Stalemate

Part VI- A Journey on Foot | Chapter 27

The landscape before them shifted from grassy plains to scant green forests and abandoned plantations. It happened almost too slowly for Doon to notice. By the fifth day, they'd made it almost a hundred miles inland. It was the farthest Doon had ever been from the sea.

Rain pittered around them gently. Delicately, as if washing the world and making it anew. A blue haze surrounded them, revealing to them only a marble of soggy path and drooping grasses, pellets of rainwater rolling off their blades. The almost melodic sound lulled in Doon's mind, nearly putting him in a trance as he trudged along, his sopping sleeves hugging his body. The briny scent of the coast had been completely waned. His eyes bounced about, blinking away the water falling into his eyes and pelting his face, and he wondered, for a moment, if he would be forever here. If they were to walk a hundred more miles and these grasses never changed. That he would stay suspended in this purgatory, this odd place between true freedom and bondage. Behind him lay all of his prisons: Cherry Hill, the ocean, a ship, the city. And he wondered if he would ever truly find liberation.

He watched Dinor's back, always ahead of him, leading them, though Doon sometimes wondered if the boy really knew where he was taking them. But Doon had trusted him this long.

His empty stomach howled at him. Food was becoming a problem; the rain had solved their thirst issue, but foraging with no supplies did not offer much variety. They'd managed to find berries or mushrooms (Doon, with his knowledge of agriculture, could tell which ones were safe to eat), but they needed protein that only game could offer.

Doon squinted into the fog and rain, but he could not see more than ten feet in front of him. In the daylight, before it had started raining, he could see the muted blues and form of distant mountains. A long, flutelike river drew the eye to low valleys that curved and rose and disappeared into forests. Along the bed, he thought he could make out smoke rising from sporadic chimneys.

By this point, he was so hungry that he was sure that, should it come to it, ____. Doon never thought he'd feel this way, but he longed to be back at his house on Cherry Hill. At least there he had a familiar bed, albeit creaky, and Ashtin's half decent cooking. But a part of him also longed to be resting in that comforting place just between awakeness and sleep, feeling the undertow beneath his back, the gentle sloshing of the feathering waves against the hull. And another part of him wanted to be atop a roof overlooking a sleeping city, feeling the sea breeze flow over his skin like a current.

Truthfully, Doon wasn't really sure what he wanted. Perhaps just for this rain to end. But he and Dinor persisted nonetheless. Doon's eyes merely traced the puddles, the small furrows formed in the path by the rain reminding him of the fields he'd plowed. How his boot prints made oblong indentations, dissolving the furrows, and he thought of how other travelers would not know whether they were the prints of a Dordan or a Minarian. In a sad and mundane attempt to entertain himself, he tried to step only in Dinor's prints, which caused them to lose their shoe shape completely so that they looked almost inhuman.

Doon focused on his game for a while, until he noticed that the rain was starting to subside, and that Dinor was slowing his pace so they were walking shoulder-to-shoulder again. "I thought I saw a trading post up ahead," Dinor said, his voice quivering. "Or just a building. I'm not sure. It looks promising."

Doon nodded, his chin pressed to his chest so the water was only pecking the top of his head.

Dinor sniffled and wiped his nose with his soaking sleeve. "I doubt they get much business out here, so it'd be hard to go unnoticed," he probed. Doon knew where this was going. "It's probably empty, and—"

"And if someone sees me?"

"Well I'm sure it'd take a while for the police to come. We'd be long gone by then."