The next couple of weeks were a time of peace, at least relative peace. Sure, we still got hassled and abused in almost every village we passed through, but the treatment wasn’t nearly as extreme as our last misadventure. I guess none of the kids thought they had a daddy who could kick everyone’s ass. I made certain that Mero rode beside me whenever we passed through a settlement. I thought my presence might offer him a little protection, given that any attack lobbed at range would have a chance of hitting me instead of him. As far as the villagers knew, I was a fine, upstanding member of the six-fingered race, and fairly rich to boot.

The more distance we put between us and the capital, the better we were treated and I am not certain why. After the first week, the kids had stopped spitting and throwing stones. The jeering, snide, venomous comments continued unabated, though. Actually, that was mostly true until the end of our trip. It was a decided improvement over being pelted by spittle and stones, so nobody complained about it.

I describe things as relatively peaceful, however, because while our treatment by strangers had markedly improved, the constant state of stress and wariness that we were living started to have a fairly significant impact on our group unity. After what had happened back in the village, nobody had much use for Helvia. Sometimes, having someone blithely risk your life without your consent will do that. Most of the time, really. When language instruction rolled around, she was shunned and she was smart enough to understand what was happening. I don’t think anyone had treated her that way before at any point in her life, and she was poorly equipped to deal with it. It made her brittle and grumpy. Her back remained a mess of painful, now healing, wounds. After she was lashed. I actually had to stop in the next village we passed through to buy a supply of thread and a few needles so that Aleyda could sew up her deeper lacerations. By the time that occurred, Helvia was awake and none too pleased to receive stitches without anesthetic. Add basic first aid supplies to the list of things I should have remembered. Just because I could heal up from most things didn’t mean anyone else could without treatment.

Finally, the dam burst. One day when Aleyda was spreading some sort of greasy unguent over Helvia’s back that Aleyda had made out of some plants that she had harvested along the way and some rendered animal fat, Helvia snapped.

“You clumsy oaf,” she said angrily to Aleyda. “You are hurting me more than helping me.”

I was close enough to hear the exchange and I quickly turned my attention to watch the pair but I didn’t intervene. Some things just needed to work themselves out.

I wasn’t sure what language Helvia was speaking in, but it was one that Aleyda clearly couldn’t understand, but I had no doubt she fully comprehended the emotion behind the words.

Aleyda turned to me. “What did she say to me?” she demanded.

I told her. Aleyda’s face clouded with anger. Then, she tossed the small container of unguent at Helvia, who did not react quickly enough to catch it. It fell to the ground, some of the contents spilling out.

“Tell her she can care for her own wounds,” Aleyda said. “And if she ever speaks to me that way again, she will have new wounds to tend.” Then she stormed off headed towards Lapina.

“What did she say?” Helvia asked.

I repeated Aleyda’s words to her.

“How am I supposed to reach my own back? The servants you have found for me are untrustworthy. I can’t believe such a mild rebuke angered her so.”

I locked eyes with Helvia and stared hard at her, holding the gaze long past the point it became uncomfortable. Finally, after she started fidgeting, I spoke.

“Servants? You think the other people in our group are your servants? I can’t imagine the mental gymnastics that you had to perform to reach that conclusion. Every single one of these people have value, value that they demonstrate day in and day out through hard work because they are trying to reach somewhere to make a better life. You have no servants. You will never have a servant again. I don’t know why my message isn’t penetrating the cloud of delusion that you have woven out of nothing, but your old life is over. Over. Done. Finished. You best start making some friends. Once you are healed, you need to start contributing. I know you have been pampered your whole life but right now you aren’t an asset, you are a liability. The reason you are being shunned right now is that all of these other people think that you are going to say something or do something that will get them thrown back into slavery or killed.”

Helvia’s face flushed and she turned to stomp off, but I interrupted her escape.

“No more of that. You can’t keep running away from things you don’t want to hear. If you can’t learn from your mistakes, then I will have no choice but to cast you out to let you make your own way in the world. And let me tell you, experience has taught me that is a hard road to walk alone. You will find yourself dead on the side of the roadway or working in a brothel or spending the last few years of your life toiling in a mine.”

She spun back to face me and instead of anger I saw unshed tears welling in her eyes.

“Maybe I don’t want to live in this world,” she said.

“None of us do,” I replied. Drawing my recently sharpened knife from my belt, I tossed it to the ground at her feet. “But the rest of us have decided to try to make a life for ourselves. If you are hell bent on self destruction, so be it. Grab that knife and do the honorable thing. We’ll make certain your body is well taken care of. You don’t get to make that same decision for everyone else here. You don’t get to drag everyone else down with you.”

She bent to the ground and picked up the knife, intently studying its keen edge. Around us, there was silence. Everyone else was watching our little drama unfold, finding solidarity in their silence. She began to move the knife towards her body, then dropped it collapsing to her knees in a shuddering sob, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“I feel so lost, so alone,” she gasped out between sobs.

“So do I,” I replied. “Every day, though, I am trying to strengthen my bonds with others so that someday soon I won’t feel that way. There are a lot of good people around you, and I think they all would be willing to give you a chance if you just threw away the privilege you wear around yourself like armor and treat them as equals.”

“I will try,” she said in a choked voice.

“That’s all I can ask of anyone,” I replied.

Mariam swept in, dropping to the ground next to Helvia. She cradled Helvia gently in her arms, tears streaming down her own face. I doubt she understood a word that Helvia was saying, but she must have picked up Helvia’s reply from the context of my own responses.

If that was the only issue I had to deal with, I would have felt lucky. It wasn’t, though. One night, Mero was bouncing around the camp with the endless energy of youth when he accidentally bumped into Bowen. Bowen responded by pushing Mero away, sending him to the ground. Xeng witnessed Bowen’s overreaction and took offense to it. With a growl, he sprung to his feet and charged at Bowen. Bowen stood to meet him, and the fight was on. It didn’t last long. While Bowen was more skilled with weapons, Xeng was larger, more powerful and plenty quick enough. Xeng lowered his shoulder and tackled Bowen and then started raining down strikes with great regularity. Patrick and I quickly responded and pulled Xeng off. Bowen sprung to his feel and ran towards one of the wagons where we had weapons stored.

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“None of that,” I told him, drawing my rapier. He reached the wagon, but instead of going for one of the swords he stopped, wiping away the blood that was dripping down his face.

“You are just going to let him attack me?” he asked.

“I think he was demonstrating his views on child abuse,” I responded. “Mero bumped into you accidentally. He is a kid. Accidents happen. Your response was disproportionate. Xeng’s response was also disproportionate but probably a little less so than yours since you acted purposefully. If you want to act like might makes right, you need to be aware that you won’t always be the most mighty.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have pushed the child. Mero, I am sorry.”

That confrontation actually turned out fine. Within a couple of days I saw Bowen and Xeng laughing together. If there was one thing that Bowen respected, it was strength.

Finally, something happened between Werner and Lapina, but I was away from camp when it occurred, taking care of a biological necessity, so I didn’t witness it. Apparently, Werner had misconstrued Lapina’s endless friendly chatter as some sort of invitation and had decided that she had taken a liking to him in a more than friends sort of way. Anyone with the observational skills of a two year old could have told Werner that wasn’t true. Lapina was like that with everyone. It was just her personality. As I have mentioned before, though, self delusion is a wonderful thing. Apparently, while I was away from camp, Werner decided to make his move. From eyewitness accounts, they were standing together talking in our version of pigeon English when he reached for her. Lunging forward, he wrapped her in his arms and tried to kiss her. She headbutted him in the nose. When I returned to camp, he was sitting by himself with a chagrined look on his face with his head tilted back trying to get his nose to stop bleeding. It was so very hard not to laugh at him once I found out what had happened. I felt horrible for Lapina. For the next couple of days, she was subdued. Rumination replaced her normally effervescent personality as she tried to work out whether she had done something wrong. Finally, I took her to the side and told her she did nothing wrong, that nobody had the right to try to force themselves on her. That seemed to help and within a couple of more days she was back to normal.

I didn’t see Lapina and Werner hanging out by themselves after that, though. When they were together, there was always someone else with them.

Of course, this wasn’t the entire list of petty disagreements and grievances. It seemed like there were one or two every day. Not being able to clearly communicate didn’t help at all but I think, given all of our stress, a couple of petty arguments every day amounted to nothing, just farts in the wind.

Our two weeks of travel had taken us out of the most densely populated portion of the country. Especially since we moved at a slow crawl, there were entire days when we did not pass through a village or town. Those were good days. On those days, everyone relaxed a little bit and there was more laughter, more genuine camaraderie. We still had many more of plodding along the road before we would reach the turnoff to Shroud Hallow, but I could tell that the constant travel was wearing us down. Our pace slowed even further when we started to hit more extreme topography. If we had to do a lot of climbing, then we were lucky to make it eight miles in a day. One night, when we were between settlements in a rugged, hilly stretch of land, we made our camp beside a small, clear lake. The land around the lake was too rugged to be farmed and it looked like the major industry in the area was logging.

I enjoyed our night’s camp so much that the next day, I awoke early and decided that we were going to stay there for the day. After the others woke up, I announced my decision. Nobody was unhappy with my choice. We moved camp slightly around to the side of the lake away from the roadway and spent the day relaxing. Swimming in the chilly water and basking in the sun were primary activities. Helvia actually demonstrated a playful side, getting into a water fight with Mero. We were undisturbed that day, although we could see other travelers passing on the roadway. The next day we moved onward.

During our day of relaxation, I started to think long and hard about my plan and perhaps how to revise it. I had been so fixated on the one place that I had been treated well, the ranching lands out beyond Shroud Hallow, that I felt like I had lost sight of why we were headed there in the first place. I was looking for safety, but just because I happened to encounter one family of kind souls didn’t mean everyone else there was kind as well. If anything, my days on the road had reinforced my belief that there was good and bad in every group of people. In fact, there was good and bad in every person. I imagine that Levan had been kind to his family and respected in his community. What we needed was a place to call our own, to defend against any enemies that happened to show themselves. I didn’t want to sell my people on a dream that might not be real, as if I were Lenny talking to George about the farm in Of Mice and Men. We didn’t need to find perfect, we just had to find good enough.

After we resumed our journey, I started talking to people as we passed through villages. I would ask whether there was any land for sale that I could invest in. Strangely enough, when I started to do that our treatment got better. Few people wanted to start off a relationship with a potential new neighbor by pissing them off. That wouldn’t be neighborly. And when you live out in the middle of nowhere in an isolated, largely self-reliant settlement, having neighbors you could ask for help was everything. The first few villages we passed through didn’t have anything that I thought would meet our needs. When it became clear that we weren’t staying, the verbal abuse recommenced, but it was kind of halfhearted.

One day, when we were four or five days out of Shroud Hallow, we were making our way through a village located on a plateau ringed by a series of rolling hills. The place was pretty small, maybe a few hundred people in total. It seemed that the area immediately around the village was cropland but herdsmen plied their trade throughout the surrounding hills. I had no idea what the settlement was named.

As we made our way through town, I engaged several people in the usual conversation. When I asked whether anyone had any property for sale, one older orc volunteered that he did have a few acres that with a little home at the far end of the valley closest to Shroud Hallow. He explained that his wife was dead, his sons went off to the war and never returned, and his daughter had married a tradesman in the village. His health was failing and his daughter had insisted that he come live with her family, her husband and his grandchildren, for whatever time he had left. He told me that he would love to have something to leave to his family when his time came, and he was interested in selling it.

“What’s your name, sir?” I asked him.

“I am Nulrik,” he replied.

“And what’s this fine village called?”

“Greynard is the name of this, the finest village this side of Sleetfield,” he replied.

“Mr. Nulrik, I am interested in taking a look at your land. Is the ground fertile?”

“You can put five acres in crops, and there is plenty of forage for grazing as well.”

“That sounds good to me. Do you care to travel out that way with me to show it to me and see if we can make a deal?”

“Yeah, I can do that,” he replied. “My daughter would have my hide if I left with you by myself, though. I better find a couple of other people to go along to make certain I can make it back alright.”

“I understand,” I said. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. I will be glad to bring you and your companions back whether I buy the property or not. To make certain that I am acting in good faith, I am even willing to leave a deposit with your daughter. What were you asking for the property?”

“Five hundred gold,” he replied.

I reached in my pack and pulled out a gem worth perhaps a hundred gold. “Will leaving this show that I am dealing with you in good faith?”

“That it will,” he said with a smile.

He took his leave, the gem in hand. Twenty minutes later, he returned with two younger orcs. One he introduced as his grandson and the other as his son in law. We had used many of our supplies on the trip out, so there was room for all of them to ride.

After settling in the wagon, we began the slow plodding trip to the other end of the plateau, and what I hoped might be our new home.