Suspicion


    The Mute Ones stood in a circle. Holding hands, they walked inward, closing the circle, trapping Bun and Cao Nyut inside. This alarmed Cao Nyut, who looked left and right, forward and back, in search of an escape route. As for Bun, the witch, May, was affecting his mind. There was something wrong with him.


    Cao Nyut saw how Bun’s eyes shifted. He saw the wary glint in Bun’s eyes as he looked up at the one who he had always called his friend. Now there was something wrong with the boy. Bun’s seafoam colored eyes were dull.


    Where was the shine, the warm regard, the recognition in Bun’s beautiful blue-green eyes? What was this dark spell which had, all of a sudden, nulled the boy’s sparkling vitality?


    “Prove you are not Thermock,” said Bun, his smooth face a stern monolith.


    “Bun,” Cao Nyut said, “snap out of it.”


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    “Yes,” said May, “let him prove himself.”


    The pachyderm sighed. “What would you have me do?” he said.


    Suddenly, a wind rose up across the dead air in the dark playground of Shandapidoor. The head on the stick started laughing; at that, the wind picked up, ruffling the cloaks of the Mute Ones, who seemed, somehow, to sing wordlessly on that rising draft of air, a cerebral hum that Cao Nyut heard in his mind, and fought against; but Bun, when he heard that humming, embraced it, snatching that note out of the wind and humming aloud alongside it. The tuft of hair on top of his head ruffled too, and soon it seemed that that whipping tempest was rocking his whole body and mind.


    Bun slitted his eyes at Cao Nyut.


    “You are the shapeshifter,” he said, “I should have known all along. But my eyes are open now. You were the Thermock all along.”


    “Bun,” said Cao Nyut, but his companion did not hear him; the only answer that the pachyderm got was that awful cackling sound coming from the decapitated head above, and the growing roar of the whipping wind all around.


    Suddenly, without warning, Bun unsheathed his short sword from its scabbard. With a wild cry, he lunged at Cao Nyut, the tip of his blade pointed straight ahead.