Waiting For Sunrise - The Books Of Beginning AU

34. Goat's Milk

When Emma awoke, dawn was just breaking, and a thin gray light was seeping through the cracked curtains into the cabin. A crunching sound had her rolling onto her side - noting, as she did so, that her brother and sister were still sleeping beside her - to see the man who had rescued them last night. He was stomping out the last few embers of the dying fire, cinders crumbling under his heavy hunting boots and spreading the scent of ash throughout the cabin. His arm was bandaged where the wolf had bitten him last night.

Emma watched as the man, satisfied that the fire had been thoroughly smothered, moved across the room and shrugged on a thick coat made of canvas and wool. Then he selected an array of items from where they hung on the wall - a knife, a bow, and a small quiver. Hunting gear. He tossed a quick look to the bed where the children were, but didn't seem to realize that they were not all asleep, because he gave no reaction to Emma and left without a word.

The twelve year old scrambled out of bed, taking care as she did so not to jostle her sister, and to only jostle her brother an acceptable amount, not enough to wake him. She tugged on her (blissfully dry) clothes, jammed her feet in her own boots, and followed the man out the door, still buttoning the bottom of her shirt as she ran to catch up. (It was at times like these that she was acutely aware of how small she really was, especially when compared to their rescuer, who had to be over six feet tall.)

It was foggy out, but she could see the silhouette of the man's broad shoulders cutting through the gray. Keeping uncharacteristically quiet and cautious, she followed him into the forest carpeting the side of the mountain. He moved quickly and with the ease of someone raised in this wild environment, so it took some effort for Emma to keep up with him. Still, she was determined to do so. 

The fierceness was characteristic, but applying that fierce nature to following an adult around was definitely not. As a rule, Emma didn't find adults interesting. There were a few exceptions to that, of course. Miss B was competent and fascinating, both because of her magic and because of her strong personality. (After all, she had turned a man into a pig, once. Emma had to respect her after hearing that story.) Scruggs was odd and kept to himself, but for the most part, he was alright. Abraham had frustrated her in their own time, but after helping them out so much here in the past, Emma had to concede that he was a decent person. And Dr. Pym was pretty interesting too, by simple virtue of being a wizard with a strange house and a strange history. But other than that, Emma did not care for adults. They all blurred together, just cruel orphanage directors, rude prospective parents, vain targets of thievery, and a handful of decent individuals like the ones she had come to know in the magical quarter of New York. None, especially not a stranger, had ever captured Emma's attention so thoroughly as this man had. 

He came to a stop and Emma quickly ducked behind a boulder. The man was down a little ridge, head tilted, as if he was listening to something obscured by the fog.

Emma couldn't help but remember a few years prior, when she and her siblings were living at an orphanage in Philadelphia, and a wealthy old man had paid for all the kids to be taken to the city zoo for a day. Probably because he was a dirty businessman, getting real close to the moment when he'd kick the bucket, and he wanted to ease his filthy, greedy conscious before he went. Still, his less than altruistic motives did not change the fact that the outing made for one of the best days of Emma's young life. She had run all throughout the menagerie (driving Michael crazy as he tried to read through leaflets about how the place operated) dazzled by the presence of so many species. She saw two black bears with keen eyes and thick fur, a bison that towered above her, skinny-legged yet graceful deer. There were monkeys that whooped and chattered as they swung through the trees, parrots from South America that cawed so loud, shiny scaled snakes that could deliver a nasty bite, even a crocodile straight from the Nile river. But the most impressive of all the animals, the one that had her stopped in her tracks, watching with uncharacteristic stillness, was a lion.