Page 24 of Captive

She couldn’t tell what purpose the building served, but it didn’t look like an interrogation room. Wicker baskets and pots and boxes crowded the floor, and shelves lined the walls. A collection of swords designed in the unique Varai style hung on one wall. There was a kitchen at the back of the room, and clusters of drying herbs hanging from the ceiling.

It was oddly homey, and was nothing like any of the Ardanian army facilities she’d seen. This kind of disorganized, multi-purpose space would never have passed muster there. She looked around at the clutter. This was what passed for a supply room here, and an armory… and a kitchen, apparently.

Aruna gave her a stiff look, which she returned, and then he went to speak with the lone occupant of the room, an older woman who’d been working at the kitchen as they entered. She didn’t look like the military type. Probably because she wasn’t.

The Varai didn’t have a military in the same way Ardani and Ysura did. They had strong, well-trained fighters and mages, but not in the vast numbers that Ardani had, and without the same hierarchy and organization.

The people here looked like warriors, but they did not look like a matched set the way Ardanian soldiers did. They all wore different clothes and armor and carried varying types of weapons, more like a militia than a real military.

The Varai had seldom needed to fight in actual battles. Their defense of their borders and their infrequent raids on neighboring towns were carried out by small but deadly teams, and they didn’t involve themselves in the wars of other nations. And on the rare occasions when someone did foolishly try to march into Kuda Varai, the forest did an excellent job of defending itself on its own.

The woman helped Aruna gather some things from the various boxes and shelves around the room. By the time they’d finished, his pack was twice as full as it had been when they’d arrived.

He looked up at Novikke and seemed to remember something. He turned back to the other woman, saying something that made her frown. She started searching the clutter again. It took her longer to find whatever he’d requested this time.

Finally, she emerged from the depths of a chest with a small book in hand, which Aruna accepted with a broad smile and a grateful dip of his head. Novikke felt a flutter in her chest. She’d never seen him smile like that. Probably because she’d only ever seen him interact with herself and Zaiur, and he didn’t like either of them enough to smile at them that way.

When he returned to her side, he was writing something in the book with a charcoal pencil. The book was blank, made to be written in.

He held it up for her to read. “Are you hurt?” he’d written.

She shook her head. He looked relieved. Novikke felt another annoying flutter. He wrote some more.

“I’ve been instructed to bring you to another outpost a night’s travel from here. We will go there now.”

She felt faint with relief. She’d been spared for another day. She resisted the urge to say something sarcastic, and merely nodded.

???

When they’d been walking for a while, she tapped him on the shoulder and made a writing motion with her hand. He handed her the book and pencil, then looked over her shoulder to watch her write. She tried to ignore the heavy, dark presence of him conspicuously close to her.

“What happened to Zaiur?” she asked.

His face darkened. She would have expected anyone else to disregard her and keep walking. But she wasn’t really surprised when he took the notebook and started writing without hesitation. She was beginning to suspect that he enjoyed talking to her.

His job seemed to involve a lot of traveling and camping in the forest. She suspected that he spent a lot of time away from cities, like she did. If he was anything like her, he probably got lonely and bored. Maybe he was secretly pleased to have someone new to travel with.

“He continued ahead of us. We determined that one of us would be enough to escort you.”

His handwriting, now that she saw it in a book and not in the dirt or scratched on a rock, was small and tidy, in contrast to her own writing, which was a messy scrawl of irregular, malformed shapes.

She supposed it would be overly self-important of her to think that he’d encouraged Zaiur to leave for her sake. It must have been a coincidence.

“You don’t like him,” she guessed.

He shrugged.

“You argued a lot.”

He nodded.

“Why?”

He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “He says a lot of things,” he wrote vaguely.

“He does worse than just say things,” she noted dryly.

He frowned a little, then shrugged again, as if he didn’t know how to respond.

---