“Tamass,” Mary said, “your father gave you to a northern plains tribe allied to your mother’s people. Only the tribal chief knew who you really were, and she promised to love you and raise you as her own son. He entrusted your safety to the spirits and called on your daemon cousin Hazel to keep you out of trouble.
Paul listened without comment. Demons and daemons. Were they the same thing? Similar? Surely not. Hazel was lovely, while the demons that destroyed his house were the stuff of nightmares.
“Paul, he took you into the world of Water, where he entrusted your safety to the orphanage people and asked Bob and me to watch over you. We were the only ones who really knew you, and we’ve loved you as the son we could never have.”
He’d never seen old Bob and Mary naked before. He’d never thought about them naked. Somewhere in their mid-sixties, they were still solidly muscular, lithe, and showing dark body hair in all the normal places.
As the sun had glinted above the flat eastern horizon, they’d climbed the rocky hillside at a steady pace in human form and hadn’t seemed in the least bit bothered by their nudity.
Paul’s first thought had been that this showed them in a completely new light. His second thought, hot on its heels, was that they were the shapeshifting Beasts of Bodmin for goodness sake so what was a bit of nudity among friends?
Twenty-four hours ago he would have been embarrassed. Now it didn’t matter at all, as long as they were safe and unharmed.
They’d accepted a blanket each from Karen, and taken thirsty drinks of water from the bottles offered, and huddled down with the others to await Hazel’s return.
Paul hugged each of them in their blankets, and then read the legend to them.
Now they were completing the story as far as they knew it.
“For years we hoped that Jaun had escaped Baron Rake’s demons,” Mary said. “We kept telling each other he’d have to lie low for years before he could come for you in safety.”
Bob nodded sadly. “Eventually, we had to accept that he must have been caught.”
Hazel arrived on horseback, accompanied by two young Tokki men leading seven saddled horses behind their own mounts.
While the strangers took care of the horses, Hazel greeted Bob and Mary again with respect and handed them a small pile of garments, which they put on while everyone found somewhere else to look.
When the Thornes were clothed and settled, Hazel opened another of her saddlebags to distribute freshly baked bread rolls filled with melted butter and tasty bite-sized flakes of smoked fish. “Our food for today is a gift from Ortz. There are some buttered rolls without fish for you, Karen.”
Paul touched Mary’s arm. “You mentioned a Baron?”
She answered between big hungry bites of bread and fish. “What does the legend say? A demon master of Fire? Jaun called him Baron Rake.”
“You never knew what our father’s dangerous secret was?”
“No.”
“It must have died with him.”
“Well, possibly. Or possibly not.” Sted dropped his turban into his lap and gave his scruffy balding scalp a vigorous scratch.
Karen and Paul shared a quick amused glance.
Tamass roused himself from a thoughtful silence. “Do you think you could discover more?”
“I can certainly try. It would be a start if we could trace your father’s movements before he went on the run.” He regarded Bob and Mary as he twisted the elaborate turban around his head again then polished the big purple stone in its brooch and pinned it back into place. “Can you help us with that?”
They exchanged a steady look, then slow blinks, as if agreeing silently to trust everyone with the knowledge they’d kept secret for forty years.
“Micca and Jaun came to find us in our place of safety,” Mary said, “where they’d left us a year earlier after we’d journeyed together for some time, dealing in information. We’d been unable to start the family we’d hoped for, but Micca was pregnant and Jaun asked us to protect her while he followed a dangerous lead. When he returned two months later, demons were hot on his trail and we had to run.”
Mary’s careful choice of words showed how difficult she was finding it to throw off her habitual cloak of secrecy.
Karen asked gently, “Returned from where?”
“The Norse lands.”
It was Tamass and Sted’s turn to exchange a significant look.
“I wonder,” Tamass mused.
“It would make as much sense as many other theories,” Sted replied. “More than most.”
“Hello?” Paul said. “Care to share your thoughts with the rest of us?”
Tamass explained. “Demon attacks on northern countries during the final months of the war. We were fighting, half a world away. All the armies of the world were with us in the desert lands, pushing the Ba nation back inside its own borders again.
“We kept hearing word of slash-and-burn attacks on northern countries by an army of Ba’s demon mercenaries. They destroyed all the Norse settlements first, then moved west through the Twin Seas towns, south through the coastal settlements, and then farther west again, right across the territories of the plains tribes.
“Few escaped, except for a handful of communities like those two newly rebuilt towns down behind us, whose people fled out to sea in boats and watched their homes burning in the night.”
There was nothing like this in Paul’s books.
“The demon army destroyed hundreds of towns and many thousands of people,” Tamass continued. “They wiped out entire societies. Including my mother’s people, the De Danann.”
“And my people,” Sted said. “The Scoti. No one understood the demon strategy. In eighteen years of war the northern countries had remained free from conflict on their own land. Apart from the Norse navy, who were right in the thick of it with us, they’d all had an easy war. They supported our cause, but so did many others. There seemed no reason for such a savage wave of destruction across defenceless lands when the hostilities were nearly over.
“During the peace negotiations, Ba generals and diplomats denied any knowledge of what lay behind the demon attacks. Even now, four years later, no one knows.”
Tamass tapped a repetitive fingertip rhythm on his sword handle, and stared into the distance. “Maybe the demons did have their own agenda. Everyone in the world could see that Ba was going to lose the war. Maybe Baron Rake directed the demon mercenaries to abandon Ba to its defeat, and search for the source of our father’s secret.”
“Maybe.” Sted selected a horse and swung up into its saddle. “I’ll go ahead. I’m no use to you here, when I could be studying my maps and texts at home. I’ll meet you back in Ys.” With a perfunctory wave of his hand, he rode away.
Paul caught Hazel’s wry smile. “Wizards,” she said. “Any excuse to travel alone. He doesn’t like my windows, but would never dream of showing me his own thin places.”
Tamass smiled too. “Nandi’s people have a saying: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
“Nandi’s people are wise.” Hazel watched Bob and Mary sitting on a flat rock, leaning against each other’s supporting shoulders. “Do you need to rest before we set off? We can afford two or three hours, if you need them.”
The old couple got to their feet and stretched like cats. “We’ll need to rest some time,” Bob said. “But not now. We’ll all be safer when we’ve put some good distance between us and last night. What’s our route?”
“The window is a day’s ride to the west, and we’ll camp there overnight before going through in the morning. Ys is well-guarded.” She winked. “That’s the Tamass Effect. So we don’t want to arrive unexpectedly in the evening twilight and make any city wall archers nervous.”
Paul wondered if Ys would be as magnificent as it was in his books. “Will the window take us right into Ys?”
“No. Thin places are strictly regulated since the war. No city or town in the world will allow one to exist within its walls nowadays. Dissolving them has become a lucrative sideline for wizards. Our window will take us to within an hour’s walk from the city gate.”
She surveyed the group. “Is everyone ready? Shall we get going?”
Paul had never ridden a horse before. He didn’t like not being in control of the big beast, and was glad they were only moving at a walking pace over the rough grassland.
Tamass took the lead. Hazel rode behind him, then Paul and Karen in single file. Behind Karen rode Bob and Mary, side-by-side, and at the rear were the two Tokki men who would take all the horses home when they reached Hazel’s thin place.
Everyone else looked perfectly at ease in the saddle, so Paul was surprised, an hour into the journey, when Karen eased her horse in beside his and said, “Takes some getting used to, this. My bum’s going to ache tomorrow.”
He winced. “Mine too.”
She lowered her voice. “Did you hear what Tamass called his people?”
“Yes.” Paul frowned. “Can’t remember.”
“De Danaan.”
“That’s it. Irish folklore, I think.”
“Yes. In our world, the Tuatha De Danaan was the tribe of the goddess Danu. They ruled Ireland for thousands of years, until the uprising of the Milesian tribe, which divided Ireland in two. Above ground was given to the Milesians, whose descendants are the Irish people of today, and the Underworld was given to the De Danaan. Also, the De Danaan formed an association with creatures called the Sidhe, who were the original fairies, and who possessed keys to magical doors between the realms.”
She raised an eyebrow and inclined her head in Hazel’s direction. “Remind you of anyone?”
This was why Paul admired Karen so much. As well as being a renowned expert in her professional work, she brought the same energy and depth of knowledge to her hobby. She was making links between things he wouldn’t expect to be related.
She hadn’t finished. “In this world, the De Danaan is a real tribe. Or it was, until the demon army wiped it out four years ago. Your father left baby Tamass with them. He’s a product of their society and culture.”
It all sounded reasonable.
“So an ancient mythology in our world turns out to be real life in this one. I wonder how many other mythologies entered our world the same way. Seeped through from here, sort of thing.”
“Lots, probably. What did Sted say his people were called?”
“The Scoti.”
“He doesn’t sound Scottish.”
“Any more than Tamass sounds Irish. Scoti was what the Roman legions called all the northern British tribes two thousand years ago, but who knows where the Romans first heard the name? To me, Tamass and Sted both sound the way old European Americans are thought to have spoken. You know, from the early days in the conquest of the New World, when settlers spoke English with accents similar to the ones they’d left behind in their old countries. Tamass and Sted put me in mind of old-fashioned Suffolk or something.”
That was something Paul hadn’t thought of until now. “How come they all speak English?”
“They probably speak many languages elsewhere in this world. And maybe English isn’t Tamass and Sted’s first language, but they’re speaking it now for our benefit.”
“Ortz, too.”
“Yes. His native language might be related to French. I’m going to pick Hazel’s brains about this stuff.” She made one of those “Gk-gk” noises inside her cheek and nudged her mount ahead.
Whatever she said about not being used to riding, she looked a lot more comfortable on a horse than Paul felt.
Scrubland rolled away in every direction, beneath an immense pale blue sky that blended into deeper blues above the horizons. The air smelled fresh, and the wind carried different scents of vegetation. It tasted clean. The green and yellow land was never flat, but rarely rose more than a few feet above the average level. It was like a solid sea with untidy waves. Even the spine of rocky hills where they’d spent the night had slipped below the horizon behind them.
Bob and Mary smiled when Paul twisted around to look back, and they nudged their horses apart to make room for his when he gave a tentative drag on its reins.
“Thank you for saving us last night.” He looked left and right at their friendly faces. “Thank you for protecting me all these years.”
Mary wrinkled her nose.
“It’s been an honour,” Bob said. “It still is.”
“So.” Paul couldn’t stop his lips from curling into a mischievous grin. “What about those Beasts of Bodmin, eh?’
Mary snorted. “You have no idea how many times we wondered if you suspected. You were always so interested whenever we were on the news.”
“Not once. The thought never entered my mind. I didn’t even know if you really existed, although I always wanted to believe you did.”
They leaned forward in their saddles and shared a grin past him.
“I’m just glad none of those hunters ever caught you.”
“Ha!” Bob’s scornful bark turned heads further up the column. “Not a chance!”
“Says the bold boy who kept getting his photograph in the newspapers,” Mary said.
“Bloody camera phones are too good these days. Still never got close enough for a decent picture of me, did they?”
“Hmm.” Mary studied the horizon.
Bob rolled his eyes.
Paul had never seen this bantering side of the old couple before. In the past, they must have always kept it as something private between them. It was as if they’d found a new freedom after last night. Love swelled in his heart.
The breeze carried a rumble of thunder, but the sky was clear in every direction.
Tamass held up his hand, and all the horses stopped. Paul didn’t even have to pull on the reins. His horse stopped when Bob and Mary stopped theirs either side of him, as Tamass, sitting tall in his saddle, produced his brass telescope and studied the northern horizon.
The thunder sounded distant, but constant. Paul wasn’t sure how much of it he was hearing through the air and how much through the ground. He followed everyone else’s gaze and saw a horizontal dust cloud rising along the flat line between land and sky. “What is it?”
“Bison,” Bob said.
“I’ve never seen them before.”
“Best seen from a distance when they’re on the move.”
The cloud moved slowly from east to west on the horizon. “There must be hundreds of them.”
“Thousands.” Bob leaned forward to shoot a fierce grin at Mary. “Makes my heart happy to see bison again.”
“Mine too,” she agreed. “As you say, though, from a distance.”
Up ahead, Tamass snapped his telescope shut. He waited until the thunder and its cloud had disappeared before he made his horse walk on, and everyone moved with him.
Paul still had questions. “What’s it like? Being a leopard. Do you mind me asking?”
“Not at all,” Bob said. “It’s the most natural thing in the world, every bit as natural as our human form. For me it’s strength. Speed. Power. It’s difficult to describe better than that, really, because it’s always been just what I am.”
“For me,” Mary said, “it’s freedom and grace.”
“When you’re leopards, can you understand human speech?”
“Not exactly,” Bob said. “But we interpret tones of voice and smell emotions, and when I return to human form I always remember the gist of speech I’ve heard while I’m a cat, even if not the exact words used.”
“Me too,” Mary said.
“You don’t change every night, do you? I’ve seen you loads of times in human form after dark.”
“We change whenever we want to,” Mary said. “The urge is most powerful for a week or so either side of the full moon, but we can resist it if necessary. We seldom want to resist it, mind. It’s a glorious release.”
“Always at night, though?”
“Mostly. It’s safer. And natural.”
“How did you become shapeshifters? Did someone bite you?”
They shared another amused glance.
“We were born this way,” Bob sang to the Lady Gaga tune.
It was Mary’s turn to roll her eyes. “In the old days our population was stable, although widespread, but over the years our numbers decreased. Eventually they dropped below the point of no return, until we were the only babies born to our parents’ generation. Well, I had a younger sister, but she didn’t survive. Bob was an only child. No new births came while we were growing up.”
“When we left home, our community was down to thirty individuals.” The laughter had left Bob’s voice. “When we returned to try and start our own family a few years later, they were down to twelve, and all of them old. We’ll be the last of our people left alive, now.”
“Where was your home?”
“Kama,” Bob said.
Paul’s clueless expression must have showed.
“It’s a big land of mountains and rich jungle on the western shore of the Sea of Mur,” Bob said. “In your world, it corresponds to the Indian Ocean south of Assam.”
“You fit in well among Cornish people.”
Bob winked. “We know.”
“Are Bob and Mary your real names?”
“He’s Borhb. It means thorn. I’m Morhi, which means orchid.”
Each of their names contained a soft rolling-r sound.
Paul tried them out. “Borhb. Morhi. You have lovely names.”
“Thank you.” They spoke as one.
A piercing cry sounded high overhead. A bird of prey, possibly an eagle, banked away on thermals until it became only a dot in the sky and disappeared.
“Have you seen him?” Morhi asked.
“Yes,” Borhb answered.
Paul frowned. “Who?”
“A little hairy man,” Borhb said. “Don’t look. He’s getting braver.”
Paul didn’t know where to look anyway, and they weren’t giving anything away, so he stayed patient and trusted they’d let him know when there was something or someone to see.
Borhb and Morhi’s little hairy man remained invisible all afternoon, although they insisted he was still keeping pace with them. Paul tried to look everywhere, while trying to look as if he wasn’t looking anywhere at all, but it was pointless.
He wondered if they were winding him up, and their amused expressions said they knew what he was thinking.
His stomach was already growling for food when they reached a wide river in the late afternoon, but they rode for an hour more along its bank, heading in the opposite direction to its fast current that was clearly visible as a broad dark channel of vigorous underwater disturbance in midstream.
“This is the River Deuona,” Morhi said. “The Divine Daughter. The people who raised Tamass worshipped her.”
Paul studied the strong man riding at the front of the column and imagined his brother’s childhood among those people. They’d helped him become who he was today, so it had probably been a pretty good life. Exciting and free. Absolutely nothing like the orphanage.
He blinked away the comparison. “If there’s a divine daughter, is there a divine mother too?”
“Yes. The River Mosa rises in the far west, in the same mountain lake system her daughter rises from, but a long way farther south. The two great rivers carve Atland into three parts. They and their tributaries irrigate sections of the continent and make regions of rich soil where most people live. Water isn’t readily available in our world as it is in yours.”
Our world. Yours. Despite having lived two-thirds of their lives in Paul’s world, they belonged in this one and clearly felt they’d come home. Had they yearned for this world during those forty years, while keeping their promise for a friend who’d never returned?
He was missing his world, but he didn’t think Karen was. Not yet, anyway. He wondered how she’d feel if it turned out they couldn’t go back, ever.
Patches of taller vegetation and trees grew along the riverbank. When a big clump of trees appeared up ahead, Hazel passed the word back that they would camp there for the night.
It was a semi-circle of tall, slender trees tucked inside a curve in the river. The Tokki men watered the horses and themselves, then left with everyone’s thanks, and Hazel led the way on foot to a small clearing inside the copse.
The canopy high above tinted everything green, and bursts of startlingly clear birdsong rang out.
They ate the last of the bread rolls, which were no longer anything like fresh, and the remaining flakes of smoked fish, which now smelled strong and tasted only just the right side of okay. Paul’s hunger wasn’t satisfied.
He collected firewood from the remains of an old lightning struck tree on the outer edge of the copse, kindling twigs and chips at first then bigger stuff and a few good-sized logs. A campfire would be a comfort, and he thought mugs of hot tea might even stop their stomachs rumbling for a while.
Borhb weighed one of the logs critically. “Cottonwood. You’ll struggle to get a decent fire going with this stuff. Too damp and stringy. Even when it’s burning it’ll take forever to dry out, and you’ll use more fuel than you think you’ll need to generate any heat.”
Paul blushed with embarrassment. Borhb’s good opinion meant a lot.
“Hey, it’s not your fault. Cottonwood’s just rubbish firewood, and that’s what all these trees are. Give it a go by all means, but don’t blame yourself when it’s a struggle.”
Karen mucked in, and in no time at all they had three graded-size piles of firewood stacked in the middle of the clearing. Then the fun started. They tried in vain to start a fire, while Tamass sat back and chuckled at them.
He was a bit daunting. Even when experiencing the same grubby conditions as the rest of them, poking fun at their fire-making efforts and making not at all helpful suggestions, he was still very…kingly.
Hazel arrived back from whatever quiet mission she’d been engaged in with Borhb and Morhi, and crouched by the fire to help.
Paul watched her carefully but couldn’t figure out what she was doing. She simply stayed there with her eyes closed and stretched her hands palm out towards the kindling, and within a few minutes a thin wisp of smoke curled from it. He added kindling while she carried on doing whatever she was doing, and soon there was sufficient flame to add heavier pieces.
The wood was damp, though, and as Borhb had warned, they failed to get a good fire going.
Darkness fell more quickly inside the copse than it did outside. It was like sitting in a circular cinema looking through the silhouetted trees to a lighter scene stretched all around them.
Tamass made himself comfortable with his back against the broadest tree trunk in the clearing, produced a stone from inside his cloak, and started sharpening the cutting edge of his huge curved sword with slow, steady strokes. He couldn’t have presented a more perfect image of a warrior king if he’d tried.
Paul hadn’t touched his replica sword since he’d packed it away after the clifftop battle the previous night.
“Can I see your sword, brother?” Tamass slid his scimitar into its scabbard and took Paul’s sword, handling it with supreme confidence and running his expert eye over the sleek, shining blade.
He sprang upright in a fluid movement and stepped into a space away from everyone else, where he swished the sword this way and that, in great slow arcs at first then getting faster and faster and spinning on his feet until the blade flashed in a hypnotic blur all around him.
“It’s beautiful.” He was barely breathing any harder than normal, despite his five-minute workout. He extended his hands, palms up, and weighed the sword across them. “The narrow blade is far lighter than mine, and the curve more subtle, but its balance is superb and the steel work is magnificent. The sword smith who created this weapon would be a king among his fellows in my world.”
Paul accepted it back, and smiled. “I believe he is, in mine.”
“Good.” Tamass returned to his seat against the broad tree. “It certainly made short work of those demons last night.
Paul prickled with discomfort again. Tamass was being kind, but everyone knew Paul and his sword had made very little difference to the outcome of that fight.
“You know, that really was a little too easy.” Tamass frowned at the pathetic hissing campfire. “There were so many of them. If their orders had been to kill us, we’d be dead. Instead, they threw themselves on to our blades and tried to swamp us with their bodies.”
He looked around at each person in turn. “I believe their orders were to capture us. And if our splendid cats hadn’t arrived in time to hold them all back, I believe we would have been in demon chains before we could escape to safety through Hazel’s window.” He bowed his head to Borhb and Morhi. “Thank you.”
They returned his respectful nod. “It was a pleasure,” Borhb said. “We’ve been bottling up our rage against demons since you and Paul were born.”
A blue flash caught Paul’s eye, like a little tongue of flame just above the ground in the moonlight outside the copse.
“What was that?” Karen had seen it too.
It flashed again, accompanied by a brief cackling laugh in the distance.
Everyone looked at everyone else.
A few minutes later the blue flame flashed and the laugh sounded again, twenty degrees to the left of its first position and a good deal closer.
Borhb and Morhi stood up. “Time for us to do our thing,” Morhi told the group. “Sleep easy. Nothing will get past us in the night.” They left.
Everyone sat quietly, listening for the laugh again, but after a few minutes of silence Paul’s attention returned to the smoking fire.
“Have you written anything in that book Sted gave you?” Karen asked.
Paul raised his eyebrows. “Only the Tokki legend. I forgot all about it.”
“Are you going to? Maybe you could keep notes about our experiences in this world. Use them to help you write Book Ten when we get home.”
He brightened for an instant when she mentioned getting home. “That’s a good idea. We need a working title. Any thoughts?”
They sat in comfortable silence.
“The Orphan Age.”
“The Orphanage?”
“No. Three separate words. The Orphan Age.” This time, the smile made it all the way to Paul’s face and stayed there while he waited for a response.
“I see what you did there.” She grinned. “Good one.”
“I’ll go out in the moonlight for a bit and make a start.” He found a spot with good light, sat on a mossy lump of tree root, and started getting used to working with the scratchy quill pen and absorbent paper. It was a new practical skill that for a while took precedence over the actual stuff he was writing, so that by the time he’d cracked it, he’d already filled four pages with an account of sailing into Trenick Bay and Karen rowing out to meet him.
He hadn’t been writing for ten more minutes when a terrible commotion made him jump nearly out of his skin and grab the bottle of ink before it spilled away.
It sounded like a big cat fight only a hundred yards outside the copse, somewhere down near the quiet black river, with growling and snarling and heavy paws thumping on hard earth and suddenly a high-pitched scream of terror that certainly came from no black leopard.
Two pairs of eyes gleamed sharp yellow in the moonlight, swaying as Borhb and Morhi marched back into the camp. One of them held something like a medium-sized dog in his or her jaws.
Paul couldn’t tell which of them it was, even when he joined them in the clearing and they dropped the petrified bundle of skin and hair on the ground before Tamass.
The creature held one trembling hand in the air. Flames flickered from its long thin fingers.
The leopard who’d carried the thing into camp sported scorch marks all over one side of his or her powerful black face. They both turned away in a sleek synchronised movement, and left the clearing like a pair of glossy shadows.
Everyone stared at the trembling thing on the ground.
“Stand up, Jack.” Tamass gave it some seconds to obey, and when it didn’t he roared, “Stand up!”
The creature shot to its feet and stood quaking before Tamass, eyes downcast and the flaming fingers of its right hand held up away from its body.
It was indeed a hairy little man, but not a human man. He stood four feet tall and everything about him was bony and pointed, from his domed head, sticky-out triangular ears and outsized facial features, to his sharp limb joints. His hands and feet were creepily long and thin, with fingers and toes and their dirty nails moving constantly and independently, like something out of a horror film. And he was definitely a he. His extensive but scraggy body hair didn’t quite conceal his genitals.
“Haven’t you got any trousers?” Tamass sounded as if the conversation was an irritating duty he’d rather not have to perform.
The little man shook his head dolefully. “Bad men beat and robbed me, sire. Weeks ago. Been alone and hungry out on the plain ever since.”
He tilted his head to glance up at Tamass’s face, but slid his gaze back to the ground without making eye contact, in a motion that made him look sly. His body language and everything about him seemed to shout, untrustworthy.
“You followed us all day.”
“Didn’t know who you were until you stopped and I could get a better look at you. Didn’t know if you were safe. Didn’t know where you were going.” He raised his gaze for a moment. “Trying to get back to the city, sire. Are you going to Ys? Will you take me?”
Hazel shook her head at Tamass and mouthed, “No.”
“If you wanted our help, why were you out there playing games tonight?”
“Only me being me, sire. I’m just Jack. You know me. No harm in me.” He twisted his neck to look behind at the sadly smoking campfire, and his expression brightened. “I’ll get that burning for you.”
He approached it with strange, springy steps, thrust his flaming hand deep into the heart of the fire, and held it there until enthusiastic flames licked up through the sorry-looking pyramid of wood.
He applied his burning fingers to various places around the outer base of it, waiting each time for flames to take hold, and finally stood back with a satisfied smirk stretching his thin lips. “There.”
The cottonwood was burning fiercely. Heat hit Paul’s face from ten feet away. He was drawn nearer to it, and met Karen there. Behind them, Jack’s wheedling voice now held a note of hope.
“You’ll take me back to the city, sire? I’ll keep your fire burning all night so you can sleep warm.”
Hazel sighed helplessly when Tamass said, “All right, then. Keep out of my way and behave yourself.”
Paul didn’t know about anyone else, but he certainly rested more comfortably with the campfire roaring away in the clearing and his dear leopard friends out patrolling the night.
He sat on a dry log and started writing by the light of the flames.
After a while he raised his head and stared into the black night beyond the fire’s flickering circle.
Yes, he was writing again.
He smiled at that.
Life could be worse.