---Raala’s perspective---

  “You’re fraying it…” observes the brown eyed man, his long arms folded across his flat chest and a smug expression on his face as he looks down at the clay haired, teenaged father-to-be.

  Holding up the denticulated axestone in his bandaged hand, the boy answers “You ever tried to cut wood with half your hand bitten off, lanklet(!?)”

  With an amused twitch of his eyebrow, Ksem immediately answers “No… because I don’t make a habit of running around kidnapping people to pretend to kill them(!) Thus, my hands don’t get bitten(!) Enough excuses! Just cut it cleaner!”

  “What does it matter if it frays? I’m going to be pairing all this down anyway, right?”

  Condescendingly, the black haired man corrects “You fray the cut, it becomes harder for you to split the stave cleanly down the middle! You might also end up having to shorten the limbs too much, leading to a weaker bow than you want to start with! We may need to start the whole thing again with another stave and you don’t have an infinite supply of suitable ones or time!… Worse, you might put structural weaknesses in your bow that neither of us even notice until I’m gone and it snaps! You wouldn’t know what you’d done wrong and would likely blame me for your bow’s shoddiness!”

  Screwing up his eyes in thought, the boy gestures the palmwidth thick, dry, elm stave pulled from Hyena’s firewood stores and asks “Remind me again why it’s better value for me to be doing this instead of you when you already know how to do it?”

  With a haughty wiggle of his round head, the tall man patronises “Precisely because I already know how to do it! You are learning by doing!”

  “Couldn’t I learn just as effectively by watching and listening?” asks the boy, suspiciously.

  “No, you couldn’t… Watching and listening means you have to remember everything you see and hear! You’re just not going to do that!”

  “You calling me thick!?” snarls the boy.

  Wagging his face, Ksem denies “Nope!… I’m simply stating the fact that anyone asked to watch and listen to three days’ worth of demonstration and instruction and retain all of it would fail in that endeavour! Making you do the work yourself means you don’t need to remember my words! The memory will be in your hands and that’s much harder to forget!… Also, if I were just doing it for you, you might mistakenly think you’ve understood things and not ask about them! This way, when you make a mistake, I can see that you haven’t understood and correct you in real time! Your intelligence is not in question here… except to the extent that you keep questioning the value of the tutelage that your hearthstead is paying me for(!)”

  Waggling the axestone at my companion, the boy narrows his eyes to ask “Anyone ever told you you’re insufferably smug?”

  Chuckling, my companion answers “Only about three times a Moon since I learned to speak(!) Though that rate has drastically increased since I started travelling with that lovely lady by the hearth over there…” gesturing over to where I sit watching “…I like to think my smugness is all just part of my charm(!)”

  “Oh, I’m suuure you do(!)” grumbles the boy.

  “Enough talk. Cut the stave and do it neatly… I’d like to depart before we both die of old age(!)”

  The boy scowls but raises the stone to continue hacking the dry wood to length.

  I watch for a while before-

  “Hey…?”

  I turn around to a visibly pregnant teen with the most vividly orange hair I’ve ever seen standing behind me.

  “…Am I allowed to share the bench or are you gonna bite me if I get too close(?)” she asks, wryly, pointing to the other end of the sitting log.

  “Depends…” I answer, humourlessly “…are you planning to wrestle me to the ground and tie me up while saying you’re going to murder me(?)… Because, in that case, I make no promises…!”

  “Ha! Fair!” she acknowledges, gingerly lowering herself to seated with the grunting effort of a woman three Moons from giving birth “I guess biting would be an understandable reaction from someone who wanted to live!”

  Confused, I frown and ask “What does that mean? Who wouldn’t want to live?”

  There’s a long pause.

  Then she quietly answers “…I didn’t… nearly two years ago… when Lorgul captured me…”

  Appalled, I slowly and wordlessly turn my head to her.

  “I ran away from my hearthstead, down South…” she explains “…stole a canoe and just let it carry me along the Great River… When a rock smashed a hole in the bottom, I put it ashore and just wandered out onto the steppe… I was so tired, hungry and miserable when I made it here that the thought they might just end my life quickly actually seemed like a relief…! They did their usual routine, pretending they were going to kill me but, after Laga intervened, I burst into tears and begged them for death… They took me in instead… Every day, I give thanks to Mother Mammoth for creating a life for me here and to the Great Elk for leading me to it…”

  I just stare at the girl for a long time, digesting her words.

  Finally, I manage “…Why… did you run away?”

  She grimaces and answers “You’re… probably happier not knowing that… Let’s just say I… wasn’t treated kindly…”

  I feel worse at those words than I would if this girl had just punched me!

  “This… wasn’t Speartooth, was it?… Your birth clan?” I ask, apprehensively.

  “Oooh! No!” she quickly reassures “If you’d said you were heading there, I definitely would have said something about it!”

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  Relieved, I grunt a grateful acknowledgement.

  We sit in silence as the woman’s man attempts to split that stave down the middle.

  The split runs short, leaving a big piece and a little one.

  “Congratulations(!) You will now get a maximum of one bow out of this stave… This whooole side just became firewood…” chuckles the brown eyed man instructing “…Turn it over and try to finish the split from the other end... Make sure you line it up with the piece you’ve already taken off… so one doesn’t become none!”

  The boy growls frustratedly but does as instructed.

  It does feel extremely validating to have someone else around who finds Ksem’s whole know-it-all shtick grating!

  Realising I’m a bit thirsty, I reach for the ibex waterskin and offer it next to me to Tava.

  She smiles and waves it away, saying “Thanks. I’m not thirsty though.”

  I bring it to my lips and take a swig.

  In my periphery, I see the girl lean in and ask “Hey! Dying to know! What’s with all the charcoal? That’s an obscene amount to just be carrying around the steppe with you(!)” with an amused smile.

  “Fuel.” I explain, swallowing while continuing to watch the bowmaking “He wouldn’t let us leave for a third of a Moon because I had a broken foot… He spent the entire time bringing back bundles of sticks from the forest, refusing to explain how he was planning to carry them, dug a hole, lit a fire in it, threw the whole lot in (way too quickly) then put it out with water. We’d been cooking our food on charcoal fires all three nights before we got here.”

  “Oooooooh! That’s clever!!! I should suggest that here next time someone needs to leave the forest!”

  Ignoring the twinge of irritation I feel at her admiration for the idiot outlander, I explain “Yeah… his people don’t make permanent homes and don’t linger in forests. They prefer camping out on open country so figuring out how to make fuel portable made sense for them.”

  Rightfully confused, she clarifies “How does that work? How do they live out on open country?”

  I give a humourless laugh and answer “Their ancestors apparently must have made a deal to exchange their mature faces, strength, speed and the ability to wake up in the morning for stature, high numbers and infinite stamina(!)”

  “Infinite stamina?” she asks, sceptically.

  “I went on a hunt with them, out on the plains by my clan’s territory… They didn’t go more than a gentle jogging speed but they all ran until I collapsed from exhaustion, then kept running until the aurochs they were chasing did the same! They were barely even out of breath!” I maintain “When we were walking to my grandmother’s for his naming ceremony, me and my clansman would walk with him from restspot to restspot, he’d help us set things up and then just go for a walk around because he ‘hadn’t done enough exercise’! When he was holding us up in that cave, he wouldn’t leave until, like, halfway through the morning… but he’d stay out from then until twilight!”

  Stunned, she looks at the tall babyface and says “Wow! Really? Outland stamina must be something else!”

  “Guess so…” I grudgingly concede, reaching for the waterskin again.

  “Bet that’s fun for you(!)” she smirks, mirthfully.

  Perplexed, I ask “What does that mean?” before taking a swig and-

  “When you have sex?”

  -inhaling the water, spitting it out so violently that both the men look over at me before thumping my sternum, coughing!

  Desperate to correct her as quickly as possible, I don’t let myself fully recover before objecting “We…*cough**cough**cough**cough**cough*… don’t! He’s…*cough**cough**cough*… not my…*cough**cough*… man!…*cough**cough**cough*… NO sex!”

  Puzzled, she frowns, looks from me to the man who’s already turned his attention back to his apprentice bowmaker and asks “Really? You’re travelling alone together with a man who isn’t yours?”

  “Not…*cough*…by choice! You remember…*cough**cough*…the part of the story where we…*cough*…got trapped?!” I rasp.

  Still confused, she clarifies “Are you at least intended?”

  “We are…*cough*…the opposite! I don’t intend to ever let him get so much as another glimpse of my…*cough*…nipples!” I insist, only realising as I see her face getting more confused how baffling that statement would be.

  She opens her mouth to ask what the Maw I’m talking about but I start explaining before she can.

  “His people don’t do nudity… Definitely not mixed gender nudity! Apparently, after their boys hit puberty, the only women who’re ever allowed to see them naked again are healers and their woman… Same for girls!”

  “But…” she wonders “…he’s a Bane, right? He became a Bane half a Moon ago? How did that-?”

  “My grandmother let him wear a loincloth for the ceremony once he’d explained…” I clarify “…Men’s nipples are apparently fine to them… Only women’s are indecent(!)”

  Bursting into giggles, she observes “That seems arbitrary!!!”

  “Right?!” I enthusiastically agree.

  Then she frowns again and asks “So… you’ve been travelling with him for three quarters of a Moon, alone for two thirds of that time… and you haven’t seen him naked or let him see you naked once?!”

  “Eeeeeyep!” I confirm.

  “That sounds…”

  “Awkward as fuck?” I suggest.

  “Yeah! How do you handle… like… toilet and stuff?!”

  “When we were at the cave, I’d just go while he was out and I guess he was doing the same? I only remember him once leaving the cave at night for it… It’s been… trickier since we got out onto the steppe… It's mostly involved us announcing that we need to go, saying where we're going to go and telling the other not to look in that direction for a bit!”

  “Wow! Prudishness sounds like hard work!” she chuckles.

  “Yeah… it is kind of!” I agree.

  We fall silent again as the tutor explains “Now, see, this is the back of the bow! This is the belly! After you’ve debarked it, you won’t be taking any material from the back, all the pairing is done on the belly! Be careful not to take anything other than the bark off the back!”

  The teenager says something I can’t catch at this distance as he set’s to work lightly scraping off the bark.

  Then a thought occurs to me “So… like… Durlu, Kana and Kvort’s late woman… they all came here the same way you did? That’s a lot more runaways than I would’ve expected to make it out to this tiny speck of liveable land so far from anywhere!”

  She laughs and answers “Kana and Poriya both came here the traditional way… Just involved a little private explanation of exactly how they did things here once they’d agreed(!)… Durlu, though… He and his friends apparently came here and had the whole ‘we’re going to kill you’ routine… The next day though, he came back and declared he would either become Laga’s man or happily submit to death!… It sounds like it was very romantic when they tell the story!”

  “Hmmm… to me it sounds like a bit much to go that far for a woman you met once… yesterday!” I point out.

  “A woman who, from your perspective, saved you from death?” she muses in answer.

  “A gift you’re now throwing back in her face by returning with the ultimatum ‘be mine or let your family kill me’(!)” I remark.

  “Well… they ended up with four children together… Clearly, Laga wasn’t as put off by it as you’d be(!)”

  “Clearly(!)” I agree before asking “So… what exactly’s the story with the whole mock murder act? I know Kvort and Laga’s parents were exiles but how exactly did they end up deciding that the best way to act was to pretend to be about to murder everyone who stumbled by?”

  “Oh… Well… I guess… when they first came out here, it was just the two of them… very quickly followed by Kvort being born… I think, the first time, it was genuine… A guy came around here while their dad was out and… well… he came back to find his woman roughed up, Kvort bawling and this guy raiding their food stores… They’d already committed one murder to be together so, I think, he thought ‘what’s one more?’… She pleaded with him not to do it and, eventually, he relented and just sent this guy on his way, beaten up but alive… He never came back here. Since then, I guess defending ourselves by pretending to be crazy murderers to scare people off has been more… just… a tradition?”

  “That’s horrible!” I scowl.

  “That’s life, girl!” comes a man’s voice from behind me.

  I turn to see the curly, greying, clay beard and smashed nose of a man nonchalantly swaggering in our direction.

  Kvort sits down between me and Tava and continues “You find something you value, you need to be willing to protect it! Otherwise, someone else might just take it from you(!)” proving his point by snatching the piece of ibex jerky I was in the process of bringing to my mouth and popping it into his own!

  Ksem & Lorgul |