The Book Gatherer

Chapter Thirteen

Honi thought she should be used to the feeling of knowing no idea what she was doing by now, but it continued to strike her with exasperating force, hauling in a full saddlebag of doubt with it.

She let Firek go find his stick but sent Jeje over to the side of the clearing he'd entered the forest, so the giraffe could hear him better as she grazed. Honi thought she knew Firek wouldn't run—he must've known he couldn't, right? It itched at her to just . . . let him walk away. But what else was she to do.

Except maybe do the thing she'd killed a day's worth of traveling for.

Honi got up and dragged one of the two remaining saddlebags she had over to the ink-strainer. She pulled a dozen or so books out of the saddlebag and piled them in neat stacks, then got out her little knife and began her work on one book. She settled the novel—a standalone realistic fiction with a gray cover—in her lap and used the knife to cut the covers off, leaving the spine to keep the pages together. Then she sliced four individual pages off the spine, cut notches in their corners for the ink to escape out of, and placed them in the ink-strainer. Four at a time was all the beat-up thing could handle. Cranking the handle on the machine's side, she watched as the pages were squeezed between two metal plates and the ink collected in bags attached to the sides. To help dry the pages, Honi scooped hot coals from the dead fire into the small containers that would warm the plates pressing the ink out of the pages. When the four pages were dry and empty, she uncranked the handle and pried them off the ink-strainer. After placing the dried pages on the ground next to her, she cut off four more fresh pages from the spine and put them in the machine.

Jeje snorted, and Honi looked up. Firek stood in the shadows of a tree, just outside the clearing, watching her with those dark, closed-off eyes. He seemed like such a sad, angry, lost person. She understood how that felt, sometimes, during those nights when she couldn't sleep, thoughts and memories and aching swirling into a knot so twisted and tight it was near impossible to loosen. The ache of missing a father she never knew . . . Yes. She understood that.

"Found your stick?" she called to him.

He shifted his weight off a stick wedged between his arm and body, lifting it slightly so Honi could see it better. He said nothing as he slid it back under his armpit, slouching over it again.

"Didn't take you long," she noted, turning back to the ink-strainer and cranking the lever. She ducked her head to make sure the ink didn't overflow the grooves in the bottom plate that directed the ink to the bags. "What'd you do? Sneak out last night and hide it?" She joked, but it was a constant fear that Jeje would miss him one night and he would run off or attack.

"No. There was a fallen tree with a good number of branches. It would be useful to borrow some rope to tie a couple together to make a stronger crutch."

"Sure. Your old ropes are in the saddlebag with the first-aid kit." She kept a careful eye on him as he limped over to the pile and dug through her personal things. There wasn't anything that could help him escape or harm her there, but who knew what an essie might try? Thankfully, he didn't seem to do or take anything suspicious.

When Firek limped over, ropes in hand, Honi focused on cranking the ink-strainer's lever as if she hadn't been watching him. "Slow process," he commented, slowly settling himself on the ground in the same spot before.

"Yah, but it works."

"And you'll take the whole day just on doing that?" he asked, staring as she worked.

She flashed him a suspicious look. Why did he want to know? "I'll only dry as many pages we need, and use the rest of the day to maybe scavenge more herbs and medicines from the forest, and boil old bandages."