Prysmcat
The sun was very low when we reached the two houses that Serru had mentioned, surrounded by a variety of outbuildings of varying sizes.
Two jotuns, one an adult and one an adolescent, were herding a flock of goats from a pen into a barn; an extremely fluffy calico felid was milking a pcid brown cow, and a human was crouching in a garden to pick something and add it to the basket resting in easy reach on the ground. I could see half a dozen dogs, four of them massive shaggy ones that could have been St. Bernard or Bernese or Newfie types, one smaller husky-like one with a curly tail, and one of the collie-types I’d seen mostly on the Grassnds, this one with a long rough coat. That st one was helping with the goats.
All four looked up; the adult jotun said something to the adolescent and came to meet us on the road.
“Would you by any chance have room for some tired travellers?” Zanshe asked. “I’m Zanshe, from Brightridge. We’ve had a very long few days alone in the wilderness, and we’d love to catch up on the news.”
At her name, the jotun, a muscur woman taller than Zanshe with dark bronzy skin and dark red hair cut short, smiled. “We haven’t met, but friends of mine speak highly of you. Welcome, and yes, of course we’ll find room for all of you. We had word from Blue Goat Ridge a few days ago to watch for zombies and mosslings and asking us to search the area for someone possibly taken...”
“That’s me,” I said, raising a hand. “And thank you. It was complicated but I’m still here.”
“Good to hear. We worried when we didn’t hear anything more. I’ll send the wardens a note that you’re safe and alive.”
There was absolutely nothing we could fault about the hospitality of Velne and her tiny community of jotuns and one human and one felid. They had a bath-house, the water coming from a hot spring, and I was past caring about stupid things like modesty; while the rest of us made use of it, Heket and Myu enjoyed the warmth on a raised but dry bench. They showed Terenei their little post office, so he could at least send his grandfather a message to tell him what would be coming as soon as possible. Myu was very gently adored and pyed with and petted by the two youngest jotuns, and tolerated it with regal benevolence. They fed us well, all in the shared dining room attached to their shared hot-spring-powered kitchen. They even waited until after we’d eaten to ask us whether we’d be willing to tell them what had happened.
“I think that’s your cue,” Aryennos told Heket.
“I’m not finished that story yet,” Heket said. “It might be rough.”
The fluffy calico, Sentryx, (“My friends call me Tryx, and guests are friends.”) flicked her ears forward. “This sounds interesting. We don’t mind if it’s not polished yet.”
“Nathan? Can I?”
“Please do,” I said. “I certainly don’t know what to say.”
So Heket brought out her drum, and told the whole story so far.
Our hosts listened in rapt fascination.
Heket stopped when she got to the bit about us stumbling out of the wilderness and into a friendly farm. “We’re not done yet. And my apologies. I need to smooth out some of that.”
“I don’t even know what to say to any of that,” Velne said. “You’d be welcome here under any conditions, of course, but... which part of that is even the most memorable?”
“Velne isn’t speechless very often,” Tryx chuckled. “That’s impressive, but it also sounds exhausting. We’ll rearrange to make sure you have beds for tonight, although everyone will be sharing...”
“Sharing is good,” Terenei said.
“And we’ll see tomorrow if we can get you to White Springs a bit more quickly.”
A couple of the jotuns wanted to know where the cave in question was; we showed them the map, and Zanshe and Serru expined. From what I understood, they were pnning to explore the area and see if they could set up markers to the location and possibly even start mining some crystals.
Sleeping arrangements involved separating into trios, since each household was able to free up one jotun-sized bed. In the interests of bancing size, Heket and felid-me shared with Zanshe, with three humans together. The beds were meant for two jotuns, so it worked quite comfortably.
Come morning, we found a wagon out front with four of those oversized horses hitched to it. Several bags and boxes were being loaded into the back. There was a bench of sorts built along the sides, but this was obviously not meant primarily for passengers.
“Not as comfortable as it could be,” Velne said, “but Ryzen’ll get you to White Springs faster than walking and with less effort. We do a run now and then anyway, doing some trading and staying with friends. We’ll just do it early this time.”
Those horses, like Anezke’s, were powerful animals, and Ryzen knew the way and all the ups and downs and where to be careful and where we could speed up.
We were in White Springs not long past midday.
It was comparable in size to Quailbrook, the first vilge I’d been to with Serru. It was heavily jotun, of course, with a lot of the lma-people I’d seen in Crystal Pass and Brightridge, but we weren’t the only exceptions. We should be able to do a bit of shopping for tents and tea and travel bars, visit the post office and mail a substantial package to Coppersands, and find a tavern with two or three rooms we could rent for the night—or at worst, Serru said, a pce we could set up tents right outside one that would offer food and toilets and the like.
Somehow, we were considerably less anonymous than we expected.
Terenei came out of the post office with a rather bemused expression. “They had a box and everything ready to ship the crystals in. Apparently Tryx sent them a message. ‘Excited’ and ‘enthusiastic’ don’t really cover it.” He shook himself and shrugged. “Well, that was efficient. My grandfather replied after the message from st night. Also excited and enthusiastic and already looking for gatherers he can send along the coast as soon as he gets the map. I kept one copy of the formu so I can do more copies when I get time. I need another sketchbook.”
Shops wouldn’t let us pay.
The tavern’s keeper took one look at us, ushered us in and to a table for six, and told us meals were on the house and we had three of the four rooms upstairs—the fourth already had someone in it. Tryx, apparently, had also sent word to her.
“This is weird,” Aryennos muttered.
“It is certainly unusual,” Zanshe said.
I wasn’t sure whether this felt more like the welcome of a rock star or a world-saving hero from a prophecy. Either way, people were too genuinely friendly for it to register as oppressive or threatening. I couldn’t really bme them for this mix of exhiration and gratitude over the possibility of the Purification potion, especially when I’d started to come to grips with the real reason for the powerful reaction to what happened at the music festival. It was sort of uncomfortable, though.
Zanshe excused herself from the table, without expnation, and came back soon before the food arrived.
“I spoke to the keeper. I think there might be a good compromise, if you’re okay with it, Heket. A lot of the fuss is because they’re hearing bits of news about the Five Winds Festival, bits of news about zombies and mosslings in the area, bits about a way to interfere with those two. I know your story is still rough and still unfinished, but offering to tell what you have might give people some real information and help settle things down, and they’ll have truth to pass on instead of more specution and hope.”
“As long as they understand,” Heket said, “that it is a work in progress. It is still rough in pces and it’s obviously not finished. And as long as Nathan is okay with that, since it’s ultimately his story.”
“I would rather people had the reality instead of parts of it,” I said. Having heard Heket’s version st night, I really had no major specific problem with any part of it. I mean, I was just hoping that this journey would get me home to my family and I couldn’t keep from doing my job when situations happened and those two were making the whole process more complicated, which was leading to some extraordinary and unexpected results. What was there to argue with?
“I’ll be right back. I’ll tell her.”
The two people serving didn’t make a fuss, to my immense relief. They just delivered ptes of food and checked whether we needed anything else and then left us to eat. Options were limited in a smaller settlement, so mostly it was the same meal, Zanshe’s twice the size of the human ones and Heket’s and Myu’s adjusted for their diet. Presumably the rice had to be imported from somewhere else, but maybe there was local fish, and we knew there were goats and cattle and gardens. It was tasty, anyway, even if it did have mushrooms in it.
The room was filling up quite a lot, while we ate. Quietly, and not crowding us, and they were finding pces to sit and talking to each other. It wouldn’t surprise me if the tavern did have space for the whole vilge and doubled as a kind of community hall.
The keeper approached us while we were having dessert, which was a pie made of mixed fruit that, combined, reminded me of raspberry. Heket had several kinds of cheese instead, and had assured us that it was delicious. Myu clearly agreed.
“Any time you like the room is yours,” she said. “And thank you. Having the proper story will be much better than pieces of it. No one wants you uncomfortable or to be intrusive but it’s hard to keep that in mind with some of what we’ve heard.”
“Understood,” Terenei said. “I think Heket can help a lot with that.”
“I doubt we’ll all be awake for long afterwards,” Serru said. “We’ve had a very tiring two weeks or so.”
“Your rooms are waiting whenever you want them.”
Heket finished the st of her cheese, pulled her drum out of her bag, and contempted the room. Somehow, the growing crowd had left an opening around another rge rectangur table like ours, midway along one wall. Heket used a chair to hop up onto it, and sat down cross-legged with her drum.
Her audience knew what to expect: I watched them all orient towards her.
She used the drum to get attention, though she didn’t really need it, and as she had at the festival, used it for emphasis, a kind of auditory excmation mark but far more versatile.
No matter how low she dropped her voice at appropriate moments, it carried clearly, perfectly audible.
It finally clicked. “Heket does storytelling magic, doesn’t she?” I whispered to Serru, who was beside me. “Everyone can always hear her.”
Serru nodded. “It may not be her only skill, but she certainly picked up that one,” she whispered back.
Neat. No need for an artificial sound system. I wondered whether someone with impaired hearing would also hear her clearly. It seemed likely.
“I’m not sure how I feel about a story about me.”
She gnced at me in amusement. “You gave her permission. And Aryennos is writing a book.”
“The book feels less immediate or personal or something.”
“Storytelling and books complement each other. It is not impossible Ary’s parents are writing one or more songs. The consequences of your choices are creating strong feelings. People want and need to express that.”
“I didn’t want to be famous.” Despite the frantic ruthless struggle for fifteen minutes of online recognition at home, anyone with two active brain cells knew it was double-edged.
She closed her hand over mine. “I know.”
When Heket ended with her non-ending statement that it was incomplete, she still got cheers.
“Good time to sneak away,” I murmured to Serru. “The more social folks can follow when they’re ready.”
She nodded, and we slipped away from the table, scooping sleepy Myu up to bring her with us. Terenei and Aryennos and Zanshe couldn’t help but notice, but all we got was smiles and Zanshe’s murmur of, “We’ll be up soon.”
It wasn’t all that soon: there was enough time for us to use the little toilet and clean up and remove boots and curl up in bed together and fall asleep, without any sign of the others.
