Page 5 of A Touch of Stars and Stones
Lyle offers me food—a chunk of bread and a chicken leg. “Don’t get too excited. That’s the leftovers from our meal yesterday.” My stomach growls as I take the food, and I realise I haven’t eaten since last night, too occupied with the desperation to flee.
I take the food and try to catch her eye, but she keeps her face angled away.
I wait.
Patient.
But words don’t come. And the eerie quiet drags.
My heart hardens in my chest as anger threatens to take up residency. We eat in silence as foreboding settles over me.
Why did Lyle take me in as a child? What did she mean when I came around yesterday, and she said she shouldn’t have risked it?
I knew she wasn’t my mother or a blood relation, my russet-coloured hair against her straw-yellow, and my green eyes versus her blue, were just some of the signs, but I’ve felt like her daughter my whole life. She is all I know. I have no memories before her or of anything other than our life together, and I loveher. My rational mind hurls anything it can against the doubts that darken my mind against that fact.
I rub my hands, feeling the rough skin now forming on my palm where I’ve been holding the reins so tightly. And then I feel the smooth metal band of the ring that’s still on my hand. I curl my finger inward, physically stopping it from slipping off, and lean down using my bag as a pillow, careful not to crush the small cup hidden inside.
If Lyle won’t talk to me, then I won’t speak to her either.
Petty. Yes.
Childish. One hundred percent.
I wrap my hands inward to my chest and pull myself around them into a ball, trying to find a comfortable position. A tear, warm and salty, betrays me and leaks from my eye, running over my nose in no particular hurry and delaying my call to sleep.
I hope sleep will stem the heartache beating in my chest.
three
. . .
Ever
“Time to go. We have company.”
My body needed sleep more than my mind did, and it won the fight early last night. Now, it was taking a while to wake up.
“What? What company?” I muddle together.
“Uninvited. And I’ll deal with it, but you need to get ready. Go to Nettle and be ready to ride.”
“But, Lyle?—”
“Get on your horse. Now!” she cuts me off.
We lock our gazes in challenge, showing our stubborn side—the one similarity I could have inherited from Lyle. Her eyes are wide again, her jaw tight. She could have meant a hundred other things from that look, but Lyle has always wanted me safe, so I choose to hear that above anything else.
I don’t want to leave her, but I follow her command while she steps out of the cover of the stable and stands just outside the front of the house. Waiting in the open.
I stay silent as I can and make my way to Nettle. Voices filter through the woods around us, tones of men cackling to each other, stumbling through the trees, cracking twigs and rustling as they go.
She didn’t tell me to ride, so I mount Nettle and keep out of sight behind the stable, using a thin gap in the wood to spy through.
My heart hammers in my chest as I wait and watch. Why is she doing this? We could both hide or flee?
Two men walk past the house that’s crumbling to the north, and they immediately see Lyle. Their conversation stills as they slow.
She could have hidden, too. She didn’t need to do this. They are just two men; they might have never noticed us.
