The stick clatters hollow across the stone and Dick watches it rock to a stop at the same level remove he’d watched Barrow mark out the grid with. Thot watches the stick also, the cruel hook of her beak parted to expose the cotton white of her throat, the blue of her tongue. She croaks.

And, one long feathered leggy at a time, she steps down from her perch to close one talon around the stick’s base, drawing it in close enough for Richard to twist from her grasp.

He studies the grid for longer than is polite before tracing out an oblong mark of his own.

When he’s done, he passes the stick back to his terrible bird, and she wobbles it back around the campfire to Barrow like a baton in her jaws. Richard watches her go in silence.

_|_|_
_|X|_
O|_|_

The eyes are the same, fixed wide on him while he scratches out another X -- a vivid sage green, no thoughts between them, with slitted pupils that flash in the firelight. Dick’s had flashed at him like that once, in a dream.

She is waiting when he’s finished, the stick snipped up and galloped back across to her master.

X|_|_
_|X|_
O|_|O

Leathery, feathery scuffling marks Thot’s return a moment later. The fire hisses and spits where Richard’s flicked a glob of fat from his rabbit hide into the flames. It’s a pointless exercise, really. The rabbit was scruffy. They don’t have salt. He’s already poked two holes in it.

“I brought books to read,” Richard tells his wet rag, the narrow cut of his back to Barrow and their cramped, hard-packed home for the next several hours. Days? His heart sinks at the thought.

“Do you know your letters?”