Chapter 19
ZAINA WAS WAKENED by a shout. She sat up, dazed, wondering where she was and why she was surrounded by feathers. A bird’s head lifted from those feathers, white with a yellow hooked beak and an orange eye that cast her a baleful look.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and scrambled to her feet. The eagle put its head back down on its wing, and Zaina scratched the top of its head, to which it responded by raising all its feathers.
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m going.”
She collected her blanket and mat, wriggled between the two birds and jumped off the trailer.
Rider Tomason stood watching her. He would have been the one who had shouted.
His face remained impassive.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I was so cold.” Her mat slid from under her arm into the snow. She picked it up.
“I’m sur
