True to her word, Tensia was absolutely ready to murder some trees the moment the train stopped at the next station.

The station was on the outskirts of another one of those hilltop villages that we had seen all up and down the spine of Talia. I had been worried that it would be another craggy and mostly bare hillside but there were scattered trees most of the way up this hillside and a dense wood in the valley between the hill and its smaller sibling.

We didn’t have a lot of time before dark but we had enough for it to be worth trying to get a few logs. The two gardeners jumped down from the train and I followed. Asser clambered down from the driver’s cab. He’d agreed to come along to make sure we were getting the right quality of wood. I turned around to help Tensia down but she didn’t need it. She leapt down, barely encumbered by the unfamiliar weight of her new felling axe and hatchet.

Tensia had already unlocked metal tool use so she didn’t have to go back to stone. It also meant that she’d be unlocking LUMBERJACK at level 1 rather than grinding through the zero level like I’d had to do it.

The two gardeners picked a likely looking tree and checked with Asser that it was big enough and that the wood was good enough quality.

I talked Tensia through the reasons why they’d chosen that tree, and the safety precautions they needed to put in place before they started to take the tree down. She was an excellent pupil, paying close attention and asking questions about everything.

As soon as the tree was down the two gardeners moved onto another one, and Tensia and I set to work to clear the branches from the main trunk with our hatchets. We gently rolled the trunk a couple of times until we got all the side branches. Tensia was stronger than she looked and that Elven grace seemed to come with some precision of movement. She was a lot faster than I’d been on my first tree.

Once the main trunk was free of side branches and we had cut away most of the crown, I borrowed a folding saw from one of the Gardeners. It was a very similar model to the one Jethro had favoured. A flexible saw-blade that rolled up and a wooden frame that folded in two when not in use.

I showed Tensia how to unroll the saw blade, unfold the frame, assemble the saw and then tension the blade so that it would actually cut. It always felt like a magic trick taking something that looked like an oversized watch spring and half a folded deckchair and using it to saw through huge logs.

Asser marked the cut lines for us and we set about reducing the tree to logs small enough to carry back to the train. Once again Tensia surprised me with her strength and enthusiasm. We were finished by the time that the two gardeners had taken the second tree down and removed its larger branches. By then it was getting too dark to continue so we dragged the logs back to the train then I sent Tensia off to get an early night. We needed to be up at first light to get more training done before the train was ready to move.

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The next morning we were out of the train and waiting on the edge of the woods for the sun to come up.

“Do we really all need to be here this early,” said one of the gardeners.

“He’s got a point,” said Asser. “It’s not going to take long to saw that tree.”

“We’re not just here to saw the tree,” I said. “I’m not going to trust Ten to teach people LUMBERJACK until I see her take a tree down safely on her own. So she needs to do two trees before she can teach. One under our supervision and one solo.”

The two gardeners gave me an exceptionally grumpy glare for a moment before one of them said, “Two trees? Fuck waiting. Let’s get some lights up and get started.”

Before I could explain that I only expected to do one tree before the train moved on the two gardeners started lobbing light spells into the branches of the trees One of them picked out a likely looking tree that Asser agreed was thick enough and Tensia surveyed the area around it.

I’d been expecting to supervise this myself but the Gardeners seemed well capable of supervising so Asser and I borrowed the saw and cut the existing tree into logs while they explained about clearing the area and working out where the weight of the canopy was. Before long there was a pile of sawn logs and a fresh tree on the ground and the sun was barely up.

“Do you feel ready for your final exam?” I said. Tensia looked unusually sweaty for an elf but she didn’t look particularly tired or stressed.

“Yeah,” she said. “But somebody better have a stash of real coffee for afterwards.”

“Get that tree down and you can have coffee and bacon,” said Asser.

“Now that is how you motivate a learner,” said Tensia.

###

Tensia’s first solo tree was exactly what you want to see from a first solo tree. That is to say that it was so incredibly uneventful that I have literally nothing to say about it.

She took the tree down. We cut all the trees into logs and dragged the logs back to the train. I insisted on going back to grab a selection of branches for whittling. Then we went for breakfast in the dining car.

Asser had arranged for bacon, mushrooms and toast. With a large pot each of coffee and tea. The two gardeners, who had been both grumpy and grumbly about the whole enterprise, cheered up at last. They made a point to tell me that they would be happy to help the next time the train stopped.

The moment they left Asser dropped into the seat across from me, looking less relieved than I had hoped he would.

“I’ve done some calculations based on the logs that we’ve taken on board,” he said.

“Let me finish my breakfast before you ruin it with the bad news,” I said.

Asser waited patiently while I polished off the last of my bacon and drained my coffee.

“It’s not totally bad news,” he said. “We could still get lucky and have less than expected wastage.”

“But if we don’t get lucky?”

“We don’t have quite enough for an extra unscheduled stop.”

“We’ll just have to hope that tonight’s stop is close to some big enough trees then.”

“We only need the one,” said Asser “But even if we get one we’ll only have enough track for three stops. We need to focus on speed because we don’t have much more storage for track materials.”

Of course it turned out that track was the least of our worries but we didn’t know that yet.