banks—it deepens abruptly. You can wash your wounds as well.”
“I am not wounded.”
“You are not bleeding?” he asked mildly.
She frowned, caught in her lie and not certain how he could possibly know such a thing.
“Are you certain you cannot see?” She waved her arms to test his claim.
“The air moves when you do that,” he said. “I can hear you . . . and feel it. And blood has a very particular scent.”
She stopped flapping, embarrassed. “You smelled my blood?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I bleeding?”
“I don’t know that . . . but the flesh on the knees is much thinner than that on the palms. And judging from the sound of your fall, I’m guessing your knees are bleeding.”
“Only one of them,” she grumbled. “It doesn’t even hurt.”
“I think it does. Do you need my help?”
She ignored his question and moved past him to the creek. She paid heed to his instructions, though, and stayed on the bank, drinking her fill from the water that rushed over the smooth rocks. When she was sated, she rinsed the salt from her arms and legs and washed her bloodied knee, careful to do so without a wince or murmur. He waited nearby, his head tipped in such a way that she guessed he was listening the way most men watched, counting her swallows and marking each move she made.
“I will refill your flask,” she offered when she had finished. “The one I emptied.” But he approached, crouched beside her, and did it himself, his head still cocked, keeping track of her.
When he rose again, tucking the flask into his belt, she rose too, suddenly fearful she’d offended him, and that he would leave.
“I am Ghisla,” she said.
“Ghisla,” he repeated with a nod. “How old are you, Ghisla?”
“I have fourteen summers.”
“Fourteen?” He sounded surprised.
“Yes.”
“You are . . . small?” He asked the question as though he wasn’t certain he was correct . . . or he wasn’t certain she was being truthful.
“I am very small. My mother said all our people grow slowly.”
“Your mother?”
“She is dead.” Her voice was dull to her own ears, but the boy didn’t say he was sorry or ask for further explanation. He was simply quiet, as though waiting for her to tell him more. She didn’t.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I am sixteen. We are not so different in age,” he said slowly.
“You are tall,” she said.
“Am I?” he asked, interested.
“Do your people grow big?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know because you can’t see?” she pressed.
“I don’t know because I . . . don’t . . . know my people.”
“Do you have a name?”
He seemed to think about that. “Yes.”
She waited, but he didn’t offer it.
“What shall I call you?” Her voice was sharp now. She was weary. Not scared. Not anymore. Just weary. Her bones ached and her belly growled in hunger, and the water she’d filled it with sloshed angrily against the hollows.
“You can call me Hod.”
“Hod?” What an odd name. It rhymed with toad. She wondered if he would suddenly hop away. She hoped he wouldn’t. She needed him. She had grown very tired all of a sudden.
“Yes. Hod. That is what Arwin calls me.”
“Arwin . . . Your teacher?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe Arwin can teach me too,” she murmured.
Hod frowned, confused.
“But . . . you can see,” he asked, halting. “Can’t you?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how to live on my own.”
His face smoothed in understanding.
“I am very tired, Hod,” she said. “I am very tired and very hungry. And yes . . . I need your help.”
He brought her to a cave whose mouth yawned like that of a whale carved in the rock. He entered it without hesitation, the darkness almost immediately swallowing him whole.
“It is very dark in there,” she cried, reluctant to follow. He answered immediately.
“I do not need the light . . . but I will make a fire, and you can rest there, near the opening.”
She sank down obediently, peering into the depths, trying to find him, but the darkness was complete. She waited, anxious, weary, but comforted by the sounds that emerged.
Mere moments later, twin flames bloomed, one from a torch that protruded from the cave wall, another from the pit that lay deeper in the cave. Hod stood beneath the torch, his staff set aside, and he called her name.
“Ghisla, is the light sufficient?”
“Yes.”
“Come inside, then. I will feed you.”
The interior of the cave was as big as the home she’d lived in with her family. Bigger, if the tunnels that