Risk

Chapter XXIII

Jasta woke up feeling actually well-rested for the first time in a while. A warm green light was streaming in through the vine-shielded windows. She didn't want to leave the fluffy bed. Her muscles ached from riding and walking and everything else she'd been doing. She wished she still had her strength from before she'd been kidnapped. It would make everything easier if she didn't feel like a skeleton.

She sat up, wincing when her muscles shrieked in protest. It would take a long time to get back to how she was before. She still had a hard time believing that she had been asleep for nearly a solid month. Nothing but sleeping... she couldn't imagine it.

Rowan was still asleep. She wondered what he had done to gain favor with so many people. Bart from the tavern back at that first village, and now Kanara, and they seemed to owe him something as well. She recalled Bart's words, after what you did for me. But what did he do? he must have done something spectacular to gain their trust as he had.

Her eyes strayed to the windows again. The sunlight, although muted by the foliage, was bright.

She felt the familiar restlessness when she thought about the daylight they were burning by lying in bed, but she knew Rowan needed the sleep, and she wouldn't say no to an extra few minutes of rest. Each passing minute that they could be traveling made her feel antsier, but she decided to just hunker down and wait for Rowan to wake up. She didn't really have much else to do anyway; there was no tent to tear down, at any rate.

She heard a strange, warbling birdcall that she had never heard before drifting through the window. It sounded like people wailing. It was eerie. She was used to the gentle twitter of sparrows and robins. She wondered what was making such a strange sound.

She stood up, stretching out her aching limbs, and she stifled a yawn. She wondered how much farther it was until Yarul; how much longer until she would be home.

She glanced over at Rowan. One of his sleeves was rolled up to reveal a layer of bandages, and she was reminded of the fact that she had hurt him in her frantic struggle of freedom. She walked over and gently peeled away the very edge of the bandage. She had to know how bad it was. She knew it was stupid and that it would probably make her feel more guilty than she already did, but she had to know.

The skin underneath was warm to the touch and strangely grey, with thin slices of black running across it. It looked angry, though not like her own arm would if the same had happened to her. His blood was black while hers was red. Her skin would turn pink rather than the ghostly grey that his had turned.

She peeled back more of the bandage. The wounds really didn't look good at all. They crisscrossed all up and down his forearm, and some even up past his elbow. She wondered how much attention he was giving it, especially when his attention was divided with everything else he'd been doing.

She took the bandage off completely. It wasn't really doing any good anyway. She looked around the room but the space was empty. There wasn't anything except for the beds, much less something that could help Rowan, so she exited the open doorway.

She had been too tired the night before to really take in any of her surroundings, but as she made her way through the building, she looked at whatever caught her eye. The walls were made of yellowish stone, and there were so many doors and windows that she couldn't even begin to count them all. Most of the doors were arched at the top. There didn't seem to be any furniture or decorations anywhere, except for the occasional woven rug.

She eventually found her way back to the front room, where Kanara was sitting sideways in a wide-seated chair that looked like it was made out of the same things that baskets were made from. Some sort of dried grass or reed.