A soft breeze tickled Abrial’s nose.
It tickled again.
Wait a minute — was that a soft breeze? It seemed too…solid, right? And it was moving all around Abrial’s forehead, almost like something fluttering and soft.
Finley, thought Abrial. Is that her braid tickling my nose? It smells a little sweet…
Abrial blinked her eyes open. Something small and dark and feathery was obscuring her vision, flapping about like an enormous insect.
“GAH!”
She swatted it away, vaulting to a sitting position. Immediately, she hissed in pain. Not only did the wound in her side sear like a hot iron had been pressed into the tender skin, but her palms simmered painfully as well.
She lifted them to her face to see that they were wrapped with clean linen bandages.
“What the…?”
A sudden breath of coolness on her collarbones prompted her to look down. Abrial frowned deeply.
On her collarbone, there was a bright tattooed character, pressed into her pale skin. It glowed a hot orange as she examined it, then quickly cooled to a plain black. She could read the character inked there then. It read,
Remember.
She glanced down past the character, and made a strangled noise.
“Wha —?”
Her clothes had all been removed. All she wore was a thin white robe, opened at the waist so that her top half was clothed only in clean white linen bandages. Her face flushed crimson. She quickly pulled up the rest of the robe and tied it around her waist. It wasn’t substantial, but at least it was something.
“Chirp, chirp!”
The piercing noise of a bird cheeping came from above. Abrial looked up to see a small brown sparrow fluttering about above her head. It landed on a woven basket of herbs hanging down from the ceiling and continued to chirp at her indignantly.
“Too loud,” Abrial grumbled. “Shoo!”
She waved her hands at the sparrow, but it only hopped out of reach and continued to cheep. It even stuck its beak in the air, as though huffing in a superior manner. Abrial made a face at it.
She adjusted her position carefully and looked around.
It seemed she was in some kind of open cottage. It was large and round, with white walls and an enormous window on the opposite side of the room. The window opened up to what looked from where Abrial sat on the bed like some sort of garden, with flowers and trees and stalks all growing together in a sea of green.
Her heart panged. It was like a small version of the paradise gardens back at the house.
Quickly, she shook the strange nostalgia off. The gardens were where she had spent so many anxious, sleepless nights! How could she miss them? Even if they were beautiful…they represented years of suffocation! No, she didn’t miss them one bit.
Past this small garden stretched out hills upon green hills beneath an expanse of bright blue sky, a familiar sight. Maybe she wasn’t so far from that town, Futou. Or maybe she was still in it? Maybe some kind Futou villager had saved her and tended her wounds?
She glanced around the one-roomed cottage. There was a kind of vanity with a basin of water and a mirror, and a variety of pots and pans hung on the walls next to a hearth. A table with chairs was set near the window, with several bowls sitting on it and a pot in the center, as though a meal was about to begin. And covering every surface of the house, including hanging down from the ceilings, were a dizzying variety of herbs, flowers, and vegetable plants in pots, jars, vases, and baskets. It was like an indoor garden jungle.
“What a strange place,” Abrial muttered.
The sparrow suddenly hopped down from the basket above Abrial, landing right on her head.
“Hey!” Abrial swatted at it. It flew up, twirling in circles and chirping angrily. “What do you want from me?”
The sparrow flitted over to the table. It circled the steaming pot insistently, then landed precariously on the pot’s rim.
Abrial raised a dark eyebrow.
The sparrow directed its beak down at the steaming contents of the pot. Then it jerked its head up and stared straight at Abrial with tiny shiny, beetle-black eyes. It remained there, looking down into the pot and back up at Abrial repeatedly.
Abrial let out a puff of air. She stood from the bed.
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“What am I doing, talking to a sparrow? I don’t even know where I am! I need to get out of here.”
Nimbly, she began to maneuver her way around the various plants, which gave off a pleasant, earthy smell. She reached a dresser and immediately pulled open the top drawer.
“Where’s my dagger?” she muttered, eyes searching. “And where the heck are my clothes?”
The drawer held things for sewing: cloths of different colors, needles, threads. Abrial shoved it closed and reached for the second drawer. But as she did, her head was yanked back forcefully.
“ARGH!”
The sparrow had snatched some of her dark hair in its beak. It was tugging her painfully away from the dresser. She stumbled backwards, nearly knocking over a ceramic pot of tomato plants.
“You stupid tiny thing! Let go of my hair! OUCH! That hurts!”
The bird pulled and yanked Abrial all the way across the room. It released her at last when they had reached the wooden table. Then it landed daintily on the pot’s rim again with its two delicate talons.
Abrial scowled darkly. She fiercely rubbed the back of her head.
“How are you so strong for a tiny bird? And so smart? What is it you want me to do? Look in this pot? Fine, then! I’ll look!”
Abrial leaned over the table to peer into the metal pot’s depths. Steam clouded her eyes warmly for a moment. She blinked it away.
A mouthwatering aroma rushed into her nose. At once, her mouth filled with saliva, and her tongue tickled expectantly. It was a salty smell, yet slightly sweet. Spicy, too; she caught a whiff of hot chili oil, the key ingredient in her favorite noodle soup dish.
The soup inside looked as scrumptious as it smelled. Dumplings floated in it like drifting pillows, and chives had been sprinkled over the top of the crimson soup in garnish.
Her hand went subconsciously to her stomach, which yowled. How long had it been since she’d eaten? And speaking of food, her sack of edible goods was nowhere to be seen in this room. If she was going to leave to keep traveling back for Finley, shouldn’t she have something in her stomach to go off for a few days until she found a nearby town or reached the house?
“All right,” she mumbled to herself. “I’ll just eat quickly, then leave. This soup’s just sitting here, after all. It’ll get cold if no one eats it. I’m doing it a favor.”
She shot the sparrow a narrow-eyed look.
“If you peck at me, I’ll grab you and throw you out the window.”
The sparrow tweeted a high-pitched note, made haughty by the way it stuck its beak in the air, and fluttered away from the table.
Abrial’s shoulders relaxed. She had really thought it was about to attack her. What a weird thing! Somehow, she was afraid of this little sparrow, when she wasn’t afraid of dozens of guards with swords.
For the next twenty minutes, Abrial sat on a stool at this low wooden table, slurping down soup.
It was even more delicious than it looked and smelled, somehow. The dumplings exploded with salty flavor on Abrial’s tongue, and the meat and vegetables inside were soft and tender, perfectly cooked. The soup itself was a delight, savory and sweet and spicy all at once. She savored each mouthful, closing her eyes with pleasure and letting the warm taste simmer on her tongue.
She wolfed down one, two, three bowls of spicy dumpling soup. When she was just slurping up the last bit of soup in the third bowl and considering a fourth, someone spoke behind her.
“Delicious, huh?”
Abrial choked. The wooden bowl fell to the table with a rolling clatter. Hacking, Abrial spun off the stool and whirled in a defensive stance towards where the voice had come from — the large, open window.
Leaning on the sill of the window from the outside with a mischievous smile was a slim young woman, maybe twenty or more years old. Her pointed, dainty chin rested on one of her pale hands comfortably, and looped around her other arm was a basket filled with chives. Her straight, dark hair had been loosely tied into a bun, and her dark, angular eyes sparkled with mischief. She was very pretty.
Abrial coughed again. Spicy soup traveled back up her throat and shot up her nose. Her eyes watered and she doubled over, coughing and snorting and wiping her eyes profusely all at the same time.
“Wow!” exclaimed the woman. There came the noise of clapping over Abrial’s strangled clamor. “What a performance!”
When Abrial finally struggled back up, her eyes red and her nose running slightly, the young woman was still grinning. Her chin rested easily again on her pale hand. She was watching Abrial intently, like she was some sort of intriguing specimen. That haughty little sparrow had landed comfortably on the woman’s shoulder.
An uneasy feeling crept over Abrial.
“And — cough, cough, hack — who…are you? Are you the one who brought me here?” Not very subtly, Abrial scanned the room. Her muscles tensed, ready to spring in any direction at any moment.
“Looking for your dagger?” the mysterious woman smirked. Her eyes sparkled. “Relax, spunky, it’s not in here. It’s drying in the sun outside. I cleaned it in the river a couple days ago to get rid of the building blood and resentment. Seems like you’ve fought a lot of people with that dagger. You should be careful about who you fight. You seem like the type to make enemies easily. That’ll definitely come back to bite your ankles in the future.”
Abrial’s face flushed red.
“What d’you know about me? You don’t even know who I am!” she muttered. Suddenly, she remembered that she was in an unfamiliar place, in a house that she didn’t belong in, talking with a stranger.
Swiftly as a panther, she leapt to the wall and unhooked a metal pan. With this gripped tightly in her hands, she eyed the woman at the window guardedly. Like an angry tiger, Abrial toughly wielded that iron pan, her eyes still tearing up from choking on spices.
The woman leaning on the windowsill laughed. Her laugh was bright, like the tinkling of a brook. The little sparrow on her shoulder cheeped in unison with her.
“So ready to fight! I know someone just like you. His eyes were always on fire, no matter the situation.” A gentle smile traced the woman’s lips, then her lopsided smirk returned. “Do you want your clothes back, or not? If you do, come outside. You’re flashing me. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not looking for anything intimate right now.”
Abrial glanced down to see that the thin robe was hanging open over her bandaged torso and chest again. Face burning scarlet as a tomato, she dropped the pan and tied it closed. This time, she made sure to triple-knot it.
Abrial debated for a moment whether to actually go outside the cottage and meet this woman. But in the end, she did. She concluded: if this woman had wanted to harm her, she wouldn’t have bandaged her and let her gorge on her food, right? And…she really, really want her clothes and Dohyun back. Besides, that woman didn’t seem malicious…right? Just in case, though, Abrial brought the pan with her. She hadn’t met many people since leaving the house, and a good enough number of the people she had met had turned out to be weirdos or pricks. How could she know that this woman wouldn’t be the same?