THE LITTLE ONE STOOD in the open doorway of his mother’s house and solemnly sucked two fingers. He watched mud plaster fall and blinked his large eyes. He watched a hand emerge through what had been a wall and blinked twice more, even paused in his sucking. As the hand groped about blindly, then began peeling mud from the edges of the gap it had created, the child drew a deep breath, then resumed sucking with earnestness.
A head appeared. The evening was growing heavy as fleece in the sky, so few details of this head were discernible. A great deal of plaster stuck to any available portion of skin, creating a ghoulish aspect only made more terrible by the black hair standing up in wild and wooly tufts. Eyes swollen by wasp stings squinted about in a desperate attempt to find bearings. They fixed upon the child in the doorway. They widened.
The child went on sucking. With his free hand, he offered a tiny wave.
The head tried to retreat back through the wall but couldn’t quite fit. The child continued watching, fascinated, as the erstwhile prisoner contorted until he got one shoulder and then an arm outside. More plaster rained down from above until his whole head was white with it. The child took his fingers from his mouth and substituted a still more comforting thumb.
“Dragons blast it!”
With this strange cry, the prisoner made a final, crumbling burst. Then, with a last look at the child, he gathered himself up from the wreckage and took to his heels, stumbled, fell, recovered, and ran again down the dark side of the hill upon which the house was built. A curse and a rustle of leaves signaled his disappearance into the jungle.
The child, thumb in place, took a step out the door, craning his neck for a better view.
“Wolfsbane!”
That sharp voice could only belong to an elder sister. The child turned to the girl who was a source of equal parts awe and comfort in his young life. She pounced on him like a rabbit on clover, catching him up in her arms.
“You know better than to go outside on your own!” Lark chided, “oofing” to get her brother up on her skinny hip, which was really more bone than hip. She was just ten years of age and slightly built like her mother before her. But her twig-thin arms disguised wiry muscle. After all, she was the successful watchwoman over a brood of siblings, which required strength as well as cunning.
The aforementioned Wolfsbane took his thumb from his mouth and grabbed his sister’s ear for stability in his newly elevated position. “Bake,” he said, then added appropriate crashing noises with his lips.
“Break?” Lark said, using the gift of translation common in the ranks of big sisters. “What did you break, Wolfie?”
“Nuah!” Wolfsbane protested, the picture of affronted innocence. He pointed.
Lark stepped out the front door of her mother’s house for a better look. The main house was built of stone and mortar, strong and sturdy after the practice of her father’s people. But many of the attached wings were assembled according to the building standards of her mother’s less architecturally inclined tribe, easy enough for a determined man to break through if need pressed.
“Da!” Lark called, clutching young Wolfsbane by a dimpled leg as she swung about to call into the house. “Da, the prisoner’s escaped!”
“What prisoner?” her father’s voice bellowed from inside.
“The wasp man!”
“I told you”—Redman appeared from down a short stone passage, a knife in one hand, an onion in the other—“he’s not a prisoner. He’s a guest who isn’t allowed to leave, and what do you mean, he’s escaped?”
Lark and Wolfsbane pointed as their red-bearded father joined them in the doorway. His good eye, used to the cooking fire over which he had been crouched, took a moment to adjust to the evening’s blue gloom. Then he muttered, “Well, Flame at Night . . .” and trotted out for a closer look at the breakage. Lark, with Wolfsbane in her arms, trailed after, and the two children watched their father as he peered inside and inspected the hole. “Flame at Night,” he said again, speaking in the tongue of his people when he swore, which always made his children giggle. “He certainly has escaped, and left a trail of plaster a blind man could follow. It’ll take me all day to fix this mess.”
“What about the wasp man?” Lark asked.
“I suppose we’ll let the totems have him,” Redman said.
“Da!”
“All right. Since you’ve taken such a fancy to him, I’ll fetch him back to you. Pesty girl.”
Lark sniffed with great dignity at this, and Redman addressed himself to his son. “Guard this until I return,” he said, placing the onion in Wolfsbane’s wet hand. “Should I perish, you’ll know what to do with it.”
Wolfsbane stuck the onion into his mouth.
“Let me go with you, Da?” Lark asked, catching the onion before her brother violently discarded it as unfit for consumption. “I can help.”
“Me! Me!” Wolfsbane added with equal fervor.