Book 5, Chapter 2: First Night
Hiking all day long makes you sweaty, hungry – if you’re not eating – and tired. Not mentally tiring, it was refreshing and renewing to be alone in nature, the ever-present scents of pine, flowers and green herbs, creeks with their delightfully cold water. Though creeks were a blessing and a curse. Refreshing when bathing, obstacles when not. Sometimes I could hop across. Jump from large stone to stone. Other times, the stones were slippery, I slid into the water, soaking my clothes. Or there weren’t stones high enough and the water was too deep.
Like the one I was now crossing, deep enough that I had to wade through. Getting to the other side, I nearly panicked. Not from the cold or the wet, but from the many, many foxes swimming across. Hundreds of them. I backed up defensively. Getting out of the water, each fox stopped, shook their fur, then bolted back into the cover of the bushes. Let my hands fall to my side, relaxed, and carried on.
I’d managed to get halfway up a hill as the sun set, forcing me to stop, set up a camp of sorts and think about food. Rustling and footsteps all around where I stopped. Hopefully, checking the place out and not chatting about how good I’d taste come nightfall.
I produced a tiny twister to dig a firepit. Once the fire got going, I scuffed the ground in front of it to move errant stones and pine needles out of the way, set a saddle bag down, opened the leather flap to sit on. Shaking my head, I wondered why I bothered. My gambeson was as dirty as it could get.
I could hang the gambeson, air it out. Yet, that’d leave me wearing only drawstring shorts and a thick short slip that sort of functioned like a tank top. So, I’d be milling around camp half naked with a bunch of unusual animals.
Probably they wouldn’t care. But, I don’t know, I would. Not really because of them, but mosquitos, ticks, flies, ants, giant spiders, and whatever other horrors this world had looking for a tasty princess meal. No thank you!
Though, I thought, looking at the padded leather, it didn’t offer any real protection against small insects. Alright, ok, yeah, I hung the filthy gambeson on a couple tree branches.
The fire crackling, the foxes hiding, the corvids invisible and roosting, I sat down into a squat, pulled my saddlebags in front of me and rummaged through them. Found some dried meat, dug out the ale I’d stuck in the water skin, sat back down on the bags, and started having supper.
The fire burned warm and bright and I watched the flames quiver and dance for a while. The ale was lukewarm, but thick and tasty. The dried meat, salty. A meal fit for a wandering, warrior princess.
Etienne’s satchel. Laying beside me. On bare ground, pebbles, pine needles. Light from the flames reflecting off its dark tan leather. Untouched.
I gave in, undid the leather belt, pulling the bag open. A thick, folded paper, probably large as it was next to the book and about as wide. And the book. I wanted to toss it into the fire! It seemed so wrong, my future lay in there. All the events leading up to now, if I opened and read that book, would be given new meaning. Maybe become meaningless. His research into me, his findings, might override who I have become. Who I am.
I shut the flap, buckled the buckle.
Stared at the fire.
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