In the days after the death of the stranger I began to get impatient. I found myself hanging on every word that I heard about the world beyond the woods. I felt like I was in danger of stagnating. I complained about it to Jethro. He listened but would always remind me that I’d agreed to trust Agnes.
He did try to vary the work we did together. We cleared all kinds of fallen trees, helped Aldo and Fred to pollard willows, built new wooden fences, supplied firewood, built rustic lean-to porches together, and worked with proper carpenters on extensions.
Eventually Jethro admitted that he’d already levelled TUTOR twice and unlocked the APPRENTICE perk. The only reason I hadn’t noticed was that he could only take one apprentice at a time and he was saving that for his little brother.
I had expected that as soon as he had the APPRENTICE perk he would go back home and start teaching his little brother. He seemed unable to entirely explain why he hadn’t. The only thing that sort of made sense was that he had pledged to take me where I needed to go to learn more about being an Outlander. Did he know where that was? He wouldn’t say. I suspected that he didn’t and he was as curious about it as I was.
I think that we were both itching to see something, anything, that wasn’t more trees.
#
We were deep in the woods, in an area that I’d never been to before, when I stumbled upon the sign. Jethro was setting up to clear some fallen trees and I was foraging and exploring the surrounding area. The sign was painted white and stood out against the natural shades of the forest. I got curious and went to see what it was.
There was a track through the woods. It hadn’t been used much recently but it was still obvious, worn down through the forest floor by generations of feet. The sign marked the point where the little used track diverged from a more frequently travelled track that was almost, but not quite a road. I had arbitrarily decided that a track became a road at the point when it had noticeable wheel ruts in it. The busier track here had signs that people did take wheeled transport along it but not often enough to have created ruts.
The sign pointed to Rotveil. I’d never heard of the place. I’d heard of a lot of towns and villages and even a few big farms and hunting lodges. Talking around the fire was the main source of entertainment in the camp. People talked about everywhere they’d been. No one had mentioned Rotveil.
“Hey, Jethro!” I called. “Ever been to Rotveil?”
Jethro stood up straight, head tilted upward slightly, looking into the distance with a quizzical expression. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve heard people mention it but I don’t remember any details. Why?”
“Cause there’s a sign pointing to it over here.” I knocked on the wood of the sign, aware that Jethro’s eye’s were better at colour than mine but not as good at contrast.
Jethro ambled over to look at the sign. He ran his fingers over the edges of the upright post. I noticed that there was a series of notches cut into the wood.
“Forrester’s code,” he said. “It’s about half an hour’s walk from here and there is some demand for firewood. Sorry, it’s a career path ability. I can’t teach you the code.”
“So the notches just tell you whether it’s worth dragging a sled-full of logs in a particular direction?”
“Pretty much. There are also markings that warn of danger, or people who will try to get out of paying.”
“So there’s no danger?” I said.
“Well now, all we can really say is that there was no danger the last time a Forrester went this way and was able to come back to cut notches. Do you want to go and see if there’s still no danger?”
“We’d be doing a public service," I said.
#
The path wound between the trees. I could tell it was an old path because sometimes it wound around a space where a tree used to be. In some places the only reason you could tell there had been a tree was because the path avoided it.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The path was fairly overgrown. I wondered if this track was out of use now, perhaps replaced with something paved and straighter. I wasn’t wearing a watch but the half hour estimate seemed pretty close to me. It certainly felt like about thirty minutes of walking before we cleared the edge of the trees and stepped out into a large clearing.
Rotveil turned out not to be a town, which I should have guessed from the narrowness of the path, but a hamlet. There were four houses, a mill and a tiny chapel. The houses were built in the wood-frame construction style that was common everywhere in the Black Woods. A few courses of stonework to elevate the frame off the damp ground, then a frame out of heavy oak timbers, a chimney of bricks, panels of some kind to fill the gaps in the frame. I’d seen wooden panels but most of them were covered in a protective layer of plaster and I had no idea what was under it. These had wooden shingle roofs. My SHELTER ability (a free ability from SURVIVOR TYPE) was telling me that the shingles were overdue for replacement and would soon start to leak, if they hadn’t started already. The SHELTER ability was silent on the subject of the buildings because they were more sturdy than anything I could build for myself.
In the large pasture that surrounded the village on three sides the grass was waist high. I wondered where all the animals were. On the fourth side of the village was a large field. At first I thought it was planted up with some salad greens or maybe some kind of cabbage but when I looked again I realised that it was an, as yet, unplanted ploughed field that had been contaminated by a tangle of wind-blown weeds.
The village was suddenly no longer picturesque and beautiful. The overgrown pasture, the ploughed but unplanted field, the shingles overdue for replacement all added up. Individually they were each a little worrying. Together they meant that something was horribly wrong.
I dropped to a crouch, instinctively. Jethro joined me a moment later.
“My stealth is higher,” I said. “I’ll go first. I’ll hop the fence into the pasture and use the long grass as cover.”
“You’re the expert,” said Jethro. “I’ll let you get a good head start and then follow. I’ll wait for a ten count and then follow as slowly and quietly as I can.”
I crept through the pasture, crouched low, occasionally on all fours. In a place like this it was important to keep my head down. Even if there was nothing wrong there was a chance someone would take a potshot at an animal in the long grass in the hopes it might make a tasty supper.
As I got closer to the buildings I sniffed at the air. I didn’t smell the sickly sweet smell of decomposition or the metallic tang of blood but I also didn’t smell any living people. I began to worry less about my own safety and more about what I might find.
The grass of the pasture grew almost up to the wall of one of the houses. This one had a forge out the back. There was no heat from it and the almost total lack of charcoal smell told me that it had been cold for months.
I dashed forward, keeping low and quiet, and into the shadows at the back of the forge. It was an open fronted lean-to structure. It was a common style of extension in the Black Woods. Jethro and I had built a couple for remote farmsteads and one for an Inn. The farmsteads had also used them for forges. The Inn used it as a beer garden for when the weather was both hot and wet.
The forge was quiet, empty and not overlooked by any of the other buildings. I stood up and waited for Jethro to join me.
When he caught up with me Jethro gingerly reached out toward the forge, as if not quite believing that it was completely cold.
“You smell anything?” he said.
“Nothing. No people, no bodies, forge has been cold for months.”
“We can probably stop worrying that this is an ambush then,” he said.
“An ambush by people, anyway,” I said.
“You think some bears are going to jump out at us or something?”
“No. But I don’t know what kind of monsters lurk in the deep woods, do I? My world has all kinds of stories about things that lurk in the lonely places but none of them are real. You know what we also have stories about? Elves and Witches and animals that walk upright like men.”
Jethro touched his ears, looking deeply hurt. “So no half-elves in your world?”
“Nope. If I saw someone with ears like you, I’d ask them where they bought them and how they covered up the join.”
“No Witches?”
“We’ve got people who call themselves witches and some of them have crystal balls and know how to get super high with a selection of ordinary looking plants but there’s nobody who can point a wand at a tree and get it to kill a man.”
“So if there’s no Beast-Kin what were you before…?”
I interrupted him before he could get too lost in the exact wording of the question. “I was human. The same as everyone else.”
“You’re adapting to all this way better than I thought you were. I’ve only been allowing for you coming from a world with a lot of devices to save people from having to work with their hands.”
“We have that too. And it’s really easy to get information on anything. I could watch a tutorial on almost any skill any time I wanted to.” I was suddenly hit with a wave of homesickness so hard and deep that it made me dizzy and I had to sit down.
“Can we not talk about this right now?” I said. “We’ve got to deal with this place and I can’t do that while I’m thinking about home.”