Yellowhair: An Elf Hollow Prequel

THREE | Preparations

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After a time, the Orkin women began doing less and less. Inertia, you know, was what it was. Doing so little of any importance, made life feel empty and worthless. The whole family had stopped doing much of anything, and anything beyond much, was really a bore. Even being family had almost completely ceased to be something.

CHAPTER THREE

Preparations

Qello was now free to do as she chose, almost always. Some days Qello ate, some days she did not feel like it. She'd go into the house only on increasingly rare occasions. And, sadly, no one quite noticed, but Luu.

Qello's mother did not talk much after Sigrid had gone. Her hair hung limp and her step seemed to drag. Life had forced itself quite inside out.

Qello's half sisters weren't at all mean. They simply did not know how to include someone younger who couldn't play back, as their view of things went, and they gave the matter no further thought.

Luu had gone to the village for mending threads that arrived once a year from Caladorn and to see Bet. "This shouldn't have happened." She busied herself, absentmindedly, alongside Betrith Skaaken, holding up her friend's laundry to go on the line. Helping was the excuse she used to share her upset.

"She is spending more and more time away, Bet. The girls don't know how to relate to Qello, anymore than Sigrid did. And I fear most of the Village is following Sigrid's example. He had no idea how to include her in his work, nor to train her to do any kind of work for others. Surely, someone could take her in, if I weren't to make it through a winter?"

"She'll have to come around, Luu," Betrith consoled. "She'll still be grieving the changing, an' loss of her brother. She'll settle down. You'll see! Meantime, just have to teach 'er, yourself. I never, ever saw that girl without him once, not for a moment—stuck to him, always, like feathers on a duck."

"How can I give her safety in a life, dark as this?" Luu gripped Bets forearm, sounding bleaker than she'd meant to.

Bet was shocked. "Come here! Set down, girl!" She cleared the log stump she used as a pedestal to pin up her washing. "Never heard you talk so!"

Luu crumbled, Bet's arm around her. "I never thought life was this dark, 'til now. The girls will likely fit in with friends, aunts, uncles—perhaps even parents of friends might take them in. They would manage quite all right, I am sure. That pair is full of self-preservation. But nobody would have poor little Qello, to come an' live with 'em, if I couldn't make it, sometime. An' we nearly lost Mr. Groote! I've talked to them all!"

Luu looked up in alarm. "And especially not, as an orphan--on any day, as far as I could get a straight look from anys of um. Quick to deny any possible hope—far too quick." She continued, for a moment, sounding almost bitter.

Bet, sympathetically nodding, sighed, "Hands full, I s'pose?"

Somewhere deep in Luu's heart stirred a realization that if she were not to make it, neither might her dear youngest child. Therefore, when Luu returned to the cottage, she went looking for Qello, as never before had Qello known her to do.

Qello was outside, just headed through the back kitchen door to the wash tank. Luu brought her in and they had a good talk. She sat her child high up on the carved wood stool, where the girl stared at the floor.

"How would you like to go on an adventure, together?" she asked, not really waiting for an answer, but assuming her daughter would go along with what she might be bound to suggest.