Dawn the next morning was glorious, above the lake, the deep red of it catching the sand and shimmering like tiny mirrors.
Whistlecork lay there in her bedroll by the edge of the tree line and watched the sunrise. She always loved this part of the day, when only the birds were awake.
"Well" she announced as the blood sun finally started to fade into full daylight, "We're gonna have to make good time today."
She struggled out of the bedding and emptied her pack onto the dewy ground.
"If my reckoning is right, and it normally is by this point, that means a storm tonight."
Next to her, the bird struggled to its feet, yawning and checking the fire for any leftover food.
"Yes yes, once we get there I'll buy a nice big cooking pot. We can strap it to your back and you can carry it."
"Hoot!"
She laughed at that, imagining indignation in the response.
She surveyed what had fallen out of her pack, and started to put it all back together. In went her two changes of clothes and her thin boots, her fire-sparker and cooking gear. Her sewing kit, and all those little things you needed to survive on a day-to-day basis.
The bags of sand went back in next, along with all but one of the gold ingots. That she would keep sewn into the waistband of her trousers, just in case she was ever mugged. Hopefully, she could throw it towards the bandits and run, and they would be so busy fighting each other that they'd forget to follow her.
To one side she placed her waterskin, refilled from the rapidly diminishing spring that still ran through the village. Her few arrows fitted into a pocket on the outside of her pack, and her bow went behind it, safe against her back and protected with a leather cover. She had a single spare string and a small pot of wax, but she needed to pick up more.
Next, she laid out all the oddments she had collected recently. The letters and maps. Some coinage for when barter wasn't an option, and various small shells and pretty stones, all wrapped in cake paper.
She also had several bricks of fine tea, which she had picked up almost two months before on a whim, and a glass bottle containing a type of expensive plant stem. The sellers had claimed they were used for cooking, and the tiny bottle had cost her most of her cash, but it should be worth it.
She had been assured she could sell it all, once she hit somewhere big enough, but Hollow Ridge was the first chance she had gotten to make that happen.
There were other little things too, that she had picked up over the years. Her favourite was a small glass globe she had found on the shore one evening, filled with tiny seeds. The only way to get them out would be to smash the glass, and she was reluctant to do that. There was the copper coin she had found in the basement, and beside it, a chunk of polished amber, encasing a beetle with iridescent wings. There was the piece of driftwood she had found in the village, and the polished stone.
Over her shoulder, the owl hooted appreciatively at her treasures, and she smiled at them, before transferring the oddments into some of the leather bags she had found in the basement, waste-not want-not.
It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that she should probably send a parcel home soon.
Once everything was cinched up tight and protected against rain, she was ready to go. She had chosen to go without shoes again, her feet had hardened up to an extent that anyone back home would have had an apoplexy at the mere sight of them, and she liked it that way.
"C'mon then." She gestured to the owl, then frowned, "I gotta think of a name for you at some point."
The owl didn't respond, but it did give her a look, and then another at the sky.
Whistlecork shrugged, "if you wanna go up there and join me later, that's fine by me."
It stared at her for another long moment, unblinking, and then with a cloud of feathers, it was off.
She watched it go, running a hand through her ruffled hair, and then set off herself. Time for another long day of Whistlecork vs the woods.
-
She fought her way to a road around mid-morning, after a very rough trek.
When she first moved into the trees, the bird above had panicked at losing sight of her, crashing down behind her in a rain of twigs and leaves.
After a bit of debate and they set up a sort of whistle system. Every now and again it would sweep over the trees and keen, and she would whistle back, and that was enough.
"You feed them once, and they get attached," she muttered to herself, pushing out of the brush layer, considering if she wanted to walk along the road.
It looked well travelled, which meant, in a word: muddy. Adding to that, they had surfaced it with small stones, and no matter how calloused her feet, that wasn't gonna be fun to walk on.
She eventually settled for walking along the centre, in the grassy stripe where cart wheels never touched. The clouds were starting to build up in the sky above, but the mountain of Hollow Ridge was looming large ahead, promising shelter and society.
-
"Hey, you need a lift?"
The shout came from behind her, and she turned to see a small donkey cart, being driven by a swaddled figure.
"Get up," they patted the bench beside themselves, and she nodded, throwing her pack into the footwell and swinging herself into the seat.
"Thanks," she was grateful for the lift, and the chance to rest her legs.
"You been on the road long…?" They hesitated, flicking the reigns lightly to get the cart moving again, and she smiled, leaning back.
"Long enough for today."
Above her the bird circled, a small spot, almost invisible against the clouds.
Squinting up, she hadn't considered that problem.
Next to her, the driver noticed her look and also squinted up, before looking back at her, "friend of yours?"
She made a non-commital noise, and then shook her head, "yeah, new pet, picked them up a while back. Cities are always a bit weird about me bringing 'em in though."
The driver huffed beneath their mask, only their green, cat-like eyes visible. "They ain't too bad here, but you better keep an eye on it if the Dragon comes through, looks like dinner, up there."
She nodded in agreement, and they moved in silence for a time, the pony's hooves kicking up grass and mud as they went, the sky darkening above them.
-
The city walls loomed high above her as she dropped off the cart and waved goodbye to her ride.
She only had to wait a minute before the bird swept down, landing ten paces or so away from her and staring at her with golden eyes.
She gestured to the city, unsure how much the animal understood and wasn't sure how to articulate it in language the animal would understand.
"Look," she started, thinking as she spoke, "I have to in there until… Either tomorrow, or until the storm breaks. I can't walk in the rain."
She stared back at the bird, considering, "Can you deal with the rain, will you be ok?"
The owl-hawk-thing ruffled their feathers closed their eyes for a moment as if asleep, and then returned to staring.
Whistlecork considered this, and then sighed outwards, walking forward and laying one hand on the animal's head, "Alright then. I don't know if you can understand me, or how well. Gods know. My aunt used to have a dog that could practically speak, so it wouldn't surprise me."
The bird continued to stare, but shrank a little under her hand.
"Go." She commanded. "Stay above the forest. Hunt, rest."
She took her hand off the bird's head, and stepped back a step, and then another.
Turning around, she walked towards the city. It was only when she was halfway there that she heard the noise of feathers behind her.
She hoped they would still be around tomorrow.
-
The first thing she did upon entering the city was look for a place to stay. The inn by the gate was locked tight, and nobody responded when she hammered on the door, so she headed towards the market district.
It was dark enough now that if she hadn't known better, she would have thought it late evening and not early afternoon. Already the light-keepers were out, lighting the lamps and lanterns on the main street, and she was glad for the extra visibility.
It didn't look like she would be seeing the dragon park or any shops today. Disappointing.
Halfway to the market square, by her reckoning, she spotted a lodging house with a card in the window, rooms for let.
Shrugging to herself and checking her new coin pouch, she let herself in.
-
The room wasn't much, but it was clean and comfortable. Added to that, it came with a promise of dinner and directions to the baths.
Centuries ago, or at least before she was born, whoever was in power at the time had set up bathhouses in all major cities and decreed that people would use them. Probably after some plague or another.
She wasn't sure who they had been, their name was lost to the history books, but their legacy still lived on, especially in small towns like this.
She didn't even want to touch anything in the room until she was clean, and the owner of the house had made a face at her filthiness. It was only her request for directions to the baths which had convinced them to let her in at all.
She could feel the dirt ingrained into her skin, and if she hadn't been so tanned dark to begin with, she reckoned it would be a visible layer. Her last bath had been almost a week before, and in the sea, scrubbing with sand. A sea bath was fine, and it took off a layer of skin, but it still didn't leave her feeling especially clean.
Under normal circumstances, she would have booked the room for a week and spent her time exploring the city, but with the bird, she didn't feel comfortable making any long-term plans. The excitement at being in a new city, a Dragon city no less! Was replaced with worry.
She would have to go and visit the town hall in the morning and see if anyone had reported them missing. There might even be a reward for their safe return.
She hoped she could find their owner, and that they were a good person. The poor thing deserved a good home.
Then she needed to visit the bowers, to pick up a new string and some more wax. She also wanted to visit a leather-workers and get her backpack looked at, but that would have to wait.
As she changed her clothes, the gold ingot was heavy in her waistband, and she wondered if she should get it changed into cash.
She also needed to trade her tea and stalks, before they got beaten into worthlessness in her backpack, then pick up something that she could hand off further along the road. She couldn't remember what was good here, and whatever had come up in her economics lessons was now decades out of date, but there had to be some local speciality, there always was.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
She had always enjoyed the game of it, trading, living off her last few pennies. The gold took all the fun out of it.
Either way, that could wait until later. For now, it was time to find that bathhouse.
-
The first drops of rain were coming down by the time she found it, but she didn't mind, the clothes she was wearing were rags by this point anyway.
It wasn't all that difficult to find, she had just taken her time exploring the city first. Both the clouds of steam rising into the cool evening air and it being the most ornate building in town guided her in.
The stonework was starting to pit, but the roof was a vibrant green and the vines and plants trailing down the side were probably truly beautiful on a less miserable day.
She put a penny into the box by the door, feeling relief that it was open, unlike the tavern by the gate.
It was the biggest building she had seen in the city so far, but that wasn't saying much. Whilst bigger cities might have multiple areas for bathing, this place only had one large pool, with a couple of smaller ones off to the side.
She stripped down in the changing area and set her clean clothes to one side. There were no attendants at this time of day, ahead of a storm, but the steam room was active and the water in the main baths was hot.
She spent a minute in the steam room, with her eyes shut, enjoying the heat, before moving on, scrubbing herself raw with the soap and sand provided. It was cheap stuff, if you wanted something better then you had to bring your own, but it did the job.
She did this a couple of times before she felt clean, rinsing herself off with cool water. It came in through the ceiling and emptied into a bucket, which she could pull down onto herself with a string. A strange setup, and not one she'd seen elsewhere, but every bathhouse was different.
She could feel traces of magic in the water, fizzing away at the soap, and she wondered if they had harnessed a natural spring, or if it was fresh from the storm.
That done, and finally feeling almost clean, she spent an hour or so in the pool. The final room contained one massive pool, and several smaller ones, all fed from the same system and obviously meant to handle a larger population than Hollow Ridge may ever have again.
Much like the changing room, she had it to herself, and she spent a while there dozing and enjoying the heat.
This whole adventure was fun, but sometimes she would get so cold that she forgot what it was like to be warm.
As she finally dragged herself out of the bath, ready for one last rinse, she looked around the room. Somebody had come in at some point and was dozing in one of the private tubs, but otherwise, it was all still empty.
Some places would let you stand naked on the roof, arms to the sky, letting the rain wash over you, but she hadn't seen any stairs up, and from what she had seen outside, it looked more like a jungle up there than a garden.
Her clean clothes were where she had left them, and started to put them on. They were rain spotted and worn, little more than rags, but unless she wanted to walk back to her room naked…
They hadn't been in good condition to begin with, and that always accelerated the speed that rain would eat through things. A shirt which had been in use for twenty years, carefully maintained the whole time, would, for a while, bead off the rain as if it were waxed. A shirt which had been in a drawer for a year, unwashed or gnawed at by moths, would be rags by the time you got home.
People speculated why this was, but nobody had ever been able to provide a concrete answer beyond "magic".
She stared down at the shirt, pitted with tiny holes, and considered it. Nobody would be around, so she would probably get away with it unseen. That said, while some settlements were fine with it, being naked in public would get you arrested in others, and she didn't have the lay of the land here yet.
Probably not a good idea.
But she did it anyway.
-
Her host greeted her at the door, grumpy but resigned to having a guest for the night. "At least you're clean now, supper's ready, should you want some. Wash your feet before you come into the house."
Her nakedness didn't seem to bother him, she wasn't even sure he registered it, but she was already cottoning onto the fact that he was a strange sort.
She took a minute to rinse the rain and road dust off in the mudroom and then collected the last of her clean clothes from her room. She saved this outfit especially for this situation, she would have to find a washing area tomorrow, or better yet, pay somebody to do it for her.
As she walked towards the kitchen, she thought about the gold sequestered in her backpack, a little sad.
She would deal with that tomorrow.
-
The storm had blown itself out by the next morning, and Whistlecork set out to try and get all her shopping done before her new pet started to panic.
The town was sleepy and quiet as she walked, all ground-level paths and poorly kept roofs. The Dragon Park was the most well-maintained area she saw, and even that was overgrown, the grass up past her ankles.
There was a board on one wall, where they would pin a map when the Dragon came to town, but it wasn't there now and there was nobody around she could ask, the offices all shuttered tight.
It was possible they sent people over from the nearest city when the place was needed, if it ever was. Judging by the state of the board and the grass, nobody had been here for quite a while.
Despite being almost deserted, Whistlecork did find the city very beautiful. All the buildings had been built from huge bricks of white marble, and they were all carved with intricate designs. The roofs were overgrown, but that added to the peaceful atmosphere, the greenery dripping down the sides of the buildings.
It reminded her almost of the ruined settlement, and she wondered again who had gone through so much effort to build such a cellar, only to abandon it without even properly clearing it out.
The market square was as quiet as the rest of the town. The area quiet and empty, but the shops around the edges open for business, despite the early hours.
She walked around for a while, seeing what was on sale.
There was a general store, everything from string to oats, and she made a note of that one for later. Out of all the stores, that one seemed to be the busiest, and she saw three whole people go in and out whilst she was walking around.
There was a butchers, so she could buy some meat for dinner, and a well-stocked bakery. The window didn't indicate that they sold anything other than bread, but there was always something the baker made when bored, be it cake or pastries. There were also two grocers, placed antagonistically on opposite sides of the square.
There was a bookshop, which surprised her, but they seemed to be trading mostly in cheap editions and part-works, which they would bind together for you, for a price. She took a brief look inside, but there was nothing that struck her fancy.
There were other shops too, but she mostly glazed over them, sparing only a passing glance at the leatherworkers.
Finally, down a side street, she came across a small store. The windows were old-fashioned but expensive. Small plates of wavy glass, leaded together and inset deep into the stonework, with thick heavy shutters to protect it when the weather was bad.
The sign above the door proclaimed jewellery and other fine goods, and she hoped she could trade in her gold.
A bell rang as she entered the shop, and she looked around with interest.
It had been years since she'd been in a shop like this, not since she was a child. The air smelt like wax and polish, and everything expensive was hidden behind the counter.
There was one burly-looking guard standing in a corner holding an intimidatingly large crossbow, and she baulked for a moment as they peered at her with beady eyes, before deciding she probably wasn't going to rob the place and returning to watching the door, keeping only one eye on her.
She hovered around the counter for a moment, unsure if they were a guard, or just a very surly shop owner, before the actual owner came out of the back, wiping their hands on a cloth.
"What can I do for you?" she asked, as Whistlecork took off her backpack.
She looked around surreptitiously, before taking a the ingot out of her pocket. She had wrapped it in a bit of paper earlier, and she carefully unwrapped it now. "This was a gift from my niece, a birthday present. She can't get all the way out here, so she sent this, said I should get it changed into currency and buy myself something nice."
The shop owner whistled, "That's an expensive birthday gift! Give me a moment, lemme get my boss."
She paused mid-turn, as if they were going to say something else, and then with a shake of the head disappeared back into the bowels of the shop.
-
They returned a moment later, the real shop owner in tow. "This is my boss, I'll leave you two to it." Again they seemed to want to add something more, but held themselves back, nodding instead to their boss and returning to the back of the shop.
The shop owner whistled much as their assistant had, picking up the ingot and weighing it in their hand. They gave her a nod and a minute later they had it checked and weighed, a test with some sort of liquid and a piece of stone confirming that it was real gold, scales and callipers confirming that it was the correct weight.
They nodded to her and handed it back, opening their mouth-
As they… they, they, them? Spoke, her brain stopped responding, all signals crossed, all the wrong flags flown, and for a second she shut down.
She thought she had a decent grasp on the local accents, but this… This was something else.
It was a person right? They looked like a person while they were examining her gold. They still looked like a person and she knew they were speaking, but they were completely incomprehensible.
Had she passed some sort of language border? No, surely not! Her host had spoken clearly, and on top of that, she was on the main road to Lushgrave! It was a long road, but surely things couldn't diverge that much
"…?" it spoke again, and she could see lips moving and hear the resulting sounds, she could even put them into a sensible order if she tried, but none of it made any sense.
"Excuse me for a moment," she nodded, then let herself out of the shop, leaving her ingot on the counter.
She spent a moment with her forehead against the cool marble of the exterior wall, before gathering her composure and re-entering the shop.
"Sorry about that." she grimaced. "Ok, say again?"
"It - ok," said the figure behind the counter, and she tilted her head, trying to get the hang of it, "[…] — get — that — a — lot."
Ok, she could work through this. It just meant retraining her brain, she could do that. She had had enough practice.
"I'm-" she did have to stop for a moment, adjusting her voice so that she was speaking normally, and not as one would to a child or a dog. "Ok. If you're willing to buy the gold, then I'm also looking to sell some other things, if you're interested. Or you might know where I could trade them on?"
The shopkeeper nodded and gave her a price for the gold, which was about what she had expected to get. It was a little under market price, and she would have done better to sell it in Lushgrave, but cash was cash, and that was what you got for selling in places like this.
'I should have just gone to another shop', she thought, as she pulled the tea bricks and flower stems out of her bag, placing them down on the counter. "It's these, if you know somebody who specialises in this sort of thing."
She opened her mouth to add more detail, and then shut it, instead waiting to see what…. What […] did with it all. Yes, that worked. It was a vague blank space in her mind, but she could put a made-up word to it later.
[…] picked up the goods, and spent a moment looking over them. Holding the glass full of stems up to the light, inspecting them for colour maybe? Feeling and sniffing the bricks of tea, without opening their fancy paper packaging.
Eventually […] spoke, and she did her best to listen.
"[…] for the tea […] can give you two pound notes. […] know the shop you bought it from, the owner is a close personal friend, so […] —appreciate getting to try it again."
Her brain fuzzed out in the middle, but she was getting better at interpreting. She still had to modulate her voice when replying, but it got easier as the conversation went on.
The flower stalks netted her almost double that of the tea, for six pounds in total. That was several weeks' wages for many people, and it sickened her a little that just two bricks of tea and a small bottle of flower stems could cost that much. But, she hadn't made that much profit on them, when it came down to it. They had been expensive even in the first place, that had sort of been the point.
She spent a while inspecting the rest of the shop and ended up trading for a bracelet and several small rings, which were fashionable at the moment to show you were partnered. Something about the permanence of gold being applied to relationships.
It sounded like the sort of thing the nobility would do.
They were finely crafted and intricately engraved with fractal patterns. The bracelet had small gemstones set into it, and came in a small wooden box, almost as beautifully made.
On a whim, she also picked up a brooch shaped like a starling, made of a sort of gold alloy. […] smiled at her as she picked it up, and when […] totalled up the bill, […] knocked half off the price of the brooch.
[…] they said something about it, giving her a gentle smile, and she nodded. They had enjoyed making it, or something along those lines.
Leaving the shop, she had spent most of her cash on the jewellery, so she was only a little richer in coin, but at least she had things to sell once she reached Lushgrave. Splitting the ingot into smaller parts made it much easier to spend in the future. She didn't like carrying cash, and it was useless in a lot of the places she passed through anyway.
An hour later she had restocked her cake supplies and picked up a new string for her bow, along with a large pot of scented beeswax.
She had also picked up a bag of squash seeds and dried cherries, hoping that maybe the bird would like them. If it didn't, then she also picked up a parcel of eggs. Eggs were good for feathers, right?
In the last shop, she got directions to the town hall. It was a while since she had been somewhere with a real building dedicated to the cause, most town issues were dealt with in whatever the biggest tavern was, and half the time, by the person behind the bar.
The town hall was built from the same white stone as everything else in the city, but it looked utilitarian and squat. It was a wide building, two stories high with many, many narrow windows. The roof was as overgrown as the rest of the city, but she could see one or two figures up there, hacking away at it with knives. Maybe they were trying to bring it back into use for summer?
She let herself in through the big double-wide doors, and stood for a moment in the lobby, confused about where to go. There was no reception desk or map, only bare white marble and corridors stretching out in all directions.
She dithered for only a moment, before shrugging and heading off in a random direction. Either she would find somebody who could help her, or she wouldn't.
-
Ten minutes later, a rather flustered clerk led her to the office of the person in charge. They knocked on the door and then left her there.
"Come in," echoed through the door, and she had a spike of relief as it was somebody she could understand. The only… […] had been in the jewellery shop, but along with the strangeness of her host, she had been burnt twice now.
She let herself in, and a minute later was seated in front of a large desk.
"Has any of the local nobility lost a hunting bird, or a mount?" she asked, and the man behind the desk frowned.
"Not as far as I'm aware," he took a moment to shuffle through the papers covering his desk. "Not that we have much nobility around here to begin with."
He turned and peered at the wall behind him, where there was a board covered in tiny paper notes, all handwritten.
"There has been a creature terrorising a city roughtly… Three hundred miles to the south. Somewhat, they're over-doing it a bit. Apparently it's taken three cows and several sheep over the past few months." He stood up and removed one piece of paper from the board, leaning in close to read it.
"Seems they were going to try and catch it around a month ago." He handed her the note, but it was written in very tiny print and didn't have much written on it that he hadn't already iterated.
"Could be that their efforts to catch it failed and it fled here, you thought it was an escaped pet?"
She nodded, "It had a chain around it's leg and it seemed trained, it was definitely domesticated, at some point at least."
The mayor nodded and took the note back, pinning it back on the board. "How close did you manage to get to it?"
"It wasn't injured, but it was in a bad state. I fed it and I guess it reverted to training. It seems perfectly tame, and is waiting for me above the forest right now."
She pursed her lips, "I'm headed up to Lushgrave, or I was. I should be stopping at most of the coastal towns on the way. But my sister lives…"
They conversed for a minute and she put a coin towards getting a note sent to her sister if somebody came along who had lost the bird. Chances were it would have abandoned her by then, but at least she could pass on its last known location.
Job done, she finally collected her shopping and headed towards the outskirts of town. Time to see if her new pet was still hanging around.