Dark River by Rym Kechacha

Author:Rym Kechacha [Kechacha, Rym]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781912658060
Publisher: Unsung Stories
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

It’s the birds that wake her, a twittering choir of chirping that drags her from sleep, confused. She wonders if Grainne has changed the sound of her alarm, but no, she’s not in her own bedroom, the light’s too bright, and kind of green too. She tries to pull her duvet up but there’s nothing covering her and her hands only clutch at a T-shirt and some dried leaves.

She opens her eyes and the memory of where they are and why fills her mind. Dread fills her stomach, and she rolls over onto her side. Her neck aches, the muscles taut like the strings of her lute, and her legs feel like a stuffed toy, ragged and woolly as she tries to stretch out.

Locke and Grainne are still asleep, or they’re both just lying with their eyes closed and pretending they can sleep through the chatter of the birds. She wonders what makes them sing like that. Perhaps they’re unusually scared of the dark, and each morning they’re so relieved to see the light again they have to get together and have a sing-song about it. Perhaps they’re catching each other up on all the news of the night-time, gossiping and spreading rumours.

She sits up, reaches her arms up and ignores the protests from the places on her shoulders where she carried the lute yesterday. Her eyes are gritty and she feels the light-headedness of being so tired when you went to sleep that your brain can’t catch up with all the rest it needs. She slips her feet into her socks, then her shoes. She struggles to get her shoes onto her swollen feet, and they feel tight and hot when she shoves her toes right to the end of the shoe. She loosens the laces then shuts her eyes for a moment. This can’t be happening. How she’d like to open her eyes and find that it was all a dream, back in her bed next to a sleeping Grainne, ready to get up and start their real journey to the north.

She gets to her feet, hips cracking, knees groaning, and stumbles to find a large tree to hide behind so she can piss. As she pulls down her jeans and crouches, she wonders if this is the same tree she led Locke to at dusk last night, if perhaps she’s standing in the puddle she made of her own waste last night and peeing into it again. She’s surprised to find that she doesn’t much care. Watching the newscasts of the flood refugees, the long lines of people leaving their homes in river deltas or coastal cities and living in their makeshift camps, she’s always been struck by how dirty they are, how quickly people become raggedy and dishevelled when they are flung from their homes. She’s always known that she would look like that if she were in one of those camps. But she never expected to be. She thought she would be safe.

She slept in

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