Silverlight Terrace if you were on fire, i'd roast marshmallows

Cypress’ compliment had been just that — a compliment. He hadn’t meant in any capacity whatsoever, “You can help a lot of wolves with a skill like that — and when I say ‘a lot of wolves’ I mean the three strapping young men standing before you.” His sulphureous eyes swung wildly to clash in startlement with Rannoch’s turquoise ones and Rian’s jade ones, but there wasn’t any inkling of challenge in his posture or his mien. Just…shock. Confusion. Maybe a good bit of panic, too. She was going to come with them? Just like that?

Rannoch wanted her, and Rian seemed — resigned to the whole thing, so the raven fell in line accordingly. “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” he muttered under his breath, the Eshe-ism startled out of him by the very real implication of what this was. Rannoch, Rian, and Rose — it all sounded so harmonious and cohesive until you added Cypress to the mix. And now she was going to be with them in an irrevocable, official way, and the eidolon didn’t really know what to do about it. Adapt, he snapped at himself. “I’m sorry, Rose.” His mouth shaped the words and his lungs fashioned the breath to give them life, but his eerie yellow eyes were deeply troubled. “I’m not real good around new people.”

Drawing a breath, he looked at his brothers again and drew reassurance from their nearness. “I don’t know anything about you,” he quietly voiced his main concern, “and I don’t need to know anything you don’t want to tell, but I need to know a couple of things before I can give you my loyalty.” Because that’s what this was, really. Rose spoke of “tagging along” but it was more than that to Cypress, who takes everything way too seriously and occasionally gives his scribe heart palpitations because of it. This was a matter of pledging himself to trust and protect Rose way before he ever thought he’d be ready to. He reasoned that she was probably just as uncertain as he was, and that helped, but knowing that didn’t assuage his fears. “If you leave, even if it’s just for a walk, you have to tell someone,” he said. “I mean, not like we’re going to follow you, but if you up and leave without warning — ” Well, if that happened, Cypress wouldn’t welcome her back. He didn’t say that, though. “ — we’d worry something bad happened,” he said finally, and that was just as true. “We have time to learn each other,” he decided.