Talfi admitted. Ranadar set down the arrow—bronze-tipped—and picked up another. They were sitting in the walled courtyard beside Mrs. Farley’s boardinghouse, where she kept a small garden and even a struggling rose arbor. Several quivers’ worth of arrows lay spilled across the dirt at the foot of the latter. Ranadar sighted along the second arrow, checking for imperfections. “What is hard?” he asked. Talfi chewed a thumbnail. Normally, he would have liked sitting in the shade of the arbor, doing nothing truly important, as long as he could do nothing important with Ranadar. The soft afternoon light gave the elf’s scarlet hair a startling luminescence, and his ivy green eyes sighted down the arrow with inhuman concentration. He was handsome and kind and it pierced Talfi’s heart when they were separated. He liked nothing more than to slip into bed at night with him and let their bodies mold together. Sometimes he felt he could stay like that for days.
