Chapter 15. Boredom

ister Lemony amused herself by humming tunelessly and flipping her one remaining gold coin.  She delighted in the small ringing sound and its hiss through the air followed by the cool slap of it against her palm.  Up and over, she watched it reach the top of its arc and shimmer in the wintry sunlight on its way back into her grasp like a fish slapping back into the water.

“Would you please just stop that?” Pendaran barked, unable to contain himself.

“Which? The humming or the flipping?” she asked.  Pendaran looked awful.  The last few nights she doubted he had gotten more than a few minutes of sleep.  And he was very jumpy.  She tossed the coin at him, shocked when he failed to catch it and it instead struck him on the ear.

“Both!” he and Uriel shouted simultaneously.

Not that Uriel looked much better.  At least she was not swearing so much, although Lemony missed it now that the brooding silence had set in.  Pendaran picked up the gold coin and pocketed it somewhere in the depths of his mink cloak.

“Could I have that back, please?”

“No. You threw it at me, now it’s mine.”

He was getting better about controlling his tongue at least.  Of course he was mainly just speaking when spoken to, or making small requests.

“So are you growing a beard?” she asked, trying to make conversation.  He had not been shaving and he was looking rather less dapper and a great deal more roguish.

“No.  Shut up.”

“Can you show me how to flip a coin across my knuckles?” she asked, trying one more time. Nothing she did to alleviate her boredom met with the approval of her party.  They had even got annoyed when she had slid down one of the icy paths on her rump.  So what if she was a little loud?  Her cries of glee had not actually attracted any monsters as they claimed.  What good was life if you could not have fun?  Besides, their screaming at her had just as much likelihood of attracting attention.

Monsters, pah.  Anything with any sense would be somewhere warm, not standing around waiting for them on some god forsaken windy ridge.  Granted, there had been a few ettins, but Uriel had roasted them nicely.  Besides, she needed something to do.  It was just sad watching her trudge along at the head of their little party all alone.  Why did she have to be so sad?  Murdi would come back.  He always did.

“No!” Pendaran snarled, “Leave me alone!  Go to the back of the line like the incredibly awful monk that you are and stay there.”

“You don’t have to get personal,” she sulked, falling back to her accustomed place ten paces behind.  She would be glad when they reached the warmth of Kryta on the other side of the pass.  But until then, it was snowball time.  At least the snow along the path today was fairly fresh and pliable.  Not too powdery, not too wet.  She paused to pack it into a nice even ball, then eased it along, gratified when it started gathering mass.

She pushed it off the path a little where the tracks of her friends had not tramped down the snow, then rolled it around between a pair of boulders and discovered a rut formed by someone or something moving across the snow heading down from the ridgeline of the southern peak to trail along beside their path.  It was a pity Morisedd was no longer with them.  He would have spotted those a while ago and gone on to investigate.  She abandoned her large mound of snow and moved to the rut to investigate.  There were boot prints and none of them were unnaturally large.  The ettins were not troubling them at least.  She followed the little track some distance and grinned at her friends moving below her as the path rose parallel but on much higher ground.  She could drop a huge load of snow on their heads.  That would be funny.