It took two and a half more days to gather the ingredients Mara needed to enact her plan.
She found the ringfeather on the evening of the first day, just before they stopped for dinner. It was a small plant and she didn’t need much, so she only took two of the small, feather-soft golden leaves.
That night, she dreamt of Davy again. Again, she found herself in bed, but this time she was listening to him return home after a late patrol. She kept her eyes closed and her breath even as she always did, pretending she was asleep while he crept about in the dark, cleaning up. Just as he was slipping beneath the covers, palm sliding over her hip to cup her breast, warmth settling against her back, she woke.
The next day, she found nothing. Rain smacked in fat, intermittent droplets against the top of her head just as they were breaking camp, and by the time they started walking, it had increased to a steady, drenching shower.
Mara’s well-oiled slicker kept her mostly dry, but by lunchtime little rivulets had crept beneath the hood and trickled down her neck to soak her collar. She spent the afternoon in a grumpy fugue, cold wet boots squishing over the bloated forest floor. She and Eli didn’t talk, and even Nick had fallen quiet, bundled up in his own slicker atop Eli’s shoulders. Nick always slept well in the rain, and she wondered as she studied his slumped form if the raindrops beating on the hood of his slicker had lulled him to sleep.
She found neither of the ingredients she needed for her truth serum, mainly because she wasn’t looking. All she could think about was the wet. The wet ground on which she was going to sleep that night. The wet clothing she’d have to wrestle Nick out of in the cramped confines of the damp canvas shelter. The wet socks leeching all feeling from her toes and the bottoms of her feet.
Mara was relieved beyond measure when they stopped to make camp an hour earlier than usual that night. According to unspoken agreement, Eli constructed their shelter while she gathered firewood, the only words exchanged a remark from her about the firestarter–how glad she was he had it, since without it they surely wouldn’t have been able to set a fire to the sodden wood. She crawled into the shelter before dark had fallen, taking Nick with her. Stripping them both of their wet boots and outer clothing, and drying them off as best she could, sapped her of what little energy she had left. Nick fell asleep while she was tugging off his damp socks, and she herself was asleep just as soon as she’d unfurled the blessed, dry warmth of her sleeping roll and crawled between the blankets.
This time, she expected Davy in her dreams. It was no shock to fall asleep into his arms, his heat at her back, rain lashing the roof over their heads. This was her favorite thing, the most glorious comfort she had ever known–the luxury of being warm and safe and loved while foul weather raged outside.
Mara woke the next morning to sunshine, which meant not only that the rain had stopped but that she’d slept in. She noticed the sun at the same moment she noticed that Nick was not beside her, but the sound of his giggle on the far side of the canvas slowed her heartbeat before it could realize it needed to race.
Groggy and ashamed of her laziness, she crawled out of the shelter to find Nick and Eli sitting cross-legged by the fire, stacking flat rocks into a tower that collapsed just as she came into view. Nick giggled uproariously, chanting, “Again, again, again!” and bouncing on his bottom. He didn’t so much as glance at her. Eli, conversely, caught her eye and offered her a smile that she was too muddled by sleep and self-reproach to receive, let alone return.
It only intensified her discomfiture when she returned from her morning privacy break to a steaming cup of tea and most of the work to break down camp already done–the shelter packed away, Nick dressed, and the fire doused.
“Where did you sleep?” she asked as she sat to drink the tea, already annoyed with the answer.
Eli, who had been lashing the rolled-up canvas to the bottom of his pack, looked up with a frown. “Me?”
“Of course, you. Who else would I be talking to?”
“I slept by the fire.”
“In the rain?”
He blinked. “I wore my slicker.”
“There’s also a shelter. That you built. And you are carrying.”
He blinked again, and it annoyed her all the more that his confusion seemed genuine. Was he going to make her explain it to him?
She squeezed the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “If anyone should be sleeping in the rain, it’s me. You’re doing all the work here. I thought…” What had she thought? That he’d sleep in the shelter too? There was barely enough room for her and Nick.
Eli finished with his pack and carried it over to where she sat, dropping it beside her and sitting down.
“I’ve spent more nights outside than I have indoors,” he said, “and in far worse weather than this. The shelter is for you and Nick.” She opened her mouth to argue, but he went on before she could speak, his eyes fixed to hers, sunlight illuminating streaks of amber in the somber brown. “You think Davy would want me warm and dry while his wife and son slept in the mud?”
She couldn’t find the words to answer, but if she had it wouldn’t have mattered. Nick interrupted, yanking on Eli’s sleeve and drawing him away to investigate something crawling about beneath an overturned rock. She would answer, though, she decided. Once she had the right words.
~~~
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Her effort to find the right words was driven from her mind just before they stopped for lunch, with the discovery of a massive cluster of willibut in the decaying trunk of a dead tree. Not a Loftland fir, but one of the smaller, leaf-bearing trees that grew here and there, stunted by the filtered sunlight of the high canopy. It hadn’t fallen yet, its shattered trunk still upright, broken branches dangling like limp fingers toward the ground.
She laughed in triumph when she peered into a rotted out tree hollow and saw the bright red caps, telltale black spots circling the rim like they were painted on by an expert craftsman. She reached in and plucked three fat mushrooms from the cluster, holding them aloft as she turned to face her companions.
“Willibut!” she exclaimed, to dubious reception. Eli narrowed his eyes as if concerned for her soundness of mind. Nick wrinkled his nose up and shook his head so hard he would have toppled from his perch if not for Eli’s hand darting up to brace his back. “For my serum!”
“Your serum?” Eli asked as she joined him and they resumed walking.
“My serum.”
“What serum is this?”
“I’m glad you asked,” she said, blowing the dirt off the stems of the mushrooms and tucking them into an oiled drawstring bag she’d tied to the strap of her pack. “It’s for you, actually.”
“If you plan to poison me, you’ve just ruined the whole scheme,” he drawled.
She laughed, which didn’t make her feel guilty. She’d thought about it the day before and decided that she owed it to Eli to appreciate his sense of humor more than she owed it to Davy never to laugh again without him. And it’s not like she was feeling joy. One could be amused without being happy. “I don’t plan to poison you. Not intentionally anyway.”
“How reassuring.”
“Would you like to hear my plan?”
“At this point, I’d be a fool not to.”
She took a deep breath, summoning up the small speech she’d spent the last two and a half days preparing.
“Okay, so I find myself in a small quandary, in addition to the… well, the larger quandary.”
“And I am the source of your secondary quandary?”
“Well, yes. Sort of. The thing is, you’ve been nothing but kind. Nothing but heroic, really. You’ve given me no reason not to trust you. Except for that initial… thing.”
“The small matter of my controlling your mind repeatedly without your permission. I remember.”
“Right. That. But aside from that, you’ve been good to me. Good to us. And I think it’s going to be important that I trust you, and that we get along, as we continue this journey. I want to trust you.”
“I want that too.”
“Right. Well, the thing is that I don’t. And it’s not your fault. Well, except for–”
“--that initial thing,” he supplied dryly.
“Right, well except for that initial thing, it’s not your fault that I don’t trust you. I just don’t know you. I barely even know about your friendship with Davy. Which is a shame, because it seems like you were important to him, and he was important to you. What I’m saying is that I want to know you better, so that I can trust you. But in order to know you better, I have to trust you. It’s a whole… a whole…”
“A whole quandary?”
“Yes. It’s a whole quandary.”
“And your solution to this quandary?”
“I… well, I thought I’d brew up a truth serum.”
“I see.” He didn’t sound terribly surprised. Maybe he already suspected what she was doing. It would have been obvious if he had even a rudimentary understanding of herbal magic. And she got the feeling that Eli was one of those aggravating people who passed through life collecting casual expertise.
When he didn’t say more, she rushed on. “If you’re not comfortable taking it, that’s okay. We’ve gotten along well enough so far, and–”
“I’ll take it.”
She stumbled over her own feet and had to take a couple awkward steps forward before she regained her stride. Once she trusted her footing, she turned to study his face. “You will?”
He nodded, shifting Nick on his shoulders and glancing over at her. “You’re right. It’s important that you trust me. And I am trustworthy, at least as far as I know. I’ve got no reason not to take it. Other than the fact you’re brewing it up using a field kit and have no way to test those mushrooms you just picked.”
“Oh, it’ll be safe. It will!” she said indignantly, when he cast her a dubious look. “I know what I’m doing, and I know willibut for depths’ sake. The markings are unmistakable.”
He huffed, and their feet rustled through fallen needles for a few long moments before he spoke. “I do have one condition.”
“What is it?”
“In the event this concoction doesn’t outright kill me, and you’re able to ask your questions–”
“It’s not going to kill you!”
“If it doesn’t, please don’t push me on anything it seems like I don’t want to answer.”
Her heart sank. The whole purpose of the truth serum was to ask him questions–a purpose which would be defeated if she had to let go of questions he didn’t want to answer.
“I can’t think of many questions you could have that I wouldn’t be able to answer. I’m only mentioning it as a precaution.”
“Eli,” Mara sighed. She wouldn’t push him into it, but she also wasn’t going to go to the trouble of brewing the potion if she had to cater her questions to his preference. “There’s really no purpose to it if I’m letting you hand-select the questions you want to answer. It’s fine. Let’s just not do it.”
He didn’t speak for a few steps, their boots continuing to crunch over dry twigs and needles.
“I’m oathbound. There are things I cannot say. But they’re specific things that I can’t imagine would be important to you. You can ask if I support the rebellion, whether I’ve ever betrayed it. Whether I have or would ever betray Davy. You can ask whether I intend to deliver you safely to the Enclave. I believe there are enough questions I can answer to put your mind at ease. I’m just asking that if you ask a question I seem reticent to answer, please walk away from that question. I don’t know how oaths interact with the serum you plan to brew, and I’d rather not be incapacitated by some magical blight so early in our journey.”
She gnawed on her lip, considering, though there wasn’t much to consider. His argument made sense.
“Okay,” she finally said. “You have a deal.”
“Wonderful,” he answered, and if he didn’t sound excited, she couldn’t really blame him. Mushrooms were a bit of a dice roll, if she were being honest.
Even willibut.