(Attendance… plz…)
….
The city gate at this hour even though so early was busy enough that nobody paid them much attention as they walked through.
Carts coming in, carts going out, the guards at the walls doing the slow patient work of checking papers and waving people past.
Reinhard and Felt cut across to the far side of the road, where a short stretch of open ground served as a waiting area for parties departing on their quest for them it was escort one.
Nfirea was already there with the wagon.
It wasn't a large wagon, which ine would expect. The bed was narrow and the sides were low, built for carrying herbs and crates of supplies rather than passengers. A single horse stood harnessed at the front, patient in the way of horses who had spent most of their working life doing this exact sort of job. Nfirea himself was sitting on the driver's bench with a cloth bag open on his lap, looking through something inside it.
He noticed them coming before they got close. His face brightened, and he waved, half-rising off the bench. Then his eyes went past them, searching, and when he didn't find what he was looking for the smile didn't quite settle.
"Good morning," he said when they reached the wagon. Then, trying to sound casual about it: "I thought Momon would be coming with you?"
Felt leaned against the side of the wagon and gave him a look. "I thought you'd come right at meeting time, not way before. How long have you been here?"
"About ten minutes," Nfirea said. He rubbed the back of his neck. "I usually come early for these. It's a habit. Nothing worse than other people waiting around on you because you lost track of the hour."
"Hmm." Felt turned her head a little, considering him. "Alright, fair enough."
"We saw Momon at the guild," Reinhard said. "He and Miss Nabe had gone back to their inn for supplies. They should be here shortly."
Nfirea nodded, reassured. Felt folded her arms.
"If they're not, we're leaving without them."
Nfirea looked a touch alarmed. "Haha. Don't worry, Miss Felt, I'm sure they'll…"
"Don't worry," Reinhard said to him, voice gentle. "She is joking."
Felt made a sound that suggested she was only mostly joking, then added, "And just call me Felt. No Miss, no Lady, nothing. Hearing it from one person is already tiring enough."
Nfirea's eyes flicked to Reinhard. The flick was quick and a bit apologetic, the way someone looks at a person they're worried has just been slighted in front of them. Anyone with eyes knew Reinhard was Felt's knight. The careful way he said her name, the Lady Felt he always used, the perfect posture even when carrying her shopping, it wasn't hard to read.
But Reinhard was smiling. Not in any forced or brave-faced way. Just his usual quiet smile, the one he wore when something small amused him. He caught Nfirea's look like he wanted to ask him something.
"Is something the matter?!"
"Huh… no… not really."
Nfirea smiled and relaxed, it seems it was just how they were with each other. He was still trying to find a graceful way to respond to Felt when his eye caught movement further down the street.
"Ah. There they are. Right on time."
Momon's armor was visible from a distance even in a crowd. He and Narberal came through the gate and across the waiting area at a steady walk, supply packs settled on their shoulders. Momon raised a hand as they approached.
"We're ready," he said. "We can leave whenever everyone else is."
"We're ready too." Nfirea set down the bag he'd been going through and gathered up the reins. "It's a long haul, so the sooner we start the better."
Felt climbed up onto the wagon bench long enough to drop her pack next to the other supplies, then hopped back down. She and Reinhard fell into step on the left side of the wagon.
Momon and Narberal took the right. Nfirea flicked the reins, the horse started forward, and the small group moved out of the city and onto the road.
…
There were two ways to reach Carne Village from E-Rantel.
The first ran north first and then east, hugging the outer edge of the great forest for most of its length.
The second cut east first, out across open ground, and only turned north once it was well clear of the trees.
The second was the safer of the two, by any honest measure. The first was shorter but came with the risk of anything that might wander out from between the trees looking for trouble like killing them.
Nfirea had decided, on something of a whim, that he would suggest the first one. Partly to see how the others would react.
He was curious, in the quiet way that young men with more caution than adventure in them sometimes get when they're traveling with people who clearly don't share their caution.
The reactions he'd been expecting never came.
Momon didn't argue. Narberal didn't even blink. Reinhard gave a small nod, the same nod he gave when someone asked him to hold something.
And Felt… Felt actually brightened at the word "monsters," her head tilting the way a cat's does when someone opens a packet of dried meat across the room.
She looked about as worried about the forest route as she would have looked about the breakfast menu at their inn.
Nfirea, a little bewildered, asked Momon and Narberal specifically once the city was behind them, just to be sure. A formality, really. The decision affected all of them, and he didn't want to feel like he'd made it alone.
Momon gave the kind of shrug armor didn't quite allow and said it was fine.
Nfirea took a breath, let it out, and guided the wagon onto the northern road.
They weren't going into the forest itself. The road ran along the edge, with open ground on one side and the tree line on the other.
Monsters that came out of the forest here tended to be weaker monsters. Nothing that two parties of this caliber couldn't handle between them. Nfirea reminded himself of that as they rolled along, and felt a little better.
Felt, walking beside him with one hand resting on the wagon rail, was very clearly hoping for a monster.
…
By the time the sun reached its highest point, the forest had grown from a thin line on the horizon into a wall.
It rose to the east of them, dense and primeval, a vast stretch of dark green that swallowed the distance. The trees were old. Their trunks were thick enough that three men could have stood around one with their arms linked and not quite managed to touch hands. Their branches spread out wide above and crowded together overhead, thickening into a roof of leaves and shadow that the sunlight couldn't push through. Between the trunks, the darkness was almost solid. Where the road came closest, the gaps in the tree line looked like open mouths, patient and waiting.
Reinhard looked into one of those gaps as they passed it and then turned back on the road, nothing else.
…
They walked for hours.
One break in the afternoon to water the horse, let it eat, let the others among them pull out bread and dried meat and chew it while standing up.
After that, back on the road. Nobody asked to stop again. Nfirea had made a mental note of what time they'd left the city and what time it was now, and he was coming to the quiet realization that at this pace they'd reach Carne Village somewhere around midnight, possibly earlier in the morning if they kept pushing.
None of his companions seemed bothered by that.
At one point in the mid-afternoon, Reinhard looked across at Felt, who had been walking for over for hours without a word of complaint, and asked, carefully, whether she might want to take a turn on the wagon or if she would like to rest.
"I'm fine," she said.
"It would only be for a while."
"I said I'm fine."
Nfirea, who had been listening without meaning to, cleared his throat. "There's plenty of room up here, actually. One or two people won't slow the horse. It's no trouble."
Felt opened her mouth to turn him down as well.
Reinhard, beside her, kept walking without looking at her.
She closed her mouth. Opened it. Closed it again. Then, with the air of someone who had done a very fast calculation in her head and decided that continuing to say no would cost her more energy than saying yes, she climbed up onto the wagon and settled next to Nfirea.
"Only for a while," she said.
"Yes Lady Felt."
Nfirea trying very hard not to smile.
Reinhard walked beside the wagon as before, on the left. Narberal and Momon walked on the right, steady as clockwork. The horse pulled them all on, unhurried.
After a while, Felt hopped back down and walked again.
…
The light started to change when they were still a good distance from the village.
The yellow of the afternoon had deepened into something richer, and the shadows along the tree line had grown longer than the things casting them.
The road ahead was still visible, but Reinhard could see where the dimming would catch them if they kept going. He glanced at the sky, then at the wagon, then at Momon across from him.
"It will be dark soon," he said. "We should find a good place for camp while there's still light. Someone can keep watch in turns."
Momon nodded. "Good call. Setting up after dark is harder than it needs to be."
Nfirea eased the horse down to a walk and started looking for a clearing large enough to pull the wagon off the road. As he searched, he glanced down at others, well, his one companion on this quest and the three walkers beside and behind him, and asked the question that had been sitting in the back of his head for the last two hours.
"Are you all really not tired? We've been going since morning. One break the whole way. I'd think someone would have asked for a stop by now."
Momon turned his helmeted head. "Not especially. Did you want to rest?"
"No, I'm on the wagon. I was asking about you guys."
"We've gone further in a day before," Momon said. "This is within our usual."
Felt, walking on the other side now, called over, "I had my turn of the rest on the wagon. I'm good."
Nfirea chuckled under his breath. It was the laugh of a man who had done his worrying anyway and now had to put it down.
"Well. That's good news. Though we probably don't have much to worry about from here to Carne either, in terms of monsters." He waved vaguely at the dense green on their right. "We've already passed the stretch where monsters wander out. From about where we are now all the way to the village, this is the Wise King of the Forest's territory. So it tends to stay quiet."
Felt's head came up. "Wise King of the Forest? What's that?"
Reinhard glanced at her, then at Nfirea. "I have not heard of that name either. Is it dangerous?"
"Ah, right. You two are new around here, of course you wouldn't have." Nfirea adjusted his grip on the reins. He looked pleased to be the one doing the telling. "Personally, I've never seen it. It's more of a legend than anything, at least for people who live near here. There are some who claim to have seen it, but the way they describe it is so inconsistent that a lot of people say they probably saw something else and told themselves it was the Wise King after. Or they hallucinated. Fear does that to people in a forest."
"No reliable witnesses, then," Reinhard said.
"Well, there's one saying that might explain why." Nfirea paused for effect. "They say whoever meets the Wise King doesn't come out of the forest alive."
Felt whistled through her teeth.
"Has it attacked the villages?" Reinhard asked. "Any reports of it coming out of the forest?"
"No, that's the thing. It stays deep in the forest. The only humans it's supposed to have killed are the ones who went in after it, hoping to hunt it. Which is probably why there aren't any reliable witnesses. Nobody who finds it makes it back out to talk about it." He smiled a little.
"And the villages around here, like Carne, actually consider it a blessing. It keeps other monsters out of its territory. And anyone who tries to go through its territory to cause trouble for the villages... well."
"A guardian, then. In a sense."
"A dangerous one, but yes."
Felt, who had been walking with her hand on the wagon rail, pulled her hand away and cracked her knuckles.
"Hmm," she said. "I really want to see it."
Nfirea looked at her for a long moment, as if hoping she was joking. She wasn't. She was staring out at the forest with the face of someone who had just been told there was an excellent pastry shop somewhere she hadn't visited yet.
Reinhard, beside her, did not say anything. He had the mild, familiar expression of a man who had watched this process happen many times before and had learned that arguing at this stage rarely helped.
Nfirea turned back to the road, tightened his grip on the reins.
….
A/N: Heh heh
Q: Was it good? Or bad?
-Good
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