Sleepy Fox Hollow Where I thought I knew it all before I knew what love was

Vhen you left, you took home vith you!

Mahler couldn't know how keen the edge of the knife he'd just thrust at her was. His booming voice snapped her back to reality but it was mostly the former that made her falter from him, the sharp edges of her walls crumbling for just an instant. It was a dual-edged sword that he pressed to her throat in that moment, for not only did it spear to the very heart of her wrongdoing against him, but also to the very reason Wylla was here in the first place.

He pressed his face into her personal space and she yearned for nothing more than to strike him, but a faint tremble cut through her instead while her eyes filled with sudden, unwanted tears. I am lost without you, she thought, and it was her dark, wild daughter who crossed her mind then; Tiercel, too, had taken Wylla's home when she left to travel the world, and it was that sense of loss that drove her back to these accursed wilds.

He would not miss or mistake the sheen in her eyes, not that close, and the embarrassment of letting her guard down for just one moment stoked the flames in Wylla to critical mass. Her lips peeled back in a snarl as she asked, mocking, so, what now, you want me to marry you or something?! We barely even knew each other, so you don't know what you're talking about!

And maybe, just maybe, there was a part of her that was hopelessly romantic; maybe there was another part who believed she was unworthy of being loved by anyone, much less this man whom she had scorned time and time again, yet met her with an admirable amount of patience. She didn't feel the same way, though now that the door was open, perhaps there could be something there ... but not while Wylla continued to surround her heart with thorns.

She growled in his face and whirled some distance away, blinking furiously against the tears in her eyes and trying to hastily compose herself enough to return to sarcastic barbs and hateful words; he did not want Mahler piercing further into her psyche than he already had.