“Maybe you can take a nap?” I suggested. Serlotminden needed more sleep to heal.
He tightened his arms around me. “I want to spend time with you.”
“Okay.” Whatever worked. It was his choice.
“Do you have any other games?”
We could playI Spy, but there wasn’t really much around us, and I had zero interest in teaching him20 Questions. If he learned that, I would never get him to stop, and I didn’t feel like answering tons of questions right now.
“No,” I replied. “Do you?”
“Most Drakcon games are more physical than I can do at the moment.”
I frowned. “‘Drakcon?’ I thought you were a drakcol.”
“I am. Drakcon is…” He paused. “I am unsure of how to explain it in English. We use it as something belonging to our culture. Drakcon technology, Drakcon books, Drakcon games. Things like that.”
“Ah.”
Serlotminden asked, “So no games?”
“No,” I replied. “You could tell me a story.”
“Or you can tell me one.”
I frowned, but in his defense, Mindy wasn’t fluent in English and he was hurt; I was supposed to be entertaining him, not the other way around.
“When I was a kid, my mom Charity started calling me ‘Ferdinand.’”
“Why? What does it mean?”
“I have no idea what the name means, but there’s a book called TheStory of Ferdinandthat she used to read to me, and she said I was like that bull.”
“What’s a bull?”
“A big, horned animal. Fuzzy. Fierce. Some people make them fight, which I don’t agree with.” Fuck, I wasn’t describing this well, especially without getting into animal rights issues.
“Why?”
“It’s complicated. Anyway, in the story, there's a bull who doesn't play or fight with the others, but sits and smells the flowers.”
“You like flowers? My brother Zoltilvoxfyn likes flowers. Sometimes we call him ‘Bloom.’”
“Interesting, and yes, I like flowers, but that’s not the point. The point was he was calm and liked to enjoy the slowness of life. That was me, even as a child. I was calm and liked to watch everything around me, so she called me Ferdinand. My other mom, Isabella, thought it was adorable. They called me that for a long time, as well as calling me Teddy.”
Mindy lifted my chin. “Are you like that even now? Calm and enjoying life?”
“I’m calm. It’s who I am. But I haven’t enjoyed life in a while.” What was there to enjoy? I’d tried to do things for Vince’s sake. He’d needed hope; I hadn’t. I, for the most part, had been fine with dying. Hell, it was probably what I deserved. My stomach churned as the scent of burning flesh and frantic screams haunted me.
“I will change that, Bartholomew. I will make sure you are happy and that you can sit and smell the flowers. I promise. You will be calm and happy one day. I will make sure of it.”
I swallowed at the emotions creeping up my spine and settling behind my eyes. I didn’t know if I believed him, but part of me wanted to. I wanted to believe that whatever he promisedwas better than what I’d left behind, that I was truly safe, and that the past wasn’t unbreakable chains dragging me down. But doubts lingered. I feared Serlotminden would get tired of me, or that he would learn about what I’d done and hate me for it, or that he’d forget all about me and this odd friendship we’d made when we were rescued. If that happened, I would never save Vince and I would never be safe again.
What I wouldn’t give to feel safe enough to simply watch the life around me and smell the flowers.
Bartholomew had fallen asleep against my side in the middle of another story about when his family had gone to the woods again. I already knew from his first story that he had two younger sisters and two mothers.
In this one, I’d learned how much he loved them. His moms were deeply in love, and his younger sisters drove him mad, though he was fiercely protective of them. He’d also mentioned that he didn’t live near them. Why? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was for negative reasons. He spoke too fondly of them for it to be bad. Though, even before he’d been abducted, he hadn’t seen them in cycles.
