Stone Circle but why do I lie awake each night thinking

She must have said something right because the boy called Aquillius wheezes into bone dry laughter- which she first mistakes as a cough before she recognizes the smile playing on his lips.

Frightful was… right. He was war-torn, had that aggressive look- the sort of creature Tauris would have known not to cross in the freelands. But there was youth underneath all that crosshatched marring, and when he tilts his face into the day she sees finally the color of his eye. Sunlight.

“How old are you?” She asks, seeing as he hadn’t so far been dissuaded by her curiosity.