When he sprung the idea of a wintry walk on Danaria over breakfast, she was just as excited as he hoped she would be. “Of course, I want to go on a walk with you. What’s the occasion?” she asked.

“I’ve just got herbs to gather,” he said vaguely, as he decided not to mention the new power he wanted to try.

Lucas had turned it on briefly this morning to test it, and it had created a map in his head, for lack of a better word. It wasn’t visual so much as it was a feeling, but there had definitely been clusters of interest nearby. He’d selected several but quickly met with disappointment as he realized he was picking up the ingredients in his lab under the cider house and the spices in the cook’s spice rack in the kitchen.

He should have expected that, of course, but there were other dots further away, indicating that there were things that might yet be found, even amidst the orchard. Flicking through them, he saw a number of weak reagents he already recognized, so there was no need to hunt them down. These included sharp burr seeds, poison holly berries, and aged owl pellets. He might yet find things of greater interest further abroad, though.

“But there’s snow on the ground,” she laughed. “What is it you hope to find?”

“Maybe there are rare herbs that only grow in the winter,” he said with a wolfish grin, “Or maybe I need rare icicles to prepare my latest potion…”

“And what’s that?” she asked, more than a little amused.

Lucas would have paid good money then for a great punchline, but he didn’t have one. Instead, he said, “I dunno. We’ll know when we find the right ingredients.”

This made her laugh anyway. It was clear to Lucas that she thought the whole affair was an excuse to get her alone, just as it was equally obvious that she was down for it.

After that, the discussion devolved into what they should pack for the picnic lunch that Danaria insisted they have. Lucas was fine with some taking some food, but given the temperatures outside, he didn’t think that the atmosphere would be romantic enough for them to lounge around on a blanket even in the afternoon when it was a little warmer.

He was still trying to find the right way to tell her this when Gerwin said, “And will the two of you be requiring a chaperone?”

“During the day, Gerwin?” Danaria asked while Lucas suppressed a laugh at the very idea. “I should think not.”

“But—” the man started to say.

“Lighten up, Jeeves; the worst we might do is hold hands,” Lucas said, noting that even that scandalous activity was enough to make Danaria blush visibly for a moment.

“Y-yes,” she agreed. “We’re adults, and we can behave ourselves.”

“Very good, mistress,” he answered stiffly after a moment. He clearly wasn’t happy about it, but ultimately, it wasn’t his decision.

The two of them took their time, talking and eating, but about the time that Adin got out of bed, they both spontaneously decided it was time to get ready. So, Danaria changed out of her dress to something more weather-appropriate, and Lucas gathered the knives and baskets he thought he would need for the short expedition.

“You want me to come with you, Boss?” Mort asked.

Lucas was about to tell him not to bother, but the Hura’gh chimed in instead. “The man was going into the woods with his lady. Clearly, the last thing he wants is more company.”

Lucas would have phrased the same idea a little more delicately, but he still laughed along with them. The truth was that he was looking forward to spending time alone with Danaria. He just didn’t expect anything untoward to happen. This was just a cute little outing for the two of them to spend some time together without the chance that her brother would join the mix.

Nevertheless, he still left the cider house under a withering barrage of good-natured jokes and lewd innuendo from the three of them. When he returned to the house, Danaria was in the kitchen cheerfully gathering the sandwiches they’d take with them from the chef.

After that, it didn’t take them long to get started. Alone, Lucas would have just walked, but with Danaria, he opted to go on horseback at least part of the way. It wasn’t a long walk to the Greenwood, after all, but with the best part of a foot of snow on the ground, it would have been exhausting to walk through.

For the first half hour, they rode across the orchard to the main road and then down it a ways as they headed toward the tower where Lucas had almost died last year. Along the way, she talked about the kind of home she’d like to have built. Apparently, She’d given it a lot of thought since they’d spoken of it the other day.

Given her wardrobe, he would have expected that her requests would have been mostly frivolous, but other than a desire to have some stained glass put in her bedroom windows with a songbird motif, they were mostly reasonable and utilitarian.

“I liked what you said about the storefront, but I was thinking, especially if I’m in the village, we’ll be receiving petitioners all the time, so I think we’ll need a dedicated parlor for just such I thing,” she argued. She spent more time stressing how she didn’t want the thing to stand out too much, though not in the way that Lucas had in mind when he was talking about making a surreptitious base of operations.

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“I just don’t want to feel like we’re lording over the other people of the village, you know?” she explained. “That would be incredibly rude, and subjects or not, I don’t think they’d take kindly to it.”

Lucas nodded and commented occasionally, but he was more focused on his ability now. It took some concentration to keep on, the same way that his ring did, and he found it difficult to do other things while he focused on the reagents it was detecting.

As it turned out, the pickings were slim. There were plenty of roots and barks of various types and more than a few seeds. Amusingly, the nuts and acorns were in clusters that almost certainly marked the lairs of hibernating rodents. As funny as he thought that would be to check, the last thing he planned to do was wake up a squirrel to steal its dinner.

They kept riding for a while after that while he figured out how to slowly filter the undesirable results from his list. He finally stopped when he finally found some lamspur moss. It almost certainly had nothing to do with blue, but it was an excellent healing compound.

Lampsur Moss: Endurance 2, healing 2, strength -1. Can be used raw on an open wound if necessary. 50% more effective against bleeding damage and other blood diseases in potion form.

“Did you finally find just the right icicle?” Danaria teased.

She was only slightly more impressed when he cleared away the snow around a fallen log and came up with chunks of deep red moss. “The perfect icicle remains elusive,” he said with a smile. “But this will be pretty useful.”

“Really? What’s it for?” she asked.

Lucas spent the next few minutes explaining the moss to her. Eventually, that led to other healing herbs. He spent at least an hour explaining all the different sorts of healing potions he knew of and how they were good for different things.

“I had no idea you knew so much about this,” she said, brightening. “I thought you mostly just made… you know.”

“Well, I learned some stuff from Cassara,” he nodded, sidestepping the issue, “But the first potion I ever learned how to make was a healing potion. I’ve been doing it for a long time. There’s just not a lot of money in it. Well, not enough anyway.”

Truthfully, there was a lot of money in it. That was the reason they functioned as such an effective bribe to the population as a whole. Even more than gold, his bootleg red potions were doing a good job of cementing his control of the region. Medicine was expensive, but he could make it cheap, and everyone knew someone with a condition or ailment.

Sometime after that, they had their lunch. “I’m sorry it’s so meager,” Danaria said several times since it was only rolls with cold meat and cheese, but Lucas had no problem with that. It was more than he would have brought if he’d come out here by himself. They even had some wine to go with it, which was almost enough to make him laugh out loud.

“Any meal that’s served with wine isn’t something you can complain about,” he assured her. “I think that’s a rule.”

“A rule, is it?” she asked, looking at him sternly.

“Yeah, a rule,” he insisted. “I’m pretty sure it’s written down somewhere, and if it isn’t, I’ll do it when I get back.”

He almost kissed her when she laughed then, but a gust of wind came through, making her pull away as she sought protection from it behind a tree. Had he been smoother, he would have…

But I’m not, Lucas thought to himself. Smooth isn’t on my list of skills.

After they’d packed up lunch, they continued looking for new ingredients. He found some verdant pond scum but decided that he didn’t want to carry around melting ice with him, so he left it behind. He did take arrow root with him, which was a common enough anti-poison and a couple rarer components he’d only seen a few times before. The only one that was actually new to him, though, was the Moonflower.

Arrow Root: poison - 3, makes any potion containing it twice as bitter.

Fae Toadstools: mana 3, poison 2, 10% chance of vivid hallucinations. Side effects are more likely to occur on the night of a full moon.

Motes of True Ice: +3 endurance, -2 agility, strongly water aspected. Strongly air-aspected. Dissipates in above-freezing conditions.

Lucas had been forced to walk out onto thin ice to grab that one. It was a lilly in a pond, and though the cold should have long since withered it to nothing, it hadn’t. He didn’t know how to explain that. He didn’t even try. Instead, when Danaria asked about it, he just said, “And you didn’t think that flowers bloomed in the winter,” in a sarcastic tone.

Moonflower: -1 poison, catalyst. Damaged by direct sunlight.

Truthfully, he didn’t know when it bloomed, but he was tempted to look for more. That was doubly true when he noticed that it was a catalyst. It wasn’t the only catalyst he’d ever found the Greenwood, but that was a pretty short list.

He was almost so completely distracted by the engrossed in studying it that he only vaguely registered a new reagent popping up not so far from him on his mental map. Lucas should have checked it immediately because it was strange for something to just appear like that now that he’d eliminated so much from his map, but the sunlight had come out through the clouds in the leaden sky just then, and the rays of the setting sun framed Danaria so perfectly while she spoke that he almost interrupted her with a kiss.

It was only an afterthought that he saw that the new component was listed as horse blood. That took him a moment to parse, but as soon as he realized there was only one nearby source of horses, that he and Danaria had tethered to a tree not so far away a few hours ago, he instantly understood. Something was hungry, and it was coming for them.

Lucas whirled and interposed himself between his woman and danger just as the first of the goblins crept out from behind the tree they’d been hiding behind as it prepared to ambush them. No, not goblins, he realized. Hobgoblins. He swallowed at that. Hobs were the bigger, uglier cousins of gobs, and while they weren’t the size of men or orcs, they were more than worth their weight in gobs.

“Fuck…” Lucas growled, drawing his sword, even as the thing drew up to its full height and one of its friends started to appear behind it. “Danaria. We got company. Keep a lookout for more of them.”

“Wha… what should I…” she started to stammer as he took up a defensive stance and sized up his opponents as they started to spread out. “No! We should run. We should make our way to the horses.”

Lucas didn’t have the heart to tell her that the horses were already dead. No, the only way they were getting out of this was a fight.