Promise Me, Little Bird

They broke for camp late, too late, and waking up alive and alone was the greatest surprise that it could have been. Lark crawled free of the tarp first, to start the fire and set the coffee. Aramina stayed under to wrap their mats and stuff their bags. A lovely form of monotony, packing up camp. The meat of it never dared to change.

Aramina tossed their bags, then followed them outside. Pine-scent brushed her nose, thick in this ring of evergreens. The ground was soft with their needles. Luck had been with them last night, and the spot they had chosen was sheltered enough to turn the morning light kind.

“Good morning,” she said.

Lark grunted, her lips on the rim of her mug. Steam curled beneath her nose. The fire she’d made was a pittance, a conjuring born of dew-wet twigs and a little bit of magic. There would be no coals to leave behind. Aramina pulled the coffee and poured her own cup, watching the flames tickle in gentle wind.

“I’m thinking,” Lark said. “I’m thinking. Could I pull off a robin? Or a jay?”

“Are you looking for a name?”

“Yeah.” She looked up. Her eyes were green, turned bark-brown by the light.

“Why those?”

“Common little birds, aren’t they?” Lark smiled. It was nothing but gesture. “Everybody knows.”

Nobody knows, was the correct answer, but Aramina found the words sap-like in the throat. You look like a lark, she wanted to say.

She pulled on the coffee. The heat had already gone from her cup, and the drink was wet and warm against her lips.

“Too common, I think,” she said. “You might as well name yourself Parrot, for all the good it’ll do.”

A faint tension smoothed from Lark’s face. Another smile curled her mouth. It stung of forgiveness.

“I’ll have you know, parrots are horrible little birds. Absolute monsters. They’re cocky, and mean, and smart enough to use it. I was on a team with a parrot once, and I hated every second of it.”

“Oh?” Aramina set down her coffee and cast around for their kitchen kit.

“She was a nightmare. She would crawl out in the early morning, before anyone else was up, and patrol outside my room. Then, when I opened the door, she would rush me like a fucking boar, just come screeching at me with her stubby little wings all puffed up.” Lark folded her elbows in, stuck up her hands, and waddled in place like the rocking doll she had gifted to Aramina two towns back. “It was horrible. She was horrible. I am never associating with a parrot again. Are you making eggs?”

Aramina set the pan, sparked the flames, and cracked four eggs. “I am making eggs,” she said.

“Are you going to add the green bits again?”

“I was planning to, yes.”

“Amazing.” Lark tipped her chin back and closed her eyes. “We’re living like kings.”

Kings among runaways, maybe, with their one bag apiece and nowhere to go but forward. There was a week left in their cross-wood journey — a week left in their friendship of several wonderful months — and the more Aramina discovered her needs, the less she knew what to do about her scattered wants. Never before had she wanted to keep walking forever. Never before had she needed to know what it mattered that they kept going, or that they stopped and stayed.

“What happened to the parrot?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe she got eaten by something. Plenty of nicer critters could use that meal.”

Aramina shredded the last of their green onion over the eggs, then flipped them, chanted the pan into an unsteady levitation, and split their share. Lark frowned at her magic.

“You’re getting weaker.”

“I’m getting less . . . immaterial. That’s not the same thing as weaker.”

“Your levitation is pathetic.”

“Thanks.”

“But the eggs are delicious, thank you. What happens when you’re completely here?”

Sometimes, when they had talks like these, when they were being honest for the sake of honesty and not to bargain for a cheaper price, Aramina felt their journey stretch outward into the Never End, everlasting on its own, without work or help. It would just be this, the two of them sat round their meager flame, splitting eggs and watered coffee until they bit the ground and returned to whence they came.

Well, Lark would return. Neither of them had any inkling as to where Aramina was meant to go.

“I don’t know. I imagine I’ll stop falling through things. Why not just stay a Lark this time? We’re not doubling back, and you said you’ve never been this far north before. Who would know you from any other bird?”

Lark wagged her fork. “Clever, you are.”

“I’m a master negotiator.”

“You’re a half-decent cook, and I love you for it.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

This time, when Lark smiled, her tree-green eyes crinkled with the curve of her mouth and the dimpling of her cheeks. It made her young. It made her wonderful, despite the fact that it made her young.

“You look like a Lark,” Aramina said. “You should keep it.”

“Okay,” Lark said, then looked surprised at having said it. “Okay, I will. But when it all goes belly up—”

“When it all goes belly up, you’re blaming me. I know. I’ve already prepared my pittance plea.”

“Is it a good plea?”

“It got me out of Kant’s house, so I think so,” Aramina said, and they grinned at each other like fools. It was a good time to be foolish. They had sunlight coming through the trees and a quiet wind to counter it, good food for eating, enough skill between them to get by. They could do this forever, really. They could be fools until the end of days.

“We could just keep going,” Lark said. “If I’m larking on and you’re turning squishy, we could just stick it out together. I can teach you how to fall properly.”

“I’ve seen you fall. Potato sacks are better at falling than you are.”

“You’re just saying that ‘cause you’re jealous of my skills. I’m very graceful, you know. Bird-like, even.”

“Bird-like, hm?”

Lark lifted her chin proudly and spread her arms. Her smile was two good laughs away from a cackle. Her shoulders bunched and her elbows carved the air like wings.

Aramina grinned to match her, then said, “Bird-like, like that twitter that flew into the windows last week? Or like that little red one, the one that tripped over its own legs and fell—”

“Some birds are more graceful than others. That’s not the point. The point is—” Lark paused, like the offer she wanted to make was too big to say all at once, like it required effort— “I think we should stick it out, see what happens.”

“Okay.”

They looked at each other properly, as though to double-check, and Aramina read her own uncertainty in Lark’s lovely green gaze.

“Okay?” Lark said.

“Okay,” Aramina said, and smiled. It would be good, to keep going until the sunset deemed it time they end, to know the body next to hers would hold her hand in the dark until the going got a little easier. It would be good to lark on until the Never End. And maybe, when it was time to go home, they could go together, to an in-between where they’d never been before.