Jennasis

6. Tanoran

Jenna watched with shadowed eyes as Har packed provisions into a rough sack and prepared yet again to explore more of the Inside world. As always, she did not speak until he started for the door.

"I want to come," she stated bluntly. Jenna was always blunt. An unnecessary word never escaped her lips.

Har smiled at her. "I know," he agreed. He tried to be gentle and reasonable but he knew how wounded she felt. "But someone needs to stay here and see to the house."

She didn't reply, she only looked at him, and he had to turn away. Her eyes said more than her mouth ever did, and the reproach in their golden depths hurt him. He knew he was being unfair. He could take care of the house and their few animals better than she could, and she would love to see the land. She had an adventurous spirit, and would probably learn the terrain better than he did, but he was afraid, and he wanted solitude.

Jenna sat alone after he left. She fed the birds they were trying to domesticate, weeded the garden, and walked listlessly around the spotless house. With the sun sinking in the west she turned her back on the clearing and went down the path to the shore. Boredom and loneliness threatened to overwhelm her. With a habitual glance over her shoulder to make sure of her solitude she shucked off her boots and hiked her skirts up to her thighs. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the surf. It licked at her toes, then her ankles.

Exhilaration swept against her with the cloud of sand against her feet, and she went further. The waves crashed against her legs and she fell down into the water, then somehow found her feet under her and she came up shrieking and laughing in the cold. Her feet and legs felt numb, and her teeth chattered. She wanted to go deeper, but she didn't know how to swim so she turned back to the beach and stretched out, ignoring the itch of the sand on her skin and in her clothes. The leftover heat from the sun-warmed sand soaked through to her skin, warming away the chill of the water. While she watched, the sun set and the moon coasted up into the sky.

She turned her head. I know this place, she thought with sudden clarity. This is where I came to the Inside. She could see a glimmer of the portal she had made, and her mind reached with needle-like precision, piercing the veil between the worlds. If Har knew where I came from―How I got here... Her skin pebbled with abrupt fear.

Witch.

I'm not a witch, she told herself angrily, any more than I am Magi.

"Jenna..."

She did not hear the voice. Autumn leaves whispered through the portal on a winter-scented wind from her old home. Jenna came to her knees, turning toward the seductive residue of the Door.

"Jenna, where are you?"

In a flash of terror she let the Portal collapse. A rush of displaced air scattered the alien leaves across the sand and she scrambled to her feet in the dark, turning to face the path that led to the house. She watched with hooded eyes as Har approached her in the darkness. The moon gleamed on the sand, showing the leaves blown through the portal on the beach like dark trembling spots of shadow.

"Jenna." His eyes traveled to the sand at her feet, and he bent swiftly, picking up one of the dry brown leaves. He looked at it for a moment, then back to her white face.

"Jenna why didn't you answer me? I've been calling for a quarter of an hour."

"I―" Jenna choked on the lie. "I must have been sleeping."

"Out here in the dark and the cold?" Har's mouth twitched. "In wet clothes?"

Jenna turned up the path without a word, and Har had to trot to catch up with her, still clutching the stem of the leaf in his hand.