The climb with Grace proved slow, grueling work. Muriel had done her best to make it as comfortable as possible by securing her to his back and shoulders with the assorted pieces of desert garb. The arrangement didn’t stop the young woman from shaking and squeezing Stephan’s chest with all the strength she could muster. He even caught her sobbing and whimpering several times.
“Did you look down?” he asked as he pulled them over the cliff’s top and onto the edge of the highland forest.
She nodded against his back, and Stephan chuckled. “A beginner’s mistake. The experienced climbers don’t look up or down.”
“Stop teasing the child, S—teve.” Muriel stood waiting for them, the Tracker having no issues scaling the cliff by herself. She looked around. A near-solid wall of thorns choked the ground without revealing a hint of a path.
“Come on,” she pointed. “Blackberries don’t grow in the shade; we’ll soon be rid of them.”
Stephan’s jaw dropped when the Tracker moved through the sea of bushes, hardly disturbing any and snagging on none.
“Could you carry me?” Grace asked, still tied to Stephan’s back. “I just ran through them the first time, but I don’t want to go through that again if I don’t have to.”
“Sure,” he didn’t mind. He was going to walk through them anyway.
With a deep inhale, he steadied himself and started walking. His pants caught on thorny canes, the thorns scratching against his skin but failing to pierce it. The first ten feet, the blackberries were thick, a dozen of them snatching at Stephan every time he moved, faint ripping sounds following each step. Then they thinned, and soon, they entered the much more navigateable forest, joining Muriel.
“Do you know where your village is?” She helped Grace off Stephan’s back, undoing the advanced knots with which she had secured the young woman.
Grace looked left and right, thinking for a moment before shaking her head.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been this far from home. It shouldn’t be too far, I think.”
Muriel didn’t show an ounce of surprise. “Well, Steve, I guess it’s time for you to find some tracks. Animal or human. If we can’t find the village by nightfall, the least we can do is find some food.”
“We can’t,” Grace paled, “the baron might hang us for poaching.”
She… has a point. If you hunt in a forest that doesn’t belong to you back home, and the noble finds out, they fine you. Are we poaching?
Whether she wanted to or not, Muriel dispelled Stephan’s doubt. “Our kingdom doesn’t recognize your baron’s claim. These are free lands as far as we are concerned with the game belonging to whoever finds it, and we’ll handle a couple of Commoners should they catch us and try anything.”
Then she glanced at Stephan. “It’ll be fine. There’s enough dangerous animals here that they can’t enforce their hunting bans. And even if some crazy forester crosses our path, he will be a level ten or twenty Commoner, nothing either of us should be afraid of, so relax.”
The fact that they might get caught didn’t frighten Stephan for multiple reasons. No, what he wandered about was something entirely different.
“Do you have a king here?” he asked Grace, thinking how they referred to the southern lands as bandit baronies.
“We do,” she said, “this is our kingdom.”
Stephan thought the answer would make things clearer, but it only further muddled the water. Why did everyone refer to the bandit lords as barons, but never mentioned a king? Was it to make them feel illegitimate? What was right and what was wrong? Should he obey local laws?
I never promised to follow any laws. The thought was new, but logical. He vowed to protect the weak from the strong who were hurting them. Whether they were fiends, fae, dragons, beasts, or other humans.
I never promised to follow the laws back home either. His power would grow with each life, and at some point no law could bind him. Is that how the past Paladins imposed their will on the kingdom? I really need to read those books on law; they might hold some clues…
He dismissed the thought. It wasn’t a matter he could pursue in his current life. Instead, he focused on the task Murial had given him. “If I miss something that could hurt us, like we don’t find dinner because of my mistake or a wyvern is watching us from atop a branch, feel free to take over, all right?”
Muriel smirked and said nothing. Stephan kept looking at her, but her smirk was all the acknowledgement he got before he started searching for tracks.
The forest had rabbits and foxes, and—
“What’s this?” Stephan pointed at something that was deeper and wider than a wolf’s print. The animal was certainly bigger and heavier, but it didn’t have claws.
“Forest lion. We don’t have those up north. They are smaller and less aggressive than the wasteland lions. I’ve heard several people mention that it ran away when it came across their group. Still, there’s only three of us, so it might attack. Those prints are two to three days old. Now you explain why they are fresh, but not that fresh.”
And Stephan did. He relied on a mix of knowledge he had gained in the dry Iron Forest and the damp grassland at the bank of the Desertcutter River, giving answers that made even him feel proud of himself.
“… and the ants here have cleared the entrance completely, and that takes half a day. Then you can see these scratches; they passed here enough times to leave a mark. So, at least a day and a half old.”
Grace just stood by the side, watching and listening until Stephan reached the end of his short discourse on the clues he could gather from the dozen or so tracks he had been looking at.
“That’s passable,” Muriel said, her voice suggesting a much higher evaluation. “But the forest lion is neither a villager nor supper, so let’s keep going.”
Around noon, they caught a rabbit, through no fault of Stephan’s. Muriel simply drew an arrow all of a sudden, loosed, and the critter was dead.
A few hours later, Stephan came across boot-prints.
“We still have a couple of hours of daylight,” Muriel said. “You can try to find the village on your own for a while.”
The teasing look told him she already knew exactly where the Lacy’s home was, and they were relatively close. He first scanned the forest, searching for thinning trees or more light which would reveal the edge of the woods, but he didn’t notice anything.
The village was at least fifty yards away.
He listened closely, but all he heard were the sounds of the forest - chirping and rustling of birds, insects, and small critters moving around. Finally, inhaled deeply through the nose, nostrils flaring.
“There’s smoke in the air.” He slowly turned, trying to catch the flow of the breeze, but it seemed to come from multiple directions.
“It’s somewhere over there,” he gestured in the general direction from which he guessed the true wind was coming.
“A good guess,” Muriel smiled. “Now, you need to confirm that with the tracks, and not by cheating because you could guess what I was thinking and what I know.”
Stephan frowned at her. “And you found the village based on this here print?”
“No, I smelled the smoke too. You’ve been leading us around it for a while now. I’m surprised we didn’t come across a road or a beaten trail.” She turned towards Grace. “Your people must really fear their lord when there are next to no hunter paths, and the only one to venture here is an old man collecting firewood.”
Stephan wanted to ask how she knew that, but instead of using his mouth, he used his eyes.
There. He found the patch from which a thick, lichen-covered branch had been moved and then a couple of larger twigs snapped off it.
“That branch was too big for him, so he broke off what he could and carried it,” Muriel explained what Stephan had already concluded. “That, or he was afraid of picking up the whole thing. Probably both.”
“We’re only allowed to collect twigs,” Grace confirmed a part of her guess. “If you pick up fallen logs or big branches and get caught, the enforcers haul you off for forced labor until the baron says you’ve paid the value of the wood you stole.”
Stephan listened with half an ear as he processed the new information. For someone to collect twigs in the forest meant an armful, or perhaps a basket. He just had to follow the person’s trail and they would be back at the village within an hour.
Stephan commented on what the forager was doing until he moved aside a bush with broken twigs and reached a disturbed mushroom patch growing next to a thick birch. “He stopped here to pick button mushrooms.”
Muriel passed the bush and glanced at the mushrooms over Stephan’s shoulder. They had beautiful, pure white caps, smooth gills, and slender stems. The mildly disinterested look in her eyes grew sharp in an instant, her pupils going wide. She turned so suddenly she nearly bumped into Grace.
“The village is this way, hurry.” Urgency tinged her voice, and she was already running towards the village.
“What happened?” Stephan shouted, passing bewildered Grace and following behind Muriel.
“Those aren’t button mushrooms; that’s destroying angel. We have to stop the old man before he eats one.”