When Tomas and I packed up and left the next morning, that conversation was still working its way through my mind. We stopped a little more frequently than I would’ve liked and Tomas seemed a little more concerned with my well-being than the day before, but we made decent time otherwise.

  Shortly after noon, we emerged from the sea of trees, and I paused, eyes on the top of the coming rise.

  “Want to take a break?” Tomas asked. “You look like you could use a few minutes off your feet. I could use a few minutes without the world perched on my back, too.”

  My eyes flicked to the increasingly cloudy sky. “Probably not the worst idea. Might start raining soon, better to rest now while we’re dry.”

  I made my way over to a nearby fallen log. After checking for snakes and other critters, I shrugged out of my pack and helped Tomas out of his before thumping my ass atop the fallen timber.

  “God, this is kicking my ass far more than it should,” I muttered as I fished the last of Cailleach’s kain fruit out of the pouch on my chest.

  “I’m kind of surprised you insisted on leaving, honestly. You still look a bit too much like someone left to the leeches for all this. Though, the kain fruit helps with that.”

  I made a sour face as I flicked the last one into my mouth.

  “Something wrong?”

  “This one’s the last Cailleach gave to me,” I noted.

  Tomas sat up a little straighter and glanced back and forth along the forest edge. “Well, the soil here isn’t quite the best type, but give me a few minutes. I might be able to correct that.”

  As he walked off, I fished our messenger book out, checked for new messages, and wrote a quick entry detailing the journey so far. When I was done, I reread the information Wyk had given Aoife a few times. Not that many units were left to defend Annesport, I guess.

  When Tomas returned with length of stem plastered with dense clusters of red berries, I couldn’t help but squint at it. By the time he sat, it finally dawned on me why the plant seemed so familiar and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Tomas said, holding the plant out to me. “I’m a bit fond of kain fruit, too, but I’m not sure I’d be that happy, even if a friend fetched me some.”

  Still chuckling, I plucked one of the red fruits from the stem and tossed it in my mouth. “Tomas, I’m not just happy for me. I actually recognize the plant from my world. Jenna is going to shit herself when she finds out kain fruit is coffee.”

  “Coffee?”

  I smiled. “Maybe not, though. Coffee has two seeds in it, not just the one, but you dry the seeds and roast them.”

  Tomas’s face shifted to something skeptical. “And you eat them?”

  I paused for a second, trying to remember what little I could. “You could, but they’re really bitter.”

  “I may have burnt a few when I was still just a lad, so I know that’s the case. What do you do with them then?”

  I motioned with my hands, grinning the whole time. “You grind them into a powder and filter hot water through it. Add a little milk, sugar, or honey to taste.”

  Tomas leaned away from me minutely, squinting the entire time. “I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone doing that. It does sound intriguing, though. Is it good?”

  “Is it good?” I snorted. “If you don’t fuck up any of the steps, it’s amazing. Jenna’s more addicted to coffee than I am.”

  “Addicted? To powdered beans?” One of Tomas’s eyebrows rose and he incredulously asked, “How the blazes does that work?”

  Amused at his reaction, I grinned before shrugging. “To be honest, I don’t remember the specifics, but basically, the drink allows you to ignore how tired you are, so—”

  When I paused to figure out how to word the rest, Tomas nodded and muttered, “Right, right, so if you’re ignoring how tired you are, it eventually wears off like any potion. Suddenly you feel more tired, so you drink more. It works less because you never stop actually being tired. Rinse, wash, repeat. Interesting.”

  I spat out a pit and popped another fruit in. “Pretty much exactly that.”

  “Do you think we should save the pits? It’s not much.”

  I glanced down at the stem in my hand. “Honestly, we’d need a lot more than this to make it worth the time. Drying takes days, roasting to the right level of dark isn’t simple, and we don’t have anything to use as a filter.”

  “That’s fair, I suppose. I guess it’s something to look forward to when we get back. Kain fruit is almost a weed back home, depending on where you are in the forest. Grows best near the edge where it can get enough light without being directly exposed. Soil needs to be a little sandy, and adding pine needles periodically helps quite a bit. Really finicky about how much water it can get, too.”

  “You’re oddly familiar with it.”

  Tomas slowly smiled and turned his eyes to the sky. “My mother grew many things. Kain fruit was one of the few she had time to teach me about.”

  I mulled over how to phrase what I was thinking. “Sickness took her?”

  Tomas pressed his lips together and nodded quietly. “I was told she never really recovered after my father died, that eventually she chose to let it end. I don’t know how much I believe that, but it’s not like I knew her before I was born, you know? How could I tell, even as a kid?”

  I spit out another pit and plucked another fruit. “That’s fair.”

  “Sometimes I have trouble remembering her face, but I’ll always remember her smile. I remember how she yelled at all the other kids when they made fun of my ears and called me Dopey Tomas.”

  I reached out and silently patted his shoulder a few times. “Kids can be remarkably cruel.”

  “That they can be.” Tomas drew a slow, mostly even breath. “Adults tend to only be better at hiding it, usually.”

  A few seconds went by with only the wind passing through the trees.

  “Can’t really argue with that, Tomas. That’s one of the reasons friends and family are so important.”

  He nodded and when he focused on me, the brave face was unmistakable. “So what’s this you were saying about our trip getting more complicated yesterday? With yesterday’s excitement, I don’t think my memory is what it should be.”

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  Part of me wanted to just give the kid a hug, even if he was physically older than me, but I knew that wouldn’t help in the slightest. I’d only mentioned that plans had changed during our break right before we smelled the smoke from the tanner’s place. “Right, so you remember the original plan? Just head east, follow the river down until we find a place to cross, follow it to the fog, find a way to Longreach?”

  Tomas nodded.

  “Scrap all that.”

  His brow came down.

  “So, we’re still going to head east, but about halfway to the river, we have to cut north and find a way to Annesport.”

  Squinting, Tomas reached for one of the fruits. “Why?”

  “There are a few places Fiachra wanted us to check out near there. I was kinda hoping we could do that on the way back, but Cailleach asked if we could scout out something in specific. On the plus side, it’s in the outskirts of Annesport, not in town proper, and on the road heading this way. With luck, things might not be so bad with the fog.”

  Tomas seemed to consider this a few moments before starting to nod. “Fair enough. I’m a bit more inclined to do her a favor over Fiachra anyway, even after she carved up a half dozen people in front of me. Well, okay, maybe because of that. If I had to choose which of them was upset at me, I think Fiachra the safer choice.”

  Our break lasted a little longer than I would’ve liked, mostly because I’d been so set on resting that I nearly forgot basic march hygiene. By the time we’d let our feet dry a bit and checked for forming blisters, the cloud cover had darkened even further.

  Climbing the rise, the air shifted, carrying more humidity in its grasp as well as the earthy scent of incipient rainfall. We crested the rise and the landscape brought my feet to a halt, partly because of its beauty, partly because my mind was suddenly wrestling with unfamiliar terms I knew I had no right to know. Most of the terrain was wide, sweeping grasslands, dotted with intermittent groups of trees here and there. The ground sloped much steeper toward our left, southward, while the land ahead of us grew steadily rockier and more broken with fingers of granite emerging from the soil.

  Eastward looked familiar, like a trip through the worst parts of the Ozarks, where stone rose up through the soil everywhere and simply complicated everything. Like southern Missouri, the land transitioned from a higher plateau to a lower one and the native stone to the upper tier was uninterested in simply lowering itself to the level below and fought that change in elevation with everything it had. Unlike southern Missouri, nobody had taken explosives to every inconvenient cleft of rock and just paved a goddamn road through it.

  I couldn’t quite explain why the terrain to the east didn’t feel right. It was the wrong kind of stone for badlands style hills, basaltic granite instead of sedimentary like limestone or sandstone. This shouldn’t exist.

  Words like “fluvial and aeolian processes” bounced around in my head and found little purchase. I’m not a geologist, why would any of that shit make sense to me? Regardless of the litany of the proper names and concepts tugging at my attention, I suddenly understood that I was very much not going to enjoy the rest of the trip eastward along the slope, and I expressed my recognition of that fact with a singular word: “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  I flicked my eyes to the south, noted the coming rain curtain a few minutes out to our southwest, and immediately started shrugging out of my pack. “This is going to suck.”

  “Well, yeah? It’s the Dragon’s Fingers, what did you expect?”

  I squinted at the bard for a solid second before going back at unpacking my poncho. “The Dragon’s Fingers?”

  “That’s what the locals called it anyway, back when there were locals.”

  I acknowledged the comment with an unsatisfied grunt while unfolding the poncho. “That name didn’t show up in any of the shit Fiachra showed me, and the map didn’t suggest anything near as rugged as that looks like it’s going to get.”

  “To be fair, most of the fingers are only technically Syr territory. The plains below belonged to Acadia; the fingers marked the border. Nobody really lived there and most of the mining was done by the Acadians if I remember right. Maybe an oversight?”

  I sighed and motioned to Tomas to hold up the poncho while I got my pack back on. “That’s a hell of an oversight. Is there some sort of story to go with them? Like, something to do with actual dragons?”

  Tomas chuckled. “You could say that, yes.”

  I leveled an unhappy stare for a moment before slipping into the poncho. “There’d better not be dragons out here, Tomas. Nobody said anything about dragons.”

  The bard laughed as I adjusted the poncho, snapped grommets together, and tightened the arms a little.

  Already irritated over the surprise map feature, the fact that the poncho didn’t mesh well with my rifle’s shoulder stirrup pushed things just short of a low boil of fury. If something happened, there’d be no quick way to bring the rifle up. The only saving grace was the fact I could use the sword as a walking stick, even if drawing it meant I had to figure out what to do with the scabbard when I needed it as a sword.

  “Relax, Samuel, there haven’t been any dragons out here since their disagreement with Niet. Per the stories anyway.”

  Niet? Oh, end of the Age of Dragons. Right. “So he fought them here?”

  “Well, a fair bit east of here, but that’s what’s said, yes. I guess you’re not aware that the bowl the Glade is in served as their roost, supposedly?”

  I pursed my lips together while I fished in a chest pocket for the ziplock bag containing the map. “No, but I guess that makes sense.”

  I spent the next few minutes trying to fix our location on the map. Even with using my binoculars, I could only narrow things down to a vague guess due to the limited landmarks and the fact I no longer trusted the map to have any consistent scale. God, I miss topographic maps and GPS. Somewhere my old DI and his land nav fetish are laughing and don’t know why. Fuck my life and fuck you Schmidt.

  “Well, shit,” I muttered, interrupting whatever it was Tomas was humming behind me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice but to keep east. If we go north now, there aren’t a whole lot of landmarks to go by.”

  “Not even a little bit. Past a certain point, it’s all open grass, streams, and ponds. I wouldn’t be surprised if local maps back in the day actually had the individual trees on them as rare as they get. Still, east isn’t as bad as you’d think. I know a few paths.”

  “Good, good.” I tugged the poncho hood a little farther forward as small raindrops started falling around us. “What was that you were humming?”

  “I have no idea. It just popped into my head like most of the rest.”

  He started humming again as he tucked his cloak tighter around him. I noticed the rain literally just rolling off the cloak, much like it was with my poncho, about the same time the tune weaseled its way far enough into my head for me to recognize it.

  We set off again, but the next ten minutes weren’t nearly as aggravating as they could have been because I had to explain what a video game was just to explain where the song came from.

  “I don’t understand how people would enjoy that. Why would people play a game where the entire point was walking from one place to another carrying more heavy shit than any sane person should ever carry?” Tomas huffed as we made our way through the first stretch of rock.

  “That sounds like work,” he added with a grumble and then sounded suddenly offended. “That’s what we’re doing right now, even.”

  Previous aggravation long forgotten, I laughed. “Tomas, I lived in a world where damn near nobody does this shit anymore without a damn good reason. There were roads everywhere; vehicles to move everything. People liked the game because of the story and the fact the world was beautiful. I mean, the landscape was amazing, a lot like this actually. Lots of people lived in cities and rarely got to see untouched nature to this extent.”

  Tomas made an unsatisfied noise. “I suppose I can understand that. I’ve been to a few human cities.”

  “Does it happen a lot? Music popping into your head that’s weirdly appropriate, that is?”

  “All the fucking time, now. All. The. Time.”

  “Well, let me know if the music changes to something spooky. Or violent.”

  “Why would it—” Tomas’s sudden curiosity vanished almost as quickly as it had surfaced. “Ah, right. I doubt it works that way.”

  I shrugged and gestured to the path before us. “Never know, we could be lucky. Lead on, good sir.”

  Instead of blowing through, the cloud cover seemed to just seemed to settle in and keep pace with us the rest of the day. Sticking near the top of the transition down to the plains, the ground we covered went back and forth between purely rocky terrain and sparse grass. More than a few times I counted my blessings that my boots had good soles with grip as wet rock was not the best surface to traverse.

  We made camp under a stone overhang, earlier than I’d hoped, but the constant rain made it only a matter of time before one of us slipped on a rock we couldn’t clearly see.

  When I woke up after completing my half of the night watch and noted over my cold MRE that it technically wasn’t raining anymore. We’d gone from a steady rain to a light misting that really wanted to be a drizzle but couldn’t quite get over the hump.

  “So, since we’ve got a bit before it’s reasonably light out,” I said to Tomas while soaking the little chunk of MRE bread that more closely resembled concrete in what was left of my water. “I’m going to unpack something you’ll want to see.”

  Tomas didn’t say much until I had the drone mostly assembled a few minutes later. “Uhm, Samuel, what is that?”

  “Think of it like a mechanical bird that let’s you see what it sees. Give me a few more minutes, you’ll see.”