A bedraggled, lank-haired Birdie climbed painfully down the stairs to the belowdecks. Poking her head in the cabin where Idril was tending to Mithadan, she saw that the mighty, but unfathomable warrior was asleep. Rose had laid her head on the bed and was also lost in dreams beside her. (Birdie could tell Rose was dreaming because her toes were twitching.)
Birdie felt exhausted too; also very clumsy, now that she was back on a solid deck again. She looked down at her scrawny, underfed body and thought, "I had better stay away from the sea for a good, long time. Else I might be tempted to trade this old form for a better." It happened to skin-changers, sometimes. They found a form that they liked so well that they forsook their human shape, and disappeared into the animal kingdom. What happened to them after that, no one knew.
Birdie wasn't ready for that. Not yet. But if that time did come, she knew where she would go.
Child had taken a peace offering to the put-out Primrose, too eager to grow up and have "adventures" on her own. She had never seen the times when an adventure could fail, and the warriors did not return. Birdie hoped that she would be spared that knowledge for a long, long time.
And what of Pio? Now that all danger was past, would her companions ever find out why she and the Great Idril had seemed so estranged.
"Probably not," thought Birdie. Then she went to find a quiet place where she might sleep, too.
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