Dante eyed the mare’s raised foreleg cautiously, not knowing her well enough to guess if she was prepared to attack him if she felt threatened. His coat was littered with scars all over, most gathered from clumsiness rather than battle, but she didn’t know that. Yet, despite his rugged appearance, he would be easily driven away if it came to violence—he wouldn’t fight back against a young lady.

Not without a very good reason, at least. Perhaps it was better that the stranger was the non-violent type.

He stood, tense and anxious, in silence as he watched the mare begin to visibly relax. He could see even from a distance her frame shrink back down to its normal size as the tension dissipated from her muscles. He could hear her excited breaths slow and calm down before the stranger spoke at last.

At first Dante listened with his usual, laid-back and calm attitude, watching her carefully, but her accusations sparked a small flame of childish indignation in his chest. He resented being scolded for not only something he had not done, but something that she herself had just committed right before his eyes. He also cringed away from his new nickname, ‘demon’, missing Maltese’s affectionate call of ‘flame-boy’.

“I was stood here the whole time,” he replied slowly, controlling the tone of his voice, though his expression was crumpled in light annoyance. He felt all at once a child again, especially in the company of another mare so close to his own, youthful age. “You are the one who crawled out of the ocean onto my beach!”

He was unable to keep the indignant tone out of his voice as he finished, being careful to include the childish gloat over his own territory. He tossed his tangled, red forelock out of his eyes to fix his visitor with a half playful, half serious one-eyed stare.

DANTE
a man possessed of some radical notions