Taylen looks a little taken aback. "My help?" he asks. "What happened?"
Asher takes a deep breath. He has to bring thoughts to the surface that he's been pushing down all day. "My... my parents are dead." The words come out of him as if an enormous breath and he feels winded for a moment.
Taylen looks struck by Alash himself. He opens his mouth twice before words come out. "Dead, but... how? You were all just here in town a few days ago. I saw them."
"A snakebite in the fields," Asher says quietly. "I--" suddenly he realizes that in his parents' last moments he wasn't there to say goodbye, and sorrow comes shooting up like a geyser. It takes everything he has to clamp down on the tears.
"I'm so sorry," Taylen says. "But what are you doing here? You should have got to Telar. Or Shuil."
"I can't."
Now Taylen looks truly worried. "Can't? Why not?" He steps closer and scrutinizes Asher's face. "You're scaring me, Asher. What's going on?"
Asher takes a breath, and sends up a prayer that he's not dooming himself and May.
"Because I protected the girl," he says. "If they find us, they'd kill me too."
YOU ARE READING
The Unending Epic Written to Appease a Friend, Tell a Tale, an...
FantasyEach 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...
