Anyway, here you go, next installment. Romance fans you may enjoy this one...
Chapter 7 Part 1
In Which Conversations are Overheard and a Life Rekindled
Seok
shifted in his sleep, the sound of voices slowly breaking their way into his
consciousness. At first the words he heard were too slurred by his waking mind
to be understood clearly, but slowly as he awoke, the words became clearer. It
was Cain and Shula talking that had awakened him, he realized, even before he
could tell what they were saying. He still was not sure why her voice stirred
him like it did. Whenever she spoke, it was like his attention fixed
immediately on her. It was almost the same, only slightly different from how he
had been attached to Cain for the first few months after he had been found.
Then it had been a kind of pathetic gratefulness that had caused the devotion,
now, with Shula, the whole situation was different. The woman was special, but
he did not know why, and he still, after a day and two nights spent with her
could not shake the feeling that he had known her somewhere else.
“They
are seals, what I want to know is what relation do they have to Seok’s seal?”
“Ah,
now there’s a real stumper. I how did you guess my bracelets were seals
anyway?” Seok listened closer to the words the two were saying, his name
alerting him to his own presence in the other’s conversation. Some instinctive
curiosity kept him still, or perhaps he was still too immured in sleep for his
body to move if he told it to, but he listened as the conversation progressed,
with only a single thought in his mind, “My seal?”
Cain
asked Shula about her bracelets, describing them well enough that, though Seok
had never taken any notice of Shula’s bracelets before, he could picture them
in his mind as clearly as if he had seen them being made. It was when Cain
said, “I’ve done extensive research on seals and how they’re made. Seok’s
doesn’t have a maker’s mark, and from what I’ve seen of yours they’re similar
enough that they could have been made by the same person,” that Seok realized
what exactly the priest was implying.
He
almost moved to touch his headband, when the sudden realization came. The
headband that he never thought about, almost as if his mind were tricked into
forgetting it, even after people commented on his never taking it off, was a
seal? Questions came flooding into his mind. Did the seal mean he was a watu?
If Shula’s bracelets really were seals that were made by the same person as his
headband, then he had known her before? Older questions that he had asked
himself before mixed themselves with this new revelation. Had he lost all of
his memories before being chained in that cave because of the seal? Why had he
been sealed in the first place?
Shula
and Cain’s conversation continued in the background, though Seok was no longer
listening to them. They had stopped talking about him, and even if they had
continued on that same subject, his mind was so concerned with the simple fact
that he had been wearing a seal for four years without knowing it that he would
not have been listening anyway. When the conversation ended with Shula settling
down in her cloth next to his bedroll, he lay still, now fully awake, and very
aware of the wakefulness of the other two in the small room. Zija emitted a
small snore in his sleep and Seok heard Shula’s breath settle into a steady
rhythm and then deepen as she fell asleep as well. Finally, he heard a papery
rustling that he recognized as Cain’s robes as he took off and folded his sash
to prepare for sleep. Seok’s mind continued in circles, asking the same
questions again and again until he too followed the others in the room into
sleep.
Morning
dawned bright and clear, the snowstorm from the night before finished, though
the wind still blew icy needles through the clothes of the five travelers.
Almost as soon as they had cleaned up and set out, Shula fell into a brooding
silence that Seok assumed was because of the cold, as it had been the day
before. He wanted to ask her about what she had said to Cain last night about
his seal, but in a strange turn of events could not think of what to say.
His
hand reached up to rub the chain, as cold as ice from the frigid wind blowing
in their faces. He pulled at it, but it seemed locked onto his scalp, tangled
so badly in his hair that he winced. When he ran a finger underneath it though
he found there was no hair impeding his fingers at all, after all, how many
times had he had to shove his hair up underneath it to keep his lanky brown
bangs out of his face? It was definitely something supernatural, and the more
he thought about having worn it for so long, the more uncomfortable he felt.
Shula
had locked her arms around his stomach as she had done the day before, hiding
he face from the harsh wind blowing through the pass. They had entered the pass
as soon as they left the shelter. It was a narrow thing, only wide enough for
one horse to pass at a time. The wall of the mountain shot up in a sheer cliff
on the group’s right side and started out steep on the left until about the
height of the horses’ ears then the slope gentled into something that would be
easy enough to climb when it was not covered with snow or ice. The wind that
normally whipped around the side of the mountain was bottled up and
concentrated down this smooth tunnel. Even the horses kept their heads low and
laid their ears back flat to let their masters know just how unhappy they were
at being made to fight the mountain’s breath.
The
group took heart that at the end of the day that this hellish ride over the
mountain would be nearly finished. One thing they were all thankful for was
that the wind did provide them a clear path. The snow from the previous night
that had drifted high against the walls of the shelter was swept from the path
the horses had to travel. Between the wind, the horses trudging forward in
single file and Seok and Shula bringing up the rear, there was no speaking
between the riders the whole day.
At
one point near the middle of the day Shula let go of Seok, leaving the only
warm spot on the front half of his body vulnerable to the attack of the
fiendish wind. She reached back around him with one of her scarves and wrapped
it around his neck and the bottom half of his face. Seok could feel the heat
and scent of her body still clinging to the fabric. She wrapped the scarf all
the way around her shoulders and tucked the end under the collar on Seok’s
cloak, effectively tying the two of the together. Settling her head back into
its place on his shoulder Seok could not help but wonder if that surprisingly
intimate moment had been to help keep him warm or if it had been to create a
better wind block for herself.
Their
ride was finally over for the day when the pass started going downhill and
widened out. Another hour and the group was back among the trees. The trees had
blocked the wind here so the snow had piled up inches deep on the path. Another
few minutes led them to the next shelter house. The sigh of relief Shula let
out on seeing the building was audible. While the men began unsaddling their
horses next to the connected lean-to, Shula headed directly toward the door to
the small building. Only to come back out cursing when she saw there was no
convenient stack of firewood inside next to the fire pit in the floor.
She
tramped through the snow, kicking it out of her way with mutters of “Damn,
freezing ass snow, those two freaks can just go die; throwing this shitty ass
crap down here.” She bent down and picked up a pine branch that she had kicked
the snow off of. Stepping on one end Shula grabbed the other and bent it upward
until it broke with a sharp crack into two manageable pieces.
Looking
up toward the sky, as if to beseech the gods she yelled, “Who the hell’s bright
ass idea was snow anyway, huh? ‘It’ll look so pretty on the top of Bhumi’s
mountains’ my ass! It’s hella pretty now Niru!” She turned back to the shelter
house with the few sticks she had gathered. “Freaking, freezing ass snow!”
Zija
laughed as he walked past her to look for deadfall for the fire too. “It’s not
that bad,” he taunted. “We could have been a few more days late then you could
have seen real snow!” He had spent several years north of the watu border where
the winters were long and harsh as a rule. Though he agreed that the mountain
was unpleasant, he knew it would be impossible to cross this pass in a week’s
time thanks to the snow piling up.
Shula
dropped her wood into the fire pit and went out to find more, hopefully smaller
sticks that would catch fire without too much trouble. Seok dug through the
snow at the bottom of one of the trees and pulled up handfuls of only slightly
damp pine needles. He took them inside to Larkin while Zija came back with a
whole armload of sticks and branches that would burn. He was by no account a
survivalist and would probably die if left in a forest alone, but the man did
know how to find firewood under a pile of snow.
“Gee,
look, Red’s actually useful for something,” Shula said sarcastically as he
tramped through the snow past her a second time.
“You
sure talk a lot for someone who’s doing nothing,” he said, looking at the few
sticks she held in her hands. Zija continued into the trees and they both
looked for useable wood while Seok and Cain rubbed down the horses and Larkin
tried to start a fire in the damp pine needle kindling. Zija walked past Shula
again, heading back toward the shelter with a faggot of sticks held under each
arm. He raised his eyebrows at her, gloating, as he passed. “Shitty, red head,
show off bastard,” Shula muttered at him, kicking aside more snow with her heavy
boots to find the sticks she needed for the fire.
Seok
and Cain had finished with the horses and were squatting, warming their hands
over the fire when Zija came in, stomping the snow from his boots. He dumped
his wood next to the fire pit and flopped down on the floor to copy the other
two, rubbing warmth back into his fingers. Larkin unpacked the group’s only
cooking pan and pushed Seok away from the fire so he could start cooking
something he called stew for the group’s dinner. The dried meat he put in the
pan with the melted snow would have to boil for about twenty minutes before it
became something not resembling jerky.
Seok
leaned against the wall and stared off into space, still thinking about the
news of his headband being a seal. He had thought about the time that Shula had
asked him if he remembered someone more than once that day. Just as he was
convincing himself that he had actually known her before he lost his memories
she burst into the room.
Shula
glared at Zija and dropped her pile of deadfall branches and sticks on top of
his. It looked like the group might now have enough to keep the fire lit for
the whole night. Shula unwound herself from her scarves, tossing them
carelessly on the floor in front of her. “Benki,” Seok whispered from where he
stood against the wall. Shula froze, her eyes wide and mouth hanging partially
open.
The
whispered word got a similar, if less noticeable, surprised reaction from Cain;
though it was not seen by the other two men who were watching Shula suddenly
throw herself across the room and into Seok’s arms. She jumped on him, wrapping
her legs around his waist and arms around his neck as she kissed him. A long,
deep kiss, where Seok’s arms slowly wrapped themselves around Shula’s body to
support her and hold her closer to his own.
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