Frayed Ties (Ties, Book 1) | ✓

Chapter 3

Sleep came slowly and never quite felt like it claimed him, so it was a surprise when Danya woke to find the glow of morning light illuminating the now empty tent. Not only was Simon gone, but so too were his bag and the bedding he had slept on the night before.

Cold dread settled into Danya's gut. Simon had left him. After a good night's sleep, Simon had thought over his options and decided that simply abandoning his burden was the simplest way out of the situation.

How long would it take for someone to find him? Would they treat him as a runaway, or would they believe that this situation had not been his choice?

Danya let out a shaky scoff. Of course the blame would be placed solely at his feet. Why would anybody even consider that Simon could be at fault when it was so much simpler to just punish Danya?

By the time Hamish poked his head into the tent, Danya had just about worked himself up into a state of panic. "Time to go, pup."

As Danya hurried to follow Hamish outside and down now crowded rows of tents, he kept his head down and did his best to simply breathe. For now, for this moment, everything was okay. He hadn't been abandoned — yet.

Simon waited to the side of the main gate on the back of his dark mare, the reins of Hamish's paint gelding in his hand. His gaze paused and held on Danya, then jumped to Hamish with eyebrows raised in question.

Hamish shrugged. "He woke up alone in your tent. Of course he looks worried."

Simon nodded, all interest immediately evaporating now that he knew Danya's distress had been his own doing. Still, for a moment there he had looked at Danya, noticed he was upset, and cared. Maybe only because he thought somebody had disrespected him by proxy by messing with his property, but it was something.

Hamish did all the work of getting Danya up onto the horse behind Simon, because by that point Simon had decided to go back to pretending Danya didn't exist.

Danya shifted, trying to get into a position that didn't feel awkward, but that was impossible. The entire situation was awkward. He tried resting his hands on his thighs, but quickly grabbed for Simon's waist when the horse started moving.

It didn't help that, the moment Danya was distracted, he found himself leaning into Simon much more closely than he needed to. Forcing himself to lean back again was physically uncomfortable.

Simon just felt so... solid. As though even when being in proximity with him was the source of Danya's current discomfort, getting closer to him could somehow nullify it. The energy of every living thing had a different feel to it, and Simon's was more than anything one of strength and safety. Danya wanted to drown himself in it, but he felt like he could barely get his feet wet.

The area surrounding the camp was all farmland, fields of corn stretching out endless and identical. It came as almost a relief when it finally gave way to scrubby, untended grassland.

The first long wooden pole Danya saw, laying flat in a ditch along the side of the road, he assumed was simply a fallen tree. It was only when he saw a second, resting diagonally against a crest of rocks, that he noticed the torn wires rusting from the crossbeam attached to the top and realised what he was looking at: pre-war electricity poles. They had been left where they had fallen to be slowly reclaimed by nature.

Where Danya had grown up everything had either been cleaned up and restored or destroyed and cleared away, but out here nobody had ever bothered with such things. A car sat abandoned along the roadside, its doors removed for salvage long ago and grass growing along the top of it. Danya had always known the war had happened, of course, but seeing the reality of the past made it feel so much closer.