Rori dozed in his saddle as the Cunāe wagon train followed the almost imperceptible remains of a trail across the rolling countryside. He wasn’t necessarily that tired. It was more that there wasn’t anything else to do. He’d gotten all of the information he could think of from Trill and Baxter and there wasn’t anyone in the clan who seemed to care to talk to him. Also, this would allow him to be well rested later when he planned to do some training. But then as the sound of a horse galloping towards the group reached his ears, he begrudgingly roused himself and opened one eye.

  One of the advance scouts was returning at a fairly quick pace. It was possible there might be trouble. Rori opened his other eye and nudged his horse to get it to move closer to the front of the wagon train.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he neared the group at the front.

  “We’ve got problems in the road ahead,” said the scout.

  Rori shook the rest of his drowsiness away in an instant.

  “What sort of problems? Bandits?”

  The scout looked confused for a moment and then said, “What? No, there are some cows blocking the path. We were just trying to decide if we should try to go around or if we should try to move them out of the way.”

  “Cows?” said Rori in disbelief.

  “Yes. They likely belong to that farm over there,” said another man pointing to the house not that far away in the distance.

  “Oh,” said Rori his drowsiness returning quite quickly. “Do whatever you think best then.”

  The tree stump was too wide.

  This was the conclusion Rori had come to.

  A thinner trunk would have provided more challenge, but this one was so wide there was no real challenge at all.

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  His arm was beginning to ache. He decided to count slowly to one hundred and then he would switch to his other hand. Though, truth be told, why he thought standing on one hand on a tree trunk was somehow training worth doing was lost on him.

  He quit counting, flipped onto his feet and sat on the stump instead.

  Jaelle half lead, half dragged a man over to the back of a nearby wagon. She pointed at the ground and said, “Stand there and don’t move!” and then disappeared into the wagon.

  Rori could see that the man’s face was bleeding quite profusely from either one large or several small wounds to his cheek. It also looked like he had a similar wound on his arm and the beginnings of a black eye.

  After Jaelle reappeared with her first aid kit, she marched over towards Rori with the man, head hanging low, behind her.

  “Sorry Rori, I need that stump,” Jaelle said.

  Rori stood and the man sat.

  “You are going to have to do something immediately,” Jaelle said to Rori as she opened her kit and began searching through it.

  “What happened to him? Did you get attacked by a wild animal?” Rori asked.

  “I should say so,” said the man with a smug attitude.

  “Shut up,” Jaelle snapped. “If it wasn’t my job to do otherwise, I’d leave your face in tatters. It’s what you deserve.”

  “I bet he’d understand,” said the man as he pointed at Rori.

  “Understand what?”

  “This is Renton,” said Jaelle in a way that made it sound like Rori should already know what she was talking about. But he had no idea at all.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You don’t remember what we talked about at all, do you?” said Jaelle, at least part of her anger and frustration now turning onto Rori.

  “Um . . . remind me?”

  “Renton and Marcia? They are currently together, but they fight like wolverines every day and make up every night. Often it is just bickering and words, but some days it goes further, and we get outcomes like this.”

  “Is Marcia okay?” asked Rori.

  “This idiot slapped her, but otherwise no physical damage that I could see. I don’t claim to understand their relationship, but their constant fighting is having an effect on everyone else.”

  “Marcia is an adult, correct? Who am I to say that they can’t be together?”

  “A leader of this clan? Or at least that’s what I thought.”

  “But aren’t you one too?” asked Rori.

  Jaelle glared at Rori as she finished putting a salve on Renton’s face. Now that it was cleaned up, Rori could clearly see the four parallel lines where Marcia’s fingernails had torn furrows into his cheek.

  Jaelle stuffed everything back into her kit and closed the lid with a slam. She stomped back over to the wagon and disappeared inside. Rori stared after her for a moment, shrugged and then he turned to Renton and said, “You’re on my stump.”