Chapter Three Hundred and Ninety-Seven - Live Free and Dine Hard

The mothfolk decided to throw a small impromptu party. As Mister Lepido said, many of the locals had moved out, but those that remained were really happy to see the Evil Roots cleared out. Or at least, pushed back--we couldn't know for sure if the dungeon had shaken them off completely, just yet.

The mothfolk here seemed hopeful, but they weighed their hope against an equal measure of caution. They’d believe that the Evil Roots were eradicated from their dungeon when they didn’t see even a single sign that they existed anymore. For now though, they were happy to celebrate us trimming back the roots and clearing out the core.

Puffles promised--before he left with the Scallywags and a couple of others to face the dungeon again--that he’d be checking it daily until he was certain that the roots were all gone for good.

That’d have to be enough.

I... didn’t know if my way of clearing out the roots really worked in the long-long term. I’d never been back to a dungeon I’d cleared to check it out. Still...

I put it out of my mind. The folks back at Sylphfree were monitoring the dungeon I had cleared for them. If the infection started showing up again, I was sure they'd tell us.

With a big table set out in the glade before the dungeon's entrance, we sat down and had a big lunch.

There were lunaflower cakes--which were strangely spicy--and a few different flavours of stew, as well as big round loaves of very pale bread that one local called sunbread and which tasted very nutty.

I noticed that the average age of the locals was... older. Mister Lepido seemed old enough to be my grandpa, and he was about average as far as age went. A lot of grannies were bringing pots of stew over and cackling together off to one side. A number of them had brought out small stools and benches to keep the weight off their knees.

The men were almost all wiry and tough and I heard a lot of ‘back in my days’ when I flicked an ear in their direction.

It seemed as if the younger half of this village had almost all moved to greener pastures.

Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing! The community seemed tightly knit, and it wasn’t terribly far from Codwood. And it wasn’t like there weren’t any kids running around.

One nice mothlady told me that the two little ones zipping by with a flutter of wings were her great-grandlarvae, currently being taken care of by her daughter who was sticking around.

They... weren’t actually larvae, were they?

They couldn’t be that close to bugs, right?

The twinkle in the old mothlady’s eyes suggested that I’d just been duped. Then she cackled and I found myself giggling too.

I was kind of grateful, nonetheless, that I’d ended up a bun, because last I checked, rabbits were mammals too.

“Do you think a lot of the younger people will come back?” I asked Lepido. It was a delicate question, but I felt like I should ask.

He frowned, then nodded. “I think some of them will. They have children, and they’ll want them to go through the dungeon as well. It’s very limiting if they don’t. And we have some goods that can only be obtained here, and a lot of those youngsters were pushed out of the village by well-meaning parents. When things got lean here, it made sense to push our youth towards a better, safer place.”

I nodded along. “That was very brave,” I said.

“Maybe,” he replied. “I don’t know, really. In any case, the village will grow again. I’m sure of it. Ah, to be young again, though.”

Amaryllis smiled. “If you keep saying things like that, you certainly won’t feel young.”

Lepido grinned back. “That’s a fair point. I remember when I was around your age. I used to travel quite a bit around these parts. Never too far from home, but still, I fluttered about, chased the moon and let wanderlust carry me around a little.”

“Oh? Have you been to Inkwren?” I asked. “That’s our next stop, probably.”

“Inkwren! Yes, a number of times. It’s hardly all that far. Once in a while a fishing ship from Codwood will cross the Blue Lake then take a riverboat to get to Pollock. Then you can walk most of the way down to Inkwren. Big city, lots of folk.”

I wondered how big it actually was. Meaning no offence to Mister Lepido (even in my head) I didn’t think he’d seen too many big cities if he never travelled all that far from home. Had he been to the Stormtower, or even to Farseeing in the Harpy Mountains, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Inkwren.

So I asked!

“Hmm, well, the city’s one of the independent cities in that area, one of the bigger ones too, from what I gather. It was founded by a group of exiled human scholars, but nearly half the city is made up of harpies,” Lepido said.

“I’d heard of that,” Amaryllis said. “The Wren clan lives there. They’re... not part of the Harpy Mountain clans, not in a big way like some other families. The Raven clan has a large compound in the city as well.”

Lepido made an affirmative noise. “Yup. Saw plenty of those too. Hard to tell, with the uniforms. Ah, right, the city’s got a few big schools in it.”

“The academies,” Amaryllis said. “I’ve heard that some noble families from the Harpy Mountains will send their children there to study. Some merchant families as well. It’s less expensive than the noble academy in the capital and the education is apparently second to none.”

Caprica snorted. “I doubt that it’s that good.”

“Oh, no, it is good,” Amaryllis replied. “But it’s fiercely competitive. The academies are constantly at each other’s throats and while you won’t get stabbed in the back or poisoned--"

"Wait, that can happen?" I asked, incredulous. "At a school?"

Amaryllis looked a bit uncomfortable. "Well, it's uncommon--I mean, it hasn't happened in the Harpy Mountains... recently?"

I gave her a long stare.

"As I was saying!" she pushed on, "The Inkwren academies are supposedly less violent, so being from the wrong family or having poor political standing will lead to, at worst, a minor scuffle or maybe a brawl."

“Did you have any trouble there?” I asked Lepido.

He shook his head. “No, never. I mostly kept to the docks and the small... hrm, I suppose they’re their own villages? There’s a number of small settlements, about the same size as ours here, all around the city. I mostly kept to those. Never had much of a reason to go to Inkwren itself.”

“Ah, okay,” I nodded along.

“The people I met were quite kind. Though I did encounter one biologist who wanted to poke and prod me, but I rebuffed them.”

That was... a little concerning. Nobody would want to do biology of a bun though, right? I looked at my friends and winced. We... were probably all a little bit interesting to someone who was really into biology. Awen was the normalest one here, at least if Inkwren had humans.

On the other hand, I was getting pretty excited about travelling to Inkwren. The city sounded neat!

“We’ll have some time to explore,” Amaryllis said on seeing my expression. “But not too much. I’d rather arrive at Port Royal early as opposed to late.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe they have bookstores there? I bet Booksy would love a heap of books as a wedding gift.”

“Books are heavy,” Awen said. “But we can carry a few.”

Right, that was something I’d have to keep in mind before I bought a whole pallet-load of books. The Beaver could only carry so much weight.

The afternoon wore on, the feast turning into a dessert-sampling event as a number of grannies pulled out all their family-recipes and hidden tricks in the form of cupcakes and cookies and even a few pastries.

I was going to need to be rolled back to the ship.

“Where did they get the flour?” Amaryllis muttered as she picked up a cupcake.

“We trade for it in Codwood,” Lepido said. “It’s a little pricey, but the taste is worth it.”

“And where do they get it?” Amaryllis asked. “I didn’t see any fields when we flew over the town. A few gardens, sure, and maybe there are some farms on the edges, but not enough to account for lots of flour that’s easily tradable. Besides, I didn’t see a mill.”

Lepido smiled. “They get it from the Endless Swells. They are part of the nation, you know.”

Amaryllis huffed the huff of someone who decided to give up on the question.

I was just starting to worry about the Scallywags when they burst out of the dungeon, all three of them loud and exuberant and bursting with humour.

Then I noticed how dishevelled they looked. Oda had a piece of cloth wrapped around an arm which had soaked up a bit of blood, and Sally was walking with a limp.

I gave up on the cupcakes and cookies and ran over to them. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“We’re fine,” Joe said with a dismissive wave. He had a shield strapped to his back, the same sort that Amaryllis had picked up in our own dungeon run.

“We had a couple of close calls,” Sally said. “But we managed to make it though!”

I turned towards Mister Puffles as he left the dungeon behind the Scallywags. The older farmer looked a lot tired, but he nodded to me all the same. “Not the quickest run through,” he said. “And not the safest. But we made it out alive.”

“The Evil Roots?” Lepido asked as he came over.

A lot of ears were listening in, I noticed.

“Still there, but not around the core, and the dungeon spent as much time fighting the roots as it did fighting us. It looks like it’s working hard to get rid of them,” Mister Puffles said.

I clapped, and there was a cheer from some of the more exuberant listeners. “That’s fantastic!”

“It is,” he agreed. “It’ll make keeping the dungeon clean a lot easier if it’s trying to help. Might even be enough to clear the entire infection away.”

The mood in the village lifted at the news. The mothfolk who had been cautiously optimistic before let out a sigh of relief, then the chatter picked up and some of the more spry older folk even started to dance.

Grinning from ear to ear, I looked at my friends. “We did it!” I congratulated. “Ah, but we should probably think about heading out soon. Did you three manage to take out the boss?” I asked the Scallywags, and got a chorus of "yeses" in return. “Perfect! In that case, I think we’re nearly done here.”

There was a small frenzy of activity after that. A lot of folks were insisting that we load up on leftovers, and with the quality of the food on offer, we weren’t about to say no!

Mister Lepido, meanwhile, pulled me aside. “I’m not one for big speeches,” he began with a grateful smile. "Thank you for everything you've done for our village," he said. "We will never forget your bravery and kindness. I wish you all the best on your journey to Inkwren and beyond."

“Thank you,” I said. “But it’s all in a day’s work, right?”

After saying our goodbyes to the villagers and promising to visit again someday, we boarded the Beaver Cleaver. The Scallywags had some bumps and cuts, which wasn't too bad, but I asked them to take a break to heal up faster. The airship's engines roared to life as we lifted off, leaving the village and the dungeon behind.

***