“Are you cold still?” Tristan asked some minutes later, when I had been staring into the fire too long to escape comment.
“No, no, I am well.”
“Well, perhaps, but distracted.”
“I worry for Braith,” I admitted, “out in the cold rain.”
He sighed. “None worry for the forest creatures in the cold rain, and he is at least as able as they.”
I let some moments pass in silence. “He is not a forest creature, you know,” I said at last. “He thinks and feels just like you or I. He is as much a person as any in this room.”
“That does not make him a good person.”
“Yet what has he done, that you think him evil? Do not speak of my captivity. You know already my argument to that.”
“You may have noticed him dashing a pitcher of ale into my brother’s face, but very well, you ask for evil, not hot-tem
