The horror of the dream woke him, but that wasn’t the message he came away with. “The Moonflower,” he said to himself as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. It was probably toast, along with everything else he’d packed. He didn’t need dreams to tell him that, but if there was more to it, he wasn’t sure.
Lucas got out of bed and dressed with some difficulty. He was whole, and nothing hurt, but he was still clumsy and lethargic. Still, he made his way downstairs to the dining room, where he shoveled the remains of breakfast down his throat in such a hurry that he barely tasted it.
Then, pocketing a few sandwiches wrapped in napkins as they started serving lunch to a few of the guards who were coming off watch, he made his way to Heisenburgle’s water laboratory.
While it wasn’t the closest of the man’s labs, there was no way that Lucas was taking the stairs up to the air lab or the way down to the earth lab. In his current condition, he felt like the water lab would do just fine.
They all have the same shit anyway; it doesn’t matter, he told himself as he made his way down the hallway.
Guards watched him, as they always did, but no one tried to stop him. So, he didn’t run into any snags until he actually got to the lab and found that it wasn’t there.
“Mother bitch,” Lucas cursed. “Molars (beastman), Molars (orc), Moondust, Mountain soil, but no damn moon flower.”
In the end, he tried every shelf in case it was tucked away somewhere because of some bullshit elemental polarity. He spent the better part of an hour looking but had no luck finding what he was looking for. Eventually, he was to decide whether he wanted to go downstairs and try his luck there, but he decided against it. It was easier to believe that the gnome just hadn’t gathered any.
“The bastard probably thinks it's a weed, not a reagent,” he told himself as he made his way back to his room to get a warmer cloak.
Once he was dressed for it, Lucas went to the stables and had the boy in charge of him prepare a horse. “Y-yes, sir,” the lad said, hopping to it. Lucas wasn’t looking forward to riding, but he definitely wasn’t up for walking. While he waited, a pair of guards eventually approached him.
“Are you planning on going somewhere, sir?” one of them asked. “Alone, after what just happened?”
“Do I look stupid to you?” Lucas laughed. “I’m sure I’m never going anywhere alone ever again. I was going to grab some guards at the gate, but you’re welcome to come with me instead. The more, the merrier.”
They looked at each other and then back to him. The second guard then said, “Master Heisenburgle didn’t tell us that you could leave the grounds.”
“Well did he say I couldn’t leave the grounds,” Lucas asked with only a moderate amount of irritation.
“No, but—” the first one started to answer.
“Well then, I’m glad that’s settled. Come on, you’re both going with me on a little herb-hunting expedition.”
The two of them didn’t argue with him after that, but that was mostly because the stable boy brought him a saddled horse, and he immediately hopped on and acted like he was going to ride off at any moment. That got both of them into gear, giving him a moment to try out his magical herb-hunting power again.
Part of him wanted to buy the other one with his last point because it had a longer range and let him seek out something specific. He didn’t do that, though, because he had no idea when he’d get another point. So, Lucas saved it and instead started eliminating extraneous dots from the map that had formed in his mind.
He ignored the giant cluster of dots that existed inside the fortress, and instead, he eliminated every common herb, root, and mineral, one at a time, from the surrounding forest. By the time he was done and his escorts were ready to depart, the forest was completely blank once more, and he’d be able to see if anything less common popped up immediately.
The three of them rode to the gate, and though Lucas got another strange look, no one tried to stop him. Once they were outside, he asked his babysitters, “Which way would have the marshiest, swampiest ground when all of this thaws out?”
The two conferred for a bit, and after a short debate, they agreed that the answer was left. So, they went left, immediately off the trail, and into the hill. There weren’t many trees directly around the walls of Blackgate, but less than half a mile outside of it, they started to pick up. Before they’d gone a mile, the thick pine trees and skeletal, dormant deciduous trees made it nearly impossible for the three of them to ride abreast as they wove their way deeper.
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Along the way, Lucas gathered a few things he hadn’t seen before, like black acorns, duskweaver web, and motes of true ice. The last one he’d gathered before, but he hadn’t had the chance to actually experiment with it before all of this.
Black Acorns: +1 endurance, -1 poison. Makes any potion brewed with this ingredient bitter.
Duskweaver Web: +2 agility, +2 poison. Potions brewed with this ingredient make the imbiber significantly more stealthy for the duration.
The only warning sign he found in that time was troll shit, but he didn’t decide to take any of that with him. He just made a note not to stay out in these woods after dark. Still, after more than an hour, he didn’t find what he was looking for.
An icy white flower in the middle of a frozen pond in the middle of winter was an awfully long shot to find again. He knew that. That didn’t change his determination to do it. It might be the answer he was looking for, but it was a question he wanted to dig deeper into. Plus, it pissed him off that whoever had tried to kill him had destroyed it in the crossfire.
No, not kill me, he corrected himself. Kidnap me and take me God knew where to do, God knew what to.
Lucas’s gut said that it was a plan of the Whisperers and that Lord Parin had finally made his move, but he was trying not to make a final judgment on that until they had more evidence. That wasn’t just because it would make him want to kill the man who might one day be his brother-in-law, either. It was because if he focused on the obvious, he might miss the real enemy. It’s not like I haven’t made a few in the last year.
They stayed out there for two hours and then four, without any real results. As his stops got more infrequent, they began asking more and more often if they asked if this was where they turned around. It got to the point where Lucas almost said yes just so they would stop asking. That was when he saw it.
“I found you, you little bitch,” he said to himself as he wheeled his horse around and headed toward the dot.
At first, it was just a little dot at the very edge of his map, but as soon as he highlighted it and saw that it was what he was looking for, Lucas kicked his mount into a faster canter and made his way deeper into the woods while the two guards that were with him struggled to keep up.
In the spring or summer, he was sure this forest would have been claustrophobic enough that he wouldn’t have come this far without a machete. This time of year, though, he could see well enough that ambushes seemed unlikely, even after the hobgoblin attack he’d endured so recently, so he went straight there and was soon rewarded with the sight of a frozen-over pond.
This, at least, he rode all the way around, not trusting any ice to the weight of his horse. When he got to the narrowest part of the thing, he dismounted and carefully walked across the ice. When he reached the blossom, he plucked it at the ground level since the ground was frozen and then walked back to his horse to secure it in his saddlebags.
“Alright, now we can go back,” he said to the guards who were waiting for him.
“Finally,” one muttered.
The other one stayed silent a while longer while they headed back, but eventually, he said, “I gotta ask, how did you know that flower was out here? We were told you didn’t know any magic.”
Lucas stiffened, but that didn’t stop him from lying smoothly. “I didn’t. I’m just glad it was.”
“But you said—” the other man started to say.
“Ohhhh,” Lucas said, pretending to finally put it all together. “When I said little bitch, I wasn’t talking about the flower, I was talking about the streambed. Once I found it, I knew a pond wouldn’t be too far away. That’s all. Just lucked out.”
The guard nodded and seemed to believe him, but Lucas was still on edge all the way back. They reached the gate well before sunset with no harm done, and Lucas took a short name before dinner, but as soon as he was done eating and met up with Heisenburgle, there was hell to pay.
“By the gods, you will be the death of me,” the gnome muttered. “Less than 24 hours, elves tried to kill you, and then, just like that, you went into the woods alone for what? Weeds and rubbish? What were you thinking?”
“I told you they weren’t elves,” Lucas sighed. “Anyway—”
“Perhaps you want to be a pincushion?” Heisenburgle mused. “Perhaps you want those savages to peel your skin off slowly as punishment for stepping on their goddess’s toes?”
Lucas shook his head. “Okay, mom. I’ll be more careful in the future, but I found what I was looking for, and that’s what matters.”
“And what is this supposed to be?” the gnome asked, straightening his glasses. “A water lily? Am I supposed to be impressed? I have no need for a potion of water breathing or—”
“We’re going to cook tonight, and we're going to use this instead of the sour dwarf berries,” Lucas said confidently. “I don’t know for sure that this is going to do what I need it to do, but it’s the first ingredient I found in a while that might yet work.”
“Suit yourself,” the gnome answered with a shrug. “I thought you’d need a few more days to start, but preparing a few more batches of strong Blue for our patron is a fine present to bring to the ball.”
“Oh, about that,” Lucas said. “That little ambush? Wrecked my clothes. If you want me going anywhere fancy, we’re going to have to send a letter to my tailor like ASAP.”
Heisenburgle sighed. “You. Always problems with you.”
The gnome continued to rant about what a pain in the ass Lucas was for a long while after that, but he ignored it. If anything, listening to Heisenburgle complain was almost comforting after everything else he’d been through lately. Instead of talking back or getting annoyed, Lucas just started setting everything up. He had a pretty good feeling about tonight. One way or another, he was going to learn something and answer a few questions.