The air was filled with a zithering chorus of insect noises, interspersed with strident animal shrieks and birdcalls from the canopy overhead. Sara shrank fearfully against Anvar, unnerved by the strange sounds. “It’s all right,” he reassured her hopefully. “They’re only animals and birds.” But he used Aurian’s dagger to cut them two stout staves from a nearby tree, thinking as he did so how annoyed she would be at this abuse of her good blade.
The waters of the brook gathered in a hollow to create a small, deepish pool. Around its sides the vegetation had been nibbled back by animals, leaving a strip of earth and leaf litter. The mud at the brink was cross-stitched with the tracks of animals who had come down to drink. Anvar stopped to examine them. Small rodent prints, the slots of tiny deer, sinister S-tracks of snakes—and what were these? They looked like prints of hands—tiny human hands! Anvar felt a prickle in the back of his neck. Suddenly the forest seemed full of unseen eyes. He hastily scuffed the tracks away~wirii his boot before Sara could see them.
Parched by the heat and the seawater he had swallowed, Anvar flung himself down to drink, splashing cool, fresh water on his salt-tightened face. Once his first, urgent thirst had been quenched he looked around, fearful of losing his way in the forest—until he remembered, sheepishly, that he only had to follow the stream. He felt relieved. If Aurian should change her mind . . . But she would not—not after the way he had treated her. How he regretted his harsh words of the previous night. If he had only kept his temper, instead of flying to the attack because she had made him feel guilty. Surely she would have understood . . .
Gods, but he wasjmpgry! Desperate to ease the gnawing emptiness inside him, Anvar pondered the possibilities of finding food in this alien place.
Sara must have been thinking the same thing. “Anvar, I need something to eat!”
It was little short of a command, and Anvar felt a stab of irritation. Aurian had never spoken to him like that, and he had been her servant! Striving to keep his voice calm, he said: “So do I. Shush, let me think a minute.”
“But I’m hungry. 1 want something to eat now!”
Luckily, Anvar’s long-departed grandpa came to the rescue. He had filled the young boy’s childhood with tales of his own youth in the country. By the time he was nine, Anvar had been fully conversant with the skills of trout-tickling—in theory, at any rate. And not far away was an ocean teeming with fish. “Come on,” he said to Sara. “We’ll catch some fish for dinner.”
In practice, it proved to be a lot more difficult than it had sounded. Out in the open sea, the fish seemed to have developed some magic of their own. Again and again, as Anvar’s careful hand almost closed on their sleek, shining bodies, the fish suddenly vanished, leaving the exasperated fisherman with a handful of empty ocean. Anvar stood waist-deep in the sea, growing more irritated by the second. Why wouldn’t the bloody things stay still? His eyes ached from peering into the dazzling waters, and the sun beat fiercely on his unprotected head and back. He seemed to have been doing this for hours. Try as he would, he could not shake off the “fiction that the damned fish were mocking his bumbling efforts. As he lifted his hands out of the water, he saw that the skin on his fingers was white and wrinkled.
“Anvar? Anvar!” Sara’s voice rang out from the shore. What did the wretched girl want? He was vaguely aware that she’d been calling for some time. He turned—and there she stood, laughing, holding up a bag made from a white square of linen torn from one of her petticoats. It was bulging and squirming in her grasp. “Look! I’ve caught some!”
For a split second he could cheerfully have strangled her Then the import of her words sunk in, and Anvar was both astonished and relieved. Moving as quickly as he could against the clinging pressure of the water, he waded back to her through the shallows. “How in the world did you manage that?” he said, trying not to sound as indignant as he felt.
Sara dumped her writhing bundle down on the white sands and put her arms around his sunburned neck, making him wince. “Easy.” She smirked. “Aren’t you proud of me?”
“Of course!” he snapped, glaring at her, and Sara relented.
“Did you not notice?” she said. “The tide’s turned, Anvar.” She gestured to a reef, now exposed, that pointed out like a finger into the ocean. “There are lots of fish over there, trapped in the rock pools,”
“The tide?” Anvar felt stupid. He knew about tides, but not having been to the sea before, he had never understood their import.
The realization hit Sara at once. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve never been to the sea before, have you?”
“How could I?” Anvar snapped. “The Magefolk don’t give their servants outings to the coast, you know! How do you know so much about it, anyway?”
Sara looked away for a moment. “Vannor used to take me in the summer.” Seeing the look on Anvar’s face, she hastily changed the subject. She couldn’t afford to alienate him. “Anyway,” she said brightly, “I’m useless. I may have caught them —-I couldn’t help but do that—but I can’t kill them. And as for dealing with the horrid bits, well, it always makes me sick.”
She had obviously said the fighf thing, because Anvar smiled. “I’ll do that. I learned how to do it in the kitchens at the Academy.”
Sara shuddered. She wished he wouldn’t keep reminding her that he was a servant. Living with Vannor, she had grown used to having servants around, and had ceased to think of them as human beings. They were just, well, there—polite, anonymous, and at her beck and call. It made her feel unclean, somehow, to be making love to one of them. Still, for expediency’s sake, she could put up with it. Turning to Anvar, she gave him her brightest smile, which had always worked with Vannor. “It’s a good thing there’s somebody practical around,” she told Anvar, “I’m afraid I’m just hopeless. Do you know how to get this fire starte4£l’%
Before his ill-fated fishing attempt, Anvar had left his tinder and flint with his discarded shirt on a sunbaked rock to dry out. There was plenty of wood between the forest’s edge and the high-tide mark, and Anvar soon had a fire going. He used Aurian’s dagger to gut the fish, feeling guilty again, for he knew she had given him the weapon for more important reasons than this. He baked the fish on flat rocks at the fire’s edge, and they feasted in the shade of the forest’s eaves, by the stream, where the lush foliage protected them from the midday sun.
Anvar awakened in the cool, fragrant dusk. The last blush of sunset glowed behind the tall cliffs, and bats swooped over the beach, hunting insects lured by the glow of the fire. Now-the sun had gone, hordes of tiny scuttling crabs were makin| off with the remains of the fish. Anvar shuddered, and scrambled hastily to his feet, wincing at the fiery stiffness of v sunburned back, and trying to clear the fuzz of sleep from brain. All that staying awake with Aurian had finally caught with him, he supposed. He must have fallen asleep before had even finished eating.
Then he realized, with a start, that Sara was missing! Ar iously, Anvar scanned the beach. Surely she wouldn’t be stupid as to wander off alone? Taking a branch from their fit wood pile, he kindled one end at the fire, and examined the spot where she had been sitting. There was no sign of a stm( gle, so no beast from thr=forest had seized her. Then he saw footprints, leading to the stream, then away into the jungl With a curse, Anvar plunged into the shadowed forest, following the course of the water.