It was hot. The sky was brilliantly blue, clear and bright. The air shimmered over the lush, green meadow that rolled down and northward from the Far Chetwood. In the distance, Nen Harn was a spangled expanse of dark grey and green. Now and again the warm wind that gently buffeted her face carried whiffs of its dampness, and the tinge of mud and reeds baking in the heat.
Sweat glistened on the freckled skin that was faintly bronzed from the summer sun. Only in the height of summer did that milk-pale flesh attain any sort of golden hue. Her hair gleamed with streaks of golden copper that were brighter than the rest, similarly birthed under the streaming rays, only in this season of the year.
She was too hot. She longed to rise and lope over the grass to the swift, shady stream that ran past her hollowed-tree camp before emptying itself into the lake. She would do so soon. Very soon. But for now, she sat still on the flat boulder, with her face turned upwards, her eyes closed, and her arms burning and prickling.
It was growing uncomfortable, but she did not shun the concept of discomfort. It was all sensation. Sensation meant life. And she was a woman with a vivacity so strong, it bordered on singularity. She knew of no one who could match that passion, that fire, that reckless, wanton ecstasy of simply being alive.
No, that wasn't true. There had been one person. Just one. He had been so like her in that way. So vibrant, so free, so joyfully alive.
She wished she could see him again.
She felt safe out here in the wild. Safe from people, from civilization, from all the odd, annoying, confusing expectations that Men seemed to have for one another. Safe from awkward words, and from her own, blundering tongue.
Safe from the wide-brimmed hat and the rugged smile and the broad shoulders and big hands that could doubtlessly pick her up and toss her about like a feather.
She lowered her own slender little fingers to the grass on either side. Brushing her palms over the warm, tender blades. Be present. Here. Get out of your head.
She thought of the child she'd met just a few days before. A smudge-faced, skinned-kneed waif, trying to learn how to fish in the stream with a crude stick-pole. Her Pa was dead from a Blackwold scuffle, her Ma useless with grief, and her little brother barely able to walk yet. The child was not afraid of the huntress, nor of the bow and arrows and knife she carried. What was there to fear, after all, when your Pa was murdered and Hunger was ready to take your whole family next?
The woman had seen what she fancied were flitting glimpses of her own young self in the child. A scrappy, independent little creature of the forest. A small but fierce heart that beat proudly for those it loved, and wanted to help. So she took the crude fishing pole and helped the child find the fattest worms in the soft mud by the water's edge, and showed her how to spot pools of quiet, still water where the fish liked to come and rest and spawn and eat plump, wiggling worms that dangled in front of them.
A bumblebee buzzed past her cheek, tumbled clumsily along her arm, and lit for a moment on her back of her hand. It tickled there, turning in tiny circles, wondering why this particular flower had no sweetness to sip. She watched it until it decided she was not a blossom after all, and lifted away again to sway heavily on the afternoon breeze.
A drop of sweat trickled down her brow and stung her eye. She scrubbed the back of her hand irritably over the spot. That was the sign, she decided. She rose to her feet, looked to the verdant shadows under the trees, grinned, and broke into a run.
