Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Nine - Campground Ladies

We didn’t end up setting camp so much as we just found a comfy-enough spot to rest and rummage through our packs for food. We had a bunch of Sylph rations that came in enclosed packages made of something like wax-paper with a few simple instructions written on the side.

The ready-to-eat meals were... edible.

On opening one of them (vegetable lunch, it was called!) I found a couple of little tin boxes and a small pouch with some water in it. The instructions said to pour the water into one of the little boxes, then apply some fire-aspect mana to the circle on the side of the box.

After doing what it said, I discovered that the box had little wires in it that conducted the heat through the package and warmed up its contents, producing a sort of stout soup with veggies and pasta.

The meal was fun to prepare, and a lot less fun to eat.

I think some of the metal might have rubbed up against the veggies because they tasted like tin.

“Well, that was an experience,” Amaryllis said as she chucked the meal package aside.

I shook my head at the casual littering and picked the tin up. In the end, we dug a little hole and shoved all of our waste into it. Amaryllis claimed that it was a good idea to mask our tracks a bit.

With a glance at one of our provided maps, and with another look at Awen’s compass, we aligned ourselves westward and headed off again.

We knew we weren’t going to make it too far, it was midafternoon already and Fort Middlesfaire was quite a ways to the west and around a little river, so we wouldn’t make it there today no matter how fast we walked.

The hilly landscape levelled off after a while. That really just meant that there were fewer hills, but each hill was much broader, like a huge grassy plateau with drooping sides that were a bit of a pain to climb up.

The grass reached up to mid-thigh, whipping against my legs with every step. It was actually kind of nice though. At some point we crossed through a huge patch of wildflowers, all of them white with pretty yellow dots in their centre. The air was filled with their perfume, and happy little bees bumbled past, fat with pollen.

My friends and I chitchatted as we walked along; there wasn’t much else to do out in the open fields. All it took was a quick glance around to prove that we were all alone. Amaryllis went over the political implications of what had happened recently and tried to imagine what various factions would do now, Awen, when it was her turn, talked at length about her ideas. She was planning on building a wyvern-inspired flying machine one day, one fitted with a bunch of repeating crossbows and maybe some rocket-propulsion.

With all of our talking, the day slipped by. We’d done enough long-range trekking that I think our legs were going to be fine, but to someone unused to it, the long walk might have been exhausting.

By the time the sun was starting to set, we’d crossed a good chunk of the distance between our landing spot and Fort Middlesfaire.

“That’s the river,” Amaryllis said with a wing over her head to shade her eyes.

“Looks like there are some trees around it,” I said. “Should we camp near the bank?”

“If we can find a high, flat spot to set up our tents, I don’t see why not. We’ll be able to gather some kindling at least,” Amaryllis said.

We climbed up one last hill, then down the other side towards the riverbank. Being tucked between the hillsides provided the river with shelter from the wind, which meant that the trees growing around there had plenty of water and sun and not too much wind pushing against them.

My friends and I found a spot where a few big flat stones stuck out of the hillside. Someone had used the place to camp before, because there was a fire pit dug into the rocks and an old lean-to made of branches had been left off to one side. It had fallen apart, and the leaves on the branches had blown away, but it was a clear sign that someone had passed here once.

Our packs had little tents, but instead of erecting three of them, we decided to snuggle up into a single one. It would be warmer and the tents were all a mess of poles and ropes and pins that had even Awen confused and frustrated.

While she set that up, Amaryllis and I scoured the area for fallen branches and twigs. Soon enough, we had a nice big pile of them. I used some cleaning magic to wash out the fire pit (after removing some charcoaled wood from the bottom) which uncovered a little tunnel dug into the bottom of the fire pit.

“That’s to suck in air from below,” Amaryllis said. “Look, the other hole’s right here. I think a firepit like this will create less smoke too.”

She might have been right. Once we got a fire started, it didn't create all that much smoke. I had fun plugging up the hole with my palm, then popping my hand off the entrance to see the fire shift.

We ate more rations, fished out some blankets from our packs to keep our backs warm, and then stared at the starry sky above through the faint sheen of smoke rising from our fire.

We drew straws to decide the watches - Awen was first, then poor Amaryllis in the unenviable middle watch, and myself for the last slot.

I guess all that walking had tired me out more than I expected, because almost as soon as I snuggled in next to Amaryllis and closed my eyes, I fell into a deep slumber.

I was awoken a few hours before the dawn by a grumpy Amaryllis shaking me awake. Sometime in the night, she had managed to swap places with Awen without disturbing me, and now I did the same, vacating my warm bedding for the cool of the night.

Nothing much happened. I kept the fire company in the morning and got my tea stuff out as well as some rations that I cooked over the fire. A few curious birds gathered on some of the nearby trees to watch us prepare for our morning trek.

“We’re going to have to go north along the river, I think,” Amaryllis said between bites. She had the map on her lap and was occasionally glancing at the river while a talon-tip traced a path.

I looked through the sparse trees between us and the river. It was pretty wide, maybe as wide as a hockey rink was long, and the water was moving along at a steady clip. There’d be no jumping across that, and I didn’t trust that I could swim across easily, especially not with all of our gear.

“Alright, let’s find a spot where we can cross, then. Maybe there’s some shallower parts downstream.”

Amaryllis nodded. “The river will end eventually. But I think we should move upstream, not down, at least if we hope to ford it and not end up at a lake.”

“Oh,” I said. That made sense.

Once the tent was taken down and we’d packed everything away, we started off along the river’s edge.

The morning walk was fun. I got to see a fox who scampered away when we got closer, and there were a bunch of long-legged heron-like birds with bright green plumage standing very still on the river bank, only moving their long necks when they spotted a fish darting below the water.

We had to cross a few streams that joined into the river, most of them were small enough that we could just step over, but a few were wide enough that we needed to splash through or carefully walk across some logs that had been put in place by previous travellers.

By early afternoon, after stopping for a break in the shade of a big willow-y tree for a snack, we were all quite sweaty and a little tired.

I offered to use cleaning magic on my friends, but wiping away sweat was going to make it much harder to deal with the heat.

I think that after spending a week or so in the cool weather around Goldenalden, we’d gotten so used to the cold that the moderate warmth of the Trenten Flats was really hard to deal with.

“How far do we have to go, still?” I asked as I knelt next to the river and splashed some water against my face.

“Not too far, I don’t think,” Amaryllis said. “Here, can you fill this?”

She handed me her waterskin, and I dutifully filled it up with river water, then pushed some cleaning magic into it to clean out anything too icky. Fish pooped in that water, after all.

Amaryllis’ predictions ended up proving true. An hour or so later, with the river thinning down until I could almost just jump across, we came upon a little village.

There was a squat wall around it, only about as tall as I was, with maybe two dozen homes on either side of the river. A bridge crossed the water, and further into the town was a long building with a mill and big stacks of wood cut lengthwise next to it. A sawmill, maybe?

The homes looked like pretty cottages, with wooden walls and thatched roofs with chimneys poking out here and there.

“Do you think they’ll have an inn?” I asked.

“Doubtful,” Amaryllis said. “It doesn’t look like all that many people live there. We’re on the frontier here, far from the centre of the Trenten Flats, this is hardly a metropolis.”

“Ah, maybe they’ll have a general store, at least,” Awen said. “We could buy fresher food. Our rations are meant to be kept for a long time, but they’re not very tasty.”

I nodded. “And I want to meet the locals too. Maybe they’ll know something about the ships we’re looking for?”

Amaryllis shrugged. “If we can’t use their bridge, we’ll have to go all the way around. No harm in stopping by, I suppose.”

Grinning, I bounced ahead of my friends, flaring out a bit of Cleaning magic to freshen up. I hardly wanted to meet new friends while stinky and dirty. We reached the edge of the town’s walls and found well-ploughed fields with irrigation ditches running all the way over to the river. There wasn’t much growing except for some tiny hand-high sprouts of... something set a few centimetres apart.

Going around the fields, we made it to a big gate that was left wide open. The town’s roads looked like they were shaped like an H. There were two roads with houses on either side, then the bridge in the middle of the town joined the two halves together.

When my friends and I walked in, we immediately became the centre of attention.

Cervid paused on the street, with some of them, especially the younger ones, running off to hide in their homes. No one called out to us or said a friendly hello, instead they watched us as if we were twenty-foot-tall monsters bent on eating all of them.

Undaunted, I pushed on through. It looked like there was a store on the other side of the bridge, one right next to a smithy and what might have been a church of some sort.

“Hello!” I called out to one cervid. A well-built man with a hat made of woven grass. He was carrying a stack of baskets which he dropped when I addressed him.

“Warm welcome,” Amaryllis muttered.

“Maybe they’re shy?” I asked.

“You!”

I spun around at the voice. It came from an older cervid lady, one carrying a cane which she was using to point right at me. “Hello?” I tried.

“You! Strangers!” She barked. “You’re the ones who kidnapped my son!”

***