* * *
Days pass. I am given chores that will not overtax me while my head heals and my muscles unbruise. One afternoon I stop to look closely in a mirror, and see a purple blotch on the bandage around my head. The rosy woman from the clearing must have put something herbal on the wound.
I feel at home here. I hang pictures, shelve books, drape clothes on fat wooden pegs. Professor Shinnegal has given me the carven tree. I move it around the bedroom, searching for just the right place.
He sits with us at supper and tells an amusing tale: The centaurs challenged the satyrs by the brook, but it was all in good fun. Just a bit of rope-tugging to determine if two legs are better, or four. The tree-dwelling dryads judged it a draw.
The professor has yet to tell me why I am here. I think I know. A niggling unease scratches at the back door of my mind, but I refuse to invite it in.
No one questions my presence nor asks when I will leave. Sam — once a robotics engineer in the city, but now a farmer — sits with me on the veranda in the evenings, teaching me to play simple tunes on the elephant flute. In turn, I teach Bertrand to read from my leather-bound books of old tales, illustrated with once-vivid prints whose colors have mellowed in the past hundred years.
Sometimes rain falls, sometimes a storm raises its fist, but for me all the days are bright.