Page 34 of Into the West

She just knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep when the three teams left. She felt as if, even if Sai told her to go to bed, she’d need to stay wakeful, as if by not sleeping she could somehow detect danger outside the barge.

Which was utterly ridiculous, of course, but she was having no luck convincing her nerves of that.

There was a wind tonight, and it whipped up waves on the river that made the barge rock. The men’s barge is going to be half empty. I wonder if that is going to bother anyone. Not Sai, surely, but perhaps Venidel?

She tried to think of pleasant things. Sai had put bread dough to rise in the warmth of the barge, something he had not bothered to do until now because there would not have been time to bake it in the mornings before they needed to be on their way. She had thought of a clever way to gather fodder tomorrow, if Venidel agreed and had a way to help. It would even be possible that the convoy would catch up with them while they waited for the scouts to return, and she could astonish everyone with her prowess with Gift and crossbow.

But as she stared into the darkness, aware that the ceiling was within a hand-length of her nose even though she couldn’t see it, all she could think about was that the wind would make it hard to hear anything creeping up on them from the forest. All that was between them and danger were the senses of an air spirit trapped in a magical rag doll, and no one had any real idea how good or bad those senses were.

And as far as she knew, she was going to be the only one left here with any sort of skill at arms when the three teams went out. Maybe the mages had something offensive—but when, in their entire lives in the peaceful Duchy of Valdemar, would there ever have been an occasion to use such spells? Had they ever even practiced such things? And would they have the power to do so in the first place?

So the barge rocked, and she fretted, and she didn’t actually remember falling asleep, but the next thing she knew, gray dawn light glowed through the little window of her bunk.

She beat everyone to the morning chores. Not even Alberdina stirred as Delia wiped herself down, got her clean underthings from her towel, and dressed in double layers of knitted wool, followed by a sheepskin coat. It was cold this early in the morning, and there was a skin of ice on the buckets of water Sai had left to settle last night. She made it her business to rake the last of the coals and the ashes away from the cookpot where the morning stew was, and start a cookfire so that there would be nice hot coals for Sai to bake his bread in.

The morning fog wasn’t so thick as to be a danger, but it did limit visibility to a couple of barge-lengths. There was a quality to sound, when air was cold, that made every splash, thump, and clank very discrete. Sounds were more defined in morning cold; they started sharply, and ended abruptly without followup. Birdcalls pierced the fog’s thick silence, and echoes were absent. As far away from all she’d known as Delia was today, she had to admit there was such a stark beauty to this morning that she should take a few minutes’ time just to experience it. The earliest birdcalls were answered by more from another direction. Today’s avian audio war had begun.

We think they sound beautiful, but those songs are declarations and dares, warnings and challenges.

Ivar and Sai emerged from the men’s barge together, talking about something in voices too low to make out the words. Sai carried his precious risen dough in a covered bowl, and greeted her effort with a nod of approval. He didn’t have to tell her what he wanted; with her Gift, she raked a bed of hot coals a little apart from the fire, and placed a three-legged iron pot in the middle of them. Sai carefully rolled his lump of dough into it, and clapped the lid on it. Then she used her Gift to pile more hot coals on the lid.

I have to admit, I get smug about my Gift. Fortunate enough to have a Gift, and with it I can Fetch an object from one place to another instantly, and move it around once I have? It’s the best.

“You make a fine shovel!” Sai teased, then sobered. “This is much safer than mucking about with the fire the ordinary way. Heavy clothing makes us move clumsily, and I am afraid we are very flammable under these things.” He held up his arm; rather than a coat, he had a sort of cape, like a circle of very heavy wool with a hole in the middle and a hood sewn to the hole. Unlike a cape, this had no armholes.

“You stay away from poking the fire in that thing,” Alberdina scolded from the barge. “You let us play with the coals, or else find a sensible coat.”

“I have one, somewhere,” he replied vaguely, as he pulled the second pot out of the ashes and embers of last night’s fire. “Now, this should be good with fresh bread.” He took up a stout stick, threaded it through the two rings welded to the lid, and lifted the lid off. Apparently the savory aroma of goose-and-spiced-lentil stew penetrated the hulls of the barges, because shortly after that, everyone had gathered around the fire with their plates and spoons and looks of anticipation.

Alberdina always made the tea. Delia wasn’t sure what was in it, or if it had any purpose other than tasting good, but Alberdina had said that it was safer to drink the river water boiled, and that if she was going to boil water regardless, she was damned if she wasn’t going to make tea with it.

Those who were riding out ate quickly, then fetched their traveling kits from the barges. Delia didn’t envy them. Unless they got lucky and shot game, they’d be eating trail biscuits and tea for every meal they had out there. And sleeping on the ground, and hoping for clear weather. They had canvas shelters, but those were little more than rectangles of waxed canvas that would cover two people in a no-more-than-moderate rainstorm. She couldn’t imagine being in a thunderstorm and trying to keep dry under that scrap of fabric. For a moment, she had the mental image of someone sleeping under their horse while that tent barely draped over the horse’s back.

Breakfast was excellent with real bread, but no one talked about anything but their plans for the ride. No one lingered over breakfast or farewells. The three teams were in the process of mounting up when Sai handed Delia and Venidel a pair of hand-scythes, and made a shooing motion.

“Ah, fodder duty,” Venidel said, hanging the scythe on his belt. “Have you a plan? Because I don’t.”

“I do, actually.” She felt a little warm glow that he had deferred to her. “If you have some magic way of gathering what we cut into a kind of ball or bale, I can mark a spot among the horses to drop it with my Gift.”

“Oh!” He brightened. “So we needn’t carry the bulk of it at all! I should have thought of that. Well, it’ll surely take effort on both our parts, but I’d rather put in the effort with magic than manual labor in this case.”

“I feel the same,” she agreed. “I could do the gathering-up too, but I think it’d exhaust me to do both. So that’s on you. And I thought that we’d start parallel to yesterday’s trail, at the farthest place we marked, and work our way back. So instead of my having to move things farther and farther with each grass ball, I’ll be doing it shorter and shorter. Plus, we might find something good along the way.” She walked over to the horses, who greeted her with a glance and whicker. After some toeing about, she found a stone shaped a little like a rabbit. That would do. Just to be sure, Delia defined the rabbit’s appearance with pocket chalk, and set it upright against a larger stone.

Venidel made a fancy bow and waved her on. Together they scrambled over the rocky shoreline until they were both sure there were no more bits of yarn to be seen in the forest underbrush. Venidel sighed as he regarded the tangle of vines immediately in front of them. “Well,” he said with resignation, the wind whistling through the branches of the trees, and brown leaves flying, “this will still be work. We’ll still have to cut the damned stuff.”

“You mean this isn’t the glamor of magic?” Delia teased Venidel.

“It is exactly that! A ‘glamor’ is an illusion! All of us have learned these past few weeks that the daily utility of magic is what’s valuable. But it isn’t pretty! No, the great tales never speak of drying sewage or raising grass. Or razing grass. It’s always some monsters, or invasions, or demons. So many demons.”

What the horses would eat as fodder tended to be concentrated in lopsided circles, tiny meadows where the tree cover was interrupted. There was generally not too much for her to lift when Venidel muttered under his breath and twirled his finger in the palm of his hand, and the cut grasses and weeds swirled as if there was a whirlwind animating them, compacting in no time into a ball that weighed just about as much as a toddler, and was about the same size. As soon as the whirling stopped, Delia “grasped” the grass ball, pictured the rabbit-shaped stone she’d found among the horses, built up her power, took a deep, grass-scented breath, and pushed the volume of space the grass ball filled, and blinked.

The ball vanished. Venidel nodded approval, and even the rattling of branches above them sounded a bit like applause.

“And that is why we will never be employed as babysitters. Much better plan than mine,” he said. “Which involved my making grass balls, but then called for us to borrow one of the horses, hitch it to a basic sledge, and haul it that way. It seemed a better plan than carrying the damned things two at a time.”

“Do we have a basic sledge?” she asked in surprise, because surely something like that would have been hard to hide—

“Well, no,” he admitted, “we’d have had to build one.”