Looking for food was a good excuse, and necessary, really, but Sen mostly just wanted to get away from that girl for a while. This was not what she had expected from a Swarian. So far no one she’d seen from that world had shown any magical ability at all. She probably should have just left her at the portal, but she was a Swarian. They were supposed to be the foundation of magic. She should have been able to help her. Maybe not all Swarians had the ability to use magic? If she didn’t have any magic, she was useless. Unless she found someone who would want her…

She followed their path back toward the temple. That girl left more of a trail than an entire squad of soldiers. She’d have to cover it up. There needed to be no trail at all. If the Trulathians didn’t find any evidence otherwise, they would assume she was still in the temple. She hadn’t found him among the dead, but hopefully Titus was still there, his body waiting until spring to rot, or food for scavengers.

Her side ached a little, but it was improving. Just stopping back at the temple had seemed to help. If she’d had time and hadn’t had a reason to worry, she would have waited there until the healing completed.

But, back to the girl. With all of the texts and old spells in Swarian, of course it had been assumed that all of them had access to magic. But maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the girl was just useless. Better to give it another day and find out before just leaving her.

A pang hit her. She’d helped Sen when she was in their land, for no reason, without compensation. As much as Sen wanted to believe that she had an ulterior motive, there wasn’t one that she could see. Meri had risked getting in trouble to help her, and she couldn’t figure out why.

Maybe having someone who would watch her back wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Orcus watched out for each other on the battlefield, but only out of necessity. The system pitted them against each other more often than not, to keep them from banding together and fighting back against their masters. Fall too low in the pecking order and bad things started to happen to you.

She needed to stop thinking about that. It was over. The Orcus had been wiped out. Her only concern now had to be getting this infernal bracelet removed. She tightened her bicep, feeling the spikes dig in a little.

The man who had put this on her arm would be able to remove it. She just needed to find a way to get into Ortansa undetected and force him to cut it out of her flesh. Then she would kill him, so he couldn’t do it to another ever again. Burn down his shop, destroy all his notes, so no one could replicate it. She would make it her life’s work to find anyone that knew the craft and send them into fire and brimstone after the Crafter.

The snow-fall was getting stronger. Wonderful for tonight, to help hide the girl’s blunders. Not great for travel tomorrow. But it would make hunting easier, and after the food she’d had in that other world, she was ready for something with a little more substance.

* * *

Starting the fire had not gone well, to put it mildly. The little bag Sen had tossed at Meri had flint and a striker in it, or this world’s equivalent of flint anyway. But even though it had taken forever, it didn’t matter. Cheery flames danced in the little fire pit now, and that’s what counted. It had gotten warm enough in the shack to even loosen up the dead man’s throw she was wearing. She grimaced at the thought. A new cloak would be awesome, so she didn’t have to keep thinking of it as the dead man’s. It was a good thing that she’d worn boots and jeans. Snakes were the worry in the swamp, but here she probably would have lost her toes to frostbite.

The wind picked up outside, starting to howl. Sen had been gone forever.

“She better not have left me.” Her voice got lost in the sounds coming from outside. Sen was just slow because of her injuries. Whatever they were. Or she was having trouble finding something to eat. That seemed pretty plausible in this winter wasteland.

Maybe they could have stayed at that destroyed place where the portal was. It was warm there. But it didn’t seem safe, or at all comfortable, with dead bodies everywhere.

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Meri shoved another small bite of a granola bar into her mouth. Saving this would have been ideal, but after all that walking and the cold, now that she was warming up she was starving.

The door creaked open and Meri jumped back automatically. She started breathing again when Sen stepped through the door, holding two skinned animals on a long stick.

“Know how to cook these?” she asked, shutting the door.

She didn’t even tell her good job for getting the fire going. But then, it was probably something a ten year old could do here.

“Ah, no,” Meri answered about the meat.

Sen gave a longsuffering sigh and moved forward, propping the stick up to hang the small creatures over the fire. She took her top layer of clothes off and shook the snow out, pulling a wooden rack close to the fire and slinging the cloak over it. Snow dribbled in the fire, making it sizzle.

This whole thing was surreal. She’d never even been camping on Earth, let alone… wherever this was. Her mom tried to compensate for being a single parent, but camping was something she’d never accomplished.

Not that Meri had been super interested in camping anyway.

It didn’t take long for the meat to start to smell really, really good. Apparently Sen was a decent hunter, or she wouldn’t have been able to catch two rabbits that quickly. Well, at least it seemed quick, who knew? Being that small, they were probably rabbits. Did they have rabbits here? She leaned over the fire to study the rabbits more closely, just to see if there were any differences to the ones at home. None that she noticed, but it was hard to tell with the fur missing. Not that she’d spent a lot of time around rabbits at home, either.

“Is the snow getting worse?” Meri finally asked. This silence was weird. Being at school the last couple years, without a moment of silence ever, made this uncomfortable.

“Yes,” Sen said, but didn’t elaborate.

If it wouldn’t let all kinds of cold in, she’d go and look outside. Now that things were nice and cozy, the snow didn’t seem so bad again.

The rabbit took forever to cook. It started to look done, but Sen just left it on there, rotating it occasionally and flipping the stick over so the one on the bottom didn’t cook too much and the one on the top not enough. Meri’s stomach protested the wait, rather vigorously. It got to the point where she was about ready to announce that they were done enough for her when Sen took out her giant knife and sliced a piece off. She took a bite and grunted, which must have been acceptance because she then cut off a piece and stabbed it, holding it out to Meri at knife point.

She tapped it, checking the temperature. Hot, but not unbearable. She grabbed it and passed it hand to hand for a second, trying not to burn her fingers before taking a quick bite.

Instantly hot juices flooded her mouth and her stomach protested even louder, waiting for the food to make it all the way down her throat to her belly. It was so good! Unbelievably good. She destroyed her piece within a few moments, and waited to see if she got any more.

Sen almost smiled at her. It was the closest thing to amused that Meri had seen coming from her. She cut off another piece and held it out.

“So much for leftovers,” Meri said, reaching out for her next piece too.

Was it the hunger talking, or was rabbit really this good? It didn’t matter at the moment. She was going to stuff herself.

“Thanks, Sen,” Meri said around a mouthful of rabbit. “This is really good.”

Sen shrugged. “Better finish up and get some rest. I don’t want to be here much after first light tomorrow. The soldiers will be checking anything that looks like shelter, looking for me.”

Meri wiped at her mouth, trying to get some of the juice off. What she wouldn’t do for a hot shower right now. “You never really said. Why are these guys after you?”

Instantly the slight humor she’d seen on Sen’s face was gone. She almost wished she hadn’t asked.

“It’s better if you don’t know,” Sen said, then moved over to the corner and started making herself a bed.

Better if she didn’t know sounded kind of ominous. What did she really know about Sen? Not much. What if she was a criminal? That would kind of explain the bracelet, like maybe it was some kind of warning for people, a marker that the one wearing it had done something bad. Maybe really bad. And the way Sen acted, like Meri should know what the bracelet meant…

Suddenly the rabbit didn’t seem to want to stay down. Sen could be a murderer for all she knew. Maybe that’s why the soldiers were looking for her so hard.

She inched over to the far wall and slowly threw her cloak down. At least the cloak could cover both the ground, and her. It was definitely big enough, made for large men in war gear. And it almost seemed to give off heat itself, which of course couldn’t be accurate. No way. A portal could be explained by science, but cloaks that generated their own heat? Nah.

Sleeping would be difficult, after the thoughts that had just occurred to her. Why had she gotten herself into this again? She sighed. Too late now. She’d never find her way back alone, and then would end up starving to death. And she still hadn’t found anything that definitively said ‘other world.’ Sen was her only help right now, and she’d shown no signs whatsoever of meaning her harm.

All that about her being a murderer was probably just crazy. She obviously used the knife for stuff like cooking rabbits, and maybe for killing them or something. No, Sen wouldn’t hurt anyone. She had to believe that or this was most definitely going to be the death of her.