Asher moves without thinking. "Run!" he says, but she already is, and he pounds the earth behind her. The voices of the other men join Saman's cry. Asher hears their footsteps and doesn't dare look back. The hem of his tunic flaps around his shins, slowing him, and he curses at it. He should have girded it, but he had no time!
The girl, meanwhile, flies. She pulls ahead, and when they reach the trees she runs through them like a deer. He can scarcely keep up, and a moment after they enter he hears the men crashing into the brush behind them. A twig catches in his sandal and he nearly falls.
They dash between an outcropping of two rocks. She leaps over a fallen tree and he scrambles beneath it. Bushes and brambles reach out to grab them, though she always manages to weave a way through. Eventually, the sound of the pursuing men fades, and the girl waits for him to catch up. He reaches her, then puts his hands on his knees, panting. His heart beats against his chest like a drum. What would those men have done? What would they do? They had seen him with the girl.
When he straightens, he looks around them. They stand in a sunlit patch of forest; everything is aureate shades of green. There's no sound of the men, and the air is a soft quilt of buzzes and trills.
"Thank you," she says.
"You're welcome." Here in the forest, out of the dim light of the pantry, he marvels at her anew. The sunlight illuminates her skin, causing her teal stripes to stand out even more on the azure underneath. She seems to possess a magic within her, but he cannot fathom how it could be anything wicked. "What did you say your name was?" he asks her at last.
"Mayhem."
YOU ARE READING
The Unending Epic Written to Appease a Friend, Tell a Tale, an...
FantasiEach day, the story grows. The tale begins when two lives are suddenly and irrevocably twined together, and a boy from a lonely farm and a girl without a people find themselves each other's only friend. Little by little the fabric of their lives wea...
