“He’s definitely hiding something, he was too nervous and too cagey,” Mathias spoke around a mouthful of trail rations.

“Maybe he just wasn’t happy to see a guilder at his door” Gan said levelly “We don’t have the best reputation in some areas, and you don’t build your house so far from people if you want to have guests.” Val snorted at Gan’s observation,

“And you don’t not want company that bad unless you’re cagey. I bet he was wanted back on the mainland,” Mathias nodded at the suggestion,

“That could be. Maybe he would feel better if we assured him that the guild formally recognized the settlement as sovereign power,”

“I don’t think he would understand the significance. Non-guilders don’t tend to be to well versed in guild law,” Gan reasoned, but Mathias pushed on

“Then we can explain that to him!”

“Why do you care so much about putting one farmer at ease?” Val almost shouted his question, evoking an eye roll from Mathias.

“I told you already, he’s growing heartvine!”

“And you also told me he won’t sell it to us,”

“Maybe because he’s worried that we’ll try to turn in some bounty that was issued a thousand miles away,”

“I thought you said that some adventurers put an offer on them?”

“I said he claimed some adventurers bought them, but I don’t buy it,”

“Is that so hard to believe? They’d definitely want to get ahead of us on an ingredient like that,” Mathias waved off Val’s question,

“They’re hard ingredients to work with. You’d want to find an alchemist who can use them well in advance, and I talked to every alchemist in the settlement. Not one has been approached and asked about making healing regents with heartvine, and I suspect that’s not the only thing that he wasn’t being truthful about,”

“What else did he lie about,”

“Before I knocked on his door it sounded like a dozen or more people were having a party inside, and the second I knocked it grew deathly silent,”

“That’s cagey, but I don’t see a lie,”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Then let me finish. When I asked him what the occasion was, he told me that some of the villagers had helped him on the farm, and he’d cooked them dinner as thanks,”

“So?”

“So I asked around about him, and the man has seemingly no friends. Oh people know who he is, and they say he’s nice enough, but he’s not sociable. Nobody I talked to had seen him do more than come into town, sell his wares, and go back to his farm. Not even make small talk,” Val frowned now,

“That is a little suspicious. You don’t think he’s got a band of brigands hidden away do you?”

“Out here in the ass end of nowhere? I doubt it, but somebody was there, and with how quickly they quieted it’s pretty clear that they don’t want anybody to know it,”

“We should leave the farmer his secrets,” Gan cut in.

“Why?” Val’s volume was once again bordering on a shoutm

“Heartvine,” Gan elaaborated,

“We could just take it, he’s just a farmer, we’re warriors,” Val puffed up with pride at the declaration, only to quickly wither under the reproachful stare Gan focused at him for suggesting they steal from the farmer,

“Maybe we could steal them, but we could not grow them. At least not me. I am just a warrior, he is a farmer,”

Gan’s words triggered a brief moment of introspection in Val, and soon the trio arrived at the treeline.

“You’ve said that you think the man was lying about pretty much everything he told you, but you seem to believe his description of the monster and that it was scared away by something worse well enough,” Mathias just shrugged,

“I don’t know enough about his motivations to know what he was lying for, but he seemed earnest enough while he was telling me about the wolf. I could be wrong, but I would rather be wrong and over-prepared than be right and dead,” Val rolled his eyes and Gan nodded seriously.

For all his purported skepticism Val strung his bow before they entered the forest, while Gan cast a spell to cover the noise of their footsteps. After making their preparations the group quietly proceeded into the forest.

They’d almost given up on finding a magical beast for the day, though they’d encountered many manner of mundane animals, when they saw a large bird, feathered black with red highlights, hunting a pack of small monkeys. This in and of itself would have been an interesting sight, but it was the fashion in which the bird harassed the pack that got the guilder’s attention.

It would swoop low, and try to scatter them by breathing a stream of fire on them, and try to carry off a monkey that had been separated from the rest. They watched a dew such passes before Val thought he had enough feel for the movement of the bird to take his shot.

His arrow stuck into a tree, but missed the bird entirely, seeming to miss it’s notice. He didn’t try another arrow until the bird had caught it’s prey, and with the bird’s reduced speed due to being laden with a monkey, Val’s arrow struck true, taking the bird in the neck. It fell to the ground and thrashed a moment before falling still. The monkeys stuck around for a short while, until the three scared them off, and collected the bird’s corpse.

“We should head back to town today, and see a tanner. Tomorrow we can come back and set up a hunting outpost,” Gan declared.

The other two nodded their agreement proud of the tracking and hunting they had done, unaware of how closely they themselves were being tracked.