"Why does he work so hard and give so much for a stranger like me?"
Eira didn't try to answer Princess Jocelynn's question immediately. It wasn't that she didn't have thoughts of her own about the Cypress Knight. She had several. But if today had taught her anything, it was that the simple, humble knight who had once been a kitchen boy defied being put into easy categories.
She hadn't understood that at first, but today taught her that she'd been wrong about many of her initial impressions. It was only toward the end of the day that she found something that felt like a piece of common ground with the young witch. One that left her feeling both sad and worried for her friend Morwen, who hoped to attract Sir Ollie's affections.
"I think that Sir Ollie is more complicated than he appears to be," Eira said after several moments. "Not because he plots and schemes the way noblemen do, but because he slices up the world like a pie, and he's not the same person in every slice."
