“I called the Paladin Sweet Cheeks,” Muriel muttered, the words ringing hollow like life had left her along with them.
“And you bullied him into stripping in front of you,” Stephan added. “For your own amusement.”
His wet clothes clung to his skin, the chill seeping inward, and if not for the conversation they were having, he would have taken them off to dry.
He should have been shaken, but he was actually in a good mood for having survived what was probably more dangerous than a battlefield. Still, missing a chance to get slivers of petty revenge could set a poor precedent.
Muriel buried her face in her hands, suitably embarrassed, only her crimson ears visible. As far as Stephan was concerned, their score was even.
“It’s fine.” He chuckled. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”
Then he took in his sorry state, his dagger’s beat-up blade, and the singular surviving boot. He wasn’t quite happy with them after living in Cliffort, and with one missing, he had a good excuse. He removed it and chucked it into the river, where it landed with a splash. Then something else splashed, dragging the helpless boot into the depths.
“So,” Stephan deliberately turned around, ignoring the river dragon grabbing scrap leather, “you were teaching me how to read tracks before we took a swim in the fine river of death over there.”
Muriel lowered her hands, her cheeks still flushed. “Why would you want to learn how to track? You’re the Paladin.”
“Because I believe it’s a useful skill to have,” he said simply. “And I can think of a number of situations in which it will come in handy.”
Especially if he could grow proficient enough to follow tracks inside a town or a city. Cliffort’s warlock was the greatest threat he had faced thus far, even including the river dragons, and Stephan had no idea how to approach the problem without discovering his identity or at least finding his lair.
Muriel looked him in the eye, searching for something as she studied his face. Whatever it was, she either found it or didn’t, a firmness setting in her gaze and bearing as she nodded with confidence.
“I will give it my all, Sir Paladin.”
“Steve is fine,” Stephan said and rolled his shoulder, the one the river dragon had tugged at. “Now, my journey south has several purposes, one is finding out what happened with the Ranger, which I have achieved. The second is learning all the useful skills you have to offer, which I’m currently doing, thanks to you. And finally, I want to see what’s happening in the bandit baronies and the beastlands beyond the wastes.”
The wind carried a faint mineral tang along with that of the river as it blew against Stephan’s face.
“Do you think we can realistically achieve that one under our circumstances?” He looked back at the water. “It looks to me we’re stranded on this side. Which isn’t bad. I planned not to return for a while.”
In fact, Stephan expected he would die in the south after living a turbulent life there. Poking around bandits and dangerous monsters, dragons included, seemed like a recipe for a violent, untimely demise. Hopefully some levels too, but so far, he had gained nothing while death had shaken his hand and sucked on his foot.
I killed at least one of those dragons, and yet not a drop of warmth entered my chest.
“What can you tell me about the wasteland and the lands beyond?”
“Um, well,” Muriel started nervously, fidgeting with her hands before she quickly collected herself. “The wasteland is really long. I don’t know how long, but it’s very, very long and forty to eighty miles wide. It might have wider patches, but I’ve never been there, nor has anyone I know. We could cross here, where it’s some fifty miles wide, but we generally move downriver for a day or two. That way we can hunt and smoke some ducks for supplies and fetch empty gourds for water from caches we have hidden along the riverbank.”
She looked at Stephan. “There should also be some spare clothes in there, the likes of which people around these parts wear, in case we needed to go to an outlaw village.”
He shifted his weight, moist grit rising between his toes as he considered what Muriel had said. “That sounds useful; we should head there. Now, can I expect you won’t let up with the teaching?”
“Yes, Sir, I mean no, Sir.”
“Steve,” Stephan smirked. “Just Steve. And can we start with these nice brand-new prints I just left. I’ve made some barefooted and some with a shoed foot.”
Muriel didn’t find the joke funny, and instead started explaining everything to Stephan, diving painfully into the details unlike before.
“Wait, wait, stop,” he said. “We’ll do it like before. I fumble through it, then you correct the mistakes.”
He looked towards the water from which a flat and wide reptile, back covered in hard scales and two beady eyes atop a massive head, was attempting to crawl out of while remaining inconspicuous.
The thing seemed lumbering on land, but Stephan wasn’t deceived.
“We can continue the lesson further away from the river.”
***
They reached their destination two days later, using the night to rest and smoke a pair of ducks Muriel caught while their days passed in moving at a crawl through the track-infested grasslands. Muriel had mostly recovered her original manner, but still acted overly respectfully. More importantly, instead of torturing Stephan by drawing out every tidbit he could gather from a set of prints, she quickly explained what was obviously beyond his level.
Stephan didn’t mind the change, and he occasionally found himself spotting random disturbances in the natural state of things - patterns as she called them. Interruptions in the flow and small wrongnesses in the world, all of which Muriel assured him was normal once you started seeing.
“You’re starting to see, S—teve,” she still had trouble with the way of address, “Trackers notice more than regular people, but we learn how to focus on what we’re looking for while ignoring everything else other than the most obvious tracks. Novices don’t know how to do that. That’s why their eyes burn and their heads hurt the first two to three weeks when learning how to do it.”
Stephan exhaled slowly. The splitting headaches had grown further and further apart, but on occasion still struck to remind him of the torture he was putting his brain through. Especially when he reexamined the same set of tracks, paying even greater attention to questionable details.
“Did you spot it?” Muriel asked, and Stephan stopped, looking around.
The land stretched out in muted greens and browns. A stunted, struggling tree grabbed for the heavens; three shrubs huddled a few yards away.
“No,” he said after scanning the unassuming patch of grassland, nothing grabbing his attention nor indicated anything unnatural.
“That branch is wrong,” she pointed. “See how it’s tipping too low? When it was nimbler, someone tied it to the ground as a snare and left it that way. It wasn’t one of ours who did it, but we noticed the oddity and made it a landmark. Also, the crossing is harder here; the river is wider and shallower, which makes it the dragons’ breeding pool, so outlaws should keep away and never try to cross here.”
Muriel carefully moved the thorny bush and worked its branches. A hollow interior came into view, filled with packages wrapped in oiled cloth and two dozen gourds of various sizes, neatly stoppered and stacked by size, along with other trappings.
She grabbed two gourds, a big one and a small one, then handed both to Stephan. The yellowish-brown vessels were surprisingly light in his hand, their walls smooth and hard, like two polished stones brought together with a stopper on top.
Muriel then took two of the packs and opened them. Inside were bundles of beige cloth, which turned out to be very loose clothes. At first glance, they were nothing but sheets, and as Muriel helped Stephan get dressed, they draped over him, slack and folded in layers tied by lengths of sturdy rope.
“This part of the hat,” Muriel tugged at the bit of fabric just at the edge of Stephan’s vision, “you pull down if the wind picks up. The dust stings when it hits you, and can hurt your eyes if you’re not careful.”
Then she moved onto the belt. “Like everything else, this part of your cloak folds here. It covers your gourd and keeps your water cool as it does the rest of you. The big one you carry slung across your shoulder, under your armpit like this.”
She demonstrated everything he needed to know about his new clothes and moccasins with hard, wooden soles before they split the smoked meat and bundled their old clothes in the same oiled cloth from which they had taken their desert garbs and replaced it in the bush. Finally, they took a sheaf of arrows and another pair of packages with clothes to carry with them.
“So, what’s going to kill me here?” Stephan asked jokingly as they left the green patch and entered the waste, the soft mixture of silt and coarse sand giving way to hard rock.
“There are giant scorpions in the desert.” She showed the size with her hands, roughly something Misher the fisher would say escaped him when he was down in his cups.
“That’s over three feet, Muriel.” Stephan laughed, but the Tracker didn’t.
“They grow over three feet long; the poison is lethal, but not immediately. You get to live a couple of hours, your guts feeling like someone’s tearing you apart. Then there are the wasteland lions. They attack at dawn or dusk, but as long as you keep away from ledges, you’re safe.”
Muriel smiled mirthlessly. “Too bad sheltered places that have ledges make for the best resting places where we’re shielded from the chill winds. However, wyverns pose the greatest threat. They are rare, and our clothes will help us blend in with the terrain, but if they spot prey as large as us, they will chase doggedly. We stand a better chance of killing it than losing it. And as for killing it, wyverns are smaller than river dragons, but not by much. Imagine a fifteen foot long river dragon, but with wings and a massive, ax-like beak…”