Perilous Travels (The Southern Continent Series Book 2) by Jeffrey Quyle Page B

tired, and a little weak, and hungry, but unwilling to ask for food.  He sat and reapplied dabs of ointment to his sunburn as the pain intensified, and he tried to talk to the jewels.
    “Are my friends alright?  Did the ship make it through the storm?” he asked softly.
    “Did you ask something?” Lastone looked up from his work.
    “I was just talking to myself,” Grange replied weakly, and he remained silent thereafter.
    When the sun had dropped down towards the horizon, Oleen and Shaylee and two other girls came bounding into the house.  They all unselfconsciously wore the village costume of bared torsos, and Grange blushed uncomfortably as they crowded around him.
    “Let’s go!  We’re taking you to the mountain top,” Oleen said, and the four girls raced through the village, Grange self-consciously following them past the residents of the settlement, up a trail through the jungle, and to the top of a small hill, one of three hills that appeared to be the girls’ definition of a mountain.
    Grange stood at the summit as he arrived in the girls’ footsteps, and he looked around.  He could see water on all sides of the island – it wasn’t very large, he noted.  There were other islands visible to the west, their details lost in the glare of the setting sun.  He asked the girls about them.
    “No one lives on most of those,” Shaylee took the lead in talking to him; the others apparently recognized her ownership of him.  “Our men go hunting on those islands for food.  The closest island with people is five islands away.  It takes most of the morning to paddle the canoe there,” she informed him, just before they all sat down and Oleen began singing the first lovely song.
    It was a love song, one of many that were fed to Grange over the following days.  He struggled to learn them all.  Oleen sang in a sweet voice, one that hadn’t matured yet, so that it was high and pure.  Some of the songs she sang were not so pure, however, Grange was shocked to learn, as they left little to the imagination of what the proposing suitors hoped the future happy couple would do upon their wedding night.
    After a week, Layreen came to him in the evening, instead of the girls.   “I’m going to test you,” she said, and she was the one who escorted him up the hillside to the empty glade among the trees, and began naming songs and asking him to play them for her.
    He played nearly three quarters of the songs she named.
    “You’re almost good enough.  We’ll say one more week,” she told him, and so he continued practicing the music that Oleen sang.  The other girls stopped coming after a few days, but Shaylee insisted on joining them for every session.
    In the meantime, Grange’s sunburn gradually healed.  First the pain ended, then his skin peeled badly, causing another round of village gossip about him.  “Is everything going to fall off him?” Grange heard the question asked more than once.
    And after that, he began to develop a golden brown tan through careful exposure to the sunlight, a tan that grew darker with each day, and allowed him to go outside more and more, though he failed to come close to matching the islanders’ ebony tones.  His hair, meanwhile, seemed to grow whiter and whiter in contrast.
    And he and Shaylee did one other thing, something that embarrassed Grange at first, but that he then came to enjoy and to look forward to.  They began to wrestle.
    “How did you knock me to the ground the first day?” Grange asked her as they were walking up to their musical practice with Oleen.
    “I just used the palm tree move,” she answered conversationally.
    “What is it?” he tried asking again.
    “It’s more aggressive than the ant lion move, but I thought you seemed a little weak and confused after being in the water so long, so I thought it would work, and it obviously did,” she explained.
    “Your battle moves are different from the way people in my land fight,” Grange