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"Jenny, we need to close the door and secure ourselves. A storm's coming." I heard her voice, but I couldn't see her face. I could feel her breath as I nestled against her warm body.

"I thought it was too early in the season for the bad storms. And why would we need to secure ourselves?" Another voice, this one sweet and higher.

Then the room began to rock. It tumbled and flipped and tossed. I screamed. The one I felt, the one I loved and remembered and missed screamed and tensed every time the floor rolled beneath us and the crashes thundered above. It lasted for hours and hours and hours.

"How long have we been here?" the first woman asked.

"A day or so. Gilan came in a few minutes ago with the food and told us that Hal thinks the storm should pass soon. But we aren't sure where we are. The storm blew us way off course and it may take us awhile to get back to Araluen."

"I'm sure we'll get back, Hal's a great navigator. He'll get us home." But I could hear the doubt in her voice. And I heard her say something else, something that the other woman couldn't hear. "I just hope he gets us all."

I shot awake.

What-what… I never remembered my dreams. They would always slip just out of reach when I woke up. I found it annoying, but now I wished that this one would disappear, too.

The mat I slept on was cold. No light was sliding in from the small window in the hut. Still night.

I laid my head back onto the mat.

And immediately brought it back up.

The place in my dream wasn't anywhere in Mawag territory. I had been in a little room, one that could rock and roll and tilt like nothing I'd ever seen before. How could my brain conjure up something I'd never seen before? Something I couldn't have imagined?

And the woman. She'd held me and hugged me and protected me and spoken gently to me. Like Natalia did sometimes. But more… real. Like she'd been made specifically to be my mother.

I remembered a week when Dason, Natalia, and a few other Mawags went on a "patrol" around the Mawag borders about two and a half years ago. Many children had begged to be taken along, but I was the only one allowed to go, even though I had wanted to stay.

We had traveled to the border of a tribe called Chinoag and camped there for several days. I still didn't understand why we had been there, because we didn't do any patrolling, but I remember one night, right before we went to sleep, a Chinoag boy had taken interest in me and talked to me like I was his. When I had escaped, I told Natalia, but she didn't have any advice. She didn't hold me or tell me what I should do in situations like that. She just smiled sweetly.

Because she wasn't my true mother.

But I had always been told that my parents had abandoned me with the Mawags. Why was the woman from my dream so affectionate if she hadn't been planning to love me?

I thought all this as I crept out of the hut into the crisp night air and starlight.

The shadows of oak trees stretched up to the sky, as if to try to cloak the moon, and the gentle evening breeze rustled the leaves, creating a whispering effect. A heard the ugly sound of a vixen calling for a mate, but it was so far away it just sounded like a howl. Crickets and spring peepers chirped in a natural chorus while the brook that ran around the Mawag camp made gurgles of harmonies.

I sat on a mossy rock right on the edge of the woods, pulled out my throwing knife, and set to carving a small block of wood I'd been working on.

Hours passed with me like that. The stars began to fade, the sky to pale, and the choir of night sounds to dissolve. With the rising morning, a figure began to rise out of my wood. Long nose, large eyes, locks of hair falling down from between two ears. A creature. Called soquili by the Mawags. Horse by Corin and I.

Then I detailed legs, with a tail wrapped around to bat away flies.

The sky was turning red now, and I knew I needed to be finished and start my morning work, but I hung back for a moment, still thinking about my dream.

Why had my parents supposedly abandoned me?