Free Boelik by Amy Lehigh Page A

was the only one left
who even knew I existed then.”
    “ After that?”
    “ He died,” Ryan said with a
shrug. “I took the chance to run away then, and I ended up on the
step of a blind old woman.”
    “ What did she
do?”
    Ryan’s mouth twitched into a smile. “She
thought I was the stray dog she’d been feeding at first, I think.
She was out in her chair by the door and went to pet my head. It
was pretty quick after I began eating the dog food that was put out
she actually got to petting me, and she said, ‘Oh, you’re a boy?’
And when I didn’t answer she said, ‘Come now, talk to me.’”
    “ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ My
da never took less than sir, and he pounded that and ma’am into my
head. She and I talked for a while, though I couldn’t really talk
all that well. She managed to make me admit that I was alone. Then
she let me live with her.”
    “ Let you live with
her?”
    Ryan nodded, staring into the crackling fire.
The orange light brightened his face, glinting in his black eye.
“Yeah. And whenever her daughter came by I always hid and stayed
quiet while she brought in supplies and talked with her ma. She
taught me how to talk properly, too: my da only ever taught me the
simple things.”
    “ What was the woman’s
name?”
    “ Nora.”
    “ She didn’t find it strange
that you hid?”
    “ O’ course she did. I ended
up telling her that I was afraid of strangers.”
    “ She didn’t notice the
lie?”
    “ Well, it wasn’t a lie, but
she did know something was off. Actually, that’s probably why she
let me be.”
    “ I see,” Boelik said,
taking another bite of deer. “Why aren’t you still living with
her?”
    Ryan’s eating slowed visibly at the question,
and it took him a minute before he swallowed. “She, uh… she died,
too.”
    “ Long ago?”
    “ The middle of
spring.”
    Boelik nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “ What about you?” Ryan
asked, turning his gaze from the fire and shaking off his
melancholy mood. “Where did you live before?”
    “ Well, I lived in England
until recently.”
    “ Before that?”
    “ I think it was…Germany,
maybe?”
    “ And before that? ” Ryan continued to stare at Boelik expectantly,
and he sighed.
    “ I should start at the
beginning, I think. That’s where all of the important things are.”
He took a deep breath and sighed again, looking despondently at his
meat. Alas, story time would have to interrupt eating
time.
    “ Well, to start, I was born
in a land called Nippon—Japan to you—to a demon fox and a Russian
man. My father died after giving me this,” he said, raising the fox
clasp on his cloak more to the light, the gold reflecting onto the
walls.
    “ My mother had him make
this cloak with some of her fur and had him dye it, so I’d always
have something to carry around and hide under.” And always it has been, he thought, glancing at the
old thing, covered in blood and dirt. It was a good thing his
mother’s fur was difficult to destroy.
    “ Later, I was careless and
went into a nearby village to play with another child. Needless to
say, other villagers found me an abomination and chased me back to
my mother. She had to wipe out the entire village.”
    Ryan glanced down at himself.
    “ I left a few years after
that and sailed overseas to…I don’t even know where. But I found a
little village there and grew accustomed to living in the forest
nearby. I even grew to be happy there, eventually.” Boelik turned
his own gaze to the fire, memories flooding his vision. He closed
his eyes and tried to drown them out so he didn’t fall into a place
he didn’t want to be as he remembered the next part of the
tale.
    “ But that did not last as
long as I had hoped. And after that, I started living as a sort of
nomad. Which is what brought me here.” He opened his eyes to look
at Ryan once more.
    “ A nomad?” Ryan asked,
lifting his gaze.
    “ Someone who travels a lot,
to put it simply. They