Fool’s Quest

I tried to think of skills that might save us. I could fight with a knife. A little bit. If I could get one. And if there was only one person to fight. I knew something they didn’t know. They spoke to me as if I were a much younger child. I had not said anything to correct them. I had not said much to any of them, at all. That might be useful. I could not think how, but it was a secret I knew that they did not. And secrets could be weapons. I had read that, or heard that. Somewhere.

The sleepiness rolled over me again, putting blurred edges on the world. Something in the soup, or the fog man, or both. Don’t struggle, Wolf-Father warned me. Don’t let them know that you know.

I took a deep breath and feigned a yawn that suddenly became real. Odessa was crawling into the tent behind me. I spoke in a sleepy voice. “They look at Shun in a bad way. Those men. They give me dark dreams. Cannot Dwalia make them stay away?”

“Dark dreams,” Odessa said in soft dismay.

I held very still inside myself. Had I gone too far? She said nothing more and I dropped to my knees, crawled across the spread bedding, and burrowed under it adjacent to Shun. Beneath the blankets, I wriggled out of the bulky fur coat, crawling out the bottom instead of unbuttoning it, and bundled it into a pillow. I closed my eyes almost all the way and let my breathing slow. I watched her through my eyelashes. Odessa stood still for a long time, watching me. I felt she was deciding something.

She went away, letting the tent flap drop behind her. That was unusual. Usually when Shun and I settled to sleep, Odessa lay down beside us. We were seldom out of her sight, save when Dwalia was watching over us. Now we were alone. I wondered if that meant it was our chance to escape. It might be. It might be our only chance. But my body was warming, and I felt heavy. My thoughts moved more and more slowly. I raised my hand beneath the covers and reached for Shun. I would wake her, and we would crawl out under the tent side. Into the cold and the snow. I didn’t like cold. I liked warmth and I needed sleep. I was so weary, so sleepy. My hand fell, short of reaching Shun, and I did not have the will to lift it again. I slept.

I woke as if I were a swimmer surfacing from water. No. More like a bit of wood that bobbed to the surface because it had to. My body shed sleep and I sat up, clear-minded. Dwalia was sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. Odessa knelt slightly behind her and to one side. I looked over at Shun. She slept on, apparently oblivious to what was going on. What was going on? I blinked my eyes and caught a flash of something at the corner of my eye. I turned to look, but there was nothing there. Dwalia was smiling at me, a kind and reassuring smile. “Everything is fine,” she said comfortingly. By which I knew that it was not.

“I just thought that we should talk, so you understand that you do not have to fear the men who guard us. They will not hurt you.”

I blinked my eyes and in the moment before they focused on Dwalia, I saw him. The fog man was sitting in the corner of the tent. I slowly, slowly shifted my gaze in that direction, moving only my eyes. Yes. He was beaming a fatuous smile at me, and when his eyes met mine, he clapped his hands happily. “Brother!” he exclaimed. He laughed heartily, as if we had just shared a wondrous joke. The way he smiled at me let me know that he wanted me to love him as much as he already loved me. No one had loved me that openly since my mother had died. I did not want his love. I stared at him, but he continued to smile at me.

Dwalia scowled, just for an instant, her buttery face melting into sharp disapproval. When I looked at her directly, her smile was in place. “Well,” she said, as if glad of it, “I see that our little game is finished now. You see him, don’t you, Shaysim? Even though our Vindeliar is doing his best, his very best, to be hidden?”

Praise, a question, and a rebuke were all twisted together in that question. The boy’s moon-face only grew jollier. He wriggled from side to side, a happy dumpling of a boy. “Silly. Silly. My brother looks with a different kind of eyes. He sees me. He’s seen me, oh, since we were in the town. With the music and the sweet food and the people dancing.” He scratched his cheek thoughtfully, and I heard the sound of shorn whiskers against his nails. So he was older than I thought, but still boyish. “I wished we had that festival to keep, with dancing and singing and eating sweet things. Why are we not a festival folk, Lingstra?”

“We are not, my lurik. That is the answer. That we are not, just as we are neither cows nor thistles. We are the Servants. We stay to the path. We are the path. The path we walk is for the good of the world.”