Dragon by Finley Aaron

Evangeline’s.) Times two feet, I have thirty-eight muscles that are killing me, and that’s just below my ankles.
    Also, my shoulders ache like bruises from hauling my backpack and my swords. I keep trying to shift the weight so it doesn’t dig in so badly, but it just shifts back again and hurts worse.
    I really hope these guys know where they’re going. I’ll spare you the details, mostly because I don’t want to think about them, but my day has been a blur of forests and fields, barbed wire fences, and bothersome bugs. Mostly mosquitos, with the occasional biting fly.
    We’ve been avoiding villages and farmsteads. For lunch, Ram darted away from me and Ion and Ozzie, and came back a few minutes later with some roasted meat. Even though I don’t know how he had time to do it, I’m pretty sure he killed, skinned, gutted and roasted some kind of animal. I didn’t ask what kind, but it tasted good.
    Other than that, we’ve just been walking, walking, walking, as the sun slowly rises, peaks, falls, and starts to set.
    The Romanian countryside is arguably lovely, but not when you’re fleeing with heavy bags. Most concerning of all, Ozzie’s having trouble keeping up, and fresh red blood seeps up through her gauze.
    I’m afraid this trek is going to be too much for her.
    Finally, finally, when my feet are so sore they’re throbbing and I’m starting to trip over dirt and roots and branches because my feet are half numb from exhaustion, we reach a right thick stretch of woods and Ram and Ion announce it’s time to make camp for the night.
    I haven’t been camping since I was a kid, when we’d head down toward the sea (which I realize now must have been the Caspian Sea). But even then we had things like tents and sleeping bags, food and other gear, which we don’t have with us now.
    So setting up camp consists of finding a flat stretch of earth big enough to lie down on, clearing away the sticks, and heaping up soft leaves like some kind of mattress.
    A mattress with bugs living in it.
    I want to go back to Prague.
    Except the yagi were there.
    Okay, maybe, maybe, camping in the Romanian woods is preferable to living at Saint Evangeline’s, but I’m assuming these bugs don’t bite. If creepy crawly things start chewing on me, this could swing the other way in a hurry.
    I can’t wait to get off my feet, so as soon as I have a reasonable layer of leaves under me, I sit down and take off my shoes to inspect the damage. Fortunately it looks like the blister on my heel was the only one, and Ram’s bandage kept it from getting any worse.
    Ozzie settles down beside me nice and close, and I lean my head against her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to mind.
    Then Ram returns with more roasted meat, which is a bit of a surprise because I didn’t even realize he’d stepped away. I thought he was behind my head laying out his leaf bed. We kind of made a triangle—me, Ion, and Ram, with Ion’s feet near my feet, and Ram’s head near my head, and Ram’s feet near Ion’s head. I didn’t want my head near anybody’s feet because, having smelled my own, there’s just no way I could willfully lie down like that.
    The meat is a different kind this time, and I’m thinking I should ask Ram what it is and how he got it, and how he cooked it so quickly, but I’m too busy chewing, and then I’m full and sleepy and more interested in lying down flat and sleeping than in solving the mysteries of my weird companions.
    It’s all I can do to stumble to the nearby stream (we’ve sort of been following this stream—I’m assuming it’s a helpful navigational aid in addition to a water source), and I brush my teeth while standing barefoot in the cool water, which is a little numbing but feels absolutely amazing on my thirty-eight sore muscles.
    Then I step out and stand on a patch of moss until my feet are dry enough not to track mud back to camp, and I pad back barefoot, and I stretch out on my leaf bed with my Ozzie pillow