For the rest of the day, we travel through the forest, Henry keeping their distance away from me as we go. I feel like they’re more comfortable with me, though still a bit shy. The air between us thrums with a gentle familiarity.

It feels nice to have company again, even if they stay so far back. The construct feels different than other constructs I’ve bonded with or raised. They feel like a whole body. As if its soul never quite left its bones: not an amalgamation of memories too distant to recall, or bones put together from multiple sources. It’s a strange feeling, but I try not to think about it too long. When they feel comfortable with me, maybe they’ll tell me themselves.

In the meantime, it’s a comfortable silence.

The terrain gets more and more difficult for me to traverse as we start to gain some more elevation, and I find myself needing to walk in the road. I send a gentle reassurance through our connection, passing my intentions through to them, and they seem to understand. They keep their distance from the road, deep in the trees, but close enough that I can feel them nearby. We travel this way the rest of the day and hunker down for the night. They stay on the opposite side of the fire, sitting hunched over their feet with their large, gangly arms dangling over their knees.

I want to ask them questions, but after a long day of magic use and walking… I’m kind of exhausted. They are a gentle, safe presence. I know that with them around, I’ll be able to sleep.

And I do. I sleep through the whole night, dreaming of screaming people and blue rivers. Of Bill’s kind eyes before he had to pull the lever. And then the warm embrace of copper magic swaddles me and the dreams fade into darkness–I am left only with sleep.

The town the kind folk of Torsen pointed me to was a little place called Reisau. It was fortified round with wooden spikes driven deep into the ground on the outskirts, and the little streets weren’t cobbled or paved–just dirt that had worn down over years of use. It was early spring, and I could hardly wait to see the blooms. When I arrived in Reisau, I’d been on the road for three weeks and few days from the nearest city, Torsen. My hair and clothes were covered in dust. As much as Henry had attempted to gently pull twigs from my hair, there was a significant amount of leaves and residue left behind. The construct stayed out on the outskirts of town when I went in, but I can still feel them sitting just beyond the treeline, orbits following me past the stone walls that mark the boundary of Reisau and the outside world.

There are a few people out and about, chopping wood and building rock walls around their gardens. I pass by a small smithy on the edge of town, which provides an almost constant tinging of tools that filled the air. It has a nice rhythm to it. I look with interest into a small bakery, a hat shop–they all look up as I walk past. One woman at one of the first houses waves me over, meeting me at her gate. “You’re a new face around here. What brings you up this way?”

I smile at her, trying to give her the best first impression I can. She’s a slight thing with auburn hair and bright blue eyes that seem to penetrate my very soul. This woman makes me nervous already, and I’ve barely met her. I try to dig into the proverbial pocket of things that were appropriate to say, but end up saying something along the lines of: “I was sent up here to look for some land, I’d like to start a farm.”

She crosses her arms over her white cotton dress, and gives me a thorough look-over, and I’m surprised at how forward I was. “Just you?” she asks skeptically.

“Just me.” I answer, and it is the truth–technically. I don’t know how many necromancers these folk have encountered, so I’m not sure if I would be revered as a priestess or garner suspicion. Rumors kind of do that, don’t they? Having no touchstone in that regard gives me even less ideas of how they might respond to Henry.

She doesn’t look convinced. “Why up here, of all places? Ground’s filled with rock.”

I shrug. “Probably means the land is cheaper. I have experience growing in difficult places.” And I do, home was on its own rocky ground. I gesture at the tall, black mountains around us. “There’s lots of volcanic rock out here, which probably means the ground is really fertile too.”

This piques her interest and she leans against the garden wall. “There actually was a farm up here, long time ago. We mostly grow our needs in our own gardens. What would you grow?”

“Vegetables. Potatoes, tomatoes, celery, lettuce, herbs, flowers,” I muse. My sisters gave me so many seeds when I left. “Pumpkins, legumes. I’ve got a lot to offer.”

She thinks about it for a moment, long fingers tapping along her elbow. “Hey, Charles!” She shouts into the house behind her with its steep roof.

“What?” A male voice calls from within.

“I’m taking the visitor up to Old Jem’s place.”

“Why do you think I care?”

She rolls her eyes and drops her trowel. “Follow me,” she says, striding past me. I follow politely a good distance behind as we walk through Reisau to the other side, and begin our ascent along a winding path. “I’m Maggie, by the way,” she finally says once we’re out of town.

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“That’s a nice name,” I comment. “Sybil.”

“Sybil… old name. Family name?”

I feel my smile begin in a quiet, small sort of way. “You could say that.”

“Sybil, you look like a nice girl–smart girl. Why here?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. My mind swims. “It just feels right?”

Her footsteps slow a little ahead of me, and I almost crash into her, but she picks her pace up again. “Feels right, you say? Like something guided you here?”

I mull over her words, a little confused. “I guess you could say that.”

She doesn’t say anything afterwards, just leads me up the path.

When the ground flattens, it does so over a large plateau mid-mountain climb. The space stretches out as far as I can see and backs up against a peak that reaches into the air with sharp fingers. Like she said, it’s mostly rock and overgrown bushes. The air is thin up here, but manageable–we haven’t hit the tree line, not by a longshot. “Well, here it is. About three-hundred acres, give or take. Little shack up the way.” She sets her hands on either side of her waist and scowls at it. “It’s not been touched for about ten years, not since Jem.” She sighs and pushes a stone from the ground with the toe of her boot, kicking it along. “Cheap is right, but I don’t know that you’ll want it.”

“May I?” I ask, and she nods, gesturing me ahead.

I walk a bit further, and Maggie stays where she’s at. When I’ve walked far enough away, about halfway to the shack she’d pointed out, I turn to look at her over my shoulder and find that she’s not watching me. Her eyes are locked on the shack past me. From this distance, I can’t see the expression on her face, but I wonder whether it is sad or angry. What happened to Jem, the previous owner? No children to pass the farm along to? Did he leave?

I close my eyes and let a thread of magic drift through the air. Henry’s magic raises to meet it in a comforting warmth. I wasn’t alone. I bend down to the ground and dig my hand into the cold earth. I feel through it with my magic and a thrill shivers up my spine. Bones.

Colors of ombre and teal, pink and orange, green and purple all reach out to me beneath a thick layer of slate bone dust that has been churned into the soil with fertilizer. I feel the fungal growths beneath the surface reach their own magic out to me. It feels like they say, we are here, where have you been? And the bones ask, Who are you? Are you staying? The bone dust thrums beneath my fingertips, welcoming.

Will you help me? I ask the chorus of voices.

Resounding yes’s sound through my fingertips in warm zaps of energy, from the fungi and the bones and the dust, all reaching out to me with excited tendrils of mana.

Okay. Well. That settles it. I stand and wipe my hands off on my skirts. “Can you take me to the mayor?”

Maggie has started making her way closer to me, and she comes to a stop a few steps behind me. “Catches your fancy?”

I smile warmly at her. “Actually, I think I’ve caught its fancy.”

She returns the smile quizzically. “Mage?”

“Of a sort.”

Her look is suspicious, and I can only imagine what she thinks I mean by that. It doesn’t seem to scare her, however, because she smiles. “Look, if you can do something with it, we’ll talk pricing. Give it a week or two, see how you do, and then talk to me.”

It’s my turn to give her a suspicious look. “You’re the mayor?”

“Of a sort,” she shoots back with a smile.

“You’d let a stranger work your land for free?”

Instead of answering me, she passes by me and up to the little shack. “We cleaned it out a few years ago,” she says, producing a key from her pocket and unlocking the house that is not much larger than a toolshed. “But there’s a loft. A little bit of a kitchen.” I follow her into the little structure. It’s a thin, wooden building. The wood paneling beneath my feet is old and a little rotten in places. A small kitchen takes up the majority of the bottom floor, complete with a wood burning stove, and an old ladder that leads up to the loft above, where I assume a bed must be. Maggie stands to the side so I can take a closer look. Henry wouldn’t fit in here, I realize–though he wouldn’t necessarily need to.

I test the feel of the rungs and wince. I could sleep by the stove until I got it replaced. It’d do me no good to start off my second life by breaking my neck getting out of bed one morning. “It’s got a lot of life,” Maggie says.

“It certainly does,” I agree. I think that surprises her a little, because she shakes her head with a smile.

“That’s what he would say.” She turns and leaves the little home and I follow her. “Anyways, you can stay up here. We’ve had a few people come through and try, but they end up selling the land back more and more expensive than they buy it for, and…” she hesitates. “It’s been getting to be too much for us to keep up with. Now we lease the land to those passing through on a trial basis. If we like what you do, we’ll let you bid for it.”

“Who is ‘we?’” I ask.

Maggie smiles, “Reisau. I’ll send someone up every few days to check on your progress.”

“Is there anything you’re looking for specifically?” I wonder.

She stretches her arms and starts walking down the hill. “That’s not for you to know,” she calls. “Good luck!”

I look around at the great, empty space, and think that I probably need all the luck I can get.