felt Calemir turn and gaped at the beautiful creature.

“This is a rare sight” Calemir commented. A flash of movement at the corner of her eye had her tearing her gaze from the elk to Calemir. The satchel that was lying under his seat was now on his lap and opened. Nara watched as he took brittle brown papers and handed them to her.

“You draw?” she asked, studying the various drawings on the papers.

“Yes,” Calemir replied, retrieving a small stick of black and white charcoal from one of the pockets of the satchel. There were drawings of beautiful landscapes, towns, people. Some bright and some dark. One particularly caught her undivided attention. It was a man kneeling beside a body of another elf with blood seeming to be spilling from his hair and pooling around his head, eyes peacefully closed and hands crossed over his chest. The man kneeling had his hands over his face, apparently weeping over the dead man. His hair was golden like. Nara lifted her head slowly and gazed at the man sitting opposite to her. Calemir was engrossed, his fingers holding a thin black stick and moving over the paper expertly that he didn’t notice her staring at him intently.

Him and his brother. Nara’s brows pulled ever so lightly. Something tugged at her chest lightly when she looked at him kneeling and crying. She felt a sense of sympathy for him. To lose a brother, it must be painful. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel if Ingrid died. It would hurt certainly. Yet when she looked at his brother, all sentiments vanished. She felt the satisfaction of his death. End of his demise.