...
2
days later,
evening
dry days with showers mid night
"
it's wet, Al, the fire won't take to it."
Rufio dusted off her hands, mosses and damp clinging to her palms. The optimistic Wildmane tsked at her.
"The rain might not have seeped all the way in." Watch, study. Al took the role of tutor as he picked up the wrist-thick branch of dead-wood that Rufio had let thud to the ground. Using his hunting knife, a piece at the end was shorn off. Rufio peered over him dubiously, and startled when he thrust the branch upto her. "Here, put the end to your cheek."
Rufio gave him a look—I'm not that stupid—but he shook the branch. She sighed, sure she was about to walk into one of his jokes, then, snatching the branch from his hands she gave him a suspicious—if this is a joke I will hit you—look, before she placed the end of the wood to her cheek.
"Mmh?"
Alar'ck rolled his eyes. "Is it dry at the core?"
"Oh! Um..." Rufio closed her eyes for a tick, feeling the bark, scratchy and fibrous—"It is."
She frowned and cocked her head as she held the branch back out for him to take—"But it's soaked in around the bark, and just under." What meaning?
Alar'ck grinned his fox-like grin, which made Rufio narrow her eyes suspiciously again. He explained in a silly, faux voice—"Aha, you see, my deary, we split the damp wood from the dry and, o-ho o-ho, there we have it! Dry kindling."
He made the sign for 'zibri-head' at Rufio.
His cousin stared at him a tick—feeling like a zibri-head—before she rose a hand and—smack—"Ow!"—Alar'ck was left rubbing the back of his head, chuckling impishly as his cousin wandered off to gather more damp branches.
The showers had let up as the day wore on.
Rufio sat on a fur with a small pile of branches beside her. She took her kopis in her hand and shimmied it until her palm find a comfortable grip on the leather-bound handle.
Taking up a mossy branch, she wedged it between her feet, set the kopis' sharp blade into the end, and then, with a rock she had found, hammered the kopis' through the wood.
In this way she split the damp bark from the drier branch core. It took a quarter-bell to get through the foraged branches and her palms itched as she went—chafing lightly.
Grandmother Raen sat in her furs a little ways away, watching the East. Watching for Tal'ck. Rufio could hear her grandmother's teeth chattering and felt for the elder.
Winter was hard on her bones.
"Grand-mama-" Rufio called to the elder, who then turned to see what her son's daughter was up to. The grandmother let the corners of her mouth turn down in an impressed frown and teased—"Uh, is this Rufio I see making herself useful, huh, huh?"
Rufio threw her grandmother a wry look, and took a piece of dry-wood back into her hands. She settled it along her thigh, took the kopis, and ran its blade down the shaft carefully—shaving off thin wafers of wood for kindling. A smile laced in her freckled features as she worked away.
"Ah!"—her grandmother cried out happily—"Laiha and Al, good, good, it is getting dark."
The elder creaked and groaned as she hauled her aching bones to her feet, where then she hobbled over to swat her granddaughter impatiently. Hurry, hurry- "-with that fire, child. It is getting cold."
Rufio waved off her grandmother and slid onto her knees to dig a shallow impression into the dirt with her hands. The dirt was moist, and felt soft—as her fingers clawed the earthy scent filled her lungs. She heard the hooves of her cousins returning from their bells' hunting.
"You not got that fire going yet Rufio?" Taunted Al.
Laiha smacked his arm to defend her older cousin, before she dismounted
"Grandmama, we eat good tonight."—the teen gushed triumphantly, as she greeted her grandmother with a fierce hug.
Rufio watched with a sad smile.
Laiha had not stopped showering her family with these deep embraces since the pirate attack. It was as if she were afraid she would lose the family she had left any moment she turned from them or closed her eyes.
Alar'ck stomped over to Rufio's meek almost-fire, and plonked himself down beside her with a bundle of three rabbits in his hands. He set about skinning and gutting them. Rufio swept her wood chippings into the pit she'd made and then retrived a bundle of dry-grass out from a sack in the wagon.
Under Alar'ck's watchful (and slightly off-putting) gaze, Rufio struck flint and steel close to the bundle of grasses—sparks flew and dyed on the damp ground. Adjusting the lay of her hands, Rufio struck again. Again the sparks fell away from the kindling. With a frustrated snort, she struck again. Again. Again. Again.
At last!—the sparks caught in the kindling. Rufio threw down her flint, and gently lifted the bundle of smoking kindling in the palms of her hand. Cradling it, as if precious, she blew gently on the glowing embers nestled within. They fed on her breath, a tiny flame licked into life.
"Quick Rufio." Alar'ck encouraged gently.
Laiha had come to crouch on the other side of the fire-pit, and Rufio glanced at her with an appreciative smile as she nestled the fiery bundle into the dry shavings. Together they took turns to breath slowly and firmly on the tiny fire—until its flames licked hotter and devoured the tinder. Laiha passed Rufio small bits of the wood she had split—and Rufio tentatively fed these to the fire.
Steadily, surely, the fire grew—nurtured by Rufio as she fed it sticks, then branches.
"Get the fuel, Lai-lai." Al nodded towards the wagon, where they tended to keep their horses' and goats' pungent waste in a tightly woven basket. Laiha hopped up and covered her nose as she took the lid off.
With a heavy clay jug, she scooped out the dried manure and carried it at arms' length to the crackling fire. Rufio watched her and felt her humour tickled.
She laughed and shook her head. Laiha scrunched her nose at Rufio, before handing her the jug handle. Rufio took it with a giggle, and used the point of the kopis to shovel a chunk into the fire. The flames licked around it, tasting, and then encroached on it hungrily. Rufio smiled, feeling pride bristle as she got to her feet, her back popping noisily.
Alar'ck chuckled and nodded his head. "Well done, kiddo."
Grandmama Raen shuffled close to the fire and held her hands out to its warmth. "Yes, Rufio." praise. It was strange for Grandma Raen to show appreciation, of any sort, except on food.
Rufio's gaze danced to her with curious surprise.
Thoughts of Laiha's oddly uncharacteristic displays of affection trickled through her mind as she made sense of her grandmother's gesture. Here, Rufio began to notice the shifts in her families dynamics, suddenly, and her heart winced a little. These were the subtle hints of scars that trauma and grief and fear etched into the spirit.
As Alar'ck skewered and set the rabbit-meat above the flames, a silence seeped into the din. The Wildmanes' thoughts rippled worry beneath the cheery surface.
Tal'ck had still not come back.
It had been three days since they'd seen him ride off into the grasses.
"He'll find us in The Web."
Laiha murmured, startling them all. She brushed her flaxen hair out of her face and tossed her long braids over her shoulder in defiantly loyal belief.
"He'll come back..."
Alar'ck shifted uncomfortably where he sat on his furs. Grandma Raen stared into the fire, silent and cold and unmoving as stone. Rufio's deep gaze glanced at each of them, and then settled on her little cousin's hopeful, freckled features.
The flames crackled, and a spark hissed into the twilight sky.
"Course he will."
Rufio smiled and squeezed her hand reassuringly, feeling her words aging her years beyond herself, she was reminded of her mother.
A strider stomped their hooves and snorted by the wagon, that quiet noise comforting in the wilderness to them. Alar'ck took in a deep whiff of the rabbits and hummed, even as Laiha's stomach grumbled loudly. Laughter bubbled from the Wildmanes. Grandmother Raen uplifted it farther with her matriarchal demanding—"Are ye waiting for your grandmother to starve to skin and bones, don't dilly-dally! gi' uz this meat."
Rufio chuckled quietly, as Alar'ck pleaded his grandmother to hold her horses just a chime. Laiha was smiling, too.
Rufio felt relieved by the normalcy of it—
—And yet, she couldn't help herself gazing out at the shadows swirling beyond the reach of the fire-light. Wondering how the Wildmanes would survive this season without the sure and steady, plodding, wise leadership of their Ankal.
A steely resolve was slowly forging in the pit of her gut, which tasted sharp, cutting, unbidden and taboo. Its metallic hiss resonating in her thoughts—she would not let the remnants of the Wildmanes sink under the weight of her Ankal's grief. He sought solitude, fine—but he could not abandon his herd.
The half-Drykas didn't know it yet, but there was a storm brewing within her.
Tal'ck would not abandon his family
because
she would not
let
him.
