The Story of Sorrel

by Joseph R. Lallo

  She opened her eyes and scanned the ground. Little footprints traced swift paths away, each vanishing as they found parallel paths along ground that wouldn’t show their passage.

  “They walk together…” Sorrel mused. “Maybe good, maybe bad. We will see how far they get.”

  #

  “Hurry up, Reyna,” Wren called, his voice almost silent but still quite loud enough for his sister’s sensitive ears.

  “Not so fast,” she objected, rushing along after him.

  Both were running at a crouch, but Wren was managing much longer strides.

  “If we go fast, we get farther. If we get farther, she takes longer to find us. Far enough, fast enough, and we win the game!” Wren said.

  “But I can’t keep up. And we don’t know where we’re going!”

  “So? I never know where I’m going. I just go the ways I can. Right now we don’t have to worry about where to, we just have to worry about away from. And we’re going away from Mama.”

  Wren skidded to a stop as the winding valley between two sandy hills abruptly ended, denying them cover.

  “See,” Reyna huffed, catching up to him and trying to recover. “It isn’t always about being faster. We can also hide.”

  “We can’t hide so close to where we started, Mama will find us before the sun even gets close to the horizon. And then neither of us gets a story.”

  “Not if we hide really good,” Reyna said.

  Wren wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. He couldn’t smell his mother, but that didn’t mean much. For all he knew, she was right on top of them. Retracing their steps would cost them some of the precious distance they’d gotten as part of their head start. But they had chosen their path poorly. Good cover from this point forward would be hard to find.

  “Fine,” Wren said. “You’re a better hider than me. Where would you hide?”

  They’d been following some firm ground that didn’t show prints, probably the dried-up bed of a river. The sand that spread outward and upward along the dunes was much looser. It would easily show their prints if they tried to travel across it. She pawed at the sandy ground with her fingers. The top layer of the soil was dry, but not far below the surface was moist sand that stuck to her fur. She started to dig.

  “First, we use the sand, we make ourselves harder to see,” Reyna said. “Like with Mama earlier. Only with the sand here, so we match.”

  She patted handfuls of the sticky sand against her outfit. Wren did the same.

  “Mama sees very good,” Wren said. “It won’t be enough.”

  “But it won’t be nothing.”

  “What do we do after the sand?”

  “Um…” Reyna said, her uncertainty more than evident.

  “You don’t know, do you?” Wren said, grinning smugly as he smeared some sand on his face.

  “You should have ideas too. That’s why I wanted to run together. Mama says we need to be fast and strong and smart. I’m fast and smart, and you’re fast and strong. We have to be together to be all three.”

  “I’m smart too!” Wren said, realizing what his sister perceived to be his shortcoming. “I’ll show you.”

  He stared at the ground, now churned up by their digging. “First we need to fix this. She’ll know what we did if we don’t.”

  “I know that.” Reyna started smoothing the sand over. “That’s not the idea we need.”

  Wren helped her pat and smooth away the evidence of their digging. “This ground… this ground is very much like the ground we find rabbits near.”

  “No hunting, Wren. That’s what got you caught last time.”

  “No, no! The rabbits like to dig and hide in holes. If they get inside deep enough, I can’t get them. Maybe we can do that!”

  “We don’t have time to dig a hole.”

  “Maybe we can find a nice big hole. Or a little one that we can make big fast. Look, there is more sand like that this way, and all along that part there. And Mama is probably back the other way, since we can’t smell her, and that means she’s downwind. So we go that way, we look for holes, and we hide in them.”

  Reyna nodded. “Yes. That is a good idea. If you can’t be like the hunter, be like the hardest-to-get prey. Mama says that all the time!”

  They hurried off, rarely standing taller than a crawl. The sand did a wonderful job of hiding them, making fur and clothes alike the same tawny color of the soil. It even masked their scent a bit. The layer of musty earthiness over their own scent wouldn’t fool Sorrel for more than a moment, but that was a moment longer than not at all.

  As the pair dashed, they set their minds wholly upon two simple things: getting as far away as they could, and finding a good place to dig. So excited and enthusiastic were they about their new plan that they began to forget about other important lessons they had learned.

  #

  Sorrel followed the scent and path of her twins.

  “They are trying new things…” she mused to herself, noticing a half-hidden paw print. “I will stay back. Let them know that new things like this are sometimes good…”

  She moved after them with far greater care than she would ever take while hunting food. For the little ones, playing the game correctly was the relatively simple matter of remaining hidden until the sun set. For that, Sorrel had to stay far enough away that they could not detect her, but near enough that she never truly lost them. Caring for her young was an endless balancing act, making them always aware of the dangers of the world and teaching them to face those dangers, but never allowing them to face those dangers alone until she knew they were ready.

  She came to the end of the riverbed they had been following. They’d covered their tracks well, though in this case it didn’t help much. She knew they’d come this way, and as she hadn’t seen them scamper over the dunes, they could only have fled along the valley between them. Sorrel traced the path forward with her eyes. A few twists, a few turns, but with the way the wind was blowing and where the sun was in the sky, Reyna and Wren could only safely choose a single route from here without risking being seen.

  Sorrel nodded. They’d cornered themselves. It was an understandable mistake, and one that she would have made herself at their age, but it was a serious enough one that she couldn’t allow them a win today. If a hunter of her skill had truly sought them as prey, they were as good as caught. She would give them a few hours more to see if they realized their mistake. Perhaps she could afford to linger long enough for them to earn another story. This little adventure reminded her of a fine one…

  She heard a quiet buzz. Her ear flicked. Near the water, the air was thick with insects. Small, annoying bugs drifted in the breeze. Large, swooping ones made meals of them. This was certainly the thrumming beat of a large insect. But she was far from the water. There were no small insects around. She held perfectly still and waited. The buzzing came and went. She watched with her peripheral vision, waiting for the source of the sound to come into view. It stubbornly refused to. She narrowed her eyes and released a soft sigh. Sorrel had never known a dragonfly to be clever enough to stay out of sight. That left just one possibility.

  Her ears pivoted to follow its sound. Timing would be important. This was the sort of thing she wouldn’t get a second chance at. For Sorrel, that was true of most things. She was quite accustomed to making the moment count. The soft flutter of wings drew near. Nearer. Nearer still. At the precise instant it was near enough, she swiped her hand blindly through the air. Her aim was true. A tiny form slapped into the palm of her hand.

  Sorrel raised a small, struggling creature to her face. It was barely larger than the palm of her hand: a fairy. She’d had little experience with them, but her rare encounters had never been with a specimen like this. As far as she could tell, it was a male. He had dark, almost copper-colored skin. Black hair formed a frazzled nest atop his head. She knew better than to loosen her grip to inspect his body, but it felt as though he wore little in the way of clothes.

  �
�There is no water near. No fire, either. An earth fairy, then? Does such a thing exist, I wonder?” Sorrel murmured to herself.

  The fairy struggled and trilled. It was deceivingly strong, but not strong enough to pull itself free of her grip. Sorrel pulled it close to her face.

  “You should not be so curious, fairy,” she said quietly. “Now I let you go, and you leave me be. Or maybe I use these on you next time.”

  She peeled her lips in a snarl. When she was sure he’d gotten a good look at what he’d be facing if he continued to bother her, she let the little thing go. It buzzed upward and she turned back to the breeze to sample for the scent of her brood. She shut her eyes and took a long, deep whiff. The air carried the scent of sand, dry grass… but not Reyna and Wren.

  Sorrel took another breath, slower and longer this time. The trail her children had taken was right below her nose. She should smell it. There was no way she could have lost the scent. She dropped down, sniffing again and again. Not until her nose was buried in the soil did she get so much as a hint of the scent she was after.

  She cocked her head, then glanced over her shoulder. The fairy was well out of her reach, but still near enough for her to see the flutter of his wings and hear their buzz.

  “That thing… is it… changing the wind?” she mused.

  Her chest tightened. A flash of anxiety burned in her stomach. She craned her neck slightly and scanned her surroundings. The sand around her had shifted. The short grass all bent in the same direction, waving softly away from her. Her eyes settled on a tawny bit of landscape. It seemed perfectly innocuous. But something about it, something about the shadows and the sweep of it, sparked something in her mind.

  “I don’t like this… We will not play the game today. Someone else is playing the game.”

  She stood and put her fingers to her lips, readying a piercing whistle to summon the twins. Before she could, the confounding wind kicked up. Sand scoured her face and blasted her eyes. She stumbled back, eyes tearing and blinking away the grit. Rising wind whistled in her ears, but it couldn’t fully mask the sound of footsteps charging toward her.

  Sorrel sprang blindly back and away from the hill’s peak. She desperately wanted to rush to her children, to sweep them up and keep them safe. But now was not the time. To run to them now would only lead these attackers, whoever the were, right toward them.

  Her mind and heart raced as she bounded blindly down the slope. Everywhere she turned, the wind followed, spraying in her eyes. The air was thick with dust and debris. Each heaving breath choked her lungs with sand. Hidden among the wail of the wind was the half-heard whistle of rope whipping through the air. She turned her bounding run into a wild leap, but something coiled tight about her leg. She thumped to the ground, and in a heartbeat, a dozen hands pinned her to it. She was caught. And she’d never even seen the faces of those who had bested her.

  Chapter 3

  The sun slid ever lower. Reyna and Wren huddled in the shadows of a burrow they’d hastily dug. It had taken time and effort to claw out a space large enough for the two of them. Then came something that was more of an art, the sculpting and scattering of the sand to hide that they’d ever been there at all.

  Hours crept by. They were smeared with fresh soil, a thick layer patted into their fur. If not for the glitter of their squinted eyes, one could almost imagine there was nothing but a pair of wind-blown motes of sand where the twins were hiding.

  It wasn’t a comfortable place to hide, but they were used to that. Safety and comfort weren’t the same thing, and of the two, safety was better. They were hungry and thirsty, too. But food and water could wait. The sun was quite near the horizon, and they were so very close to winning the game.

  The twins started to wriggle and fidget as the final sliver of sun inched down along the horizon. Just a few seconds more. The air didn’t carry even a hint of their mother, but that didn’t mean a thing. She always seemed to turn up whether they could smell her or not. Finally, the moment came and went. Evening turned to night. They had hidden for the whole of the day.

  They had won.

  Wren scrambled from the cave and leaped and pranced triumphantly.

  “We did it!” he crowed.

  “I can’t believe it!” Reyna said.

  She slipped out and the two joined paws and bounced about. It was a peculiar sight, the pair of malthropes reveling in their victory. Even as the thrill of their first real win seized them, they kept their motions below the peaks of the hills. Even as they cheered and celebrated, they kept their voices barely above a whisper. The pair had mastered the art of stealthy exuberance.

  “What do we do now?” Wren asked, a smile still lighting up his face. “What do we win? And how do we tell Mama?”

  “I don’t know. We must have hidden better than we thought. I would have thought the moment we poked a nose out of the burrow, she would have seen us. Should we call her?” Reyna said.

  “You call her.”

  She crossed her arms. “You have the louder voice.”

  “I get scolded for having the louder voice.”

  “She can’t scold you now. We won the game! This is time for a reward!”

  “If you aren’t afraid of getting scolded, then why don’t you call for her?”

  “Because you have the louder voice.”

  Wren glared at her. “Fine. But if she yells at me, I’m telling her you told me to do it.” He took a deep breath and called out, “Mama!”

  In truth, the call was barely above speaking volume, but after hours of being too cautious to breathe too loudly, it was downright startling. They dropped down against the slope of the hill, ears twisting this way, eyes peering that way. Sorrel did not come.

  “Mama!” Wren called, now a genuine shout.

  “Why won’t she come…” Reyna said with a chill.

  “I don’t know. She can’t be far. She’s never far.”

  “You don’t think… something happened to her, do you?”

  He tipped his head up and stated in a very matter-of-fact manner. “Nothing happened to Mama, because nothing happened to us. Mama’s better at hiding and running than we are, so if something was going to happen to anyone, it would happen to us and she’d get away.”

  “Then where is she?”

  Wren turned the possibilities over in his head. “We never won the game before, right?” he said.

  “Right.”

  “So we don’t really know what happens next in the game. Maybe there’s a second part.”

  “But why wouldn’t she tell us that part?”

  “Maybe that’s part of the part. Maybe we have to figure it out on our own,” Wren suggested.

  “So what do we do, then?”

  “I don’t know. You’re better at figuring.”

  “I don’t want to figure. I want Mama,” she said, shrinking down below the sandy peak.

  “The sooner we figure out what she wants us to figure out, the sooner we get her back. And a reward!”

  “What do you think it’ll be?” Reyna asked, her fear tempered by the promise of a prize.

  “Um… Remember when we were by that bazaar down south? She stole those sweets?”

  Reyna held up a finger. “Uh-uh-uh. She found those sweets in a shop. Remember? If they can’t keep them away from us, they don’t belong to them.”

  “Right, right. But remember how good they were? I bet she kept some. I bet she has a sweet for each of us.”

  “You think?” Reyna said eagerly.

  “Mama always keeps some of something important. And if sweets are the reward for winning the game, they’re very important. So get to figuring!” He shut his eyes and hunkered down, lips curled in pleasant memory. “I hope it’s the chewy one…”

  Reyna rolled over to place her back on the cooling sand of the hill. “What would be the next part of the game…” she murmured. “The game is all about hunting.”

  “No,” Wren corrected. “It’s all about running and hiding
.”

  “They’re the same thing, Wren,” she countered. “We’re running and hiding. She’s hunting.”

  He tipped his head back and forth. “I guess. But mostly it’s running and hiding.”

  She tugged at the edge of her shawl. “So if it’s about running and hiding and hunting… we didn’t do any hunting yet.”

  “Hunting is a different game. She teaches that separate.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe it’s all one big game. Remember? On the safe days? She lets you and me play tag.”

  “And I always win because you don’t run as fast as me.”

  “Except when I hide.”

  “That’s not tag, that’s hide and seek.”

  “You can still hide during tag, Wren. And that’s not what I’m talking about. When we play tag, if you tag me, then it’s my turn to tag you.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So we finished the hiding part. Maybe the next part of the game is the hunting part and Mama hides.”

  “You think?” Wren said.

  She shrugged. “It could be. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t answer. Because she’s hiding now.”

  “But that’s not fair! Mama’s good at hiding. Better than us.”

  “But she isn’t anymore, right? She couldn’t find us, so that means we’re as good at hiding as her. The next part is hunting.”

  Wren grumbled. “You might be right.” He cautiously craned his neck. “Hunting at night is harder, though.”

  “The next part of the game would be harder, wouldn’t it?”

  She crawled up to peer with him. It was astounding how a little bit of light and a little bit of thought could completely change the way the world looked. All through the day, the field had looked so small. It had seemed like there was nowhere to hide, and no way to get far enough away to have a chance to escape if Sorrel spotted them. Now the field was nothing but nooks and crannies. Every shadow was a yawning abyss that could easily conceal their mother. And everything was so spread out. It would take them ages to reach the best hiding places, all the while scurrying where Sorrel could easily spot them.