I told Princess, as I walked with Big Sid toward the servants’ wagon.
She tsked in my mind.
She sent me a wave of sleepiness instead of answering.
she murmured.
She fell asleep as Big Sid and I crossed the camp in silence. We stopped near the servants’ wagon and one of the infenti called a greeting, and Big Sid swore at them before eying me carefully.
“I wasn’t kidding,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Your skin is as tough as a crachen’s. Not a crachen warrior, maybe, but the average crachen. Which is harder than any infenti’s skin. And much, much harder than any human’s.
“Uh,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit, Alex. But if they find out? They might ask some pointed questions.”
“Oh.”
“I just ... “ She scowled back toward the soldiers. “Those Sixer dirtbags killed my people and stole my home. We weren’t strong enough and I, I’m going to get strong no matter what it takes and just ...”
“Just what?
“Nothing.” She clamped her jaw. “Nothing.”
I looked down at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“We fought, we lost, they won. What’s there to talk about?”
“Where I’m from,” I told her, gently, “people think that talking can help with how we feel.”
“Where you’re from,” she said, just as gently, “you’re a bunch of goat-fucking morons.”
She walked away and I told Princess,
* * *
Nothing much changed for the next two days, except I grew closer to Erdinand. Despite being a crab-man, he was the very definition of a bro. He liked to hang out and shoot the shit and teach me about his cool job. He was super-encouraging. He gave me a pincer/fist bump every time I managed to handle the horses properly. He might not have been the smartest dude around, but he was just fundamentally a good guy, the kind who handled his own business and still always had a kind word for everyone around him.
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When I asked about our route, he told me that we’d only covered as much ground in two days as we could’ve in a half-day’s hard ride.
“Because we’re taking the scenic view?” I asked.
“Just the slow one,” he told me.
Apparently those elite infenti twins, Jikon and Jikap, were serious about teaching Lord Usim how to hold a sword without embarrassing himself before we reached Ryetown. So we travelled less and camped more, giving them time to instruct him. At every break, they threatened to beat the kid Lemmy--or did beat him--in order to motivate Usim to practice.
However, as slowly as we were moving, the little caravan still made some headway. And soon, we were only a day’s travel from Ryetown. Finally. I was eager to see the place.
At least my run-in with Dordor the eight-foot ollie had given me an excuse to avoid singing. Although I actually enjoyed singing if I knew the songs. I wasn’t very good, though. No better than the other humans. Back when I’d played guitar, I usually chose instrumentals. Most of my favorite stuff was Spanish classical. Third-rate Spanish classical, but good enough to get a little female attention at house parties.
Yeah, I used to be that guy, the one with the guitar. Hey, I’d been young, don’t judge me.
After days of laundry and chamber pots, tent-pitching and helping Erdinand with the horses, I almost missed the chance to sing. Fortunately, one of the servants had mentioned my ‘storytelling,’ and the other servants loved my fantasy-flavored version of Mandalorian and The Simpsons.
When Erdinand called Big Sid ‘Baby Yoda,’ she pushed him off the wagon roof.
It was a good thing that crachen had tough carapaces.
The other humans never warmed up to me--especially after I got into trouble that first night. Erdinand said that most humans weren’t so prissy, but he might’ve been trying to make me feel better. Big Sid, on the other hand, said that all humans were awful, but she was definitely trying to make me feel worse. The two of them amused me. They really loved each other, despite the things that Sid said. Not romantically, but as family. They were basically siblings. It was sweet. Plus, after a couple of days, they started looking normal to me. Like, of course I’m hanging out with Devil Girl and Crab Boy, that was nothing special.
Big Sid spent half her time in the fancy wagon, kissing ass, and always returned even grumpier than usual. Then Erdinand would chat with her about home, or take her for a walk, or just sit with her until she simmered down.
I practiced my domain skill pretty often. My favorite exercise was choosing a pebble next to my foot then blipping it into my domain without anyone noticing. And every night, beneath my blanket, I’d try to turn a single part of myself into smoke. Like, I’d pick my left calf or my right hand or my stomach, and try to turn it vaporous while the rest of my body stayed solid.
I failed every time, but I felt myself getting closer and closer.
Mostly I spent my time enjoying not being alone, eating too much, and waiting for a quest. One more urgent than ‘amass a purple bead’s worth of money.’ To be honest, I didn’t even know where purple beads fit into the whole monetary system.
So I raised that question as our wagon rattled through the afternoon. We were following the dirt road toward a lake with the loudest honking birds I’d ever heard--tufted geese that sounded like nasal foghorns. I asked the other servants how much things cost in the Port, and how much they guessed things cost in Six Coves.
We’d left the lake behind us--except for the quiet murmur of geese--before I figured things out. One gel bead would buy you loaf of plain bread. A small loaf, maybe more like roll. A foam bead was worth a dozen or so gel beads, though the exact number depended on quality. Sometimes ten, other times sixteen. Except one foam bead only bought the equivalent of ten gel, because you lost a little value when you combined them.
Which didn’t make sense to me. Maybe that was the trade-off of value with portability?
I didn’t understand the economics, but a dozen-ish foam beads made pearl, a dozen-ish pearls made gold, and a dozen-ish golds made a black.
If my math was right, that meant a black bead was worth about ten thousand gel beads. Black beads were sometimes used for enchanting, like Oksar’s ward, or for even more powerful healing than golds. Otherwise, a dozen-ish black beads made a single purple, which were worth a hundred thousand small loaves of bread.
That was a officially a shitload of bread.
If a small loaf coast a dollar, that was a hundred grand for one purple bead. Nobody used purple beads for magical purposes, at least not outside of the biggest cities on the continents. There were rumors of more-valuable beads, but none of the servant believed them. Hell, nobody had even seen a purple. So how was I supposed to accumulate more money than--
A cry sounded from the front wagon and the soldiers spurred their horses forward. Hoofbeats pounded and shouts cut the air. Big Sid was riding in the fancy front wagon with Miss Kathina, so Erdinand jumped to his feet in alarm and looked in that direction.
“They spotted something,” he said. “They’re drawing weapons!”
The soldiers thundered around a bend in the road and past a patch of forest. A handful of them remained behind to guard Lord Usim. As did Miss Kathina, wearing a different floofy dress. She emerged from the wagon’s interior to stand behind the driver. She didn’t look like she belonged in a drawing room right then; she looked more like the figurehead of a warship.
The air cracked around her, in the shape of a sloppy half-dome.
“What does she do?” I asked.
“Raises a shield,” the old crachen woman told me. “She’s here to protect the young lord.”
“Not just a shield,” an infenti servant said. “It’s made of sparks and she can stretch bits of it outward. If it touches you, you get burned. Worse than burned, like lightning struck.”
“In that case,” the crachen told him, dryly, “I’ll resist the urge to touch it.”
By the time our wagon creaked around the turn, the mounted soldiers had caught their prey: a dozen or so scared ollie kids and teenagers, who clustered closely together behind two adult ollies at the edge of a field.
Except on second glance, the adults looked young, too. Like teenagers themselves. Something about their smooth red-tinged gray skin and the fear on their face told me that they were just older kids. The girl was probably six-foot three--taller than me, but not much--and wearing a yellow sundress and heavy bracers on her forearms. The boy was more like seven feet, and a good deal wider than than girl, though still a foot shorter than Dordor the scarred ollie. He was shirtless, wearing tattered leggings and holding a quarterstaff the size of a small log.
INTUIT tagged them identically: Olifarn, Level 3.
“Just leave us alone!” the teenaged girl shouted at the soldiers.