A week had passed since we left the camp. With the two of us remembering, we could keep track of the days well enough. Well, this was the seventh day, so a week and a day in her calendar? If we left on Monday… then it would be Monday again for her. Her days of the week were called something different, but you get the idea.

Anyway, thinking about that over breakfast, I realised that I would normally wash my clothes on this day. Also realised I hadn’t bathed at all since leaving.

Sneaking a glance at her, she looked fine. Her skin clean, hair brushed out, not at all oily. Then there was me who probably looked like a stray dog. At least I combed my hair with my fingers, so no matting.

Still, now that I knew, I hated the grimy feeling. But what could I do?

At the end of breakfast, she started washing up and I distracted myself with looking for food. Pulling up plants. Last night, I had learned a bunch of plants that weren’t food, so my uprooting wasn’t entirely random. For all my effort, I found something like a potato plant where the potatoes were the size of peas.

A win in my books.

Bringing back my prize to show her, I was surprised to find her just sitting by the fire. She wasn’t cleaning, hadn’t put the fire out, not busy with something. As always, though, she noticed me coming, looking over with her usual expression.

“Is there no problems?” I asked. How she phrased, “Is something wrong?” in her language.

She shooed with her hand, then patted the ground next to her, so I shuffled over and sat there too. The fire warm, no breeze to be felt, leaves rustling, distant birds twittering. I certainly felt comfortable here, but sitting around wasn’t going to get us any closer to our destination.

Eventually, she said, “We shall take a rest day.”

“A rest day,” I mumbled, the way she phrased it different, but the meaning familiar considering we were sat here doing nothing.

“Well, I say a rest day, but we won’t be sitting idle. You need to wash your clothes, yes? And I realised that I haven’t been allowing you to bathe. I am very sorry for that, I cannot imagine how uncomfortable you must feel. After that, we can forage, some extra fresh food important to have around as another rain may be coming soon.”

Her monologue came out at her unhurried pace, tone level, yet I heard the sincerity in her apology, making me feel guilty considering I hadn’t realised until today either. I just hoped she hadn’t realised because I smelled that bad….

“It’s okay, no problems,” I said, resisting the urge to sniff myself.

She said nothing to that, instead pointing at the pot beside the fire. Looking there, I noticed there were also clothes, neatly folded. “I warmed that water for you to use and you may borrow those clothes while washing your own.”

Well, she certainly did feel shy about nudity. No wonder she changed clothes while off on her own in the mornings.

“Okay,” I said, softly smiling.

We stayed like that for a while longer, then she stood up, added some more wood to the fire, and walked off, saying something about foraging. It wasn’t that she mumbled, I just didn’t quite catch how she phrased it.

Left alone, there was no reason to put off my “chores”, so I pushed myself up and started stripping. It was nicer under the trees, barely a breeze even when the wind shook the canopies above. Had often took my jumper off to keep from getting too hot these days.

Testing the water, she really had heated it up. Painful when I tested it, but my hand quickly got used to the temperature, so it wasn’t scalding hot or anything. Oh how long it had been since I’d had a hot “bath”. Not only that, she’d left soap for me. Looked cheap, but who knew what soap was like in this world, maybe this plain bar worth its weight in gold.

Whatever the case, I rinsed off with water, then lathered up as little as I could get away with. It felt wonderful. The ash had seemed to work well enough, but it still felt kind of like washing myself with dirt. No breeze, hot water, I barely felt cold either. Just wonderful.

A last surprise, when I checked the spare clothes, a hand towel was there too. Smiling, I wiped off as much water as I could and then dried off with the towel. Not perfectly dry, but good enough to put on clothes, so I did.

Her clothes weren’t anything fancy, I thought. A long-sleeved shirt and trousers. They looked like cotton, a plant cloth rather than wool, but felt nice, smooth. Holding them up and turning them around, I realised the stitching was pretty good and that probably meant something if there weren’t sewing machines around. No way to really know, though, so I just put them on.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Since she hadn’t included underwear, I washed those first and left them to dry by the fire. No need to worry about the wind blowing them into the fire. Then I worked through my other clothes, using a bit of soap in the water to hopefully clean off the sweat soaked into them.

They were good clothes. Months of being worn every day and they still looked good as new, what you’d expect from a goddess. I knew about wearing the same clothes a lot too. Hand-me-downs and donations, clothes on the verge of falling apart, but not quite there.

Once the washing was done, I stared at the water. Soap wasn’t good for plants. Pretty sure it kind of killed them with even a little bit. But there wasn’t a drain here, was there? And I had only used as little as I needed. I hadn’t rinsed the lather off into the pot either, I thought, looking at the damp spot on the ground.

Nothing else for it, I used a stick to dig the muddy spot into a small hole, then slowly drained the water there. Keep the dead patch as small as possible.

After that, I stood there, not knowing what to do. My clothes weren’t quite dry enough to change into, but I didn’t want to dirty her clothes by digging up plants. I struggled over what to do before deciding that picking up firewood would be fine, so that was what I did, plodding around the edge of our camp. Had to keep an eye on the fire and our backpacks.

Checking on my clothes now and then, they eventually dried. I looked down at the borrowed clothes one last time, softly smiling, and changed back into my clothes. Familiar, but fresh. Probably all in my head, but they felt lighter, smoother. Like all that dirt weighed them down and my grimy skin was sticky.

Still, it was nice to wait until they were entirely dry for once. At the camp, I had felt cold, so I only waited until, like, they were dry enough to be warmer than being naked. If it was a colder day, then I washed them in two goes, but that had always felt like a waste of time and firewood.

A new routine. How much nicer life was with just a bit of help, I thought, folding her clothes as neatly as she had. I left them and the soap on top of her backpack, not wanting to go into it. It was hers, after all, full of things like that oil lamp and her wand that I shouldn’t touch. Not a shared backpack.

With that done, I stood there, kind of confused? No idea what to do again. Well, not no idea, but I was sort of stuck by the camp to watch our things. I started by putting the fire out.

Then, well, I pulled up plants. Found some more pea-potatoes. Peatatoes? Potapeas? Pea-potatoes was probably best unless Hyraj knew what they were. Really, I should have been trying to think of things less in terms of English words, but it was hard, even hearing her say the foreign words bringing to mind the carrots of my old world.

It was nearly an hour later that she returned. Maybe more like half an hour, time just feeling slow when I was doing nothing that interesting. Anyway, she had firewood in her arms—lots of it.

“Good working,” I said, amusing myself with another of the little quirks of her language.

She put down the firewood by our backpacks, then looked my way. A moment passed with her staring at me before she said, “Good working,” back.

Just like that, I wanted to crawl into a hole. Maybe I really had smelled and looked terrible.

Couldn’t meet her gaze, so I busied myself picking up the pea-potatoes I’d found. “See these? You—do you know them?” I asked. Using proper grammar was my speaking focus right now. If we did end up at a village, I wanted to make a good impression and sounding like a toddler wasn’t it.

She walked over, her feet soon coming into my sight as I stared down at my haul.

“Is it that?” she said, the question version of, “That is it.” An idle thing to say while she thought over what she saw. “I cannot say I recognise it like this…. Perhaps, when cooked, I may.”

Her manner of speaking had also grown more proper these days, no longer sticking to simple sentences for me. Harder to follow, but, getting familiar with her style, I wasn’t struggling like I had expected to at the start. Different to when I had been learning French. Maybe because I spent so much of the day listening to her speak, not just a few hours a week.

While I thought over that, she took the pea-potatoes from my hand and, making a ring, rinsed them, her other hand brushing off the dirt. The other reason I called them potatoes was their sort of yellowish colour. She picked at the skin on one, then squashed it between her fingers. At the least, they did look like a starchy vegetable to go with the pea stew.

“Yes, I may know it mashed,” she said, returning them to me. Taking out a handkerchief, she wiped her fingers. “If so then they would be hichkle.”

What she called it locked up my brain, half-carrot, half-peas. Carrot-peas.

Her handkerchief back in her pocket, she looked at me and, well, my confusion was probably pretty obvious to see. “Hich in carrot means… something that is under dirt, like we bury the seeds,” she said, and the word for bury was similar to “hich” too. “Kle is like… baby, but it is used for small things that are found or kept close together. Many names for cooked foods use it.”

Always time for a language lesson, I thought with a smile.

Unfortunately, her lesson made me think of them as baby carrots, which they definitely weren’t. Not everything could work out nicely when comparing languages between two worlds that even had different plants.

Lesson over, she took another look at the leaves, then we went searching for them. Unlike the other vegetables I had found so far, none of the hichkle plants were flowering or making seeds. No, it seemed like they grew from the hichkle, roots spreading out until the “peas” were far enough away for another plant to grow. I’d only actually pulled up a small part of the plant, roots breaking easily.

Whatever the exact details were, all I knew was that, digging up more of the ground around the plant, there were a lot of loose hichkle. It really helped having her metal stakes to dig.

So we stocked up on those and fruits and checked other plants, taking us to lunchtime. Despite calling it a rest day, we packed up afterwards, then walked through the afternoon until evening, falling into our usual routine.

Life was funny like that. You could spend years doing the same thing, over and over, barely changing your routine at all, then just drop it one day and start a new one.

The sky grew dark, our dinner eaten, and we lay down for bed.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight,” she whispered back, then settled into her even breaths.

My favourite part of our new routine, no longer alone.