Brenda insisted on accompanying Albino on his morning run around the domesticated animal herd their village kept nearby. “My morning routine cannot possibly satisfy your curiosity, dear Brenda,” Albino told her, which she innocently ignored. She was a sly vixen, and her unclear motives just added to the scheming vibe around her.
Brenda had gone above and beyond to make herself presentable. Her shoulders laid bare, her cleavage exposed, and her belly button airing out in the morning sun. Steam left Albino’s mouth with every breath, so it wasn’t the weather for her get-up. He did enjoy what she had done to her hair, though. Brenda wore a headband that kept her curly shock in check and accentuated her eyebrows and eyes. Only now did her eyes stick out from her face – those deep, brown, comforting eyes that contrasted so heavily with her outward personality.
It was moments like these that made Albino miss his mantle. He could have just taken it off and laid it over Brenda’s shoulders, and everything would be fine… If only it weren’t so conspicuous.
“I thought you would miss your mantle, so I made you one,” Quionne offered in the language of the winds.
“…That obvious?”
“Very,” Quionne said with a playful giggle in her current. “You’ve been staring at her bare shoulders like something’s out of place for a while. Even the poor girl’s starting to worry, see?”
“Oh…” This he said out loud. Albino was so used to everyone taking their sweet time in the albiversal realm, so the pace of mortals threw him off (and would probably continue to do so for a while). He returned inside and procured an impressive replica of his mantle, only in browns and whites, from a corner of the shack. “Quionne, you beautiful woman,” Albino praised in wind-speak, then quickly returned to a worried-looking Brenda. He draped the mantle over her shoulders with an apologetic smile. “As stunning as you made yourself look, I do not want this beautiful day to be celebrated with you falling sick.”
Brenda seemed unsure how to take this, but a (fake) reserved smile won out. “I will thankfully accept your kindness, my love.”
Calling him my love already? “Speaking of love, I adore what you did to your hair. Really highlights your eyes. What a mighty temptation to arrive at my door in the morning. Thank you for the visual treat, but I will have to delay indulging until… let us say lunch break?”
Albino offered Brenda his arm, which she stared at for several long seconds before accepting. There was not a hint of shame or innocence on Lancel’s face, but how could this be? Even that jerk from Verq Navan had some moments of boyish startledness in Brenda’s presence, and she didn’t even mean to trigger that reaction with him! But, well… Brenda looked at Lancel’s face as they walked at a slow pace. The other children ran by them, snickering about their linked arms, and he merely smiled and teased them back. When they came across the babe-mother on duty, Albino spent some minutes massaging her scalp and shoulders until some life returned to her tired face. Had he always been this… relaxed?
“Aren’t you supposed to be herding the cawdellis right now?” she asked when they walked down a bend that definitely didn’t lead to the main herd of cawdellis.
Albino shrugged, knowingly looking ahead. He was glad Brenda hadn’t put on fancy shoes. “My gut tells me this is the path to walk right now. It will lead me to something good, or so I believe. Do you not have days when your legs seem to understand your destiny better than you?” (Or a magical eye that ignores obstacles like a forest of pine trees as if they were see-through?)
“…I guess.” Brenda was conflicted. Telling a man what he wanted to hear was the best way to know what he was about, as his beliefs and opinions were strengthened with confidence and outer affirmations. For Lancel, she didn’t know or understand what the man thought. He was an enigma, which was a problem as her father had ordered her to find out if her fiancee was the better option beneath the secrecy.
For more than one median, they leisurely strolled down this path. Brenda longingly looked back several times, hoping they’d still find their way back. Albino laughed her off when she told him about her worries. “Do you not believe I can safely get us out of these woods?”
“But… We could at least mark our path! Here, I have a knife-“
“Marking your path is a good option when necessary, but I am with you today. There is no need to hurt these trees without reason. You do not carve your initials into every person or animal you come across, do you?”
Brenda frowned. “How is that even comparable? I don’t want to get lost! I- I’m scared, alright?”
“The first step in overcoming your fear is admitting to feeling it in the first place. Good job, Brenda.”
“Hey!”
“Well, the comparison between carving your initials into people and carving path markers into trees was a bit of a stretch. I admit that. After all, you would never consider marking another person unless the occasion calls for these little ones.” He pointed at a small sapling of a tree to the side of the path, almost hidden from view.
Brenda frowned at Lancel’s most recent antics. Then, she noticed the empty insect shells and animal bones surrounding the sapling. “A vampire slingtree?”
“A young vampire slingtree. Hand me that knife, would you?” Albino pricked his finger and delicately fed the slingtree until a crimson net appeared on its leaves and stem. The sapling was sated. “For how afraid some people are of them, they are surprisingly vulnerable. Look at us! We take wood from fully-grown slingtrees as proof of our love. I wonder if it started as a dare, like ‘Embrace your fears, and your love shall be everlasting!’ An astonishing number of animals eat the little vampire saplings. Only a small number reached adulthood. Only time will tell if this one will be lucky or not.”
Brenda didn’t know what to say. Had he just fed a slingtree for the fun of it? And what was with that face? Lancel looked at the sapling as though it was a wondrous thing when it was just another slingtree in the making to her. He… had never looked at her that way – like she was the sunshine of his life. How could he get so overjoyed at something so simple? Brenda didn’t get it.
Albino wasn’t bothered. He resumed their stroll for a few more minutes before slowing down. “We have arrived. Quiet now, lest we startle the poor thing.”
For the umpteenth time today, Brenda gave her husband to be a weird look. “What are you… oh.” Then she heard the crying. Not of a human but of an animal. A cawdelli, to be exact.
“Must have stumbled down the steep incline and dragged itself here. No wonder the herd seemed to be in an uproar.”
“…They did?” Brenda hadn’t noticed at all. And more importantly… “How do you know? You haven’t gone to see them, either!”
“I have ears, my dear. Imagine if one of Verq Bavas’s children fell down a cliff. Would you stay quiet?”
“That is… no.” Brenda hated having nothing to contribute.
In the meantime, Albino casually walked the rest of the distance, whispering, “It’s alright. It’s alright,” in the language of the winds, which was understood even by animals (to some extent). The calf perked up and looked at its rescuers with weak eyes. By the looks of it, it had been separated from the herd at night, perhaps when the sun’s light first peeked out over the horizon that morning.
Cawdellis were a type of cattle. They had curved horns as thick as a grown man’s arms, muscles as abundant as a hippo, and the demeanor of a teddy bear. Though Albino called them cattle, they only resembled cows in their general build. Cawdellis had flexible joints and skin, allowing them to stretch their three pairs of legs apart like a crocodile in one moment and return them to a straight standing position in the next. At three meters above ground, an adult cawdelli’s shoulder stood a meter above the hip, which was two meters tall. They grazed for food and gave birth once a year.
The injured calf looked about three years old, as tall as an adult cow or ox. Its pattern was still that of juveniles, a uniform black with occasional splotches of mossy green mixed in. Albino gave it some affectionate rubbings and collated a damage report in his mind. “This looks bad,” he told Brenda, who still gawked at him. “Two broken legs, by the looks of it. Freezing, too. Probably dragged its way over here and collapsed. We should be glad nothing else found it first.”
“The howler steal the calf! How did you know to come here?”
“…The howler?” There was a piece of folklore about mysterious wolf-like people born from animals in these mountains. When desperation and hunger strikes, they come to the village and steal their cattle instead. According to Quionne, there had been an incident where all herds disappeared at once several generations ago.
“…Don’t play games with me, Lancel.”
“I am not. My priority is getting the cawdelli back to the herd.”
Already, Albino was searching for materials he could use for a makeshift sled. Here, he found a sling he could use for ropes. There, Albino found a solid-looking piece of bark that didn’t break even when he jumped on it… Brenda watched him with tightness in her jaw. Getting a cawdelli of this size back to the herd was not feasible. Albino should just cut his losses and serve what could be salvaged as food-
“This should work. Until the incline becomes too steep, at least. I probably cannot carry it, but… Yes, only two legs appear broken. Perhaps we can assist it in going the rest of the way.” Sadly, those two legs were on the same side, middle and hind, so it wouldn’t be easy. The cawdelli somehow managed to hop onto the sled as Albino pulled its rear side up with all his might. Albino noticed that he had decent endurance in exchange for a general weakness elsewhere.
“…Are you mad?”
“I personally deny those accusations,” Albino said.
The makeshift sled did its job until the incline started. Chunks of the bark fell off on the journey, and it wouldn’t hold out much longer. So far, so good. Albino told the cawdelli of his plans in wind-speak, much to the frustration of Brenda. Albino looked like he actually believed the animal would understand him. Simply ridiculous.
Not quite as ridiculous as seeing the juvenile and Lancel working in tandem, like the species barrier and the language barrier between them didn’t exist. Albino had chosen this path because it was less steep and offered wide enough spaces between the trees for the cawdelli to move through. Every few meters, they had to rest, which they did by laying the animal against a tree from above, stopping gravity from reversing their progress.
Albino found more slings and solid branches nearby, from which he crafted crude casts to hold the broken bones in place. The casts felt unfamiliar for the cawdelli, and only persistent assurances on Albino’s part could soothe the animal from kicking them right off.
“Were you secretly raised by cawdellis or something?”
“Not that I know,” Albino said, chuckling at her creativity. “But I have been raised to value and appreciate life… Though it took me a while to understand what that means.”
When they returned several hours later, the entire village already searched for them. Their inquiries were drowned out when the herd discovered their lost calf. Albino went with them to prevent a stampede.
Brenda was right there with him, trying and failing not to say anything. Her silence didn’t last for long. “Father told me I shouldn’t tell anyone about our engagement, but that’s weird! We are engaged, so why keep quiet?”
Albino had to admire her inability to connect the dots, in a way. Well, she was only mortal. “I wonder why.”
Perhaps his tone had been too sarcastic. Brenda crossed her arms in response. “I’ve meant to ask this for years, but my parents always scolded me when I brought it up. Talking to you feels… different today. Like you’ve stopped your vows of silence. I am your fiancee whom you swore to confide in. Whom you swore to tell your secrets – all of them, until the end of summer. If so, then who are you? Where have you been before you arrived here, and what did you do? Tell me!”
Straight to the point, as usual. “What answer did your parents give you? Humor me, please. I am curious.”
Brenda narrowed her eyes but complied with much huffing and puffing. She fully expected Albino to try and crawl his way out of answering, as men were prone to do. “It was the same story repeated like a recited verse, so I know it by heart. My father asked you many times, but the only time you answered, you told him this: ‘Lancel can’t remember what happened before that day… Maybe Lancel was born the day you found him?’ Father never failed to speculate, each idea more outlandish than the last. Perhaps he wanted to discourage me from asking you directly, but that doesn’t make sense!”
Albino chuckled. “‘Lancel can not remember what happened before that day… Maybe Lancel was born the day you found him?’ Strange thing to say for a child of four, would you not agree? Strange way of speaking, too. So impersonal and distant from oneself.”
“…Yes.” It was weird, but if he didn’t deny that part… “Your words from back then almost make me think you were talking about someone else… But that would mean- What?”
“Finally got that, did you?” Albino was pleased. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely clueless. “Keep that between us if you want to earn my trust.”
“Your- Your trust? You’re the one pretending to be someone else! Who are- Who was- Men are always the same! Who are you, really?”
“No one, I fear,” Albino said, calmly watching the cawdelli herd tend to their injured member. The villagers wanted to butcher it…
That gave pause to Brenda’s antics. “What do you mean, no one? We are engaged since-“
“Can you call us engaged if we are discouraged from even hinting at it to our neighbors? Think, Brenda. Think! Why would someone ever consider sharing their secrets with another person? Why are we supposed to keep quiet about an engagement we might or might not have agreed to already?
Brenda scrunched her nose in thought. She hated what Lancel (or whoever he really was) did to her, making her think for herself when he had all the answers to give. It was infuriating! “I don’t know, alright! I don’t know! I’m stupid and stupid and stupid, and I don’t know!”
“Oh, Brenda. I oppose your stance, and I do it sincerely. You are naive and perhaps a bit too impatient for your own good. The answer is that we are both on trial, with the other being the judge. I do not trust you, and you do not trust me. I am not worthy of your trust, same as you are not worthy of mine-“
“How am I untrustworthy, you scheming, lying-“
“Interrupting is a crime we are both guilty of. That would make us rude rather than untrustworthy, but both are predominantly negative attributes. The point stands. You do not trust the supposed ally with too many secrets for comfort. I do not trust the woman who wishes to shield herself from another man with a loveless marriage.” Albino paused, gauging Brenda’s reaction.
His words took several moments to register, causing Brenda to grow paler by the second. “…That isn’t true?”
Albino shrugged. He didn’t really know, to be fair. Quionne had worked hard for all he knew about his future wife. “Why the question? His disposition towards you was obvious. As was your discomfort. I only became certain when you so easily agreed to marry me on what many would mistake as a whim.”
Brenda had nothing else to say. She clung to the heavy cloth of Albino’s mantle, finding great comfort in its weight and warmth while simultaneously feeling conflicted for feeling this way.
Albino stretched, stood up, and beat the dust from his pants. “In any case, this summer will determine if your scheme pays off… or not. I did agree to this engagement despite knowing the truth. See this mask over my eye? It will only come off for those I deem worthy. It is said that the eyes are the gateways to the human soul. You have until the end of summer to decide whether you want to walk through my pathways. But the same warning stands.” He lifted Brenda’s chin, looking her straight in the eyes. She was shaken and startled, but he saw more than anxiety on her face. There was potential here. “If you make me show you my right eye, I will never let you leave again.”
On this message, he left her, returning to the cawdelli herd. Brenda continued to watch him for the rest of the day, too many thoughts swirling around her head to make sense of them.
Greetings and salutations! You have earned my eternal gratitude for reading this humble mortal’s story. If you enjoyed yourself, I will have done my job well. If not… well, there is always room for improvement.
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