Kindling

A continuing serial about a lost little girl, the young woman who protects her, and the conspiracy against the both of them. Written, illustrated, and created by McClain Greene. Updated every Friday.

[kindlingserial-blog]

Jilleen peeked around the corner of the pantry-room door, and seeing that there was no one present, she entered the large, chilly room. She kept her bare footsteps light and held her nightgown close to her body to keep it from rustling too loudly. Had anyone come upon her, she would certainly not have been sent away, but she preferred to sneak nonetheless. She strolled through the room, scanning the contents of each large wicker basket set out on the tables all around. She was looking for a snack, something sweet. She stopped directly in front of a large basket full of apples that had just been brought in that morning. At the very top of the mound of fruit lay just three golden-yellow apples, the morning light catching their skins just well enough to give them a divine shine. The golden ones were picked especially for Jilleen, since she was known to have a strong distaste for red apples. Usually, the harvest yielded enough to fill a smaller basket of their own, but not this time. Jilleen sighed and picked one up. She brought it to her mouth and sank her teeth into it. The resulting crunch echoed sharply. It wasn’t as delicious as she had hoped it would be.

Jilleen then heard the echo of a slight, quickening pitter-patter of footsteps in the hall to her right. She looked to the door. The shapes of four attendants rushed just past the opening, and they were all whispering urgently to each other. Jilleen couldn’t make out any of what they were saying. Curious, she walked slowly into the hall and followed behind them. After turning a series of corners in pursuit, she realized then that they were heading towards her father’s court, a place that she had successfully avoided for four days now and had intended on avoiding further, “familial duties” be damned. She stopped in place as the attendants ahead of her disappeared through the court doorway and diffused into the unusually thick crowd beyond it. Jilleen inched forwards, using the left side of the doorframe as cover and sticking her  head out to assess the situation. She couldn’t see a thing. The tall, cloaked silhouettes of her three sisters’ backs blocked her view. While Jilleen was quite tall, Alis, Roseia, and Silia were all taller still.

Jilleen tried to peer into the spaces between her sisters’ shoulders, but she couldn’t quite see anything, so instead, she listened. Despite the amount of people in the room, it was deathly quiet, except for the very gentle sob of what sounded like a child. The somber atmosphere of the court indicated to Jilleen that the proceedings had already occurred, and the sentence had been delivered. Finally, Jilleen stood on her tiptoes and caught a brief glimpse of the crier: a young, brightly red-haired Dura girl who couldn’t have been older than ten. She was slumped on her hands and knees at the center of the court and gasping for air every few seconds to further fuel her sobbing. Jilleen reached for Roseia’s shoulder to ask for a summary of events, but she stopped herself. Instead, she let her hand rest on the shoulder of her younger sister, who jumped at her touch and span around as if a ghost had just passed through her. Appropriately, Silia gave Jilleen a look as if she had just returned from death. “Jilleen,” Silia whispered in a concerned voice, “How are you? Where’s your . . .” she was going to say “cloak,” but she stopped herself.

Roseia looked over her shoulder at Jilleen, but aside from that gave not one indication that she was aware of her presence. Alis seemed not to notice anything at all, or at least feigned it.

“What’s going on?” Jilleen asked Silia timidly, ignoring her questions. Jilleen’s voice was unpracticed, and her words came out hoarse.

“She was separated from her tribe,” Silia said sympathetically, “she says they all just disappeared, but who knows what happened. Father let her stay here, in the prison.”

“the prison?” Jilleen asked, furrowing her brow.

“There’s no one in there right now; she’ll be safe,” Silia said, “He’s going to send a ranger at sunrise to find another nearby Dura tribe, and then she’ll be left with them.”

The girl didn’t seem satisfied with that solution, as far as Jilleen could tell.

Silia turned back around to watch the guards awkwardly attempt to usher the crying girl out of the courtroom.

Jilleen looked down towards her feet. She realized that she had  forgotten that she was still holding an apple in her hand, so she absentmindedly brought it to her mouth for another bite. She remembered the loud crunch only as her teeth sunk through the skin and the sound echoed sharply off the walls, piercing the still, tense air of the courtroom. Her heart leapt and, thinking fast, she pushed off the doorway and started off down the hallway to escape the looks she knew she would have received. She walked hurriedly in the direction of her bedchamber and took another bite of the apple.

* * *

Aoife stirred under her blanket, failing, yet again, to find a comfortable position in which to sleep on top of the stone slab she found herself on. She brought her bright orange locks over the front of her face and around her ears, hoping to block out the incessant drip drip drip that echoed from some crack in the dungeon’s ceiling. A piercing shriek broke the monotony  — the prison door being pushed on its hinges. Aoife was sat up in a second.

Jilleen removed her hood and lowered her arms to her sides. “Hello,” she said softly, stepping slowly and cautiously into the cell that Aoife had been given to sleep in.

“Who’re you?” Aoife bit back. Jilleen stopped. under ordinary circumstances, Aoife thought it always appropriate to greet and welcome a stranger, but she didn’t consider her present circumstances quite ordinary.

“My name is Jilleen. I saw you in my father’s court earlier today. Do you remember me?”

“You’re one of the tall ones with the white hair, one o’ Lord Nymeris’s daughters. Right?”

“It’s Nymerr — nevermind,” Jilleen sat on the floor a good distance away from Aoife. She rested her sheathed sword against her leg and set her satchel on the ground. “Yes, that’s me,” She said, “My father’s the genius who decided this was an appropriate place for an eight-year old to stay.”

“I’m nine,” Aoife replied.

“what?”

“I’m nine years old.”

Jilleen found herself lost for a response for just two seconds too long.

“Uh, I didn’t catch your name earlier,” She mustered.

“It’s Aoife,” she said, “EE-FUH.”

“Do you have a family name, Aoife?” Jilleen asked.

“No. Dura don’t do those,” Aoife responded, still cautious.

“Well, that’ll make finding your family a bit more difficult,” Jilleen replied with a cheeky smile, “Won’t it?”

Aoife’s eyes lit up, and she jumped off her poor excuse for a bed and onto the floor with Jilleen. “Is that what you’re here for?” She asked enthusiastically, beaming with a sense of immediate trust. However, she remained at a slight distance.

“Yes,” Jilleen said, averting her gaze from Aoife’s, “but we need to hurry if we want to find them; we need to leave now, Aoife. Can you do that?”

“Of course I can!” Aoife exclaimed, jumping up onto her feet, “Do you know where they are?”

Jilleen paused. “No,” she said. She realized then that she should have clarified earlier.

Aoife was visibly disappointed. She sat back down. The drip drip drip returned for a few somber seconds.

Jilleen stood up and offered her hand to Aoife.

Reluctantly, she grasped it and rushed with her up the stairs and into the night.

[kindlingserial-blog]

When Jilleen was much younger and needed to be soothed to sleep, her attendant would take a seat by the gently purring fire place and tell her a story about the animal that adorned the Nymerren family’s banners. Ermines were, in her words, “furry, slippery little things” from the mainland that lived in burrows and feasted on the country rabbits, who were oftentimes much larger than they were. In the summer, they enjoyed darting all around, rolling in the mud and licking up the morning dew. They frolicked. Every winter, though, ermines would shed their brown coats and don new, pristine furs of pure white, to blend in with the snow. They were divine to look at, evenly pale throughout with just one modest pinch of burnt black at the very tip of the tail. The ermines would tunnel and burrow in the snow, but stay far away from the mud that they once sloshed and played in, because God forbid that the purity of their fur be tainted by the un-white. Every so often, a fresh-faced hunter would come looking for a few of those famous pelts, and would be surprised to find his work exceptionally easy. Winter ermine were hard to find against a snowy landscape, but when a hunter spotted them, the job was done with little need of pursuit — an ermine would rather give itself up than try to run, if it meant keeping its coat clean. So went the story, anyway.

* * *

Jilleen Nymerren was cold, shaking, and naked, save for a thin brown blanket that draped over her shoulders and ended well above her knees. She stood very still, feet and shoulders squared, head forward. Stoic, or trying to be. Goosebumps perforated her skin. She kept her hands in fists at her sides, unsure of what to do with them. Budding tears crowded her eyes, but none fell. They blurred her vision of the peering crowd below, and she quickly realized that she would prefer to keep them obscured. Just a few paces behind Jilleen’s back, her father addressed his subjects.

Ulfirth Nymerren’s voice was booming and his manner of speaking was slow and calculated; his words were of the type that demanded the ear to listen. Jilleen’s ears, however, couldn’t catch them even if she had wanted them to.

Her whole being was petrified. She had spent the night before staring at the one blank wall in her bedchamber and steeling herself. She had expected an angry mob to greet her with curses and vitriol, but the reality proved much different from her imaginings; It was less words and more looks. Pitying, hateful, fearful looks.

Her father finished his speech, and she felt a hand clench the cloth pressed against her back. It was a warning -- No, not a warning, because the dangers of a warning could be avoided. It was an indication. A preemptive apology. Jilleen gritted her teeth. When the blanket she wore was so swiftly torn from her shoulders, it fell to the ground gently and with no sound.

She froze, and there was silence.

Cold, deafening, silence.

Even the wind refused to blow.

Jilleen wanted to fill the emptiness. She wanted to scream at her onlookers, throw a tantrum, offend them, do anything to make them give her what she expected, but she couldn’t. Her mouth wouldn’t move. Her joints froze in place. The chill that infiltrated her body was unlike any she had felt before; it filled her lungs like frigid water, sapping away the heat of her soul from within.

Goosebumps rippled across Jilleen’s back as her father raised the frigid, wet fur of her ermine cloak from the dye bath and placed it over her shoulders. It was still white at the top, speckled with black dots, just like his. Now, the whole bottom half was heavy with a thick, muddy brown. Water dripped from every strand of fur, freezing slowly and painfully as it made contact with her skin. It merged with the dye further down jilleen’s back and stomach to create a mucky, brackish sort of liquid that oozed down her thighs and licked her ankles. She was shivering violently. Finally, the tears in her eyes grew too large for containment, and they escaped down her cheeks. She could see clearly, for a moment. In that half-second that seemed to last ages, she felt as if each and every face in the crowd before her was being imprinted upon her mind. Every insult, every jeer, every look of pity and of fear, forever in her memory. And as the tears welled up again, Jilleen realized that she did not recognize a single one of the faces below. The expressions they held were unfamiliar to her, and the forms, wrinkles, and folds of their faces seemed to contort in ways such that they bore no resemblance to the people that she knew.

Jilleen closed her eyes, but the tears continued to fall.

[kindlingserial-blog]

Blood ran warm from the tips of Aoife’s toes as she ran, and needled sticks and jagged rocks pierced the soles of her feet with each footfall. Her shrill, young voice struck through the fog that hung heavy in the air, and her cry would have been blood-curdling if there had been anyone around with blood to curdle. It was a cry, indeed, in two senses of the word: the first, a cry for help, because she hoped more than anything that someone might answer her, and the second, a cry of anguish, because she knew that no one would.

Everyone was gone. The whole tribe, nowhere to be found. Huts, possessions, tools abandoned halfway through their use, yes — but nothing of the people. Aoife’s whole family, her whole community, her whole life, gone in an instant. She had only been gone for an hour.

One would have expected to find something left behind, something to suggest a struggle, but there was, again, nothing. No blood or bodies. No Ornish spears, axes or banners. No fur, claws, or teeth dropped from those vicious things that could be found in the forest. There was nothing for Aoife to cling to, nothing for her to understand.

She fled back into the trees. It was too much for her. She sat by a large, dead oak, and she cried, in just one sense of the word.