“Good Gods Sanguine,” Edith muttered to herself as we looked out across the destroyed bandit camp. “I know ye fought thirty of them, but did ye have to go after them like a fox in a hen house?”

  Even I could admit that in the new morning’s light, the scene was somewhat extreme. Cassia was a few steps away from us, pressing her head against a tree’s trunk. Visk stood nervously a little behind us, wringing their hands. They were probably thinking that the gruesome sight could inspire me into another bout of bloodlust.

  “It was dark,” I responded grimly. “When they ran, I chased.”

  It really was that simple to me. If the bandits had stayed and fought as a group, I might have been in actual danger. Picking them off piecemeal had made the task far easier. It also spread the carnage around a larger area.

  “Do you… want me to start digging?” Visk asked anxiously. “I c-can… find a shovel, or something close enough.” Edith ran her hand across her face.

  “The first thing we’re gonnae do,” Edith said “Is gather up all the bits of folk lying around. There’s enough tarp here to bury them in. We’ll bundle what we can find together and move it all…” She pointed to a wide open spot of ground that was far away from the stream. “-over yonder. Best be quick about it too. Things will get unpleasant if we let the sun set on them.”

  “What about… ah… their stuff?” Visk asked. Edith turned to glare at them. “Wait! You came up here to… to settle down, right? You’re going to need things! They… they probably don’t need it any more.” Edith sighed.

  “Pilfering stolen bandit goods,” Edith muttered. “Who would’a thought I’d see the day. Fine. But if I catch ye thieving… Ye know the deal.” Edith flicked her hand at Visk and indicated that they should get started.

  “Edith, I think I’m going to be sick again,” Cassia croaked from her position by the tree. “It’s awful!”

  “I hate to tell ye lass, but this is what ye signed up for,” Edith said with a sigh. “Ye were very brave, making that decision last night. Ye have a kinder heart than I might. But ye made the choice, now ye have’ta follow through.”

  “That man is missing his legs Edith!” Cassia sobbed, followed by a gagging noise.

  “Sanguine, where did that man’s legs go?” Edith asked me solemnly.

  “... Threw them at…” I looked around. “Him.” I pointed with a claw to another body across the camp who had an extra pair of limbs. “Tripped.” That had been a stroke of luck for me. The unlucky bandit had fallen onto his own blade.

  Edith reached up and rubbed her temples.

  “Sanguine, please help our lass put on her grown lady knickers-” Edith started to say. “No, forget I said that. Please go help Cassia by…” She gesticulated with both hands. “Just be there for her and do what she asks ye, within reason.”

  “Doesn’t bother you?” I asked Edith as I stood up from my haunches. “... Blood, death?”

  “Oh it bothers me plenty my beasty,” Edith replied. “I’m going to hold onto you tonight and cry a lot of unladylike tears, which ye will say nothing about. I’m going to try to remember all those times ye’ve done good by us. But I didn’t become an alchemist and a healer by shying away from pain and suffering.”

  “Edith…,” I said quietly.

  “Yes beasty?” she asked, looking over at me quizzically.

  “Inside of cave is…,” I struggled to articulate my thoughts. I spoke quietly so that Cassia did not overhear. “Bad. Very bad. Do not… show Cassia.”

  “That’s where-...,” Edith started to ask, but left it hanging. A nod from me was all the confirmation she needed. “Understood. I’ll be careful. I’ll… deal with that one first. Rip off that tarp for me, would ye Beasty?”

  I pulled apart the crude structure Edith had pointed out to me and gave her the tarp in question as intact as possible. She bundled it up in her arms and headed towards the cave at the back of the gorge.

  By the time I got over to Cassia, she’d finally surrendered to her stomach again. She used some water from her skin to clean her mouth. The stream running through the gorge wasn’t trustworthy until the camp had been fully cleansed.

  “Where’s Edith going?” Cassia asked me as she took a deep breath.

  “Handling… something,” I replied vaguely.

  Cassia looked like she wanted to press me about it, but she glanced around the camp and let it go. Her shoulders slumped. I nudged her with my snout, nuzzling against her until she moved a hand to scratch the scales behind my horns.

  “I suppose I need to get started,” she murmured. “... Sanguine, when this is all done, can I ask you for something?” Her eyes showed the wound in her heart.

  “What, my Hunter Princess?” I rumbled against her.

  “Can you tell me that…,” she started to say, but reconsidered. “I’d like you to fly with me somewhere. Just the two of us for a little while. Way up high. Find somewhere that we can land and… I can hold your head in my lap for a while.” She rubbed her index finger in small circles along the scales behind my horn.

  “Yes,” I agreed. I didn’t understand why we’d need to go somewhere else to do that, but Edith had asked me to do what my Cassia asked within reason.

  “Good…,” Cassia murmured. “That will… will give me something to look forward to.” She pulled back from me and clapped her cheeks with her palms. “Okay then. Let’s get started.”

  Cleaning up the camp took the rest of the day. That was just to get all of the bodies moved out, the debris piled into stacks, and to clear out the stream so that we had clean drinking water. True to Edith’s prediction, the smell had gotten pretty foul by the afternoon.

  Edith had been worried about setting up a homestead, which would have taken months of cutting down logs and processing them into usable lumber. Now we had the exact opposite problem. Even after the bandits had burned down the logging camp, there was plenty of usable material sitting in the gorge.

  The problem was going to be sorting out what was useful and what was junk. It was of little surprise that a group of bandits would have a few men with sticky fingers in their number. That had resulted in a large collection of random objects with no immediate clear purpose.

  Visk proved to be talented at that kind of work. I’d kept a careful eye on them while helping Cassia. I still couldn’t detect their scent, but had no intention of letting them know that. They seemed convinced that I’d be able to mercilessly hunt them down if they tried to escape. In truth, they’d have gotten away from me last night if they’d not been incredibly unlucky.

  Different categories of items were piled up according to their use and ‘value’. Many things I thought were worthless were apparently considered valuable to humans. One example was a jug that didn’t hold much liquid, but was made out of ‘glass’ like my Edith’s alchemy equipment. Glass was apparently rare and highly prized in ‘the boonies’. The Redstone Hills were apparently considered to be far ‘in the boonies’, whatever that meant.

  There was a bit of trouble with piling up the weapons. I’d caught sight of Visk trying to hide a knife away. In response, I pinned Visk to the ground with my claws. Around that same time, Edith had returned from the cave carrying a long wrapped bundle. Her expression was especially grim.

  “They tried to hide a weapon, aye?” Edith asked sternly after looking over the scene. Cassia and I confirmed that. “If they do it again, drop them off the side of the mountain Sanguine. I’m all out of mercy today.” Edith then headed off to find a safe place to lay her burden down.

  Gathering the rest of the weapons fell to Cassia after that. By the time the sun set, everyone was exhausted.

  Visk proved able to light a small fire, which they sat next to sullenly. I laid on my side, stretched out. I was finally clean again. Edith had demanded in no uncertain terms that I was to take the first available opportunity to wash the filth off of my body. True to her words earlier in the day, she was buried under my outstretched wing, arms wrapped around my body.

  Cassia had gone just out of sight to clean herself. I could hear her singing softly in the dark. She’d done so sometimes when I was small, but I hadn’t heard her do it lately. Maybe I could ask her to sing to me on the excursion she’d asked for.

  “So… Dragons,” Visk said, breaking the silence. “I didn’t think those were… real.”

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  “Real. Am here,” I rumbled back at them, one hooded amber orb watching in the low firelight. “What are… you?”

  “I’m…,” Visk said, hesitating. They reached up and rubbed the tip of one ear, which twitched lightly under their fingertips. “My people call ourselves the Dok’aellen. The humans call us… dark elves, I suppose on account of our skin.”

  That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. T’laanga had darker skin than Visk did.

  “We also are more comfortable in the night rather than day,” Visk continued. “The sun hurts our eyes and burns us easily.” Visk tucked their hands under their backside. “Humans get nervous when people spend most of their time out at night. They accuse us of being thieves, or other kinds of crimes.”

  I stared at Visk, sitting on their hands in the middle of a destroyed bandit camp. They seemed to get the message and cleared their throat uncomfortably.

  “Well, people aren’t lining up to hire you when you… look like me, so I fell in with some… not great people,” Visk muttered. “One thing led to another and… Captain Avery picked me up off the side of the road a few years ago. We had some… good times. A lot of moving about.”

  “How did you even get here?” Cassia asked as she walked back into the light of the campfire. “The Cloudshear mountains are supposed to be almost impassable.” She was using a cloth to pat her hair dry. The rest of her was a bit damp, so her tunic was clinging to her. I breathed in through my nostrils. She had a clean scent, but it was still her.

  Cassia wandered over to where I was laying and patted on my horn insistently. I raised it up and she sat down beneath, letting her lay my head in her lap.

  “There is… no way I’m going to get used to that,” Visk said with wide eyes. “You just told a dragon to move over, and he did. Just like that?”

  “Well he is My Dragon,” Cassia said snootily. Edith could be heard grumbling beneath my wind. “-Our Dragon, sorry.” Visk blinked at her owlishly.

  “Right… so-,” Visk said before shaking their head. “The Captain had a map. There was supposed to be this…” Visk’s ears waggled a bit. “-fantastic treasure, buried deep in the mountains. A vault from an ancient empire.” My attention was piqued.

  “The whole crew here signed on to help crack it open,” they continued. “Except there wasn’t any vault. Or maybe we just sucked at finding it. Either way, we climbed all over the mountains last summer. I wanted to turn back once fall came close, but the Captain insisted we’d almost found it. Then a blizzard hit and…” Visk shivered, despite the mildly cool spring night. “We ended up getting lost. Very lost. Half the crew died between the cold and avalanches.”

  I knew quite a lot about those things. While I didn’t care much for Visk, I could sympathize with their plight.

  “We dragged ourselves down the mountains here as things started to warm up a couple of weeks ago,” Visk went on. “Captain acted like that was his plan all along, finding a route across the Cloudshears. ‘That’s the real treasure’, he said. ‘The money we’ll make from taxing traders!’.” Visk was able to do a passable impression of Avery. They’d clearly spent a lot of time together.

  “So yeah. Most of the… more agreeable men from the crew didn’t make it. Only the ones willing to cut another man’s throat for his last bite of bread. That also meant the worst of the lot. I don’t know why Avery tried to… set up a kingdom, or whatever he was trying to call it, out here.”

  “I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, but he didn’t… He didn’t used to be like this. Sure, he was… a little reckless at times, but…” Visk drew their knees up to their chin, tucking their head in against their legs. “It’s like… he died up on the mountain. What came down wasn’t him anymore… just something… broken, running around with his face.”

  Cassia rubbed her hand back and forth across my snout, looking into the camp fire. Silence settled back over the gorge for a while. Beneath my wing, Edith shifted to a more comfortable position. I continued to watch Visk, unsure about whether I believed their story or not.

  “Did you love him?” Cassia asked after a time. Visk startled a little bit. When they looked up, their eyes were damp. “Your… Captain Avery. Did you love him?”

  Visk didn’t seem to know how to respond. The end of their ears vibrated intensely before slowly drooping back down. Their cheeks turned a deep charcoal color.

  “I… I thought I did,” Visk said quietly. “We never… said anything like that. He always enjoyed… company, where he could find it. But he… he always talked about… when we struck it rich. That we’d buy an island together. Somewhere warm. Never worry about… going hungry or running away, ever again.”

  Cassia settled her palm onto one of the ridges along my head. I could feel her holding onto me tightly.

  “And now?” my Cassia asked quietly.

  “... I think the man I loved… if that’s what it was, is gone,” Visk choked out. “And I don’t… I don’t know what to do.” That seemed to be the extent of turmoil they could handle. Visk got up and walked away. They sat on a rock with their back to us a small distance away, head in their hands.

  My Cassia sighed softly and curled up around my head, holding me tight to her body.

  “Archibald, I really hate to say this, but I think you’ve gotten us lost,” Mortimer said to his familiar. The white raven flapped its wings irritably. A few feathers were still missing from when the magic orb had finally exploded on them.

  They were fortunate, perhaps, that the orb had exploded when they were in the middle of being attacked by a pack of wolves. Never one to waste a good explosion, Mortimer had lobbed the orb right into the middle of the pack right as it fully destabilized. As a result, they’d had plenty of wolf meat and furs to get them through the last days of winter.

  It was a shame about the coach driver, but whose fault was it that the poor man had run off into the night? He’d been screaming about insane old men talking to birds. Ludicrous.

  There was also the incident with the ferryman that had stranded them in their current predicament. It was just plain bad luck that a sudden bout of warm weather had weakened the snow clinging to the side of the Cloudshears and started an avalanche. The avalanche had gone all the way to the River Coil just as their ferry barge was passing through.

  “No, I’m not saying it’s your fault that the ferryman went into the water when the wave hit us. No, I’m not blaming you for soiling the deck right next to his foot. You can’t be blamed for the occasional bout of avian incontinence. We’ve been eating wolf for weeks!”

  Mortimer stood on the side of the river bank, ringing out his robe and his beard with his hands. Archibald was perched on his staff, which was tangled up with a pile of driftwood a few feet away. The wreck of the ferry was a mile up the river from their position, just barely visible through the trees.

  “What I’m blaming you for is pecking me in the middle of my spell! I had a perfectly fashioned line-of-sight incantation on my tongue and you interrupted me!” The old man pulled a small eel out of his beard and tossed it back into the river. “I am not a ‘snack’ Archibald! I don’t care what those lady bird friends of yours say!”

  Mortimer crossed over to the pile of driftwood and yanked his staff out of it. Archibald fluttered up into the air before flapping back down to perch on Mortimer’s head. The old man snapped his fingers and a wide brimmed hat appeared in his hand. He shooed the raven back off of his bald dome and jammed the hat over it.

  “Blast, it’s still soggy. Years of study to summon it fully repaired and laundered, but get it the slightest bit damp and it stays that way for days.”

  The raven perched back on Mortimer’s staff, tilting its head back and forth.

  “Yes I suppose it could be worse. I could have teleported us back where we started. At that point I’d have just said ‘bugger it’ and took a nap.”

  Archibald wished that had been what had happened. He was distracted from day dreaming about his nest at home by a man falling out of the tree line onto the riverbank.

  “Oh look at that Archibald, it’s a new acquaintance. He’s dressed like a clown, though. I hope he’s not. We’ll have to kill him if he is.” Mortimer strolled over to the colorful man, who was painfully dragging himself to his feet on the sand.

  “Hello good sir,” Mortimer called out. “You wouldn’t happen to be a practitioner of juggling, would you?”

  “Wha-?” ‘Howard’ the Bard said groggily as he tried to focus on the strange old man with the bird in front of him. Two days of walking in circles with no food or water could do strange things to a man’s mind. “-uhh, I can juggle, yea-SHITE!”

  In spite of his disorientation, well honed survival instincts in ‘Howard’s’ body had him dive to the sand as a ball of fire shot past him. Mortimer raised his staff again to cast another spell.

  “Young man, if all clown school taught you was how to eat dirt, you clearly got high marks,” Mortimer said with a cackle. “But you’ll need more than that to get one over on a proper Mage!”

  “I’m not a cl-OWW,” ‘Howard’ yelped as another bolt of fire singed his shoulder. “I’m a bard! A harking BARD!”

  Mortimer lowered his staff and looked at his raven.

  “Isn’t a ‘bard’ the same thing as a clown?” Mortimer asked the bird. “... Oh, it’s not? They look the same though don’t they? … No you’re right, he doesn’t have the nose. Clowns have to have a nose. That’s the rules.”

  “Young man, just to confirm,” Mortimer said to ‘Howard’ as the man scrambled backwards on the sand. “You are not, in fact, a clown or prone to any type of Tomfoolery, Shenanigans, or Capering?”

  “Never capered in my life!” ‘Howard’ shouted earnestly. He didn’t even know what ‘capering’ meant. “Don’t even do Hanky-Panky, swear on my mum’s grave!”

  “Do you not? Poor fellow,” Mortimer tutted to himself. “No wonder you’re dressed like a buffoon. Any man would go a little mad without a woman’s touch their whole life. Or a man’s. It’s not my place to judge.”

  ‘Howard’ was pretty sure he was hallucinating by that point in the conversation.

  “I’m not dead, am I?” he asked desperately.

  “No, do you want to be?” asked Mortimer solemnly.

  “NO! No! No! I’m fine, really,” ‘Howard’ said, pulling himself to his feet. “Just let me go in peace and I’ll be on my way.” He looked back and forth along the river bank. He pointed towards Wintertide. “That way!”

  “Oh, lucky us!” Mortimer declared. “That’s where Archibald and I are heading. Terrible accident, you see. Stranded us right here on the river bank. I’ll give you some wolf jerky if you guide us. It’s a bit soggy, but will still put meat on your bones.”

  ‘Howard’ was so hungry that he would have gladly eaten a wolf if one was in front of him. Even then, staying one more minute in the crazy old man’s presence seemed like a bad choice. His stomach growled.

  “Half payment up front,” ‘Howard’ said, trying to muster his courage. Mortimer smiled and pulled a soaked slab of cooked meat out of his robes, slapping it into ‘Howard’s hand.

  “Deal!” Mortimer declared. “Let’s be on our way then, my good Bard! My name is Mortimer and this here is my research assistant Archibald.” Mortimer indicated the white raven. ‘Howard’ stared at it. It stared back, looking suspiciously hungry.

  “My name is Howard,” ‘Howard’ declared. “Howard the Bard, and nothing else.”