It was a long, restless night for me.  Every time Bushwack breathed a strong gust of warm air hit me, adding to the discomfort I already felt from the night’s heat.  Even though it was constant and regular, it was impossible to adjust to.  Worse, though, was feeling like I was a prisoner, my gigantic captor mere inches away.  Jumping off the side would have been extremely painful on its own, and the prospect was made worse by the certainty of me landing on Kirinhalut.  I did not know what she did while everyone else slept, but I was sure a night with her would be worse than where I was.

Golden sunlight appearing over the trees meant this particular episode of my torment was about to end, and I turned over to watch Bushwack, waiting for her to wake up.  A few minutes after the light hit her face her eyes fluttered open, and she groggily looked toward me.  “Have you been staring at me all night?” she asked, already sounding exasperated.  “Weird.  You better not have touched me.”  She rolled onto one arm so her head was directly over me and stared down for a moment.  Her harsh gaze made me uncomfortable, and I squirmed while her dark eyes probed me.

“I’d leave you here,” she finally declared, “but Kiri has enough to deal with without the normal-sized humans bugging her about where you are.”  She grabbed me with a huge hand, pressing me against the mattress so she could slowly wrap her fingers around me.  Her grip was tight like she was trying to strangle someone, and she nearly dislocated my shoulder with a fingertip when she picked me up.  As before, her hand constricted my body from the shoulders down, leaving just my head poking over her fingers.

Bushwack crawled from beneath the covers and stood on her bed, making my vision a confused jumble of blurred shapes and color for a few moments.  When she stopped, her hand rested in front of her stomach, making me crane my neck back at her torso towering over me.  A jolt ran through my body when she pushed off, snapping my down head fast enough that I bashed my chin on her finger.  She gripped me tighter as she beat her wings, and it felt like she might crush me by accident.  Fortunately, her fingers settled for merely making a very tight seal around me, and I was glad I did not need to breathe.

We flew over the camp toward the fire, which still had a few weak flames licking at some mostly spent logs.  From inside Bushwacks iron grip I spied Llelwyl crouched beside the bit, tossing a few small bits of wood in for fuel.  Bushwack changed course to fly right toward her, making my insides lurch with the sudden change of direction.  The pixie took her usual spot on Llelwyl’s right shoulder and steadied herself, then presented me to the elf like a sort of prize.

“Look what I got!” she proclaimed proudly.  The sudden shock of being thrust forward dazed me, but her voice forced its way through the fog.

Llelwyl turned to face her tiny friend, nearly bumping her off with her chin, then squinted at me poking out of her hand.  Bushwack was gigantic, but seeing Llelwyl this close reminded me that it was all relative.  Her pointed chin was large enough I could lie down on it, and I had to look up to see her narrow lips capable of completely engulfing me.  If she wanted to, she could shove me up either nostril of her long, rounded nose, and her smooth gray eyes, half as tall as I was, seemed to mock me on their own as they peered down at me.  The morning sun made her angular cheekbones cast long shadows, making them seem like outcrops I could use to hide from someone like her.

“Why do you think I want to see that?” Llelwyl responded.  The sudden blast of power from her voice blew my hair back and made my bones rattle.  “I’m busy getting the fire going again, and once I’m done I need to look into those documents we seized last night.  How did you even get that?  I thought Kiri had it for the night.”

“She gave it to me for safe keeping when she went to bed,” Bushwack answered.  It was difficult to get upset over her blatant misrepresentation of what happened when they were repeatedly referring to me as an object.  “Something about not wanting to roll over and break it.”

“Well, I’m busy, so get it away from me,” Llelwyl replied.  “Don’t you have something else you could be doing?  Your little daggers aren’t going to coat themselves in poison.”

Bushwack looked to me and stroked her chin while she considered something.  “Nah, you’d probably mess it up,” she said, just loud enough for me to hear.  Then she addressed Llelwyl again and asked, “What should I do with this, then?”

“What do I care?”  Llelwyl tossed another bit of wood onto the fire.  “Just put him somewhere out of the way.”  She jabbed one of the logs with a long stick, making sparks erupt as the lumber shifted.

Bushwack stepped off Llelwyl’s shoulder, and my stomach jumped to my throat from the sudden drop.  Her wings kicked in around the elf’s waist level and we started gliding, skimming just over the ground.  Rocks and pebbles whizzed by below us as she raced on a collision course toward a stump.  She suddenly stood in mid-flight, stalling her movement, and gently descended until her feet touched the ground.

I was still around her waist, and she simply opened her fingers and let me fall.  Reflexively I tried to grab something to stop myself, but her tree trunk-sized legs were just out of reach.  With a thud I landed on my face, bruised but with nothing obvious broken.  Without even checking to see if I was okay, Bushwack launched herself into the air and flew back toward the wagon.

Alone again, I considered what I could do.  Llelwyl was only a few feet away grabbing larger items to shove into the fire: I could be there in just a few minutes.  Seeing me would just remind her that I existed, though, and there was a decent chance she would just toss me into the fire to avoid dealing with me.  I squeezed myself between the stump’s bark, making myself as unobtrusive as possible while I watched the elf from a distance.

Ten minutes passed, and it was still just me and Llelwyl around the fire.  It had grown significantly, large enough to at least cook breakfast at this point, and she had moved on to the documents behind her.  She read through them carefully, her lips moving silently while her eyes scrolled over the words on parchment.  It was like she had no idea I was there, and I did nothing to remind her otherwise.

A tremendous boot slammed down in front of me, blocking my view with brown leather, and I grabbed onto the bark to keep from falling over.  While my teeth rattled the boot rotated, building up a wall of dirt as tall as I was before it came to a stop.  The base of the mound bumped into me and small clods of earth rolled from the top, pelting me.  Behind me, the stump rocked back when someone sat on it, then forcefully shoved me forward when it thudded back onto the ground.

I ended up near the boot’s instep, and followed the leg up with my eyes.  A gleaming, curved plate covered her shin, leading to a much more complex, hinged knee joint.   Brass straps and leather buckles held the plates in place, and it looked like the trousers strained to contain her quads.  While I was being shoved around her other boot had apparently landed, and I looked up to see a pair of light blue eyes set inside a tanned face.

Margret stared into the fire, idly picking at her cuticles while the flames danced on her corneas.  I began jumping up and down, waving my arms as widely as I could and shouting up at her.

It took a few seconds for her to notice, but when Margret looked down she noticed me immediately.  Initially her head recoiled back, but once she realized what was going on she gave me a wide, toothy smile.  “Hey, little guy!” she exclaimed, too sudden for me to shield my ears.  “You look lonely down there.  Want to come sit in my lap?”

Before I could answer she leaned forward and placed a hand against the ground, palm up.  She motioned with her eyes for me to step on, and I climbed over the pad of one fingertip onto the digit.  Her finger curled inward, sending me sliding down its length and onto her palm, where I rolled into the depression of her cupped hand and came to a stop.  Slowly, as though she knew going too fast would make me uncomfortable, she picked me up from the ground, using her other hand as a shield between me and the rest of the campsite.  It took half a minute for me to reach her lap, and even after she stopped she left her hand in place.

“I’ve been meaning to come find you!” she said.  Her voice was quieter, but it still felt like someone was pounding on my ears.  “It feels like Sondra and Kiri have been hogging you, and I’ve been wondering when I was going to get a chance to talk to you!”

“It looks like this is your chance,” I replied, hoping she would get the humor.

“You’re pretty hard to hear down there,” Margret declared.  “I guess having you in my lap is nothing compared to having you in the palm of my hand, anyway.”  She began lifting me again, as slowly as she had earlier, until I was in front of her nose.  Her smile had not dimmed in the slightest, and she reached in to tap me with a fingertip.  I stumbled forward, and her grin got a little wider.

“I’ll be honest, Sondra and I talked while you were away last night,” she began.  “It sounds like you’re quite the adventurer!  While I feel deeply sorry for the loss of your friends, and I know nothing we can do can make up for them, I think we’re lucky to have found you in between parties like we did.”

“You mean I was quite the adventurer,” I corrected her.  “I’m not doing much adventuring these days.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense,” Margret responded.  “You’ve been letting other people get in your head.  I’m sure we could find a role for you, even if it is just as our mascot or something.  You just need to be given a chance to find out what you can do and show it off!  I know I wasn’t an expert with a mace the first time I picked one up.  You just have a more unique challenge to overcome.”

“While I’m glad for the vote of confidence, I’m not sure how I feel about being your mascot,” I told her.  “Outside of that and acting as your delivery guy, I’m not sure how much I can really contribute.”

Margret’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.  “She would never tell you this,” she started, “but when we first picked her up, Bush was a warrior too.  Maybe it worked when it was just her and Lell, but she sucked at it!  We made her learn how to do other stuff, and it took a while, but now she’s the best sneak thief I’ve ever seen.  If you stick around, I’m sure we can find something you can do that doesn’t infringe on anyone else.”

“Aren’t you sure that Kiri will take me with her when she goes?”

“I can’t put my finger on why, but I don’t trust her.”  I knew exactly what she meant, but without anything we could do about it there was no point in telling her.  “When that time comes, I’ll see if we can keep you with us.  I know Sondra will, too.  It just doesn’t seem right to leave you with her just because we found the two of you at the same time.  For all we know, she spent all your time together torturing you.”

She was exactly right, but I felt a buzzing in my head when I tried to tell her.  I had to completely avoid the topic of Kirinhalut if I wanted to keep the conversation moving.  “You don’t think that’d cause a fight?” I asked.

“If it does, it’s a fight worth having.”  While I appreciated her conviction, I was not sure how much of it came from personal belief and how much was the succubus’s influence.  “If they’re okay handing you over to someone who might hurt you, I wouldn’t want to adventure with them anymore.”  Margret’s readiness to fight her friends told me more than she could have thought about her motivations.

We de-escalated the conversation from talking about potentially murdering people to more mundane topics, like how I would join them in the tavern when this was all over.  After a while Sondra joined us, and while she took part in the conversation she let me remain standing in Margret’s palm.  Being the center of attention for these two beautiful, gigantic women was a little overwhelming, and I did my best to remain a party to the conversation.

Llelwyl suddenly stood and made a scene as she flapped her documents around, folding them for travel.  “Okay everyone, pack it up, let’s move!” she declared, walking back to the wagon.  “Get your hard tack for breakfast, because we don’t have time for anything else!  I know where the orb is, and we’ve got less than a day to get it, so let’s go, go, go!”  Sondra rushed off to break down her tent, and Margret carefully stood, making sure to not jostle me too much.  Wherever they were rushing off to, it sounded like their quest was one step closer to an end.