Feather in the Wind is completed. Well, this draft anyway. I need to rethink it. To give the character depth and the worlds he visits more feeling. I need to bring in more of his upbringing and more of his skills.
I need to make him more interesting.
But... the first draft is done, and I'm happy enough to let it sit where it is for now.
The snippet:
On the sixth day he found them in camp.
He came up after dark. He'd started seeing signs of them as the sun set -- gutted animals that had been killed for food, a place where they had cut away several branches of berries. The cuts still bled with a light green sap that had drawn more creatures.
It went dark. He thought about stopping, but coming this close --
If they hadn’t made a fire and put lights about the camp he would have missed it. They were quiet -- most of them asleep, but one sitting in the boat by the swamp's edge.
"What the hell --" the woman said, startling everyone in the camp.
"Hey," Feather said. It was, he thought, the first word he'd spoken in days.
"God!" The others were getting to their feet. He counted five in all, so they had lost two others somewhere -- probably in the fall of the building.
He had found them. He poled up to the island and slipped off his little craft, drawing it up after him out of habit, though he'd be going with them in the boat after this.
People stood before him. The guard had left the boat and come to him, shaking her head.
"Who the hell are you?" she asked.
"Feather Wind," he said. "I'm a scout for the IWC. I was supposed to come in and find you, but the bastard captain and his pilot didn't like me, and dumped me out in the swamp without any of my supplies."
"And you still found us," one of the men said. "Damn. Out here. In the middle of all this? How in God's name did you do that?"
"Tenacious."
"Can you get us back to the settlement?" the first woman asked.
"That's the easy part... well, relatively easy," he amended.
"Welcome, Feather Wind. Would you like some tea?"
"Oh, that would be wonderful."
He had a cup of warm tea, accepted a blanket, and fell into a long, well needed sleep while someone else kept the watch....
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