He takes the petalfruit, which has the semblance of a closed, bulby red flower, and places a few of the fist-sized bulbs into the fire. May sidles up next to him to stay warm.
Asher, meanwhile, looks into the flames and thinks. The petalfruit were falling. The days had been long and dry. The harvests were coming in. Autumn was beginning.
He thinks again of his plan. Go south, find a town, live from the land as his father and mother had. But the plump fruit rolling on the ground had shown him that he didn't have time plow and plant a field. The winter rains would come before he got seed in the ground, and the spring floods would wash any harvest away. He couldn't very well hire himself to a temple or estate with May. In the face of the changing season, his plans were beginning to seem boyish.
The petalfruit pops and shakes him from his thoughts. The fruit, now cooked, lies on the embers like a splayed citrus. Or, more true to its name, like an open flower. The others pop and open as well, and Asher pulls them out with a pair of sticks and sets them to cool on the sack. They can keep walking and finding food, he realizes, but sooner or later their luck would run out.
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...
