All things considered I felt better in the morning than I had any right to. Which is to say that I felt pretty rough but not nearly as rough as I expected to after sleeping on the ground, wrapped in borrowed blankets and in an unfamiliar body. I was parched and thick-headed but fairly alert.

I wandered out of my borrowed tent to find the camp already busy. Agnes was orc-handling barrels of cold water from the river to the camp and then back to the river for emptying when they got too much soap scum in them. I joined the bathing queue. The others explained that Agnes did this every day. She had magical heating stones for the water that raised the temperature from glacially cold to pleasantly warm in just minutes.

I don’t know much about thermodynamics but I know enough to be impressed by the sheer energy output of those stones. I didn’t think that technology could raise the temperature of that volume of water, by that much, that quickly without also making the water radioactive.

I washed in the warm water and then joined Jethro, who was already impatient to get back to work.

“There’s an old lady shepherd that lives close to the edge of the woods. We’re going to clear out some deadwood that’s close enough to the road to be a fire hazard and then deliver it to her. She’s going to pay me in mutton and you in a washed fleece. You’ll have to make your own spindle and spin your own yarn but there’s plenty back at the camp that can show you how.”

“Let me guess, Agnes sorted this out over the C-mail last night?” I said.

“Well, some of it was this morning, but yes,” said Jethro.

“Aren’t you even a little bit upset at being bossed around and having your plans changed?”

Jethro looked fairly cheerful about it. “That’s just Agnes. She’s never been able to keep her nose out of anything. Probably comes with the Witch career cus I’ve known a few witches and they’re all like that. They can’t see a problem without wanting to solve it.”

Another bit of information to keep in mind. A piece of the puzzle that was Agnes.

#

We followed the road uphill for a while. Long enough for me to get hungry, thirsty, tired and bored. The wood around us changed from deciduous, to mixed, to mostly evergreen.

When we found the dead-fall I could see why people might be in a hurry to get it cleared up before the weather got any warmer. It was a tangle of pine branches from at least two whole trees. It looked to me like at least one of them had fallen across the road and had to be hastily cut in two and dragged out of the way.

Jethro ran his hand over the bark and then snapped off a couple of the smaller branches with his bare hands. “Bone dry and full of resin,” he said.

“Yeah, if that catches it’ll go up like…” I tailed off. I’d been going to say ‘like a Roman Candle’, a type of firework that was popular when I was a kid. I might also have said ‘like the fourth of July’. That’s what I say when I’m talking to Americans because I don’t know if they have the same names for fireworks. “Like something that burns really easily,” I said. “I’m going to have to come up with better ways to phrase things or everyone is going to realise that I’m an Outlander.”

“If that catches it’ll burn like tinder,” said Jethro.

“Not very poetic but at least it’s accurate and easily understood,” I said.

“If you wanted poetic you should have picked Bard. Now make yourself useful and see if you can forage us some breakfast.”

“What are you going to do?” I said as I walked by him and into the trees.

“I’m going to untangle this mess. You can’t help me with this without increasing the risk of something rolling onto one of us. Stay close though. If this pile does shift I might need help.”

I resolved to stay well within earshot, my cute bear type ears were far sharper than my old ears ever were so it wasn’t hard to stay where I could hear him.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

There was less to forage in the pines than there had been around the broad leaf trees. Or maybe it was just harder to find and two levels of FORAGING wasn’t enough. Even so I did manage to find some mushrooms. There were a few deciduous trees scattered amongst the pines and I gathered assorted nuts. Looking up at the pines I could see some large pinecones. There might be pine nuts. I closed my eyes, half expecting a useful journal entry on the subject of pine nuts to appear in front of me but there was nothing.

I dropped my string bag at the foot of a likely looking tree and climbed it. I expected climbing to be harder. I only took one level of CLIMBING and I only took that because my clawed hands and feet gave me the perk, CAREFUL OR YOU’LL HAVE SOMEONE’S EYE OUT, that allowed me to cross-level skills that used my claws. In this case CLIMBING and PARKOUR.

I felt secure at the top of the tree, even though it bent slightly under my weight. With one arm around the trunk and my claws dug into the bark I felt perfectly safe. I grabbed a pinecone and was delighted to find that it was opening up and that it was full of the kind of large seeds that we call pine nuts. I grabbed as many as I could and dropped them onto my bag at the foot of the tree.

I was almost at the bottom of the tree when I found that I was suddenly on edge. It took me a moment to work out which of my senses was responsible but then I caught another whiff of the scent that had set me off.

I smelled sweat. Human sweat and not the good kind. There had been a strong smell of sweat at the camp but that was the healthy, almost sweet smell of people who worked hard, bathed daily and wore linen next to their skin.

This was a stale, musty kind of sweat smell. These people wore leather and washed infrequently and this sweat had smelled worse to begin with. It was adrenalin sweat and not caused by hard work or hot weather.

I marvelled at how much information my nose had given me even as I began to run. I didn’t even bother to pick up my bag. I went straight for where I’d left Jethro, moving fast but staying low and quiet.

Three men were sneaking through the woods ahead of me while a fourth stayed on the road. The one on the road called out to get Jethro’s attention. Jethro stood up and clambered out from the tangle of the dead fall to speak to him.

The other three crept closer and one of them drew a dagger from a sheath on his belt. That was the one I needed to focus on.

I became aware that I had dropped to all fours, bounding through the bracken and ferns faster than I had ever run in my old life. I knew that I wanted height. I wanted to come down on him from above so that he would drop with no chance of slashing at Jethro on his way down.

I leapt up, into the trees, feeling my claws digging into the bark and springing off the branch with enough force to carry me a good fifteen feet and onto the neck of the man with the drawn dagger.

SNEAK ATTACK SUCCESSFUL. CRITICAL DAMAGE. It was just a line of text that I could see on the edge of my field of vision. But it was also the terrible snapping I’d felt as the man crumpled beneath me. I didn’t stop to see how much damage I’d done. I threw myself, teeth first, at the throat of the second of the three sneaks. This one had a sword at his waist and his hand on the hilt. I don’t think he managed to do anything with the sword before my teeth closed in his neck and my mouth filled with blood. Afterwards I was too busy gagging to check.

I lashed out in the direction of the third sneak with a clawed kick and got lucky. I connected with his leg. My claws raked through his flesh. I doubted it did him any serious damage but it did knock his feet out from under him and I heard him hit the forest floor with a dull thud.

I scrambled to my feet, worrying about Jethro and the fourth man but I needn't have. That guy was already on his way to the ground with Jethro’s felling axe bisecting his face.

Jethro let go of the axe and turned to deal with the man I’d kicked to the ground. I expected that he’d check on the man, maybe knock him out or tie him up. I didn’t expect to see Jethro finish him off with his hatchet.

“What the fuck, dude?” I said.

I wanted to ask some more coherent questions, questions about who those guys were and why they wanted Jethro dead, but that was all I could get out. Just, “What the fuck, dude?” over and over again.

#

When I’d finally calmed down enough to ask those coherent questions, Jethro didn’t answer right away. Once he was sure I’d stopped hyperventilating he dragged the four bodies into a pile a short way into the woods, where they couldn’t be seen from the road, and began looting them. He stripped a shirt from one, knee-length breeches from another and a leather sleeveless jerkin with a lot of pockets from a third.

He dumped the clothing in front of me. “They’ll need a good wash but at least you’ve got more than your smalls to wear." It was only then that I realised that he’d picked things which were roughly my size and mostly free of bloodstains.

“I can’t wear dead men’s clothes,” I said, because I still wasn’t ready to tackle everything else.

“Sure you can. You won them fair and square, right of combat. Everyone knows that. If they wanted to be buried with their trousers on they shouldn’t have tried to kill me,” said Jethro. He still looked like the same calm, generous, hard working man that I thought I’d been getting to know. He didn’t look like someone who’d just killed two men.

“But why would they…?” I started to ask but stopped because I was suddenly worried that it might be some kind of faux pas to ask that kind of question.

“Because they’re murder hobos. The lazy bastards.” Jethro aimed a kick at the one who’d approached him. “There’s always some people looking for a shortcut and randomly killing strangers and stealing their stuff is one of the fastest ways to level.”