out. The pool of blood has mostly seeped into the ground, but there’s a small puddle still somewhat liquid.
I dip the ‘pen’ into it and write a message to the girls, assuring them I am alive, then giving some suggestions and observations and heart-felt opinions about the general state of this planet and its wildlife until there’s no more room to write.
I roll the parchment back up, then unroll it again and add
PS: This is not my blood.
No need to scare the girls too much.
Caronerax and the spidermonkey are carefully ignoring each other, while at the same time staying tense.
I squat down and hand the scroll to the spidermonkey. “Thank you. Can you please take this back to the person who gave it to you?”
The creature looks up at me and curls its fingers around the scroll. It glances over at Caronerax, then jumps thirty feet away in a single, high bound, and then keeps bouncing away, above the treetops.
I can’t help but wonder how it gets across water, but those jumps are really long and if it got here, then it will be able to get back again.
That thing moves fast, but how long would it take it to make its way here from Bune? It must have taken it a day or maybe less. If I remember correctly, the distance between Canada and Florida is more than a thousand miles. And even spidermonkeys can’t move a hundred miles an hour, right? Fifteen to twenty would be a more realistic guess. At twenty miles an hour, for about twenty hours because the day here on Xren is shorter than on Earth… that’s four hundred miles. Still a long way, but nowhere near as far as I feared. And that’s the worst case scenario.
I also notice that the spidermonkey is moving pretty much straight south, which also has to be a good sign. I was right about that, at least.
I walk over to Caronerax. “It was a message from the other girls. They are leaving the planet and want to know that I’m still alive.”
“And you told them you are?”
I cock my head to the side. “I appear to be. You’re not planning on changing that, are you?”
He looks me up and down. “Not at present.”
A lot of tension is gone from my mind, a lot of worry has dissipated. The girls will soon know I’m alive, they will wait until I’m there before they take off, they will know approximately where I am, who I’m with, and what they can do to maybe speed up my return considerably. This is all starting to look really good.
I put more wood on the fire and sit down on the not-sheep fur.
Caronerax saunters over and sits down beside me, long legs stretched out as he leans on the boulder. “Did you tell them about me?”
My eyelids are starting to feel heavy. “Maybe a little. I don’t know much about you.”
“Good.”
“I think you enjoy being mysterious. While I’m the least mysterious person you ever met. Anyway, I have something for you.
He lifts the curtain of curly hair out of his face. “What?”
I open my palm and show it to him. “This simple thing here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something that will help you see better, which is important for captains of rafts. Can I put it on you?” I reach up and gather his hair to the side, then slide the small wooden thing over and through it. “There.”
He touches it. “Again, what is it?”
“We call it a hairpin. It keeps the hair out of your face. So that you can see stuff?”
He looks around, angling his head this way and that. “It appears to work.”
With the long, golden hair out of the way, he is even more heart-stoppingly gorgeous than before. And the contrast between the girly way of keeping his hair out of his eyes and the intense masculinity of the rest of him just doubles the attraction by some mechanism I will never understand.
“And it makes you look tremendously manly,” I assure him.
He gets up, walks over to the water and looks down at his own reflection.
“It does,” he reports with satisfaction when he returns and sits down.
“Told you. Do you mind if I…” I lean my head on his shoulder, not giving him a chance to protest.
- - -
I wake up lying on the fur, and I have no memory of how that happened.
My dress is on and perfectly proper, the fire still has some embers left glowing, little waves are