CHAPTER 36

The coin gleamed in the light of evening, and dropped into her palm. Heads. That clinched it, she'd head into the forest. She clamped her lips together. After a stop at Grettas'... for a massage.

A short but ponderously large man blinked at her unusual dress as she passed by him, stopped and waddled back.

"Excuse me." he asked in a somewhat breathy voice.

"Yes?" She responded, turning to look down at him. It almost seemed to her that he was trying to make up for his height with how much he could grow at the waist.

"Apologies, My Lady. Are you perhaps an Inquisitor, or a Witch Hunter?"

She nodded and reached into her shirt and pulled out her holy symbol. "I am indeed a Witch Hunter in service to the Golden Lady". She replied simply. "My name is Katarina."

He nodded. "Ah, wonderful. Wonderful. Simply wonderful." He replied in his breathy voice and patted her hand.

"I am mayor of this town. I'd been getting reports from some of the townfolk that strange things have been seen in the forest. I dunno whatall it could be, beastmen or the like, I have no idea. We sent a few men into the woods east of here and we're waiting for them to come back, but so far we've heard nothing." He frowned, but she smiled at him warmly.

"Tell me more of these problems. If you can give me something more than rumor and speculation, I'll be happy to help you out." She stopped suddenly, an idea flashing through her mind. "Actually, I tell you what. You find me a room with a bed, a hot meal, and a hot bath in that order, and I'll look into this for you with no other charge but that."

He blinked in surprise, but chuckled, jowls quaking. "For a servant of the Golden Lady, I'll let you stay at my house. My wife cooks an excellent repast." he patted his expansive belly. "Perhaps a little too excellent." he chuckled modestly and she smiled politely.

The bed was excellent, the food was exquisite, and the bath heavenly. Tomorrow she would ride into the forest and investigate.

She took the time between bath and bed to clean her gun. Her gun used a system of paper cartridges, which was far more precise and efficient than the old method, where some of the powder had to be rammed down the barrel, some wadding, then the ball, and then some powder poured into a small pan on the outside.

Her paper cartridges were basically the bullet load with the powder sealed in a paper cylinder treated with either tallow or beeswax, and the end was a brass cap. With this system she was able to break open her gun, slip three paper cartridges in, and fire three times. the brass end caps had to be removed manually (and she saved them, because they could be reused) but still, it was far more efficient than it used to be. Her gun needed to be cleaned frequently, so she spent times like these going through the rites and rituals of cleaning.

Her gun was chased with scrollwork and holy symbols, and the heavy wooden grip was inlaid with orichalcum, blessed and consecrated. One of the final ceremonies that recognized her as a Witch Hunter was a ritual that bonded her to this gun. Her faith and zeal would empower her shots against magic users. Anyone else holding the gun would find it a normal firearm, but in her hands it was a powerful bane against all spellcasters.

She climbed into the bed and relaxed, and fell into a deep sleep, a twinge of relief and regret at not having visited Gretta's establishment.

The mayor was a far more welcoming than the nameless innkeep that treated her with casual indifference or the suspicious pastor, directing her to the street lined with shops, and even providing a small wagon to hold her parcels, which was a surprise.

For the past sixty or so years, the Anglish Empire was aggressively expanding north across the Gulf of Mirras and establishing themselves on the northern continent of Hesperia. As people streamed in, there were any number of jobs that needed doing, some of which required mercenary work. The Church often hired "adventuring groups" to go and chart a particular stretch of forest, or slay predators, or any number of such tasks. What had recently gained in popularity were these small wagons, narrow enough to wind through most forests, robust enough to take punishment, light enough to be lifted over obstacles, and the wagon itself was modular, which meant that in certain situations it could be easily dismantled, or if a part was broken, that part could simply be swapped out.

Katarina had never needed one before, but the Mayor urged the small wagon on her anyway. As she moved from one shop to the next, her small wagon took on her parcels. Travelling food, incidental supplies like rope, healer's kits, an extra blanket and replacement bedroll.

She stood outside one of the shops as she placed her bundles into the cart. "You look like you're going to leave right now." She admonished, but shrugged. "Might as well." She climbed on the bench and signaled her horse, who was unused to pulling anything.

She directed her horse towards the forest road awkwardly. Her horse wasn't used to pulling carts, and she wasn't used to directing them. She kept twitching her knees in the driver's box and gritting her teeth when the horse simply didn't respond.

The mayor had mentioned that eventually the road would likely be paved with stones as the city expanded, but for now, the road was packed dirt. The man at the gate was happy to lend Dillon to her, as the boy had explained. True to his word, he carried a warden's hatchet, a long wooden club that was knobby with iron studs, and a bow that was decorated with feathers.

"I'll follow as you direct milady, except to point you towards the trails." He said, and she nodded.

The logging road that led into the forest was smoothed dirt, the ground heavily rutted with deep grooves from heavy carts carrying trees. Likely those wagons were pulled by enormous draft horses or oxen.

As she rode, she sang softly. Dillon rode beside her, saying nothing, respecting her space, for which Katarina was silently grateful. The first morning she was in the forest, she concentrated her thoughts on Araya the Diviner to distract herself from the emotional hurricane she was weathering over her adventure in the brothel girl's room.

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Araya had been a happy but wistful girl. Eccentric too, prone to changing the topic abruptly, or leaving things half-said. She was very sad when she spoke about Katarina's next assignment, and Katarina had found out why. It was a frightful burden. She remembered sleeping with the girl, who would squirm and roll around and steal the covers and occasionally kick her. Katarina tried vainly to refer to Araya as a woman, after all she was more than fifty years old, but looked a youthful fourteen.

Katarina tapped her finger on her lips and thought about Araya and the Yamato as she rode through the forests with Dillon.

The Yamato were an island race. According to Sasaki, there was a point in time when the elven race and the human race were separate entities, but eventually both races consumed each other through intermarriage. In most, the elven blood was insignificant, and they looked, behaved, and aged as normal humans. The stronger the elven blood, though, and the differences became significantly more visible.

It was said that if an elf were to live unmolested, they would live about three hundred years. They achieved maturity around the same time as humans did, around fourteen to sixteen years of age, and for the most part would not age physically past this point, changing very little until the twilight years.

Of course, the Yamato did not have full elven blood, but the more potent the elven blood, the longer they lived. Araya claimed she could expect a lifespan of about a hundred additional years to her fifty-two. Katarina blinked as she dwelled on that. Yamato ruled by blood, with a complex system of blood ties and familial relationships and they also ruled by who had the most elven blood. This meant that Lady Cardinal Yuriko was likely part of the royalty of Yamato itself, which in turn made Araya some sort of ... lesser princess, perhaps.

There were other benefits to having elven blood. Magical corruption did not affect them the same way as it did normal humans, which is why elven mages were feared. They could cast without reservation or fear of corruption.

One of the drawbacks of having elven blood was that you were subject to elven emotions. Elves were described as very emotional and passionate. Their faiths were fanatic, their duties religious, their loves epic. They did not do things normally, everything was grandiose. They did not have children, they gave birth to entire clans. That, coupled with their immense lifespans, and elves were nightmarish. Katarina remembered Araya's passionate outburst: "If I find a husband, I will give him a thousand children, prepare his meals with my own hands, do whatever it is he asks of me, and spoil him rotten!"

The question Katarina considered was church doctrine. The Church of the Golden Lady had declared war against the elves. They were not human, and thus deserved extermination. This occasionally lumped them in with beastmen, mutants, monsters and abominations, depending on the amount of zealous devotion to church doctrine. The Yamato were recognized as part of the Anglish Empire, and one of their own served on the Book of the Golden Lady, the ruling council of the Church. Elven half-breeds and the like were often killed by inquisitors and witch hunters on sight or discovery. Why then were the Yamato accepted and the other halfbreeds scorned? Why were dwarves revered and elves considered synonymous with vermin? She glanced up at the sky. It was getting time to start looking for a spot to camp. She glanced over at Dillon, who true to his word had barely spoken a peep besides pointing out the trails she should take.

"What do you know of elves, Warden Dillon?" She asked, and his head came up.

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"Elves, milady?" He asked, and she nodded.

"Mmm. Not much. Never seen one, myself. Knew a Warden that described em as having seven heads and ten horns." he shook his head. "Frightful creatures."

Katarina raised an eyebrow. "I think he was describing something different." She advised, and his eyebrows rose.

"That so?" Katarina nodded. No help there.

"Know of a place to camp within..." She looked to the sky and judged the speed of their travel. "Two hours?" He nodded at that.

"Yeah- Yes." He corrected himself. "There's a clearing near a mountain spring."

"Why do you do that?" Katarina asked curiously.

"Hmm?" He asked. "Do what?"

"Correct yourself." She replied.

"Mmm. Didn't have much in the way of learnin' in Apopka." He replied. "In Norn people talk proper. They tend to treat you low when you speak like you don't have smarts." He blushed. "I take lessons sometimes at the Church, when I can."

Katarina nodded. "Wise." She complimented and he smiled under her praise.

Katarina opened her eyes; morning seemed to have come almost as quickly as she could close her eyes. A low groundmist had sprung up overnight and everything was chilly and slightly damp. Dillon was an indistinct lump in his bedroll.

Katarina built up the fire as the sun peeked over the horizon. She should have picked up proper food before she left, she grumped. She had normal trail rations, beef jerky, dried fruits and nuts, and several waxy blocks of Traveller's Soup. If she hadn't been in such a rush to leave, she would have picked up proper food, she mused.

If the Goddess commands you to do something, and the Church tells you not to do that thing, to whom do you give your obedience? Katarina wondered, and then blinked, frowning. The thought didn't feel like her own. It felt strange and alien.

The answer was so explicitly obvious to Katarina, it might as well have never been asked. She would follow the Goddess, of course. She always had. The Church was a beastly conglomerate of rules and politics and bureaucratic machinery that dispensed assignments and obstructed her at every opportunity.

She nodded to herself as she dug in the soil with her trowel, and then blinked. When had she retrieved her trowel from her saddlebags? Moreover, why?

She put the trowel down and contemplated her hands. What was she doing? She stared vapidly at her hands for an interminable amount of time, not thinking or doing anything. Exhaustion dragged at her head and she nearly pitched forward into the dirt.

She jerked her head upright, the vagaries of a coalescing dream blowing apart in her mind.

She blinked a few times and shook her head and goggled; at some point while she'd nodded off, she'd retrieved her skillet from the cart and filled it with a number of gathered plants. The pan was filled with forage: shallots, sliced cattail roots, some wild carrots, and the fleshy scales from some flower bulb she'd apparently dug up at some point. She splashed in some water into the skillet, added dried meat and salt, covered it, and set it in the fire to cook. As she did these things, she tried to piece together the dream she'd had.

"The first lesson: What I have offered, Katarina, let no man refuse." She repeated. "I have lost a child, and it falls to you to return him to my side." She recited from her dream. Who had said that? She shook her head. What did it mean? Meaningless babbling that had bubbled up from her dreams?

"What was the rest of it?" Katarina asked, and then nodded. "There were two other lessons in that dream, I'm sure of it." She decided. She opened her mouth, and the second lesson seemed to tumble out of its own accord.

"The second lesson is the first lesson you were taught, Katarina:" She began, and then waved her hand. "Stop filling your head with all the stupid fucking rules and laws and bullshit from the church." She growled, imitating her master, The Wolf of Alastor. "The Goddess is Love, the Goddess is Life, and the Goddess is the protecting arm. Anything more than that and you get tangled up in stupid shit." He had instructed. She nodded again. Nothing spectacular; she knew this already. She was given a practical, pragmatic sort of imagination; flexible enough to think of several solutions to a particular problem, but not given to irrelevant flights of fancy.

"So what was the third lesson?" Katarina asked herself. There was no need to wonder, there was only a sense of certainty that there had been three lessons. She adjusted the skillet in the coals. Suddenly the fire was just a mound of coals, the wood she'd added had disappeared. She looked up suddenly, and noticed that the trees around their campsite had lost their vibrancy and were a lifeless, flat gray. What was this? She rose to her feet and then staggered, going to one knee as a wave of exhaustion washed over her. She collapsed onto the ground and closed her eyes.

As Katarina's mind drifted, she seemed to visualize a warm radiance somehow suffusing her body from within and radiating itself outward from herself. It came all at once, the knowing of how to create such a radiant glow; a simple prayer and moving the hand just so...

Katarina awoke, feeling lightheaded and dizzy. Her skin felt uncomfortable and tight, a crawling sensation like insects spidered across her skin. There was a deep-seated ache in her bones, like a sickness. She barely made it out of her bedroll before she vomited.

Katarina opened her eyes. She lay half in and out of her bedroll. A sticky pool of vomit steamed gently in the morning air next to her head. Katarina grimaced and turned her head and pulled herself to a sitting position. She sluiced water into her mouth from her waterskin, rinsed and spat. She was absolutely famished, but reluctant to eat, given her earlier episode. What had caused it? She wondered.

She checked her saddlebags, mentally kicking herself for not picking up some cooked food before she left Norn. She had several blocks of the ubiquitous "Traveller's soup" which was a waxy block of sliced vegetables and grains and seasonings in a block of congealed fat. All one had to do was have a pot of water and cook the block until the fat melted. It was nutritious and cheap but deliriously greasy. She grudgingly decided she'd need to cook some up, maybe add in some jerky, and spoon out the grease as best she could.

She suddenly glanced off to the side at her firepit. Bizarrely, her skillet rested in the coals. How had that gotten there? She wondered, and a fleeting memory of filling the skillet with forage flitted through her mind. She shook her head at that, dismissing it. That was a dream, plain and simple. Likely she'd left the pan in the coals overnight. She nodded to herself and glanced at Dillon's bedroll. He was rolling a smoke from a pouch he'd kept at his waist.

She'd dreamed at some point between last night and the morning. Of what? She struggled to remember. What was it? She glanced around and rubbed her face. Until she'd stopped in Aston, she hadn't dreamed much. Was this the price for sleeping in the same bed as Araya? Now she understood why there was an aversion to being around the little Diviner.

She rose to her feet, took a breath, held, it, and let it out. She stepped to the firepit and took the lid off the skillet. A warm wave of steam, laden with the scents of cooking food pushed against her. She frowned at her skillet. Had she somehow done this in her sleep? She got up and fetched her bowl and utensils and served herself from the pan as Dillon rummaged in his saddlebag for his own bowl.

She spooned food into her mouth, chewing and eating stolidly, not tasting her food. The dreams were intense and left her weak and trembling. She glanced at the young Forest Warden across the fire as he dragged a whetstone across his hatchet with slow, deliberate strokes.

Had she been awake or had she been dreaming when she had filled her skillet? As Katarina ate, she moved back to saddlebags and examined the contents. She pulled out her trowel and noticed the chunks of dirt clinging to it. Either she was sleepwalking, or she was awake long enough to dig up flower bulbs and cattail roots to add to her forage, and then... what? She went back to sleep?

Dillon went to the tiny spring to tend to his morning ablutions, and joined her at the fire. Katarina's first thought was to ask him if she'd been sleepwalking, but she caught herself. No way could she ask that. Not to him, not to a stranger, not to someone who thought of her as a consummate professional.

She gave the ranger a careful glance. "Dillon." She began, and stopped. What should she say? "How much further?"

He glanced at her quickly, and then away. "Not much further. There's a cave we'll check. It's a stopover point. If he's not there then..." He sighed. "I guess we'll head back."

"You won't look further?" She asked, and he shook his head. "We don't go much further into the forest from there. Either we'll find him on the way... or we won't find him." he finished heavily.

Katarina nodded, and found herself captivated by swirling motes of dust in a shaft of sunlight. She shook her head and slapped her cheeks. The world snapped back into focus.

"Milady... I hate to bring this up, but... are ya well?" He asked, the concern evident in his voice.

She nodded. "Feeling the aftereffects of something I had in Aston." She complained, and he gave her a curious look. Alone and on horseback, it could take anywhere from a few days to a week to travel from Aston to Norn. Hangovers didn't typically last that long.

"Well... he began, and then hesitated. "If you start feeling worse, let me know." He offered, and she raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.

A sudden, comfortable warmth seemed to spring up and enfold her, a feeling she hadn't experienced in a long time. She blinked in memory; a vision she'd had in Aston had reminded her of it. A jolt of adrenaline startled her as she remembered waking up next to the saloon girl, feeling that warmth bloom in her breast.

"I get the message." Katarina complained gently, and began packing away her things.

Dillon eyed her at that, but she waved him away irritably. She'd have to be on guard to avoid thinking out loud in front of him.

"What was it that you was-" he paused, correcting himself, "were saying, milady?" He asked curiously.

"I talk to myself sometimes." She replied simply, he eyed her askance, but said nothing further on the matter, for which she was profoundly grateful.

She took her horse further into the woods alongside the ranger. Although Dillon was surprisingly still quiet, she sensed he preferred to ride in silence. He pointed the way through the forests, heading towards what he told her was a campsite that he and his brother had used.

The forest was mostly aged oak, interspersed with stands of aspen, and the ground was rich soil over gentle hills and low valleys. The density of the forest waxed and waned, sometimes trotting across open meadows and moving slowly through the more dense areas.

After a short midday meal without a fire, they rode through a constant drizzle. She covered her saddlebags with a waterproofed leather sheet and they kept moving. She entertained herself by softly singing hymns and carefully guiding her mount between heavy stands of trees. Dillon followed her in an oiled leather cape, hood pulled forward, occasionally joining in with the hymns he knew.

It was nearly evening when Dillon stopped her.

"Milady, we're not far from the campsite." He advised.

"How much further?" She asked, and he pointed up a rocky incline. "There's a cave up there." he advised simply with a shake of his head. "We'll leave the horses. They might make it up there, but it'd be a bitch. Even worse coming down."

Katarina eyed the incline. It was a slab of rock that rose up on a gentle angle. It was fissured and cracked in several places. Dillon was right; their horses might make it, but it would be rough going. Coming back down, gravity and the earlier rainfall would make it tricky, and Katarina wasn't willing to make the attempt.

"The horses should be able to make it up there." She mused, and he nodded. "I've done it myself." He agreed.

"But getting back down..." She agreed with a shake of her head, and they took a moment to hitch horses. She gave her horse a quick rubdown and a couple sugar cubes, affixed the feedbag, and then covered their saddles with the leather sheet.

As she covered their saddles, Katarina's head came up and she took a moment to listen.

"Dillon?" Katarina asked, her hand falling to the butt of her gun.

"Milady?" He responded simply, hand going to his hatchet.

"It's gotten awfully quiet." She replied, glancing around. He blinked, startled, but he couldn't do anything but agree. All the animal sounds from the forests had stopped, and eerily, even the wind itself had died. Dillon had his bow out, a quiver of arrows on his hip and an arrow in his hand in a matter of a few moments.

"Quiet." Katarina whispered, and he nodded.

All that remained was the occasional whisper of wind through the branches, the rustle of leaves. Katarina listened for anything, a clue. She heard nothing, so she advanced to the trees slowly, moving from tree to tree.