CHP8

Seneya woke what felt like hours later, laying on a couch of some sort, a wooden thing covered in worn cushions and woven throws that smelled of must.

A warm glow of firelight danced around the room, cutting the impending nighttime chill.

She felt good, better than she had ever before. The air around her felt peaceful and whole and smelled of the man that had carried her and dankness. Sadness hung in the air, but she didn’t know how she knew.

A distinct feeling of anxiety overcame her, and she slipped from the blankets, looking around a darkly lit room. Wood walls surrounded her on four sides, packed gaps between large logs, like a cabin. Nails stuck from surfaces periodically as if things had hung there at one time, and cobweb-covered rafters loomed over her.

At first, she thought the cabin had a dirt floor, but she looked closer. The floor was just that dirty. Grit and debris formed layers over a hand-carved wood floor.

Seneya sniffed the air, then the blankets and something smelled distinctly male. She feared men with an unrivaled intensity, but this smell… felt comforting, but despite that, the anxiety intensified.

Her eyes swiveled from a dusty window to her left, noting the fireplace crackling with low coals before her. To the right of that, she saw an ajar door and an entryway directly to her right. A quick glance around revealed a door to the outside behind her. A small window at the top of it reflected dark blue from the evening sky.

“I’d appreciate some input.” Seneya held her breath as her eyes darted about, wondering where her backpack went. She could leave without it if necessary but on the off chance… Her spirit offered no comment after a few tense moments.

She could think of only three reasons she’d be kept in a place like this by a man. The most likely? They planned to send her back into the system again. The second most likely, she refused to entertain. The third? She wondered if the voice that spoke to her in her madness, Sohken, told truths.

Would she find help here?

She stepped lightly over firm wooden floorboards. Despite the lack of sanitation, the place looked pretty new. All the doors seemed straight and in place, but she didn’t see any light switches or anything that ran off electricity.

Just to be safe, she stepped between boards to distribute her weight as she made her way to a slightly ajar door. She pressed on it, and the hinges swung easily. She squinted into the darkness within as a messy bedroom came into view with a bed covered in piles of slept-on clothes. She couldn’t see an inch of the floor for clothes in it as well, strips of cloth that somehow made sense to part of her mind. Strangest of all, a sword lay propped up against the side of the bed.

She balked at the strangeness for just a moment before slowly closing the door and walking away.

The doorless entryway by the right of the couch gave way to a disused kitchen with a window that shone the dusky evening light next to an unlatched door. She eyed it for a moment, then bolted for it, tugging the handle and slipping into the outside world. The anxiety met her full force, worse now. It felt like a force more than her own feeling, like what she felt around Dax.

She inhaled the fresh outside air before blinking around fearfully, noting the setting sun. She had less than an hour of any usable light left.

A tree line met her eyes in the distance across a clear-cut grassy field. The line of trees surrounded the cabin as far as the eyes could see beyond the grassy glade. She didn’t walk around the side of the house, but she suspected that the trees surrounded the cabin.

Her pain spiked, the anxiety surmounted, and she ran.

Her heart remained deceptively calm as her feet pounded the tangled grass, two yards, then five, ten yards, and with an abrupt halt, something caught her arm, and her own momentum jerked her shoulder hard. She stumbled. Her breath wheezed out of her as a strong forearm swooped under her sternum and held her from falling.

Immediately, the anxiety she’d felt went out like the flicker of a candle’s flame.

“You’re awake, little starling,” the man spoke in hoarse and bitter English. He didn’t talk often.

Her heart, which had been calm, raced with a furious flurry, her eyes darting left, right, then up as she tried to measure her routes of escape.

The world spun around her as her heart struggled to beat.

“Easy,” he warned as he drew her back to him. Her bare arms brushed his equally bare chest. She pulled hard, but he stood like a steel rod buried deep in the earth—unyielding. Below his bare chest, he wore a strange pair of shorts that wrapped around his legs like the strips of cloth she’d seen on the bedroom floor, accented by a parted drape of fabric across his hips. “They interrupted my evening to tell me you needed me. I don’t know what sort of creature you are.”

Seneya struggled again as her breath grew heavy, her mind fogging over. Finally, she turned her head to look up at him, and the overwhelming urge to sleep, to close her eyes, settled over her once more.

Safe. Comfort. Rest. An instinct within her urged her to take respite against him.

No, not now. Seneya thought as she tried to meter her breath.

“Human, I think,” She wheezed in her spirit’s language, Acerrai, as the effort just to speak put the final strain on her, and she fell limp in his arms.

He spoke in the lulling melody that the girl and mysterious voice had used earlier. “’ I think!’ she says. Not even a hello or thank you. Human, pah!” He bundled her up into his arms once more and trudged back towards the cabin, cradling her as if she weighed nothing.

“You knew to come here, but not what would be waiting for you. Who sent you, I wonder?” the man asked to himself in his musical tongue.