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“Oh no,” I comment, feeling empathy and sadness for him. “I didn’t know it was hurting you.”
“I’m not the best at sharing my pain with others.” He squats by the fire and begins to roast the meat.
That part I can believe. Part of him seems very shut down like he’s built a wall around a part of his past. I watch him cook the meat and shift my weight on the rock, accidentally hitting my gash on the hard stone.
“Shit!” I exclaim as I wince and reach for my injury.
“What?” he asks quickly, putting the meat down and rushing to me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just….” I inhale sharply and scrunch my face at the pain. “I bumped it on the rock; it just hurt a lot.”
He takes my leg in his hands and turns it slightly to inspect it. His hands are warm, and he handles it gently. A rush shoots through my body from his touch, and I try to shove the feeling out of my mind again.
“It’s infected badly.” He puts it down and gazes up at me with his deep amber eyes as he sighs. “We shouldn’t walk for a while. You need to rest, and we need to tend to our wounds. We should stay here while we can. You need a break….” He looks at the ground. “And I do, too.”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “That makes sense; we can stay.”
I agree with his statement, but I really think that the last place I want to be is a cave. What Ishouldbe doing is separating myself from him to get these wild thoughts under control. I worry that I won’t be able to deal with his presence well for much longer if I keep slipping into this delusion.
A human can’t have feelings for an orc, and it goes against our nature and our history with them. Orcs have killed my kind before, and even though I don’t believe Hurian would ever harm me, I also know I must not be his type.
I remind myself that he’s helping me because he knows I can’t survive alone, and I can’t act on these thoughts at the risk of making things awkward. Getting rejected in the first place would be very difficult, but losing the partner that’s kept me alive this long would leave me alone and probably dead in the woods.
I watch him as he returns to the fire and continues cooking the meat. I wonder why he rushed to my side when I exclaimed about my leg. He didn’t have to do that; he could have stayed by the fire like he usually would have.
The thought crosses my mind that he might think the same things I am. I roll my eyes and quietly chuckle at myself, realizing how insane the notion is…but is it?
15
HURIAN
“Did that tree do something personally to you, or…?”
One more blow of my ax sends the small oak tree cascading down to the ground, and I might preen a bit when I see Dana’s eyebrows raise in admiration. She’s looking healthier after a bit of rest. Less wan. But she still makes a face as she sits on the newly formed tree stump.
“It’s for the table.” I pull the tree down a bit, closer to the stream. And then I wait, listening. The human tribe is still close enough that I have to worry about potential scouts, or whatever they might call themselves. I’m not eager for Dana to become their next human sacrifice.
“Oh, of course, the table. What cave doesn’t have a table?” Dana nods toward our temporary shelter. “I thought we weren’t supposed to make too much noise?”
The wood splinters as I haul the ax down again. I’d prefer to cut it more evenly, but I’ll have to make do with the tools I have on hand.
Dana watches me work for a moment before speaking again. “So, I’m not a master craftsman or anything, but how are you supposed to make a table without nails?”
“Splines.”
“And those are…”
If it were anyone else, these prying comments would drive me insane. But it’s nice, hearing her voice. Sharing. I answer her in bursts, between chopping the tree into long pieces.
“They’re like nails, but made of wood. I’ll carve them so that they twist around. Typically, we’d add an adhesive to the joints, but unless you know of any particularly sticky plants around here, we’ll stick to what we have.”
Dana looks thoughtful. “Did you save the boar hooves? We could boil them down.”
I shake my head. I wanted to keep them for a stew, but they wouldn’t have kept long enough. It’s a small miracle we were able to smoke as much of the boar’s meat as we could, and it’ll have to keep us until Dana’s healthy enough to travel again.
“We won’t be here long enough to need it, anyway.”
That’s the mantra I keep using as the day progresses, but somehow I find myself fashioning a broom and sweeping the cave clean, and the wood is used for a table and a rough palette that we fashion into a bed, heaping furs and anything soft on top we can find.
