In a place where a silver stream spilled into the sea, she indicated by gesture and action that she wanted to make camp. Trees crowded the stream’s banks, spreading upstream and along a gully. Thickets of assertive chamber-bells in flower spilled into the scorpion grass that carpeted the far hillside. Spiny broom mingled with carob bush.

She took the horses. He walked a wide circuit from the shore, tasting the air for threat. He allowed his sense of the world to expand until the smallest things touched him: the snuffling of a red deer through a stand of pipe tree; the rattle of a pair of yellow caps within the cover of the prickly-branched chamber-bells; the respiration of blue tranquillity flowers, petals quivering with each touch of the breeze. The gasp of breath as life, and spirit, escape a living creature.

He stood, turned his head, listened.

Footsteps crashed through brush. A mouth panted. There came a branch-splintering tumble, a grunt, and then a cough of triumph. The salt heat of blood spilled onto the wind. He ran back to the camp, his face hot and his hands cold with fear.

With the other arrow, she had killed a small red deer, slit its throat, and hung it from the branch of the largest nearby tree, hindquarters up and head down. She had filled his good bronze cup with deer’s blood. Her lips were stained as red as a jarya’s as she looked up and, seeing his hurried approach, offered him the cup.

“Neh, neh, I am sure I do not care for any of that,” he said, swallowing a bitter taste in his own mouth. To drink blood fresh from the animal was a barbaric custom known among the lendings or the herdsmen in the Barrens but not among the civilized city folk where he’d been bred and raised. Yet as the thought struck him, his revulsion vanished as he paused to watch what she would do next.

She drained the cup and set it aside. With his machete in hand, she wandered into the trees. He followed her, taking the cup, which he rinsed out in the stream. She tested first this tree, then that. She tore off strips of bark and twisted them; she chopped down saplings and bent them, testing their spring and strength. With a quickening of breath, she saw what she wanted: the tree known as silver-bark, which usually preferred higher ground and a cooler climate. Somehow, a scattering had taken root in a damp depression where the stream had made its bed in former years. She measured, then cut down one that was more than a sapling but not yet truly a tree. This together with two saplings she dragged back through the undergrowth to their camp.

He watched, not wanting to interfere, although he set up a shelter against the rains that might come in the night. She took out every item he possessed and sorted them: The iron pot and tripod legs she kept beside her, the cup and leather bottles she set aside. Flint and knives and awl and shovel she set beside the pot. He caught in his breath when she examined the writing box, but she placed it unopened back in the saddle bags with the small brass lamp and strings of vey and leya. Needles, leather, cordage and straps she recognized; the scissors she puzzled over.