Craft (6 page)

As he spoke, Ellie realized he was not
so much a man as he was a boy. He could not have been much older
than she was, perhaps, sixteen or seventeen at the most. His voice
broke a bit over the threat. His voice knew his doubt even if his
mind did not. He was not the seasoned killer he was trying to
portray himself as being.

Ellie clamped her lips together and
looked up at him. While she sensed he was not certain what he would
do, she sensed the capability to do whatever it took to escape. He
had a survivor’s instinct. He would find the ability if it came to
it. Besides, he was a Cooper, and Coopers were born with the
ability to kill; it was in their nature. Certain he had scared
Ellie into silence, he started pacing in front of her. His
uncertainty for the situation found relief in movement.

“Why did you bring me to this prison?
Torture? Leverage?” he demanded. “My family won’t pay to get me
back.”

“I don’t understand,” Ellie said in a
small voice.

“Oh, right, I forgot,” he said.
“Bumbalows don’t understand the big words. You don’t believe in
schools or something. You’ve all got the educational level of
second graders…”

Ellie’s fear was replaced by her
indignation. He had no right to insult her and her family without
knowing her first. She was not going to let someone with no accent
and cold eyes tell her she was not as smart as he was. Her anger
gave her courage.

“I know what those words mean!” Ellie
said. “I don’t understand why you think this is a prison. I'm not
trying to keep you here. Fact, the sooner you leave the
better.”

“You put vines on the outside of the
door to keep me here!” he said, his voice rising in anger. “Only
the greatest crafters we have can shift such plants. Your family is
keeping me here, and I demand to be released!”

“The vines have always been there,
since I was born,” Ellie said. “I didn’t put them there on account
of you.”

He was not buying it. He knew the
Bumbalows had captured him. Her words could not change what he
knew.

“My family will come for me!” he said.
“If you don’t release me now, they will make you pay for
this!”

Ellie knew he was right. Neveah would
have gone after even the most distant relative if the Coopers had
kidnapped them. She would not sit back and let the kidnapping
stand. There would be blood. Ellie could only see one way out of
the situation.

“Why don’t you go to them, instead?”
Ellie asked. “I’ll part the vines for you, if you’ll just go away
and not kill me.”

He thought over her words, which
sounded much too reasonable to him. His eyes told her that he
doubted her truthfulness. He was convinced she was trying to trick
him or lead him into a trap. There was no way a Bumbalow gave up a
captive so easily.

“How do I know you won’t use magic on
me if I set you free?” he asked.

“Because I’m scared of you, and
because I want you to leave, so your family won’t come back looking
for you and hurt my family,” she admitted.

Her fear was palpable. It was too
honest for him to ignore. He went to the sofa and sat down. He did
not seem to know what to do with it. He put his head in his hand,
so he could think over her offer without having to look at her
frightened eyes. He weighed the options, trying to see the lie he
knew she had to be hiding.

Ellie took his moment of thought to
focus on her surroundings. While gesturing was an important part of
her craft – her family could not function without it – she had been
teaching herself how to do her craft without gestures. It was hard
and took a lot of concentration, but she could manage small things;
things like lifting something off the ground and making it travel
short distances. If she could find something to knock him out with,
her problem would be solved. She looked around her room in search
of an obliging object.

Ellie saw plenty of things that could
be used as a weapon. There were sharp things and dangerous things,
but she was not eager to hurt him seriously after spending so much
energy healing him. It was not an option she even liked
considering, however briefly. She just wanted to make sure he did
not kill her for her trouble.

She focused her attention on a book
stacked behind his head, one that would not have to travel too far
to reach its destination. It would not kill him, but it would knock
him out. She narrowed her eyes in concentration and felt the craft
swirl around her eagerly. The book twitched slightly. It was
waiting for a wave of her hand to obey the craft. Ellie focused
harder on the book. It was all about what her imagination could do.
Her only limitation was there. It took a minute before the book
finally started to rise off the stack it was resting on. Inch by
inch, it defied gravity.

The boy remained oblivious to the
danger. He was lost in trying to figure a way out of the shack that
would not risk his life further. His distraction was his
undoing.

Finally satisfied with the book’s
height, Ellie made it fly straight at the back of his head. The
edge of the large book slammed against his head with a solid
‘thump!’. The boy’s eyes crossed, and he toppled to his side. The
book dropped on top of him. He did not make a sound as the heavy
book hit him for a second time.

Ellie craned her neck, to make sure he
was unconscious. He did not move. His body was a stone on her
floor. She started working at the ropes surrounding her. Twisting
her hands as hard as she could against the tough rope, she focused
on moving the rope as she had the book. The rope was harder to
manipulate. It took more effort without the gesture. She had to
maintain her focus, which was difficult as she kept expecting the
boy to jump up and attack her again.

After ten minutes of worry and
struggling with the craft, she was able to stand again. The rope
dropped to the ground as she stood. It was her turn to tower over
the boy. She did not feel nearly as dangerous as he had.

“Are you pretending?” she
asked.

He did not respond. She bent down and
nudged his face tentatively with her finger. He started drooling
onto the floor at the touch. He did not try to grab her or use his
craft on her. He was out cold. No one was that good of an
actor.

Satisfied the book had done its job,
she used the rope he had crafted to bind him from his shoulders to
his feet. Aware that he might know how to craft without gestures as
well, she crafted a blindfold and a gag. She finished tying him up
and backed away to the farthest corner of her shack, just in case.
She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She had managed
something her family had told her she would never be able to do.
She had fought a Cooper and won. She could do the same things the
others in her family had been doing for years. She could fight the
feud. It occurred to her briefly that a more experienced Cooper
might have given her trouble, would have killed her without a
second glance, but she did not let that ruin her feelings. She
savored the moment.

Her moment did not last. As she looked
at him, she realized she did not have a clue what to do next. His
attack on her proved that he did not want to be in her shack,
almost as much as she did not want him there. She should have known
he would not take kindly to being in Bumbalow territory. She would
feel the same way if she had awoke in Cooper territory with no
memory of how she had gotten there.

Another question made her doubt her
next move. If she did get him back to his kin, would he come back
and try to retaliate for tying him up? How would she get him to his
kin without knowing where they were or even what direction town was
in? Was it dangerous to let him go and make him find his own way?
What was the alternative? The questions and the uncertainty danced
around in her mind. She was not sure what to do.

Before she could decide, Ellie felt
strong craft in the air. It was the familiar craft of her family.
Convinced the boy had no way of escaping, and that he was still
safely unconscious, she decided to see where the craft was coming
from. She had to know if the Coopers had come back for their
kin.

Ellie waved her hand and felt the
vines around her shack part. She stepped outside and immediately
had an answer to her question. Eugenia was to the left of Ellie’s
shack and her eyes were on the woods. Her concentration was intense
as she held her hand out in front of her. The craft swirled
familiarly around the woman. Eugenia smiled briefly when she saw
Ellie, though she did not say anything in greeting.

“What’s going on?” Ellie
asked.

“I’m crafting some wards around the
house,” Eugenia said. “Make sure the Coopers don’t sneak up on us
again.”

“What kind of wards?” Ellie
asked.

“No one but a Bumbalow can get through
these. Or those we allow. It boils a person from the inside out.
You gotta say, ‘I allow this person,’ and then bend the ward to
your crafting. Not that you’ll be needing such a thing,” Eugenia
said with a small laugh.

Ellie blinked in surprise at Eugenia’s
laugh. She had just been thinking she was glad for Eugenia’s
warning. Without it, she would have never gotten the boy off her
property safely. All her hard work in healing him would have ended
with him boiling like a lobster.

“No…” Ellie said. “Not me.”

“Run along now, girly” Eugenia said.
“I gotta get this ward up before we move to your cousins’ houses
down the way.”

Awkward and certain Eugenia would see
through her lie, Ellie turned back to the shack. She forced her
body through the tiniest of cracks in the door, to keep Eugenia
from seeing the boy, and closed the door again. She set her back
against the door and felt Eugenia continue her craft further down
the property line. Ellie had never known them to go so far as to
put such strong craft around all of her kin’s property. Most of her
family felt safe in their homes. They trusted their crafting
abilities to keep them safe from the Coopers. Wards around all
their houses felt like overkill. It was proof the attack had
rattled the family more than they were willing to admit to Ellie.
Their fear made Ellie more determined to get rid of the boy before
his family tried to attack again.

“So, all I gotta do is give you
permission,” Ellie told the unconscious boy. “Don’t sound so
hard…Except, you know, us being mortal enemies and all.”

Ellie shook her head and realized
talking to him made as much sense as talking to a wall. He could
not hear her and would not have taken kindly to her words if he
could. She sat down in the chair she had crafted and stared at the
boy. As she did, she remembered the way he had talked when he had
threatened her. He had not had an accent typical of her
kin.

She knew the Coopers were different
from her family; it was fact that they were different. Even with
that knowledge, she had never been able to imagine such a strange
way of talking. His language was precise, the way she imagined the
characters in her books speaking. It was a way of talking her
family would have mocked her for if she had been foolish enough to
speak that way in front of them.

It was obvious, despite his evil
status as a Cooper, that he knew things she did not. He had not
spent his whole life living two miles from home. She imagined he
had traveled the world, seen wondrous things, met crafters with
ability beyond any she had ever met. The wonders held in his mind
went beyond Ellie’s ability to imagine them. Someone who spoke like
him had to be used to seeing whatever he wanted to see. Ellie knew
he had even seen town. It was common knowledge the Coopers lived
there. She was suddenly jealous of him.

Ellie had dreamed of going to town
since she was little enough to be aware that a town was nearby. She
wanted to see the place her father had died. She wanted to
understand the differences between her world and the Coopers’
world. Most of her family had been to town at least once, usually
to attack the Coopers. Her sisters had told her it was dangerous
and scary, but that only increased its allure. She wanted to know
what it looked like, how the place carried on with its day-to-day
business, and what craft the people had used to build the town up.
She wanted to place a visual to the splendors her imagination had
formed. Above all, she wanted to experience the types of adventures
the people in her books experienced.

Going to town would be a small
adventure, but an adventure all the same. It would not be as
dangerous as the adventures in her books. She would not be saving
the world or rescuing anybody. She would just be seeing something
she had never seen before. She would not have to mention she was a
Bumbalow. There had to be enough visitors and strangers about town
to make that seem likely. The idea of her adventure seemed simple
enough to Ellie. It was something she had never dreamed was
possible before seeing the boy.

It was not just the fact
that Neveah would kill her if Ellie went to town without permission
that had kept her from trying. It was the fact that Ellie did not
have a clue what to expect. She did not know which way to go in
order to get to town, nor what kinds of dangers were out there once
she got to town.
She was scared. Scared to
try and scared not to try in the same moment.