Lyrian Whisperleaf's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The fruit still warmed Lyrian's palm when the knock came at his door. He set the lamp-fruit on the sill beside the glowing tree and let his two friends in. He had not asked them to come. Someone in the village always knew when a scrawny elf was about to do something stupid. The cat came first, black and low, tail up, weaving between his ankles like she already owned the trip. She jumped to the table and sat on his folded shirts. The fairy came after, no taller than his hand, yellow hair bright against the dark rafters. She hovered over his open pack and frowned into it. "You'll die," the fairy said. "Three days out. Maybe four." "Thank you," Lyrian said. "Look at you." She landed on the rim of the pack and tapped his wrist. Her finger was smaller than his smallest bone. "You can carry food for a week. The road the tree showed you is longer than a week. You'll sit down under some pine and not get up." He knew she was right. He had weighed the pack twice already. Bread, hard cheese, a waterskin, the crown wrapped in a shirt, flint, a knife. Add another loaf and the straps cut his shoulders raw by noon. He was seventy years old and built like a boy of twelve. The wanderer in the book had walked alone. The book had not said what she ate. The cat put a paw on a small blue notebook at the corner of the table. She pushed it toward him. "That's mine," the fairy said. "Take it. Write down every spring, every farm, every hedge with berries. Mark the roof of anyone who feeds you. You come back that way." Lyrian picked up the notebook. The leather was soft with use. An orange label on the cover waited for a name he had not earned yet. He slid it into the pack's front pocket. "And us," the fairy said. "No." "Yes." The cat's yellow eyes did not blink. The fairy folded her arms. "She hunts. I scout. You eat. That's the trade. The tree said walk alone. It didn't say starve alone." Lyrian opened his mouth to argue and closed it. He thought of the guildmaster waving bread at him. He thought of collapsing in a ditch with a crown of blue fire in his pack and no one to carry it home. Pride was not a meal. "Scout ahead," he said to the fairy. "Hunt at dusk," he said to the cat. "I keep the notebook. I choose the road." The cat stood and stretched. The fairy shot up to the rafters and back, laughing. Lyrian buckled the pack. It was heavier now, and lighter. He shouldered it, blew out the lamp, and stepped through the door onto the pull behind his ribs.