CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

KULA WOKE UP to the smell of something delicious mid-toast and the smoke of a wood fire. Beneath her cheek the soft form of her mother’s chest was steadily breathing and under her outflung hand the ribcage of the centaur was rumbling in a way that she thought funny, though the funny didn’t make it near her face. She opened one eye cautiously, then the other. It was dawn. The figures she remembered from the night before were busy breaking camp. A skillet was over the campfire and the fat stallholder was bent over it intently, watching bubbles pop in the top of pancakes, a machete held aloft, ready to flip them over.

To his left the pale woman and the two monster people were busy in conversation as they polished and attended various weapons. She kept a long gaze on the painted tusker but he seemed engrossed in what he was doing, softened by his association with the warrior at his side, and none of them were paying attention to her. Carefully she pulled her hand off the centaur’s side and moved a bit to show that she was awake. A sense of disquiet and urgency kept colouring them all, but she thought it was different for each one of them.

Her mother sighed and went to get up. Kula stuck close. She was able to hear a little, through her mother, and as she concentrated this ability grew. She wasn’t used to listening but she thought it must be useful and her mother was still not awake, not properly. She was only a little bit aware and she had almost no understanding of what was going on, so Kula had to lead her out to the security of some bushes to make water and show her how to manage the clothes, then back to the camp to get something to eat. She didn’t have to have the food herself but she knew how not eating made these people suspicious and anyway, the smell was very good. It had been that smell, among others, which had brought her out of the fields to Taib Post in the first place.

She accepted two cakes from the stallholder, who gave her a well-meaning smile, a weary look that she knew meant she’d caused him trouble. She handed one on to Lysandra, shuffling the hot things in her fingers and trying not to laugh when Lysandra copied her as if it was an important part of the process. She copied the laugh too. Kula pulled a piece off her cake and popped it in her mouth. Lysandra mirrored her and then Lysandra’s eyes widened in surprise and she started grinning as she was eating and then she leapt up with joy and jumped around as Kula wanted to do but hadn’t, making noises of appreciation that startled everyone and pointing at her mouth and holding up the cake and shaking it as if it were the totem of a mighty spirit. The sun was just rising and it caught all the jewels in her hair and on her dress so that for a time she was a gyrating dancer of brilliant colour, graceless and exuberant, like a peculiar bird.

Eventually she spun to a halt and toppled down, sitting, smacking her lips and making much of the cake. When her eyes met Kula’s gaze they were so full of life and fiery joy that Kula felt her heart catch it too. She had been right. Her mother was not gone, she had only been missing for a while and now they had found one another again. She smiled and ate her cake, filled with happiness.