Today, Lea finds herself particularly entertained by the way the light and shadows dance together on the tree trunks. The sunshine filters through the canopy, whose branches are shaken by the breeze, which causes little swaying silhouettes of the leaves to fall upon the forest floor.
"What are you doing?"
Lea turns around to see her big sister, Renna, standing behind her. "Oh! I'm looking at these shadows."
There's a small silence, during which Lea starts to expect Renna might join her, but instead she just laughs.
"Come on, we have to get some food before the sun sets." She steps away, gesturing for Lea to follow. Her knapsack and quiver clank as she walks with a limp. Lea rises with a huff and follows by Renna's side.
"But I don't like hunting!"
"Yes, well, starving is worse."
The two continue on their way through the forest. Ordinarily, Lea would have to quicken her pace for her little legs to keep up, but her older sister's knee was injured a couple of days ago. They've been traveling slower lately, and many times Lea has asked that they just stay in one spot and let her knee heal, but she always brushes her off. Renna takes out her bow in preparation, keeping watchful for some sort of animal she can hunt.
A couple of times, she's tried to teach Lea to hunt, but to no avail. Being quite young, she has trouble holding the bow properly, and still hasn't gotten used to the sight of blood. Renna assures her that they only spill blood for things that are important, like eating to survive, but Lea still isn't fond of it. She prefers when Renna was her age, and they'd whistle and hum and pick berries together.
"Even if you don't pick up hunting, I'm sure you could find another way to help with food." Renna says, finding and settling into a vantage point.
Lea turns and looks at her curiously.
"Maybe something like fishing," Renna continues.
"...Oh." Lea says nothing, but gives a short nod before turning back and looking for something to occupy herself with.
For most of the time they spend waiting, Lea sits on the ground and plays with sticks, using them to flip over small rocks and look for bugs. Eventually, though, she hears Renna take an arrow out of her quiver and nock her bow. She doesn't look.
That night Renna skins and guts the catch, and Lea only helps once it's already chopped and has stopped looking like an animal. They cook it in a small pot over the fire.
Lea isn't particularly fond of the taste of meat, which is amplified by the fact that they really don't have much to season it with. They talk a little while they eat, though the conversation is brief, and then Renna lays out some blankets for them to sleep on.
Renna nods off quickly. Lea does not.
She stays up a long time feeling a little bad about how she can't help to hunt, because her sister doesn't seem to be eating a lot. They always split what little food they can find, but surely Renna should eat more if she's injured. Lea's been noticing how she gets tired faster as of late. Her sister doesn't hum anymore, or even whistle, and their chats have been shorter. She thinks back a little further and realizes that she can't really remember when Renna started acting like this, if it was even because of her injured knee, and she can't recall when they stopped picking berries either.
She does, however, recall a nice spot where they used to pick berries.
Lea sits up, then looks at Renna to make sure she doesn't start stirring. She keeps looking as she stands, keeps looking as she takes a couple of steps, and only stops looking once she's a good ways away.
The air is cold as she walks through the underbrush. Old leaves crunch quietly under her feet. She can barely see with the faint light of the sky, but she keeps going. Though it feels so long ago now, Lea remembers the first time she and her sister came here quite clearly.
"Here, just past this big tree!" Renna had said, pointing forward with one hand and holding Lea's in the other. "I found a cool place..."
Then she ran forward—most likely at a pace faster than she'd realized, considering her little sister was struggling to keep up—and took a couple of turns. Lea couldn't keep track of the way they were going at the time, but she would soon learn over the course of the next few visits. Soon enough, Renna had slowed to a stop.
They were standing in a part of the forest Lea hadn't seen before, a lush grove of verdant green with sunlight beaming down through the canopy. What caught her eye was the abundance of bramble bushes, each one teeming with ripe red berries. If Lea put her hand up to them, they would reflect the sunlight into soft shades of red on her skin.
"We can cook these and make jam..." Renna said with a glint in her eyes. "Isn't this great?"
Lea nodded happily.
She finds herself at the same big tree now, though it seems ever so slightly less impressive now that she's a bit taller. She follows her memory of the path, taking the same turns and looking for the same landmarks until she finds the entrance to the grove. Once she gets there, she feels the same excitement she did years ago.
It takes on a different feeling in the moonlight—one that is hushed and serene, but of course, it's just as beautiful as it always was. The bramble bushes are still here.
She approaches one and kneels down, reaching out and taking one of the berries in her fingers. Just after she touches the bush, though, she retracts her hand with a little gasp.
"Ah!"
There's a tiny bead of blood on the tip of her finger. She remembers, now, that branches of the bushes are laced with deceptively sharp little thorns.
"...Ouch..."
There's a moment of deliberation. However, it's quite a short moment. She reaches out again and picks the berry, and then another, and another, and another, and she keeps going.
After a while, her pockets can fit no more berries, and her hands are covered in pricks and scratches, but neither of those things stop her. She continues gathering whatever more she can hold in her arms, and only stops once those are full.
Now satisfied, and carrying far more berries than anyone would ever expect a child her age to have the patience to pick, she starts her walk back home. About halfway through, it occurs to her she should've brought an actual basket to hold the berries in, but the sound of the chirping of the early morning birds and the wind rustling the trees help to distract her from the mild annoyance of having to hold her arms up the whole time.
She passes the big tree again, finding her way back to the little camp her and Renna had set up by the time the sun is starting to rise. Once she's there, she drops all the berries in her arms onto the blanket she was laying on before she went out, and they each hit the ground with a quiet little thump.
"Hey, Renna?" she whispers, sitting on her knees by her sister. "Renna."
After a little bit of poking and nudging, Renna wakes up.
"...Huh?" Renna's voice is still groggy. She blinks hard a few times. "What is it?"
"I got berries."
"...What?" Renna just barely lifts herself to look, but surely enough, she does see the berries in Lea's pockets and scattered on the blanket.
"You got..." She does a double take, and then sits up fast enough that Lea almost gets worried that she'll give herself whiplash. "Lea! You went out and got berries all by yourself!?"
"Yeah!" Lea answers, not acknowledging any of the utter concern in her sister's voice. "I wanted to help get you food, because you're injured!"
Renna looks like she's trying to figure out what to say, but is too flabbergasted to come up with anything.
"We still have the jars, right? Can we make jam with them like we used to?"
"Like we used to...?"
There is a long pause, during which the gentle sound of the swaying leaves fills the silence. The wind is whistling through the trees.
"...Okay." Renna chuckles in a sort of confused, astonished way. "Yeah, okay, I'll get the stuff out."