No Strings Attached - Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-One

56th Day of Spring - Year 1758 of the Golden Era

Shorefarm, Yellowfield, Draya Calyrex

They camped under the stars.

They didn’t have to. There were trees and small patches of forest along the road. There were even some smaller farms and a few cottages that they noticed parked along the winding rivers that the road crossed over. A few times on their walk, they slid through towns that were barely more than five or six homes all squeezed in close, with pens for animals that were missing and cold hearths.

They stopped poking around those after they were attacked by a ravenous man with a bloody pitchfork at the second. He went down to a single spell from Lazur, but he had almost spooked Viridian’s soul right out of her chassis.

In any case, they had options for where to stop for the night when the sun was starting to dip, and they chose the open.

It was a choice that they discussed for a while, but Carnel made a solid argument when Lazur suggested that they stop by the next small town and take over a house.

“The towns are at crossroads. People move through those, even in the night. A home has lanterns and lights, and we’re going to want to light one. And while we’ll have walls, they’ll mean being blind to what can come. And there’s the smell of people around homes.”

“We can’t smell,” Lazur said.

“But animals can. Big ones better than small ones.”

It was a valid enough point, Viridian thought. But the thing that really swayed her was the moon. It was hanging above. Not quite full, but not too far from it, and high in the sky. Without any clouds or fog, it was going to mean a fairly right night. Or so she hoped.

And so they looked for a place to camp out for the night, and found one atop a hill.

The hill was next to a prairie, a small rise before the ground flattened out and spread down towards the distant coast. From the very top they could just make out the ocean in the distant as a sliver of silvery-blue waters. There were more woods around, of course, but they were so distant that even the larger trees weren’t any bigger than Viridian’s thumb when she held her arm out.

The grass wasn’t all that tall, only coming up to their knees, which meant good visibility for a long, long way.

They installed themselves on the hill top just as the sun finally set, and then started the long wait for morning.

They talked for a while, but they knew what they had to say already. Lazur continued to practice her spell, firing tiny kinetic bursts at a few rocks along the upper edge of the hill and sometimes sending them flying over the edge. Soon enough, however, she ran out of easily accessible rocks and sat down with the other two.

The night grew quiet, even the monsters and animals finding rest. There was some movement, but always in the distance. The glint of a fox’s eye, the hoot and swoop of an owl, the flutter of a ribbon of bats. Nothing approached them, however.

So they watched the stars.

And then, eventually, morning came.

“Let’s go,” Carnel said without any fanfare. The sun rose and with it the fog. The plain they were on and the hill was mostly cleared of fog, owing to a strong breeze from the ocean, but the woods all around were masked over by it.

As they started to walk, they eventually plunged into the mists and visibility went from clear for as far as their mechanical eyes could see, to only just being able to see what was just ahead. Viridian held her pike out, and she could barely make out the tip.

Still, the road wasn’t hard to follow. It was pitted and rough, unmaintained since before whatever had happened on Draya Calyrex, but still functional enough.

A few hours after sunrise, they encountered a strange group on the road. Four people, dressed in peasants’ garb. One of them carried a spear and another had a bow. They were walking down the road, coming the opposite way as Viridian and her companions, and all four paused with a start on seeing them.

The fog had meant that they were surprisingly close already. Still, they stared for a moment. The man with the bow tried to be subtle as he nocked an arrow into place. “Whoa there,” the one in the lead said.

He was a little older than the rest. Grey hair and grey eyes. He looked gaunt, but unlike the others, he somehow wore it well, as though being tired and weary were normal to him. He reached up and adjusted his long-brimmed hat. “Hello, strangers,” he said. “We don’t mean any trouble if you don’t.”

“They only outnumber us by one,” Carnel muttered, too low to be overheard.

“They don’t seem mean,” Viridian said.

Her current measure to tell if someone was hostile or not was whether they chose to talk before attacking or not. So far that measure was still rather accurate.

“Who are you?” Lazur asked aloud, her voice carrying.

“Could ask you the same!” one of the men said.

The one who’d spoken first waved behind him, almost as if telling the man to calm down. “We’re hunters,” he said. Just out here looking for our next meal is all.”

The way they shifted... Viridian suspected that that wasn’t the whole truth. But they were equipped for it. One of the men had a pair of large traps linked to his belt by a leather strap, and they had more bows, the strings undone, in leather sheaths. The men all had knives but other than the one with a spear, they weren’t armed for combat. Nor dressed for it.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” the older man said. “Who might you be?”

“We’re travellers,” Viridian said before Carnel could invite them to fight. “We’re heading north, to Three Lakes.”

“Three Lakes, huh,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “You look like those strange automatons the richer folk and mages have around them, and the ones in the circuses.”

“We are,” ViridianV said.

“And what are you heading to Three Lakes for?”

“Business,” Viridian said. Specifically, none of theirs, but she didn’t say that aloud.

The man eyed them for a good long while, then nodded. “Alright. We’ll step aside then, and let you be on your way.”

“Seriously?” one of his friends asked, the one with the bow.

“Yes,” he replied. “They’re no enemies of ours, I don’t think. And besides, puppets like that are the playthings of nobles.”

Viridian felt a little insulted at the remark, but... was Magus Maldrak a noble? Perhaps the hunter wasn’t far from right. “Thank you,” she said. “Are you coming from Three Lakes?”

“The outskirts,” he said. “Little Lake. It’s a small nothing town just a walk away from here. If you continue on this road you’ll be passing through.”

“Is the city... well?” Viridian asked.

“No,” he said. 

And that was that. The men stepped aside, and had seemingly decided to keep whatever thoughts they had to themselves. Viridian tightened her grip on her pike, but no one jumped out at her as they passed on by.

It was another short walk before they arrived at a vantage where they could see Three Lakes. The city was hard to miss.

It was, at a guess, three times as large as Shorefarm. A city with a proper keep, though the castle wasn’t anything too special, just a large stone building perched atop a hilltop next to a lake whose end Viridian couldn’t make out.

The city itself spread out below and around the other hills in the area. The land had been cleared except for a few patches of forest, often between Three Lakes and the smaller hamlets that looked to be about an hour’s walk away down the main roads leading out of the small city.

Three Lakes had a wall. It encircled the homes within, but stopped along the sandy beaches of the lake it was next to.

“Looks alright,” Carnel said. “Bigger than Shorefarm.”

“And not burned down,” Viridian said. She half expected to walk over to find nothing but ruins.

“We’re far away, still,” Lazur said. “Wait until we’ve made our way over before deciding on that. It might be worse than Shorefarm.”

“Those hunters seemed nice enough.”

“I think they were poachers,” Lazur said. “They seemed shifty.”

“Oh.” She supposed that wasn’t too surprising, but it was still disappointing to hear.

“Let’s get going. Maybe we can hunt something too, on the way back. I don’t want to have done all of this just just a trickle of essence,” Carnel said before she took off walking again.

***