Page 11 of Among the Burning Flowers
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The fight had pushed her starving body to the limit. Part of her thought she would die in her sleep. Instead, she woke in the smothering heat of midday, bruised and tender, parched and sticky.
Melaugo brushed an oak spider from her forehead. She peered at her fingers, checking for the redness that heralded the plague. They remained the same deep olive as always, with the same tiny scars from fishhooks and fights.
With a dry mouth, she heaved on a tunic, tasting blood. Her gums were raw again.
Once dressed, she walked to her traps, head throbbing. Finding no fresh catches, she returned to her tree, too weak to hunt or fish.
A round dark loaf waited outside.
She collapsed by the oak and picked up the bread. Still warm. With a watering mouth, she sank her teeth into it, breaking the crust. It was coarse and gritty and the best thing she had ever tasted.
When she had first arrived, she had thought her crossbow would be enough to keep her fed, but hares and birds were faster than Draconic things. She had spied on the villagers as they foraged, to see which mushrooms and berries they chose, but that had only ever quelled the hunger for so long.
She ate every crumb of the bread and washed it down with a mouthful of water from the stream. Lying on the hard earth in the hollow, she imagined herself back to the coast, waking up with Liyat in her room above the shop. Meeting her on the warm sands of Lovers’ Cove, where the smugglers hid their cargo. That first kiss on a starlit wharf in Perunta.
Your pride will kill you, Estina. Her voice drifted from the memory.Just this once, I will swallow mine first.
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Each day, another loaf of dark bread came, sometimes with a smudge of butter or a wedge of grainy cheese. Melaugo had eaten six of them by the time one of the villagers came to her oak.
She stood up a little too fast. Once the faintness had subsided, she emerged from the hollow, blinking in the daylight.
A sinewy woman in her winter years waited outside, furrowed as a baked walnut, with callused hands from splitting wood and long hair in a braid. Melaugo recognised her from the day she arrived.
Unless you can offer something we need, you are on your own, outsider.
‘Have you decided I’m not catching?’ Melaugo said icily. ‘Or do you already want another beast slaughtered?’
‘Neither.’ She eyed Melaugo. ‘If you’d told us you’re a culler, we’d have taken you into the village at once. You even have your own weapons. Why hide it until you were starving?’
‘I hoped you might take pity, you heartless—’
‘We’ve not survived this long by giving alms to outsiders. We’ve enough sick and frail of our own to support,’ was the curt reply. ‘I’d have liked to leave you here for another week or two, to make sure you’re not tainted, but you’re wanted at the alehouse. There’s a man.’
‘A man?’
Her stomach turned cold. Any new arrival could be an agent of the king.
‘An outsider. A rich one, from the looks of him,’ the woman said. Melaugo tensed. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. He’s no outlaw hunter. But heissearching for a young woman with red hair and eyes like honey. Thought it sounded like you, culler.’
Melaugo absorbed the words.
‘This man,’ she said. ‘Does he have scars on his face, from the pox?’
‘He does.’ The woman looked her up and down. ‘You should come and claim a meal.’
She returned to the trees. Melaugo leaned against the oak, clutching her sore ribs, and sighed.
The Knights Defendant had not found her, but somehow, Harlowe had.
Melaugo
AFELAYANDA FOREST
KINGDOM OF YSCALIN
