Kared's Children - Chapter 12

Meanwhile Aleda prowled among the prairie grasses.

Damon leaned back against her pack, as she had done, and contemplated the evening sky. It had been a long, tiring, eventful day. Though they’d only traveled for one, it seemed as though they’d been walking for many. He was far from his home, far from anything in distance and time and experience that he ever had been able to think of as home. He’d watched the Keike from the city when he was young and trained in it along its edges as he’d gotten older, but never gone this far into it. He’d never traveled to Creg. Never stopped at any of the villages on the other side of the Keike Plain. Never ventured north into the Badlands.

But since that time, which seemed now to him to have been such an innocent, protected time, he’d fought creatures he’d never seen before-and one, virtually a slave, was cowering and muttering not far away. It was a good sign, a good start to their journey. And though they’d almost been killed, they hadn’t been killed. They’d survived, and for now, that they still were alive was all that mattered. That and his tiredness.

He must have dozed because Aleda suddenly was beside him, looking at him wordlessly while she reached into the backpack. She extracted the small black pot she’d used for him, whenever it was, that morning or the day before or a week. She set something beside the pack on the ground: four bulbous roots. Three of them were round and fat; the fourth was red and spiky.

She looked blankly at him and set the pot on the ground in plain view of Reek, then dropped the round roots into the pot and beat them with the pommel of her dagger. She ground the roots into a paste and squirted water from her waterskin into the pot. She stirred the concoction with the blade of her dagger, then offered the pot to Damon.

He looked at the oily mixture distastefully.

"Mmm," she said. She motioned as though he should drink it.

He took the pot and lifted it to his nose. It had no smell. Lumps of the roots floated in the water.

"Mmm," she repeated.

He made as though to give the pot back to her, but she frowned suddenly, ferociously.

"Mmm," she said.

Reek was watching them.

Damon lifted the pot to his lips and drank. The mixture was sweet and only slightly oily. He drank a little more.

Aleda’s fingers touched the pot.

Damon lowered it and gave it back to her.

She drank from it. With a hand hidden from Reek, blocked by her body, she crumbled the spiky root into the pot and swirled the mixture around. She smiled and nodded at Damon; her gaze lingered on his eyes. Then she offered the pot to Reek.

Reek croaked something Damon didn’t understand. The Graywillow didn’t reach for the pot. Reek said something else.

"Gruk kimur," Damon understood. The Graywillow was asking what the mixture was.

Aleda motioned with the pot toward her lips and then offered it again toward Reek. The Graywillow spoke again, a soliloquy Damon didn’t follow and which Aleda because of her throat couldn’t translate. She shook her head and set the pot near Reek, but not too near. She glanced at Damon and, casually, nonchalantly, pulled out a whetstone and began rubbing it in tight circles against the blade of her dagger. Her message was clear: she’d forgotten about Reek and the pot.