Isa could see that Alice was trying to swim to shore, but the strong river current kept pushing her toward the middle. Isa ran along the bank of the river, trying to keep up. Her pack bounced against her back. Her pack. Her pack had rope. She’d just need to get to it.

As Isa stopped to shrug off her backpack Lund thundered by with a coil of rope in hand. Mery followed at his heels. To Isa she said, “Great Georgie’s ghost, she can swim, can’t she?”

“Yes, she can swim! That’s what she’s trying to do.”

Lund was below Alice now and poised to throw his rope out. Alice, for her part, tried slow her movement by spreading out her arms. Her russett red cloak trailed out behind her.

Isa glanced up at Mery as she pawed through her bag for the rope. “Don’t you have a spell to help her?”

“I can’t sing her out of the river, lass. Don’t you have a spell?”

“Fuck if I know, and I don’t have time to figure it out now.” Isa grabbed her own length of rope and ran to join Lund. As Alice bobbed closer to them Lund threw the rope, but it landed short. Isa swirled her rope end over her head and threw with all her strength. The rope went past and behind Alice, who tried to turn around and grab at it, but the river moved too swiftly.

“Isa!” Mery was at her side. “Try again. You’re a hero and a fighter. A dexy fighter, eh?”

With Mery’s encouraging words Isa jogged ahead and threw the rope to Alice once more. This throw went right to Alice, and she grabbed hold easily.

Isa was so excited to have the rope in Alice’s hands, she didn’t think about the weight of Alice on the rope. It pulled taut almost immediately, and then the rope almost slithered through Isa’s hands. As it was, she got a terrific rope burn on the webbing of her left hand where the rope burned past before she got a better grip. The momentum of Alice and river still almost pulled Isa off her feet. With casual grace Lund reached out and steadied Isa by hooking his hand on the waistband of her pants.

They pulled Alice to shore, and as she neared the riverbank, she seemed to find her feet and trudged ashore. Isa threw her arms around her girlfriend, ignoring the sopping wet clothes. Peck landed nearby and croaked out a call that Isa took to be a cheer.

“Next time,” she said to the bird, “let’s not let Alice walk and ride at the same time, eh?”

Peck cawed again, and Isa and Alice laughed. Isa wiped Alice’s hair from her face. “Don’t scare me like that again, right?” Alice nodded and shivered in the cold wind.

“How far is the campsite?” asked Lund. “We need to get you in dry clothes, and I don’t think that can wait.”

“We can build a fire here; won’t take 2 minutes.” Mery slipped out of her pack and stripped a handful of leaves off a small shrub growing at the river’s edge.

“Fire!” said Alice.

“Yeah, honey. We need to get you warmed up.”

“No, I mean we saw smoke at the ruins. Me and Peck. There’s a campfire; someone is there.”

Isa rubbed Alice’s arms. “Well that’s good, isn’t it? They’ve got the place heated up for us.”

“That’s bad, Isa.” Lund paused midway through unbuckling his bag. “I don’t know--”

Isa said, “We can deal with it when we get there. Right now we need to get Alice warm and dry.” To Mery she said, “Too bad you don’t have a ‘dry’ spell to go with your ‘mend’ spell.”

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“Ah!” Alice tapped her head. “I do. I have a spell. Prestidigitation. It can warm material.”

“Good girl!” Mery grinned over the small fire she’d built. “That’s a bard spell and a wizard’s. Not something I ever studied, but dead useful here.”

“At least take my cloak for now.” Isa undid the clasp at Alice’s throat and pulled the heavy fabric away. In another moment, she’d removed her own cloak and settled it across Alice’s shoulders.

Alice sat down, cross legged at the fire with her bag beside her. “There’s just one problem with casting prestidigitation. My spellbook is ruined.”

“Oh babe.” Isa sat down hard beside her.

“What happened to it?” asked Mery.

Both Isa and Alice gaped her. “You will have noticed,” said Isa, “that she just took a swim in the river. Water and books, not friendly. Not a good combo.”

Mery scrunched up her face. “It’d take more than water to hurt a spellbook. Have a look.” With her chin she gestured at Alice’s bag.

Sure enough, Alice’s spellbook was dry. A few drops of water beaded on the cover, but the pages were bone dry. Her notebook was also unharmed by the river water. Isa pulled her own notebook from her pack and flipped through the pages. “I feel like I’ve already learned a lot since I’ve been back. When are these numbers going to reflect that?” she asked the group.

Lund shrugged in response, but Mery said, “When you’re young, or new to the world, I guess I should say, well, everything is new, isn’t it? Every spell, every creature, every problem and solution. It’s all new. But soon enough, you get used to the world, the creatures, how things go day to day, and so the experiences, they pile up, eh? They pile up one after another, blurring into weeks and months of the same situations, same problems, same solutions. And you look back at a year’s worth of living, and you can remember a handful of moments. Just a handful out of all the hours of all the days and weeks.” Mery stopped abruptly and poked at the fire.

“She means,” said Lund, “that it’s going to take a while before you get to level 6.”

Alice bunched her shirt fabric in both hands and began her spell. Prestidigitation can only warm a small area, but one spell was enough to warm her shirt. “That will last for an hour,” she told Isa.

“What about your pants? You’re still soaked through.”

“You can run the spell twice more,” Mery reminded her.

Once Alice had warmed each leg of her pants she touched her bracelet and summoned Peck. “Since we’re nice and settled,” she smiled wryly at her own words, “Peck and I are going to do a little more reconnaissance. Someone is camped in the ruins and before we go to far, we should take a good look, right Peck?”

“Wait a sec,” said Isa. “Why did you stumble before?”

“I got excited about the campfire, I guess.”

“You guess? Not good enough.” Isa crossed her arms.

“I’m sitting right here. Not trying to walk or talk or anything.” Alice crossed her own arms.

Mery shook her head at them both. “Did you not read the spell?”

“Of course I did!” Alice straightened up.

“May I?” Mery pointed at Alice’s spellbook. After Alice nodded Mery picked it up and flipped to the Find Familiar spell. “You have to be within a 100 feet of Peck for that connection. That’s why you tumbled.”

Alice leaned over and read the page. “I think I read those as two separate things - the link and the seeing. But they are, well, linked, aren’t they?”

Mery nodded and handed the spellbook back to Alice. “Magic’s trickey. But then, it has a right to be. Here we are taking a hand in shaping the world.”

As Isa watched Alice sent Peck straight up from the fire and with some testing figured out what 100 feet looked like. From the height Alice was able to confirm smoke in the distance, but they were too far away for her to be able to determine anything else.

Lund suggested caution. “We’re at the edges of the world now,” he said. “No one to help us if we stumble.” But Mery, naturally, disagreed. “Whoever is there, if we can’t be friendly, we’ll know soon enough and adjust accordingly.”

“Seems risky,” said Alice. “Maybe it’s a traveler like us, but maybe it’s a fugitive or a camp of bandits.”

Isa slapped her hands on her thighs and stood. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. But here’s something. He can see our fire as easily as we saw his, so we’re not going to be surprising anyone. Any traveler would make for the ruins, it seems to me. Even if you didn’t know it was there, once you saw it, you’d think ‘That’s the place to make camp.’ Right? So that’s what we’ll do. This must happen. Different groups converge on a likely camping spot. What do you do?”

Mery sighed. “We hope for the best, but we ready our blades.”