Bazza'Jo

Chapter 7

Coming home late in Julia's clothes served as more than enough of an explanation for her recent whereabouts to Nana Lalia, who had greeted her with near-hysteria. Not a word needed to be said about almost being killed in a tree, or Kal. 

Of course, arranging to meet Kal again would take a new story. The next day Raina sent a message home with Ibli saying she was going to Isabel's house for dinner after school. Telling tales to do what you liked worked rather well, she thought, when you had a history of good behavior. She felt a little guilty for taking advantage of everyone's trust, but quickly justified it to herself. After all, it wouldn't be necessary to tell any tales if anyone just trusted her judgment. She would be perfectly happy to tell anyone "I'll be home late tonight, thanks. I'm going into the deep woods to hunt skycats with my good friend, Kal the Brughar of the East Wood." if she didn't know very well that they would lock her in a room on the spot and call in a specialist to have her head checked out.

She dressed in dark clothes this time: a long sleeved blue blouse with a fitted black vest over top, black loose slacks tied at the ankle and sandals. She had her hair tied into two braided pigtails, with a million little pins to keep the hair in place. Her sunburnt skin seemed to glow in the dimming light of the woods and she wished she had fitted boots like Kal's so that she could cover her feet properly. 

It's the right colour, she tried to give herself a mental pep talk, You have to start somewhere. The last thing she strapped on was her hide quiver, tied to her back in the proper Kreel way. There, she settled. That's better.

She had arranged to meet Kal at a fairly shallow spot in the woods. Her camouflage was nothing like his natural one, however. She reached the spot and had barely been standing three seconds before she heard a cheerful "Hello!" right in her ear and she whirled around to find him right at her shoulder. In the dimming light, just as it had the day before, his dark colouring and clothes made him nearly invisible even at this close range. To her credit, she didn't yelp or even startle to betray her surprise.

For the first time in her life, now that she was face to face with Kal, Raina was suddenly struck dumb with self doubt. What on earth was she doing here? Free of the adrenaline and excitement she'd been full of yesterday she felt entirely out of her league. Kal was dressed almost exactly as he was yesterday, but in the light of the late afternoon he looked bigger and more assured than she remembered. Maybe it was that she now knew he was the brughar of these woods, or understood that in some way he had probably saved her from harm yesterday, either by leading her out of the woods or by cutting her off before she got shot by some other hunter or village brughar. Maybe it was because of his continual displays of competence and skill when she tried so hard and seemed to fail. Maybe it was the still-painful memory of how much more respect her aunt and uncle showed him than they did her.

It dawned on her with blazing clarity then that if she was going to really do this- befriend the brughar of these woods, learn to hunt, skip off dinners and school; in short, embark on a new chapter of her life -she was going to have to either jump in with both feet and not look back, or give it all up right off the bat. Because she suddenly understood that this was serious. Kal wasn't a kid, for all his appearances, and for some reason or another he didn't seem to think she was either. The things he did were dangerous, and one single doubt, one hesitation or one fit of temper high up in the trees wasn't just going to make her look stupid or get her in trouble with her Nan: it could kill her. With a wiser instinct than she had thought herself capable of - an instinct which perhaps Kal saw in her - she saw that the decision she had to make now wasn't just to go hunting today or not, but to really choose to be a hunter. For all of Kal's jokes, you couldn't play at becoming a piece of the East Wood. She couldn't just try, and see how things came out. Trying means accepting the possibility of failure, and out here, failing meant losing as much as your life.