Archive | March 20, 2011

3WW: Pause in the Journey

Three Word Wednesday is a once-weekly 3-word writing prompt.

The three words are breeze, mellow, tickle. This is set in the Rin & Girey world, before View-Point


Pause in the Journey

Girey was either still asleep, or faking it well, but the day was too nice, the sun streaming in through the tiny glass windows; Rin couldn’t stay abed any longer. She glanced again at her captive, who was, for the first time since Ossulund, sleeping comfortably and solidly, with a smile on his face. Let him rest. They would be into Callanthe civilization soon, and there would be no rest for either of them.

She slipped on her outer qitari but left her shoes and hose off. The weather was unseasonably mellow, and she wanted to enjoy it. She opened and closed the door to the way-station as quietly as she could, and stepped out into the sunlight; for the first time she since and Girey had started on their trip, she was alone.

The grass was growing, as it often did in the wet season, so quickly you could almost see it growing, and the breeze was warm, bringing a current from the sea that smelled, however faintly, of salt-water and fish. But it hadn’t been raining all that much in the last week, and the ground didn’t squish beneath her toes, so she walked out onto the small yard, kept well-cropped by visitors’ goats, as theirs were doing now, and let the wind tickle at the back of her neck and the grass tease between her toes.

It was nice to be going home, she had to admit, and yet, at the same time, terrifying. What would she do with him, her staid, grumpy Bitrani prisoner, when they were in Lannamer? What would she do with herself? The war was over, and the mopping-up stage would have far less need for healers, so she’d been given her release. She was no longer part of the Emperor’s Army, except in the most formal sense. She wasn’t a student anymore, and, though she could have gone back to the University, she didn’t think Girey would be happy there. That left palace life, and politics, or putting on the guise of a wandering healer, and taking to the roads again.

She thought through that one for a few minutes, her face tilted upwards to the sun, her hands out flat to the breeze. She could do it, and Girey would likely be all right with a small wagon and a box-bed (a long wagon, of course, for his stretched-out height, but they could still do with two goats). No one would think to look for the missing heir of Bithrain in an itinerant healer’s wagon. Nor would they look for an heir of Callenia there. It would be just the two of them, and her clients. Just the two of them…

…a flea chose that moment to bite her, and she swore softly. The palace, at least, would have more regular baths. Baths, and beds that would fit her captive. The day no longer looking quite as beautiful, she headed back into the way-station.


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