Gideon could feel the latent moisture in the air increasing with each day the caravan traveled further from the desert. As they drew closer to the great Obeeskogee river, the oppressively dry desert wind began to lose strength and finally gained some humidity. Life seemed to be returning in force to the landscape. The grass slowly changed colors from a dehydrated yellow to a healthy green, and it coated the low hills in large patches. The thin, lonely trees with needle leaves disappeared, replaced by groves of hearty oaks and tall cottonwoods. Rabbits and field mice became a common sight, and Gideon spotted a herd of deer grazing off in the distance one evening before training.
Surelin continued to make steady, consistent progress. The introduction of Kara as a sparring partner had a drastic effect on her growth, forcing Surelin to adapt to an opponent who was only slightly taller than herself. Kara had a completely different approach to combat from Gideon: she was far more cautious and calculating. Learning how to handle the differences between their two styles and sizes became the most beneficial aspect of Surelin’s training, and Gideon noticed significant improvements in her skills after each of their sparring sessions.
The constant physical training and sparring began to transform Surelin’s body. After a full month had passed, there was more breadth to her shoulders, and her arm and leg muscles had gained more tone. She’d always been thin, but the daily running and exercise had tightened her physique. Hardly a trace of body fat could be found on her anymore: she was all stringy muscle.
Gideon also noticed that her self confidence had improved along with her fitness. From the very first, he’d considered her to be a remarkably strong and outspoken person, but there had also been a hard to pin down reticence about her. Surelin clearly felt very strongly about doing the right thing for others, but when it came to herself she often faltered. After a month of training, though, her assertiveness had increased. Her posture straightened up: she held her shoulders back, and her head level. She now always made eye contact with Gideon and the others during conversation, and her language generally sounded more self-assured.
At some point, Gideon realized that Surelin's opinion about him had also improved. She seemed much more curious about him, and during their down times she would often ask him questions about himself. He told her nothing about his childhood or the other things he'd done, but spoke freely about the many places he'd been to. She prodded him regularly to reveal more about himself, but he always begged off. Not everything he'd ever done had been objectionable, but much of it was, and he didn't want Surelin to think negatively of him.
That had been a troublesome realisation about himself. Her opinion about him mattered a great deal. He'd never experienced that with a woman before, though in truth he'd never cared much at all about that sort of thing.
He was almost certain it went beyond mere curiousity for Surelin. During their conversations, her gaze would sometimes linger on him longer than necessary. In the evenings, she never failed to sit next to him when it was time to eat dinner with the rest of the caravan, and she was always eager to share her food with him. Once, when he was preparing his bedroll for sleep after training, he'd caught her furtively staring at him.
A faint sort of tension had come into existence between them. It seemed very much like there was mutual attraction, but something was preventing it from moving any further. Gideon suspected it was related to what had happened to her, but he couldn't be sure. He did understand, however, that making any overt gestures towards her would be a major mistake.
They remained at a respectful distance from each other. He was her teacher, she his student. Beyond that, outwardly at least, they were simply amiable.
Kara, though, quickly became Surelin’s best friend. After adapting to training, it became rare for Surelin to be so exhausted that she needed to spend the entire day asleep. She spent many evenings before training chatting and fooling around with Kara in the lead wagon. Gideon was grateful for their blossoming friendship: it meant he and Surelin could take some time off from one another. He spent their time apart preparing for the coming night’s training, or simply relaxing in the rear wagon, lazily watching the world crawl past while lying on his bench.
For the next month, their situation did not change in any meaningful way. Surelin continued to improve her fitness and swordfighting proficiency as the shifting landscape slowly acquired more water and life.
Levidia was a low country full of flowering meadows and little rivers. Pink and yellow daisies bloomed in the meadows under the sun, filling the humid air with sweet scents whenever the highway happened to cut through them. Dense forests of beechwood and ash framed the meadows, filling out the rest of the land to such an extent that getting a clear idea of the area beyond the immediate vicinity of the highway was difficult. The caravan stopped almost every night in the middle of a forest, settling down to rest underneath a canopy of branches.
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As the summer drew to a close, the monsoon season began. It rained often during the day, and even more often at night, sometimes so heavily that Gideon would be forced to call off the night’s training. After spending just about every night since Kenan in training, he welcomed the occasional night off, and it went without saying that Surelin did as well. Fog would roll in on the nights without rain, reducing their nighttime visibility even further. They spent many nights exercising and sparring in sleepy fog-filled meadows and dark forests, within the grainy lights of their lanterns.
There was a deep chill in the air on the morning they reached the Obeeskogee river. The highway cut through a dense forest that spread all the way down to the riverbanks, matched by another forest on the opposite shore. At its widest point, the Obeeskogee was miles across, and in some places it could be several hundred feet deep with swiftly flowing water. But where the highway crossed it, the Obeeskogee was a mere hundred feet wide, and the water flowed at a relatively slow speed.
An elderly Levidian ferryman and his extended family had taken up residence at the crossing, living in a small cluster of cottages within the shade of the trees on the river’s north bank. After being paid for his services, he brought the caravan across the river on his ferry one wagon at a time. When it was their turn to cross, Surelin sat on the ferry’s edge and dipped her bare feet in the water, calling out to the wagon earnestly to try and coax Gideon out of it. She clearly enjoyed teasing him for not knowing how to swim, and he spent the brief trip across the river hiding inside the wagon like a house cat in a thunderstorm.
Another caravan arrived at the crossing from the north, just as Gideon and Surelin’s wagon landed on the riverbank. Kara and the other caravanners greeted the newcomers with great cheer, and there was an enormous amount of hugging and other eager greetings between the two groups. Afterwards, Kara managed to trade with the master of the other caravan for a few minor items, including several barrels of white rice.
Upon seeing the rice, Gideon had an idea. He approached the ferryman and purchased from him several armfuls of cauliflower and zucchini his family had raised, along with an entire cartload of freshly caught trout. That afternoon, the caravan stopped in a meadow to eat lunch, for once, and a bonfire was raised. They boiled the rice and vegetables while grilling the trout, and it ended up being one of the best meals of Gideon’s life. Every face around the bonfire had a huge smile as they ate their first decent meal in two months. Surelin seemed practically giddy as she wolfed down her food. After months of the same hardtack and dried meat, the fresh food tasted heavenly.
They left the forests and meadows of Levidia behind after another two weeks of travel, and entered a vast, endless-seeming steppe. Surelin had never seen it before, and she expressed astonishment at the sheer flatness of the land. It was like traveling across a featureless, bland dinner plate, populated only by a single massive field of yellow-green grass spreading to every horizon. There were no trees, and little in the way of animal life beyond a few wary prairie dogs and the hawks who hunted them, circling high overhead.
The steppe was similar to a desert in the sense that standing water was rare. The rains that had accompanied the caravan almost every day in Levidia did not join them on the steppe, and in some ways the acute dryness of the grasslands reminded Gideon of the Kahn desert they’d left behind a mere two months before.
For three weeks, they traveled through the same flat, grassy landscape until round hills topped with pine and cedar trees gradually appeared on the horizon. The land’s flatness ended, and it became one long series of hills that grew ever taller, carpeted by a growing population of trees, shrubs, and other low-lying plant life. On occasion, Gideon’s ears popped as the highway climbed into a higher elevation, growing ever closer to the alpine environment of his birthplace.
As Autumn arrived, it began to get much colder, especially at night. The decreasing temperature made the nightly training more miserable, but all the physical activity acted as a good countermeasure against it. After three months of dedicated training, Surelin had become a good swordswoman. She and Kara were now on equal terms during their sparring sessions —more or less— and Gideon had been forced to take her much more seriously in their own sessions. He felt confident now that Surelin would have beaten Romus’s two friends back in Kenan if she’d possessed her current skills at the time.
As she kept improving, Surelin only became more motivated to continue. On one particularly cold and windy night, Gideon had suggested that they skip training, but she had immediately refused. She seemed to have developed a genuine love for it, and a dedication to it he hadn’t seen in anyone else before.
The caravan now seemed to always be traveling up or down hills. In direct contradiction to the steppe, flat and even ground became a rarity: the land was almost always sloped to some degree. Around the highway, the landscape was heavily forested with spruces, pines and firs, whose leaves were just beginning to turn with the change of seasons. Large shrubs and bushes occupied what little open ground remained between the densely packed trees. In the early mornings, a cold mist descended over the landscape, remaining for hours until the wind blew it away or the sun evaporated it.
They traveled in this way for the next four weeks. During this time, the attitude of Kara and the other caravanners gradually changed. They became more serious and cautious, taking greater care with the daily chores and paying closer attention to Kara when she gave out orders. Loso was close, now, and no-one wanted anything bad to happen just before they finally reached their destination.