Free Craft by Lynnie Purcell

know!” Ellie said.
“They don’t tell me nothing, especially about the feud. I’m just ‘a
girl’…someone too stupid to understand what they’re on about. I
just gotta do all the chores, put up with Neveah’s bullying and eat
crow.”
    The raven she had made out of dirt
cawed once at her words. She petted it without thinking, taking
comfort in the touch. The boy looked at her with curious
understanding in his eyes. Her confession meant something to
him.
    “What’s your name?” he
asked.
    Ellie found his eyes. She did not
answer right away. Her mind worked overtime to understand. He acted
as if knowing her name would erase their animosity. Was it a trick?
She wanted to believe that he was genuinely eager to lay aside
their differences. The dark was a convincing reason to be
indifferent to whatever opinions she held in the light. Being lost
in the woods was another reason to allow for a moment of peace
between them. It was the only moment of peace that would ever
happen between a Cooper and a Bumbalow.
    She answered him slowly, her doubt
circling her mind. “Ellie. What’s yours?”
    “Thane.”
    “Thane?” Ellie repeated.
    She giggled at his name. She did not
consider that her giggles might make him angry and the feud would
flare back up between them. She could not help the laughter. His
name was too funny. Thane frowned at her, silently demanding an
explanation.
    “Sounds like something someone would
say if they were cursing!” she said around her giggles.
    Thane wrinkled his nose and stepped
closer. He sat down facing her. His expression suggested she was
not far off the mark. “It does when my dad gets hold of it,” he
said dryly.
    Ellie stopped giggling at the
admission. His words reminded her of Neveah. Neveah had a way of
turning Ellie’s name into a curse as well. Maybe they were not as
different as Ellie had assumed.
    “I reckon I know what that’s like,”
she admitted.
    They stared at each other for a
minute. Ellie was uncomfortable. She could not help but wonder what
mischief he was dreaming up as he looked at her. He had to be
planning something. Why else would he bother to stop and chat with
her? The fact that she had seen very little of the outside world
did not mean she was stupid enough to trust someone she was
supposed to hate. Her books had taught her enough of life to be
weary of a sudden change in character that came out of nowhere. A
Cooper purposefully searching out a conversation with a Bumbalow
was definitely out of character. She was not sure when the last
time the Coopers and the Bumbalows had words that were not some
kind of threat or curse.
    “What do really want?” Ellie asked
finally. “Why’d you stop?”
    Thane shrugged casually. It was as if
he was admitting to his hair being brown instead of planning to one
day use their conversation against her.
    “I figure you’ll be the only Bumbalow
I’ll ever get the chance to talk to. It’s best to know the enemy,
so I can fight you better in the future.”
    “Seems that’s a sad way of looking at
things,” Ellie said.
    Thane shrugged again and looked around
at the darkness pressing in on them. Ellie also looked around at
the night. It moved against her and made the monsters of her
nightmares crawl to the surface of her mind. What kind of evil was
hiding in the dark? Were more Coopers waiting around the trees to
attack her and take back their kin? Was it possible the monsters
she had read about in her books were real?
    She had trouble sorting fact from
fiction in the dark. There were just so many things she did not
know about in the world. She knew her books were not real, but some
of them had mentioned magic. Though they distorted craft from what
she knew it to be, it was enough to know that some things in her
stories were based in reality. It was enough to fear the monsters
in the dark. The dark scared her more than she was willing to admit
to a Cooper.
    She wanted company, no matter the
source. She was also