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The Wild Girls (chapter story)

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YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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CHAPTER SEVEN: STEALING CREATION

A soft hum drew Heather out of unusually tranquil dreams.

She stretched, immersed in comforting darkness. It felt nice under the covers. Warm. Soft. She felt amazing, too. It felt almost like she’d slept in, but nobody slept in at the Bandit Camp. You’d get the blankets yanked away from you and a bucket of cold water in the face if you were lucky. If you weren’t lucky, you wouldn’t wake up.

But she wasn’t at the Bandit Camp.

Heather’s eyes opened. She stared up at pale sheets, at the boarded-up windows, at pale, muted wildydawn light filtering in through the cracks.

At the source of the warmth, the girl she was cuddled up next to, one arm slid beneath her waist.

Heather recoiled so fast she nearly fell off the bed. Pain rocketed through her injured leg, and she let out a hiss of pain.

Catteken’s eyes shot open, striking dawn-brown gaze meeting Heather’s. Concern washed through them. “Oh, is your leg acting up?” She sat up, rubbing an eye. “I’ll make some more tea. Sorry, I meant to wake up before the last dose wore off completely, I was just…” She trailed off.

Heather remembered just in time her internal promise to be nice. “It’s fine,” she managed, turning her head to hide her burning cheeks.

She remembered how they’d swapped positions in the bed, at least. She’d stumbled out of bed last night, half-asleep, to take a piss outside. She grimaced. It wasn’t safe to just stumble outside into the darkness on your own, not outside the Camp.

She didn’t fully remember getting back into bed. She definitely didn’t remember moving in close.

It had been cold last night.

She buried her face in her pillow as Ken climbed over her to get out of bed.

“You were right,” Ken said as Heather heard her place a kettle on the stove. “I was being very silly last night. Bodies are just bodies.”

“Right.” Just bodies, Heather told herself, willing the color to fade from her cheeks. Just flesh and bone. Just warmth. That’s all.

30-Apr-2023 18:51:06

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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“Mm.” Ken crouched down before the fire beneath the stove and placed another log within. She seemed oddly reserved.

Heather shifted. Right, she’d upset Ken last night. She scratched her chin and paused, noticing she was getting a little scruffy. “Do you have a razor?”

She didn’t care if Ken was upset with her, she told herself as she shaved. Not her problem. Who gave a damn if some Wilderness whackjob didn’t like her? Bandits didn’t need people to like them. It was safer to be feared. Caring about other people’s feelings past that was how you went soft.

She studied herself in the hand mirror, scanning for any lingering fuzz. Her gaze fell instead on Catteken in the background. The girl was still bent over, blowing on last night’s coals in an effort to rouse them. One of Catteken’s hands tapped against the floor in an anxious rhythm.

On the other hand, she reasoned, keeping Ken happy with her… that was the goal, wasn’t it? It wasn’t about sentiment. It wasn’t about Heather going soft. It was about staying alive.

“This tea should be heated soon.” Ken stood up. “I’ll go do the chores.”

“What, alone?”

“I always do them alone.” Ken met Heather’s gaze through the hand mirror, and Heather almost dropped it, startled. “I know how to take care of myself.”

"Yeah. Obviously." Heather drew the razor carefully across her jawline, watching the tiny hairs fall down to the floor.

Ken stopped midway to the door and stared at Heather. "That's sarcasm."

"No, I'm not!" Heather raised her hands, still holding the mirror and razor. "I figure you know how take care of yourself. I mean…" Her mind raced as she searched for a way to divert the topic. "I mean, your setup is crazy. These vegetables—you can't seriously expect me to believe you've been growing those?"

Something in Ken's eyes sparked. "Of course I have."

"No way."

Ken grasped the doorknob, raising an eyebrow. "Do you not believe me?"

Heather folded her arms with a petulant smile. "I'll believe it when I see it."

30-Apr-2023 18:54:51

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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Catteken waited until Heather had finished her mug of tea before offering her the crutch. "Just be careful, okay? This doesn't handle ashdrifts so well."

"I'll be fine." Heather rolled her eyes. Playing nice or no, she couldn’t stand feeling coddled. "I usually run around barefoot out here."

"That seems very dangerous." Ken pulled on her coat, then retrieved a scarf, which she offered to Heather. "Put this on. It's cold outside this close to the glacier."

Heather regarded the scarf dubiously. It was a clumsily-knitted thing, rich brown knitted wool that hadn't been dyed. "That looks scratchy. I'll pass."

Ken's eyes narrowed. "Put it on."

Heather looked between Ken and the scarf. "Again, thanks, but no thanks. It's not my style."

30-Apr-2023 18:55:15 - Last edited on 30-Apr-2023 18:56:11 by YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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"It is scratchy," Heather muttered, tugging at the scarf as they stepped outside into the mists of wildydawn.

"Oh, stop whining." Ken, closed the door carefully behind them. "Let me know if you have any trouble with that crutch, or if the herbal tea feels like it's not kicking in right, and we'll head straight back."

Heather rolled her eyes. "Fine. Whatever." She had no intention of showing Ken any more weakness she didn't have to, but she forced herself to smile. "So, show me this 'garden' of yours."

Catteken didn't seem able to suppress her excited grin. As she turned to lead them around the cottage, Heather tried to memorize their surroundings.

She sort of understood how the cottage had gone ignored for so long. From the outside, with no lights on inside, it looked utterly decrepit. Any paint once on it had peeled or burned away, and the roof was laden with ash. The windows were boarded up from the outside, hiding the intact glass behind them, and the smoke rising from the brick chimney could easily be mistaken for more billowing mist if you weren't looking closely enough. There was even enough wind here to blow away most of their footprints.

Careful inspection would still betray that the house was occupied, but maybe not a lot of people got close enough to inspect it carefully.

Nearby stood an old shed, its door held shut by a thin, fraying piece of twine. Heather guessed this was where Ken had taken that bath last night.

And aside from the shed, everything was..

... empty. Just empty dunes of ash. It was freezing, though, and Heather barely suppressed a shiver in time. The last thing she needed was Ken deciding she needed to go back inside 'for her own good'. Or, worse, Ken getting a chance to I-told-you-so about the scarf.

30-Apr-2023 19:01:34

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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She followed Ken around the side of the cottage, limping on her crutch with as much grace as she could manage. She noticed that there were trails of large flat stones leading in to the shed and along the path Ken was taking, stepping stones mostly concealed beneath the ash. If she felt her way around, those were a lot easier to walk on.

As they came around, she smelled sweetness, and noticed that hum from earlier rising to fill the morning.

The cottage stood in the shadows of a vast glacier. Heather realized with a start that it was the Plateau. She'd never seen it up so close before. Even on the clearest, most mist-free days, it was usually only a distant chunky blur to the northwest.

For a moment, all she could see was the great towering wall of ice, the places where the stone columns of the cliff face cut through, dark muddy-gray stone streaked with glints of metallic stormy blue. Heather had only seen metal like that one other time in her life: in a scimitar resting in a wanderer’s dead hand, just before the Bandits had taken it, bundled it away, and sold it to a trader for a year’s supply of grain and salted meat.

She swallowed, clutching her crutch tightly. This was the north. This was the far north, somewhere in the thirties or forties. And... was it just her imagination (it had to be, it had to be a trick of the light), or were some pieces of especially clear blue ice up there moving ?

It was only when they came to a stop, and Ken cleared her throat, that Heather registered what lay in the foreground, cast in the weak morning light.

30-Apr-2023 19:01:52

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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A waist-high wire fence had been strung around a plot of land about the size of the house. Within the plot rose three elevated beds, two larger, narrower beds flanking a smaller square bed next to a large gray box. Oak planks framed the allotments, holding in dark, rich, musty-smelling soil that looked nothing like the burnt, gray grime of the Wilderness. Almost nothing could grow in Wilderness dirt, but this…

Filling the raised beds was greenery of shapes and sizes and colors Heather had never imagine.

She’d heard that fruits grew from larger plants, obviously. She’d seen drawings, and she’d even seen proper, living trees when the bandits had strayed down south. Those were dull, sickly trees, though, ancient oaks that had learned to live on less. Nothing like this.

Thick, spiky leaves bobbed in a faint breeze from one plant around a dense green thistle-like flower bud at the center. On other plants, leaves the color of emeralds folded tightly around one another to form compact vegetables nearly the size of Heather’s skull. Little yellow flowers blossomed from vines in one of the longer allotments, growing alongside slenderer leafy green herbs. In the central allotment, a lumpy brown plant Heather recognized as limpwurt rose up toward the sky and erupted into a beautiful orange blossom shaped like a star. Heather had never even known limpwurt root came from something like that.

Plants she recognized as onions grew in the other long allotment, though they were much smaller than the onions she’d had. Sticks tied together to form crisscross patterns bore up delicate climbing tendrils, some laden with little green pods, others erupting in breathtaking trumpet-like indigo flowers.

As Heather tried to take it all in, Catteken slipped past her and began casually plucking pods off the vines. She gestured with one hand, not looking. “Could you please get me that basket over there?”

30-Apr-2023 19:02:14

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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“Um, yeah, sure.” Heather limped over to one of the fenceposts and took the wicker basket hanging from it by its handle. She held it out.

“Thank you.” Ken took it with a muted smile, then did a double-take, looking back at Heather with wide eyes. “Oh, I—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be asking you to fetch me things with your—”

“I told you, I’m fine .” Heather looked at the indigo flowers. “What are those?”

“The flowers? Hm…I’m not sure!” Ken grunted as she struggled to pull out an especially stubborn onion. “I find all kinds of seeds around the Wilderness.”

“So you don’t know what they’re for?”

“What they’re for?” Ken looked up at her, tilting her head to the side. Somehow, she’d smudged dirt on her face. “Well, they definitely aren’t edible. I guess those flowers only bloom during the day, so they’re nice for telling time on ash days, but… mainly, they just look pretty! Sometimes that’s enough.”

“Right.”

“There’s not a lot of color this far north. Ha!” Heather finally wrenched the onion out of the soil, sending bits of dirt. “That’s useful. Seeing pretty things makes me happy, and keeping myself happy is useful. Isn’t that kind of the point of staying alive up here? So we can have good days?”

Heather considered it.

“Yeah. I guess. Maybe.”

Heather hobbled around the fence to lean against the post from the other side, watching as Ken finished the harvest and turned to selecting one of the leaf-ball plants to pick.

“I guess that sounds pretty stupid.”

Heather blinked.

She bit her lip.

“... no. That makes perfect sense, actually.”

30-Apr-2023 19:02:55 - Last edited on 30-Apr-2023 19:03:51 by YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

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There was a long silence. Ken set the basket aside and turned to watering the plants with an old, rusty, many-times-patched watering can.

“So, don’t plants need lots of sunlight?” Heather asked, squinting up at the ash-choked sky.

“Oh, that was my idea!” Ken said. “That’s why they’re next to the glacier! During the morning, the ice reflects a lot of light down here. It helps make up the difference. They don’t grow as big as I guess they would down south, but…” She laughed. “They still taste very good!”

Heather looked between the plateau and the garden. Sure enough, a lot of light seemed to be coming from the opposite direction from the sunrise. “That’s pretty clever, I guess.”

There was a shy little smile on Ken’s face as she averted her gaze.

Heather told herself that she was just saying all this to butter Ken, but she wasn’t really listening to that voice at the moment. She took up her crutch and hobbled among the greenery, breathing in the sweetness.

Something buzzed right by her head. She started back, nearly losing her balance.

She realized she’d been so captivated by the garden, she hadn’t even looked closely at that strange gray box at the center, registered how loud the hum was getting. It was actually three stacked boxes elevated on a squat wooden table. Bees were buzzing around it, alighting atop flowers, disappearing into a hole in the bottom of the beehive.

Heather took a nervous step back, though the bees didn’t seem aggressive. Her eyes fixed on the boxes. Something was off about them. Was that…

It couldn’t be.

“It took me a while to learn how to get them to germinate,” she heard Ken mumble. “Even with my books.”

“Ken.” Heather’s breath caught. “Is that…”

Ken looked over and followed her gaze.

Very gently, so as not to spook the hive, Heather reached out and touched of the topmost bee box. As she'd suspected, it wasn’t wood or stone.

It was soft, very pale clay.

30-Apr-2023 19:04:45

YuBiusk Ink

YuBiusk Ink

Posts: 2,904 Adamant Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
“H-How.” She forced herself to take a deep breath, turning to Ken. “How did you get this?”

Ken looked up at her with an adorable obnoxious little half-grin.

Heather stared back at her in stunned silence. It took her a moment to manage words. “Do—do you know what kind of a target this makes you?”

“It was hard to get. But the bees like it.”

“That’s not—how hasn’t this cottage been razed to the ground yet?” Her head snapped between Ken and the box. “The Mystics, the yellowjackets—” The Bandits , she held back.

“We’re really far north.” Ken rose to her feet. “Most people don’t look. And ...” Her grin widened as she reached behind her back and gave her bowstring a twang .

Heather suddenly realized, cursing under her breath, that that bow was also made of clay.

“I can take care of myself.”

Heather felt like the world was upside-down. She felt like it had been for the last two entire days. “You… madgirl .”

“Plus!” Ken giggled. “Now I have you around. And you look like you can handle yourself, too.” She clasped her hands behind her back, water from the can sloshing onto her clothes. “Actually, you look like you’re kind of ready to knock me unconscious with that crutch, but that still means you can fight.”

Heather was so taken aback, she couldn’t help but laugh. She hobbled over to the fence.

“Not that you could~”

Heather’s head snapped back around. “Oh, is that so?”

30-Apr-2023 19:05:21

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