Guruk plucked the pen from my hand.
I turned to protest and found him watching me with that expression; the one I still hadn't found the right word for. Theone that made me feel like the most seen and loved person in any world.
He held out a flower to me with the hand not holding my pen prisoner. Small, pale blue, with a center like a yellow star. He must have picked it somewhere in the trees without my noticing.
“Don't write it down,” he said, tucking the flower behind my ear.
I sucked in my lower lip. The urge to scribe the journey hit me hard. I knew it was a coping mechanism, a way to control the uncontrollable. Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, “I wasn't going to.”
His eyebrows rose.
I sighed. “Really. No writing.”
He handed my pen back. I clipped it to my notebook.
As we turned back toward the path, I noticed Guruk pause at the meadow’s eastern edge. He crouched low, the same motion he made when checking an animal’s tracks on the farm. He was quiet and focused, his big hand hovering just above the grass without touching it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing of note.” He straightened and fell into step with me, his expression easy. “A deer, perhaps.”
I accepted that and walked on. He knew this land far better than I did. Though the urge to catalog it in my journal buzzed at me. I ignored the itch and placed my hand in Guruk’s much larger one. The warmth of his palm pressing into mine.
“It is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I smiled up at him as Berry came to rest on his shoulder once more.
“With you,” he smiled back, “every day is perfect.”
I blushed, and we walked on, east, into the golden afternoon, the meadow humming softly at our backs.
4
Whispers in the Woods
Guruk
A scent of turned earth permeated the air, carrying on the breeze before the path curved to reveal its cause.
“Mudslide,” I said aloud, though no words were needed.
The damage was significant. The hillside had collapsed in an arching sweep, raw and dark with moisture, the displaced stones sitting where they had fallen with no moss yet to soften them.Recent, then. Days at most.
I studied it with the eye of one who had spent enough seasons watching the land shift to know what fresh disruption looked like. My fields I knew intimately, every low patch that flooded, every stretch of soil that ran thin over rock. This road I knew less well, only as far as my lumber trade had ever taken me, which was to the village market and no further east than that. But I knew disturbed earth. And this had not been here long.
“Dungeon fork number one,” Sammy said, sweeping her gaze over the chaos, her notebook already open against her forearm.She had been sketching before I finished looking. The mudslide was rendered in her quick, intent lines, bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Wait it out or we go around?”
“We go around.”
“That was fast.” She glanced up at me. “Do you know another way?”
“I know the valley drops southeast from here.” I studied the trees, orienting myself from the position of the sun and the slope of the land the way my father had taught me — reading a landscape from its bones rather than its roads. “There will be a path through. These hills have been settled long enough that no obstacle goes unnoticed for long.”
“That's less ‘I know the way’ and more ‘I have a strong feeling about the way’, Guruk,” she said, with a quirk of her lips.
“I am an orc, Sammy,” I said. “I read land. I know the land.”
She considered this with a tilt of her head. “Alright. Lead the way, my orc.”
I led the way with her claiming of “my orc” ringing in my ears. It would never get old. Nor would her trust in me, freely given. It still moved something inside me every time. My chest expanded as if filled with the power of the land itself, or rather, my little human’s love.
