Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

Andana came back from the thicket with cold hands and a problem she could not outrun. The man would wake soon. He would feel for his pack, his pouch, his sketches, and find none of them. If he asked her where they had gone, she had no answer ready that did not begin with a lie. She crouched by the fire pit and watched his chest rise. She could not invent a thief out here, where the snow held no tracks but her own. So she would not explain the missing things at all. She would give him so much care that asking felt rude. She pulled her own sleeping roll from the corner and unrolled it beside him, the thick blue one with the two pillows she had carried up from the south years ago. She eased him onto it and tucked the folds around his shoulders. Then she set a low board within reach of his right hand. On the board she placed a cup of clear water, three slices of yesterday's bread, and a small bowl of lentil soup kept warm by the coals. She tasted the soup herself to be sure it was not too hot. A patient woke to food. A prisoner woke to questions. The scarf was harder. She took it from the chest under the leaning wall and held it a moment before laying it across the foot of the roll. It was hers, the only soft thing she owned, embroidered in pink and blue by a woman whose name she had stopped saying aloud. It still smelled of the chichewa bark she packed it in against moths. She folded it once and set it where his hand would find it when he reached for the cup. Let him think a kind woman lived here. Let him build that woman in his head before he built any other. He stirred near dusk. Andana sat across the fire with her hands open on her knees so he would see them first. His eyes opened, found the cup, the bread, the bowl. Found the scarf. He touched the embroidery with two fingers and brought them to his nose. Something in his face loosened. He looked at her and said thank you in a southern accent, careful and low. She nodded and passed him the water. He drank. He did not ask about his pack. He did not ask about his animal. He asked her name, and she gave him one, and the lie set clean between them like a stone laid in a wall. The waystation had its first guest, and Andana had bought herself another day to decide what he was.