The Starving Little Girl Who Saved Her Tribe novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What a Child Saw

Ilu woke in the gray before dawn with her mouth full of thoughts.

She lay still in Lois's lap and let them line up.

Her wrists hurt.

Her mother was a yard away, tied, with her head against the rock and her eyes open.

The sound of stone had stopped.

Somewhere behind them a wall now stood in the dark where the warm wind used to be.

"Mama," Ilu whispered.

Kesh turned her head.

She did not say sorry, because she had said it already.

She only waited, and that was the first time Ilu really looked at her face since the rock hollow.

It was gaunt, and it was streaked, and it was begging for something without asking.

"I saw something," Ilu whispered. "Before the cave. When we were at the river camp. And I forgot, because I was hungry."

"What did you see?"

"Hurn's men. The hunters. They came back from the lake with their hands all shiny."

Kesh's eyes sharpened.

"Shiny?"

"Like fat. They wiped them on the snow."

"And Hurn's mouth was greasy, and he said, no meat, the hunt failed again."

"And I thought, why is he licking his fingers?"

Ilu swallowed.

"I was little. I thought it was just a thing he did."

"At the lake," Kesh said, very slowly.

"At the north end, where the willows are. There were drag marks, long ones, like a sledge."

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