May Charles's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

May woke on her back, warm. That was wrong. The last thing she knew was mud and rain and the tree that met her head. Now a wool blanket lay over her legs. A bandage wrapped her forehead. She touched it and felt the cloth pull at her skin. She turned her head slow. She lay on a cot inside a small house, wood walls and a red door shut against the light. She pushed up on her elbows. The room tilted, then held. A pot sat on a stove across from her. Steam curled off it, and the smell of cooked fish reached her. Somewhere outside a chicken clucked, then another. Wood creaked as something moved past the wall. Someone lived here. Someone had carried her in, cleaned her head, lit that fire. "I'm lucky to be alive," she said out loud, to no one. Her voice cracked. She had drunk bad water, gone hungry, fallen. She should be dead in the trees. Instead she was dry and bandaged in a stranger's home. She did not know whose. She did not know what part of the island this was. The red door opened. A young man ducked under the frame with an armful of split wood. Dark skin, dark eyes, a torn shirt buttoned to his chest. He was near her age and moved like the house was his and always had been. He saw her sitting up and stopped. He did not smile or speak. He set the wood down by the stove. "You're awake," he said. That was all. "You brought me here." It was not a question. "You fixed my head." He crossed to the pot and stirred it. "You were bleeding. Storm did that, or you did." He nodded at the bandage. "Sit. Eat when it's done." May watched him. He would not look at her long. "Where am I? Whose house is this?" "Mine." He ladled fish into a bowl and held it out. His hands were steady, calloused, sure. "Eat." She took the bowl. The warmth of it went straight through her fingers. "What's your name?" He turned back to the stove. "Doesn't matter." "It does to me. You saved my life." He was quiet. He fed a stick to the fire and shut the little iron door on it. "Eat while it's hot," he said. "Then we'll talk about you leaving." May ate. The fish was hot and clean and the first real food in days. Her body took it and steadied. She was not going to die on the beach or in the mud. She was safe, fed, dry, healing. But she was in a locked room with a man who would not give her his name, on a part of the island she had never seen, and he had already said the word leaving. She did not know if that meant a way home or a way out the door and back into the trees alone.