Broken Bonds

XXIX. Exchange day

Rey totally forgot about this.

So much time passed since she was last part of this event that when S ran inside the house to tell them the whole village gathered outside, her instincts were telling her to run.

Were they on the verge of another attack? Or something even worse was happening?

Well, something indeed was happening. But it wasn't a bad thing.

It was an exchange day.

A tradition held inside her own pack for years, one Talon obviously decided to uphold even in his years as an Alpha.

As the name already implied, the rules of the exchange day were simple. Members of the pack were free to gather all the things they no longer found useful and bring them to one place, usually to the centre of the village. They were then free to exchange them between themselves.

Exchange days weren't a once in the year occurrence, rather they were organized every time a certain amount of people came after the alpha with a request to organize one. It was a lot easier than going from door to door and trying to find a buyer for the thing one no longer needed.

"Can we go too?" S practically beamed from all the excitement. While they were pretty content staying in the village, they were all getting more and more bored with each day that passed. Thanks to Brynn's reputation as the best healer in the country, they always had hands full of work and this was the longest break they had in the past three years.

"Sure," Brynn agreed, "we don't really have anything we don't need, except maybe you," she joked and got one ugly stare back from him, "but yeah, we can go."

Rey feared her answer would be that and now it was her turn to figure out how to get away with not going. She was still not in the mood to deal with large crowds of people and she regretted she didn't sneak out in the morning.

Lia was somehow faster than Rey and Rey's conscience was already guilt-tripping her for leaving Brynn and S on their own for the past few days, so she decided to spend some quality time with them. But she thought the quality time would be with the two of them, not with the entire village.

Apparently, Brynn was not only a healer but also a mind-reader because she said: "Don't even think about that. You are coming too."

"I really don't want to," Rey protested. She didn't want to do it just yet, but she had some cards up her sleeve to use when necessary.

"I know, but I also know it can't be good for a person to spend so much time inside their head, so we are going, and we are going to have fun!"

Rey made it a mental note to ask Brynn what her definition of fun was because this was anything but. The cards were not as strong as Rey hoped because Brynn remained hard as a rock and Rey was forced to go.

It wasn't as much of a disaster as she anticipated. The villagers were so busy doing their things, they barely paid attention to any of them, and Rey was having a bit of fun discovering the various things people brought with them to exchange.

Some of the pieces were older than Rey herself, and she liked studying them from afar. She always found it very interesting to learn how the past generations lived and when she was younger, she would spend a lot of her time listening to the tales of older members of her pack.

She made sure to keep Brynn and S a safe distance from everyone because the exchange day could quickly turn to an almost attempted murder kind of day when more than one person wanted a certain thing.

And just as she was admiring a piece of furniture Rey had no idea what the use of was, S yelled out food and dragged Brynn with him.

Rey tried to keep her eyes on them, but the crowd made it impossible, and she was left on her own which turned her mood too sombre once again.