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thrown back the hood of his cloak. The firelight scudded over his features with careful fingers, drawing gold and light touches of claret from hair curling damp and unruly. The effect kept glissading back and forth between primitive forest god and boyish artlessness.
    Wil shook himself, shifted his stance. “The fire,” he said. “How did you start a fire with wet wood?”
    “Oh.” Brayden turned back to the smoky fire, feeding it what looked like hacked up chips and small split branches. “It’s easy with pine,” he told Wil as he worked 31

    The Aisling Book Two Dream
    steadily, stoking and fanning as he continually added fuel.
    “You can do it with any kind of wood if you split the bigger branches to get to the dry wood inside and chip away the wet bark. But with pine, there’s the sap or resin inside that helps it catch a lot quicker and burn hotter, so the wet outside will dry and burn, too. Well, most of the time.” He shrugged, poking at the base of the flames.
    “We’ll have to keep a steady eye on it, else it’ll likely sputter, but I need the light to make the shelter, and we might as well have a hot supper while we’re at it.”
    Huh. “That’s…” Wil swallowed his self-consciousness with an effort. “Will you show me?”
    Brayden didn’t even raise his eyebrows; he merely nodded, said, “Of course, but right now there are other priorities, all right? Between fuel for the fire and the shelter, I’ll need to cut quite a lot more.” He jerked his chin toward the horses. “D’you know how to hobble?”
    Wil rolled his eyes. “I did work in a stable, y’know.”
    “For two weeks,” Brayden muttered, then, louder:
    “That doesn’t answer my question.”
    “ Yes , I know how to hobble horses.” Wil had already taken some lengths of rope from his horse’s saddlebag and was looping them to size.
    “Well, could you take care of them and then come over here?” Brayden asked. “I could use a hand.”
    The mares were still munching tiredly and unlikely to wander off, but Wil braided the knots, mostly by feel in the dim light of the small fire, then looped the hobbles about the fore-fetlocks of both horses. Neither one of them even twitched, but he quietly apologized anyway, and promised them each an apple later before he went to help with the shelter. Brayden had already started without him, moving beyond the small circle of wavering light, but all Wil had to do was follow the muttered curses in the dark.
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    Carole Cummings
    “Good,” Brayden said, took Wil by the shoulders, stood a little too close behind him, and guided his left hand up over his head. Wil was already gripping a thick, crosshatched bundle of prickly branches before he thought to shrug Brayden’s grip off, and by then, Brayden was already rattling off instructions: “All right, feel how these are connected by this one joint? I need you to hold that tight and don’t let them loose while I lift the other end and get it secured in those branches over there.” What with his eyes having to re-adjust to the dark again, Wil couldn’t see two feet in front of his face, so he decided to take Brayden’s word that there were indeed branches
    ‘over there.’ “It’s going to be heavy for a few minutes, so be ready,” Brayden went on, then he let go of Wil’s hand and was gone.
    It did indeed get very heavy, and Wil had a hard time of it, what with the bark digging into his hand, and the circulation in his arm slowing to a near-halt by the time Brayden was satisfied and told him he could let go. They repeated the process three more times before Wil was able to see exactly what Brayden had done. He was terribly impressed. He’d been expecting something like a lean-to, but Brayden had more-or-less built a roof made of pine boughs, laced and woven together, using the branches of the surrounding trees as supports. It was higher on one side than the other— “So the water will run off and we won’t end up buried beneath