Danen awoke still feeling tired, it was becoming an all too common feature of his mornings. When he had escaped from the Ker-ja kingdom a fortnight ago he had never thought the men he had killed would affect him like this. Despite Danen’s years of combat training, he had not killed until he buried his axe in that first assassin's chest. At the time he had moved fluidly with the reflexes that his instructors had hammered into his body. The adrenalin of the moment had even let him feel as sort of savage joy in it, however, a few nights after he crossed the border into the Odun kingdom and had started to let himself believe he had gotten away, that was when the memories had returned.

He didn’t have nightmares or wonder if the men he had felled like dead trees were haunting him. No, it was in the gap between laying down and finding sleep. The hours when he lay staring up into nothingness, alone with his thoughts. All his logic pointed towards this being silly. Danen well understood that those men would have killed him eventually and also reasoned that it was better to have transitioned to real combat fluidly rather than freezing and being killed on the spot by a foe. This was unfortunately not a logical issue because what really kept him up a night was, when he was honest with himself, not the killing so much as that savage joy he had felt. His logic had given him the adrenaline to use as an excuse but Danen wondered if that's all it was an excuse. He wondered if he actually was a man who took pleasure in violence and death and that thought kept sleep far from his grasp any night he let it enter his conscious thought. Last night had been a prime example of what happened when he did. Lying awake for hours, Danen had watched as both logical and emotional thoughts chased each other around his head until his body had final overruled his head letting sleep come.

Well, he was awake now so now use complaining, Danen rose, sitting up in bed before swinging his legs down to the floor. The night in this inn had been his first night under a roof in over a week, which made the fact that he had spent a large proportion of it lying awake hurt even more. The inn room was nothing fancy, the lack of furnishings and decoration showed that this was not designed for long term tenants. The room had little else other than a bed, a desk and a chair over which Danen had put his coat, damp after a light shower the day before. He stood up from the bed walking over to it running a hand over the leather. Glad that it had dried he moved on towards the door. Opening it he found a small bucket of water placed beside his doorway. Lifting it back inside and grabbing out the cloth that was floating inside he began to wipe the worst the dirt and grime from his skin, sucking in a breath at how cold the water was. One thing he did miss about being a prince were the baths, lovely and warmed by a small fire he could lay in the water for hours without it getting cold. What Danen wouldn’t give for a royal bath right now. Luckily, he wasn’t ignorant to how ordinary people lived and hadn’t expected every inn to have heated baths, nevertheless, he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and although he knew many things in his old life were extravagant luxuries he had still used them for all of his life and started to miss them now they were gone. Of course, he wouldn’t complain, or at least he wouldn’t voice his complaints, it was, after all, a very small price to pay for his life.

After he had washed as best he could and gotten dressed he went over to the desk and grabbed the two saddle bags that were sat there. One had a change of clothes, a large woollen travel cloak as well as a flint and tinder. The other held both his axe and shield, a large pouch of coins and various map of The Last Land. His plan was to join the druids, the druids had the power to excuse new recruits of some minor misdemeanours and more importantly to him they had little contact with the Ker-ja kingdom which was defended from corruption by the Ko-tun Mountains and had no druid forts. Nevertheless, he didn’t simply head for the closest fort in the Odun kingdom. he brought the maps to guide him south, Danen knew his brother thought him dead but he still preferred to be cautious planning to head through both the Odun Kingdom and the New Principalities that surrounded the two peaks of Si-Kan mountain. He would then be in the Ru-eln Dynasty and could head to the nearest city where the druids were recruiting. He was in the new principality's now and starting to truly feel safe, perhaps that was why the sleepless nights were coming more frequently.

Danen brought his bags with him and walked down into the taproom on the inn's ground floor. The room was fairly quiet due to the early hour but noise of pots and pans came from the kitchen door and a small group of men sat round a table. All the men were large and Danen carefully looked over them as he walked to a table. He knew he was being paranoid but he couldn’t help it. The men looked like they could snap bones with ease but the Woodsmen's axes that lay on the table showed that they gained their brawn through labour, not martial training. “Or they want me to think that so they can catch me off guard,” Danen mumbled to himself, the sound drowned out by the clunk of his bags as he put them down on a table. He sighed and put out a chair sitting down almost unconsciously in a place that let him see both exits, the stairs and the men. The men each held a mug of drink and he doubted that their cups were filled with water despite the morning sun streaming through the wooden shutters.

Shortly afterwards a girl walked out of the Kitchen the open door allowing Danen a whiff of the food cooking inside, the smell set his stomach growling. The girl was his age maybe a year younger just having gained a womanly figure that wasn’t quite filled out yet. She still had the cute slightly round face of a girl with glowing green eyes and brown hair that only just brushed her shoulders. Her skin was remarkably pale and it didn’t escape Danen’s notice that each of the men at the next table were staring at her, or that each of them appeared to be tensing as many muscles as they could. The men put Danen in mind of a group of shaved bears and he had to struggle not to chuckle at the thought. The girl moved around them picking up the mugs that were empty and refilling them behind the bar before putting them back before the men.

The largest man even tried to touch her behind but giving no sign that she had seen the hand the girl performed a quickstep that would have put Danen's instructors to shame moving beyond their reach. It wasn’t a martial move, though, Danen remembered that one of his instructors had said that normal work developed certain movements unconsciously in the same way martial artists train consciously. For example, a smith spent all his days hammering metal and unconsciously began to develop mastery in downwards swings, able to deliver more power that way than even a practised warrior.

“E-excuse me?” the voice snapped Danen back to reality, his eyes focusing again only to find the girl standing in front of him.

He started, almost crying out. Danen shook himself looking at the girl “Could I get some food? I paid for a room and meal last night.”

“What nam…” The girl started to respond but it seemed it was her turn to stare into space or rather into Danen’s mismatched eyes. Danen wasn’t surprised but the stare still made him self-conscious. In recent years his reason for avoiding court was his dislike of politicking and plotting against his own siblings but when he was younger he stayed away because of the stares people gave him when they saw his eyes. It didn’t make him run from the room like it had when he was a child but that stare that had silently judged him as defective still made him uncomfortable. He had to admit that since he had escaped people stared at him differently, especially girls they would glance at him when they noticed before whispering to whoever they were with. This girl, however, was staring for quite a while wasn’t she, he heard grumbling from the other table and coughed slightly to wake the girl.

“Ahem, miss?” The girl started at the sound, her face turning bright red as she quickly shuffled away towards the kitchen. “Sorry! I will ask them to make your food out quickly.” she quickly went through the kitchen door and before it swung closed Danen saw her bury her face in her hand. What was that about? That was certainly a new reaction to his eyes but remembering her embarrassed face as she backed away brought a little brush of red to his own cheeks. Maybe it was an attractive feature in the south, that was an odd thought to him, the few nobles who he had met back in Ker-ja had either ignored it if they were being polite or consoled him like he was a freak of nature when they were being rude.

“Don’t get any ideas boy.” The voice came from the table of woodsmen and looking over Danen saw it was the largest man who had made a grab at the girls behind while she served. Not knowing how to react to him he just stared at the man with incredulity etched on his face.

“I’m sorry could you elaborate?” Danen was honestly confused, he doubted very much that there was any sort of relationship between the girl and this mountain of a man. Danen failed to see what he had done to offend the man.

“Oh trying to play the fool are we?” The man then did a very poor job of imitating Danen and spoke. “Ahem, miss?” The words were accompanied by a swish of his hair and a blink of his eyes as he pulled them wide. This drew laughter from the other men at the table and they slapped their palms and banged their feet. The large man spat on the floor as he spoke again. “Pah… You think you can just flap your odd eyes and posh accent and then take any girl who blushes.”

Danen felt heat rising in his chest equal parts embarrassment and anger. The imitation had been laughable and the accusation preposterous but they the thought of the girl's red face as she left and the sound of the men's laughter made him smoulder. The men continued to laugh as they drank and a few minutes later the girl returned. She appeared to have regained some measure of self control as her face was no longer crimson although Danen noticed that as she walked over a pink tinge returned to her ears. She set down a thick wooden plate with some freshly baked bread, sliced fruits atop. Danen noticed her efforts to make eye contact again but he purposely avoided it glancing over at the occupants of the other table, watching him like a pack of wolves watch a lone sheep. The girl caught the look and instantly seemed to lose the smile on her face. She walked over to their table grabbing up all the mugs, empty or not, carrying them over to the bar. “You will be late if you don’t go now Roran.” Danen was quite surprised that the previously blushing girl so obviously told the men to leave and did it with quite the steel edge to her voice.

Danen held back a smile at the shock written on the men's faces. Especially the twisted face of the large man whose name he now knew to be Roran. Roran eventually corrected his expression, appearing not to take the hint but probably just ignoring it, and sauntered over to the bar.

“Come now, Jen. No problem with us finishing our drinks, in fact, why don’t you join us?” as he finished speaking walking closer and reaching out his hand again in the same way he had earlier. Jen seemed to know what was coming and Danen expected the same result as last time, however, instead of quickly stepping out of reach she rounded on him her eyes hard and slammed one on the half-filled mugs into the side of his head.