Book One – Chapter 19

And now, Yu was about to serve one of those beasts, one of the same kind that outright wanted to kill his shirka. He would have to, eventually. And he understood the order of things. He knew from first-wing experience that the new travellers must be drop-dead starving and, respectively, should be cared for first. But there was no world in which Yu would serve a borman before anyone else. So, after serving Bawal and Jerakill, he turned the eighth bowl into the second helping for Nion.

During all this time, he borman said and did nothing. He just sat, either staring at Yu or straight towards the kitchen entry. Eventually, Yu realised that he was not watching the door but the space behind, where his human had disappeared.

Meanwhile, there was no sight nor sound of the krynn. He was still with the selder and the shaman, presumably. Yu believed that the krynn wanted to keep watch over his companion. He thought that he was wary of the shaman and her tools, and that he was probably set on waiting until she was done. Those thoughts came from the screaming part, with the terror reasonably filtered through the mask until it was processed into sensible whispers. The wanting part whispered something else entirely, something without words —

Yu stopped it, pushed it back and then pressed it down. And then he spoke over it to tell himself that the krynn would come out of the sick bay in his own time.

But he did not. Not while Yu finished serving Harrow’s group, not when he did his first, second, or third sweep of the kitchen spills and neither during that follow-up attempt to scrub the floor. Not even when he finally brought a bowl for the borman.

    
So then Yu brought a second bowl.

    
Which he also set down on the bormans’s table.

    
“This is for the krynn,” he explained, more to the room in general than to the borman, because by the time the last word left his mouth, he had already taken his five steps back.

As if the krynn would hear that. As if he would suddenly come out after all this time, after all of Yu’s countless passings back and forth through the walkway. Why did he not come? Did he really not hear what was going on? Did he not smell the stew? Did he not want to eat? Or could he not come, because … because the shaman held him?