The incident of the rowboat was surreal for Solveis. She couldn’t decide if it had actually happened. Except that Arlendr kept fuming about it, she would probably have pushed it into the recesses of her memory.
The other children called on her to confirm Arlendr’s tale of the rowboat. Between the surreal nature of her memory and her disinterest in telling her stories to Girselle, she felt that she had nothing to tell them. Girselle therefore decided that Arlendr had made up an adventure to make them jealous, and she denied the reality of his story.
“How come your brother is so mad about some rowboat?” Livia asked Solveis confidentiality one day. She herself was trying to get some concept of the reality of the event.
“I think we saw a row boat with a horse-hu and another guy, rowing away from my mountain,” Solveis answered her little friend honestly.
Livia was confused. It didn’t fit with her reality of the island, with splashing in the water, jumping on rocks, and eating in the cabin. She was old enough to have some desire to understand things and make them fit within her image of the world, so she pressed on trying to merge the information with what she could understand, “Like a boat? A real rowboat?”
“I don’t know. It looked like it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Solveis answered in genuine puzzlement.
“Arlendr chased it away then?”
“I don’t know. – No. I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” Livia was still confused, but her little brain had given up understanding the phenomenon.
The confused and scattered information given ended up giving Livia a surreal concept of the story, some combination of Arlendr’s, Solveis’s, and Girselle’s stories.
The conversation ended up being useful for Solveis though. It got her thinking about why it could have happened. Why would people come here, if in fact they had? Would they have wanted something? Maybe they were homeless people. She had heard stories about such people sleeping in random places. But, just two of them… and they own a boat… and they didn’t stay the whole night… No. If it had been real, then the intruders must have had some reason to go there.
Solveis considered asking the old man about why such a thing would have happened, but since she wasn’t sure it actually had, it would be pointless discussing it. Besides, what if that sort of incident upset him? What if the parents heard and revoked outdoor fun privileges?
Another result of the encounter with the rowboat was that it caused Solveis to reconsider her past assumptions about intruders on her mountain. One weekend, when she was on her rounds, surveying her mountain, she saw yet more evidence of small disturbances. She had a sudden realization. The changes that she had been seeing were probably mostly from the large grown up intruders, stomping stupidly. Probably very few of the changes had been from the aepsis siblings who were too fragile to wander around alone anyway.
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During her surveying, while she was still deeply in thought, En and Girselle happened upon her. Livia was not on the island this weekend, for some reason; maybe that was why the intruder siblings had chosen to find Solveis. Solveis wanted to ignore them and get back to her task, but she couldn’t search properly with people watching her.
She put her thinking and surveying aside for the time being. She also took the opportunity to practice some conversation scripts that she had observed peers using. “The rain has been crazy, hasn’t it been?” she asked her two companions.
“It’s made us be in your cave more,” En answered.
“Yeah. The cave has been well used,” Girselle added. “You put someth’n new in the display – or was that your little brother. I’m sure it looks fine either way.”
En’s comment was more along the line of what the script expected, so Solveis responded to him, “Yeah. Gotta keep indoors more when it’s gross out.” Then, as an actual thought, she continued, “At least I can go in the cave, and I don’t have to be in the head pike. – It’s really good to have the cave, isn’t it.”
The positive spin of the conversation put En at ease, “Yeah. I really like it. It has all the good games in it and stuff. And my mom and dad never go in. That’s kinda nice too, you know…”
The three of them wandered, walking around. Girselle interrupted Solveis’s and En’s pleasant conversation, which had not been interesting her. She pointed down, “What’s that junk? String and stuff? You know you’re supposed to dispose of junk in the trash,” Girselle accused Solveis, while pointing to a pile of damaged little things on the ground at the base of some trees.
Solveis had to think quickly, in order to not give anything away. Those were her things. They were things she didn’t really care about from a stash that had already been found, a stash in a nearby tree. They looked like they had been dumped, dropped from the top of the tree, down to the ground. – Wait. This had been the tree that Girselle had stolen Solveis’s stories from, to burn them.
Realizing this, Solveis’s eyes lit on fire and directed themselves at Girselle. En’s good mood vanished, and his head retreated down into his shoulders.
Girselle looked pleased with herself. She thought that her trash insult had landed and offended Solveis.
“Oh, sorry,” Girselle said sarcastically. “Not trash – things.” She smiled gleefully.
Solveis dug one hoof into the ground, and spun all the way around on it, and sprinted off to somewhere more remote.
The consequence of this small disturbance was to clarify Solveis’s mind even more. It seemed that Girselle hadn’t recognized the hiding place or the things belonging to it. Her insults had been general, searching for a sensitive topic, but not already having intimate knowledge of the stash. She didn’t reference the stories on the scrolls, which she definitely would have, if she had know that was where they had been. Solveis had always been confused on how the weak, skinny Girselle could have gotten up that part of the tree. Apparently, she hadn’t gotten up there. It must have been the other intruders. The rowboat ones. The paper in the fire pit must have been some other papers, some scrap from one of the unlocked tins. Taking something from a tin and burning it must have been what made Girselle so deviously pleased with herself that day.