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I reached over and felt of it. And to my surprise, it was dry. The strange material had wicked away the water and the sun had warmed it. I pulled it over my head and Ray was right. I did feel better.
“What is it you have there?” I asked.
He glanced over his shoulder, and looked faintly relieved for some reason. Then he looked down at his catch. “Oh. Crab,” he explained, shaking the obviously dead creature. “I’m gonna enjoy cooking this bitch up. It almost took my nose off.”
“Can we cook?” I asked, as he squatted down by the river to clean his catch. The sun, or what passed for it here, was getting lower. It would be dark soon, and a fire would show our location all too well.
And that was assuming that the trees didn’t get us first.
Ray shrugged. “May as well. We have to have a fire anyway.” He thought about it. “That’s rule number five. Never sleep without a fire, especially not at water’s edge.”
“But if we light one, somebody might see us.”
“And if we don’t, something might eat us.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going on,” I pointed out.
He started to say something, but then looked up and saw my face. Or perhaps he read my mind, and picked up on some of the strange feeling I was having. Not fear exactly, but something approaching it. Anxiety? Was that the word?
“That’s the word,” Ray said. “And if you didn’t have any around here, you’d be either stupid or crazy.”
“All right,” I said.
“In Faerie, you gotta pick your battles,” he added, working on the fish. “Look, I’m not gonna lie to you and promise that we’re going to make it out of here, okay? I’m not gonna do that. But I will promise that tonight, we’ll do the eating.”
I felt my face crack, and then smile. Ray had a way with words. It wasn’t a conventional way, but it was a way.
“I’ll make the fire,” I said.
* * *
The meal was simple but good. Hunger is the best sauce, as someone once said, and I was very hungry. I ate all four of the fish, some of the dried fruit, and most of Ray’s crab. It had almost taken his nose off in an epic battle, so he had eaten some as a point of honor.
He had also drunk another pint of blood, reducing our stash to three, which told me how much healing he’d had to do earlier. A master shouldn’t have needed another feed so soon. Especially not with a family back on Earth to draw from.
“Can your family not supply you?” I asked, as I handed it over.
He rolled his eyes, which I was beginning to see as a favorite gesture, and poked our fire with a stick. He’d found some driftwood along the banks, so we had a good blaze. It was chilly now with the sun down, but the fire warmed not only us but the rock behind us. I thought we’d sleep comfortably enough.
“You seen my family, right?” he said, after a moment.
“Yes.”
“So, what do you think?”
I ate a fish eye. “I think they are too weak to help you, and that it is my fault.”
He looked up, the firelight splashing his face. “Why would it be your fault?”
“I am not a proper master. Neither is Dory. Your old master could give you power through the blood bond, but we cannot. As a result, your people draw from you, but you have no one to draw from in return. It weakens you.”
Ray picked at the mostly empty crab shell. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Is that not how you look at it?”
He shot me a look. “No.”
For a while, nothing else was said. The wood popped, the wind rustled through the treetops, and the water murmured over the stones. I looked up, and the rocky fingers seemed as if they were reaching out, to clutch the sky. There were stars visible, but no moon. I wondered if Faerie even had one, and felt a strange quiver at the thought that I didn’t know.
