“Please. I need a break. Can we have a break before you do whatever it is you’re going to do to try to kill me?”
The woman shook her head.
Leo sighed.
“Come on with it then,” he said. He stretched out his hand in expectation.
The woman gestured to someone else behind the trees. It was another woman, this one older.
In her hands was a horn. It was just like the horn in the bag.
“I guess that makes sense,” said Leo. “What are you going to do with it? Gore me?”
The women shook their heads and said something to each other in their language.
The older woman held out the horn to Leo, keeping a careful distance from him.
Leo reached for it. Might as well get it over with.
The horn was filled with water.
“Water?” asked Leo.
The women shook their heads, but they gestured to him to drink.
Leo smelled it. It smelled of nothing, but for all he knew, it was filled with deadly poison.
He took a sip anyway. He was too tired to fight it, and Gods, was he thirsty.
It was water.
More men and women emerged from behind the trees. Leo tried to move away from them, but they came over to him slowly, gently, like they were approaching a frightened animal.
They brought some of the furs, and they wrapped them around Leo’s shoulders.
He shivered and pulled the furs closer to him.
The strangers touched his ears and whispered in their strange language. One of them tied something soft, a plant of some kind, to his ear that was bleeding from the arrow wound.
Then they led him into the trees. He followed them up a ramp and into a hut.
Inside was a set of furs for sleeping.
Leo looked at the strangers. They gestured for him to lie down.
He didn’t know what to do. He was scared and exhausted and had no idea whether to trust these people.
They gestured to the bed again. A child ran in, laughing, to show him how to lie down. She must have thought he didn’t know how. Then she got up and fluttered her wings to land on her father’s shoulders.
They weren’t going to hurt him. They wanted to help him.
Leo slowly lay down on the bed and cried.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
REFLECTIONS
Ceri
