People don’t exactly jump out of the way as we approach the gate, if only because they’ve already mostly cleared out of our path. It’s a straight shot from the yard to the gate and then onto the road to Stonehill, which I find absolutely fascinating. Calfort’s streets all appear to belong to a single grid without any oddly-angled junctions. The road to Caulfield was laser-straight for its entire length. If the road and Stonehill’s receiving yard are set up the same way—which isn’t unlikely, since I remember reading that Roman roads had the same resolute disregard of terrain—then this means that Calfort’s entire street grid is probably aligned to at least some portion of Stonehill’s grid! Across this whole distance!

Note to self: pull out my compass and see how close this road is to being perfectly aligned with the east-west cardinal direction. I know that the forest is “to the north,” but that’s a roughly ninety-degree range since all the hedges and coppices mean I still haven’t seen the forest with my own eyes.

…I should also ask what magnetic deviation is like around here. Or, uh, if their compasses even use magnetism at all, given that they don’t have a spinning lump of molten iron to produce a magnetosphere. Or if they have magnetism at all, in fact, since compasses could well be minor divinations or a Gift replicating behavior from its more spherical original setting. Or, indeed, if “north and south” are aligned with any geographical features at all, given that cardinal directions might well have been defined and become ossified before anyone went far enough to realize that their planet was square! I wonder if Land is square, actually, or if it has different sizes in different directions. It’d be hilarious if it turns out that Land is a ribbon-world, like I’ve seen Minecraft and Factorio players generate for challenges. I imagine that having a world ten miles tall and a million miles long would be even more challenging for real-life civilization than it is for a Factorio base, since transportation costs are proportionately so much smaller in the game.

Stephanos keeps blowing the whistle periodically, which I suppose is a good way to make sure people know that the road now belongs to the heavy equipment. I wonder if Heather has one of those whistles in her pocket, like the fantasy equivalent of a police car’s sirens. I’m pretty sure cops had whistles historically, so she should. If not I’ll suggest it.

The wagons roll forward at a nice walking pace. They don’t slow down as they approach the gate, the guards simply standing aside to wave us through and make sure nobody steps in our way. As we pass through the gate a woman swings up into the passenger cabin, wearing light armor and carrying what looks like a sword on a pole. She quickly buckles herself into a seat. No, not buckles, nobody will understand me if that’s the word I use, she belts herself into a seat.

Stephanos blows a long, ear-piercing call on the whistle as soon as we’re out the gates. This one draws the attention of everyone on the road and anyone that wasn’t already aware of us scuttles out of our way.

Chase and Mas lean forward against the harnesses and begin chanting a wordless cadence that resonates through the wagon. They heave in unison with the cadence’s rise. That must be the combo skill that Chase mentioned. The grass shivers in the field near the wagon, pebbles dance on the ground, and the cart begins to pick up speed. It’s not a huge amount of acceleration, not considering I’m used to cars and have been on roller-coasters before, but it still pushes me back into my seat. The wind starts to rush in my face.

Ack, this is going to ruin my hair. More than it’s already been ruined, what with having to use hand soap as shampoo last night. Short hair just means it’s even worse about getting in my eyes, I swear. I used to carry hair ties for soldering and cooking, but they got left behind. I don’t remember seeing any hair ties in my backpack. Do I have any string? I have a tent and tents need cord! But I’d prefer not walking around with thirty feet of cord hanging off my head.

Note to self: obtain a ball of string. Also, reinvent elastic. That’s hair ties and underwear I need it for.

Let’s see, who’s near me. Six rows of seats, we have the back three, Yaroslav’s party has the front three. Axelos is in the rightmost seat of our middle row. Ji’s sitting next to him, Bob’s behind him, Liv is in front of him. Heather’s beside Ji, Agnes is behind Ji, and I’m in the back-left corner next to Agnes and behind Heather.

Heather’s hair is too short and frizzy to bother her. Liv’s hair appears to be magically staying out of the way, which I’m sure she’d tell me is just high Perception, Dexterity, and practice. Ji’s hair is being immaculately tousled by the wind; he looks like a movie star. Bob just doesn’t have enough hair for the wind to matter.

Agnes, though, has hair up in a bun as always, so she should be able to lend me a tie.

I nudge her with my arm and lean over so I’m not shouting over the wind. “Do you have a hair tie I can borrow? Or six inches of string or something?”

“Of course,” she answers, to my relief. Probably still not going to be able to read much, but at least I’ll be able to practice! She goes digging in her backpack and hands me a short length of leather only a couple seconds later, which I gratefully use to restrain my unruly hair. It takes a bit to make it work, but I figure it out easily enough.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

We gradually reach a stable speed, smoothly cruising along at what looks like maybe thirty miles an hour. I slide around in my seat a little, but I’m not being bounced out of it or rattled like a can of spray paint like I’d expected. Given that these wagons are running hard rims on hard stone they must have literally magic suspension and some sound-dampening on top of that. It’s not quiet, of course; a huge fraction of road noise is from the tires hitting the pavement, not the engine. But it’s also not completely deafening.

I hear some whistles behind me around the time we finish accelerating. Then some more from further back, then more, gradually fading into the distance. Then they return, working their way up the chain to the front where Stephanos finishes the sequence. Checking to make sure everyone’s up to speed, I bet.

We’re well into the fields by now. This time I’m high enough up that I can see over the hedges, which means I finally get my first look at the wider landscape. The weather is still clear, so I can see until something physically blocks my view, rather than just to the curved horizon. To the south there are more hills. To the north, though, I see a dark line just over the horizon that’s probably the forest, and then a towering snow-capped mountain range. The flat geometry makes the mountains look impossibly huge, like they’re leaning in to loom over me. Without the horizon hiding the ground near the mountains it feels like I’m standing right at their verdant, knife-sharp foothills. The dominant trees are probably roughly similar to what we had back on Earth, but I see spots of other colors, royal purples and vibrant oranges that can’t be any mundane plant. The trees are replaced by rocks and then snow as the mountain soar into the air, and the jagged peaks march into the distance until they’re eclipsed by the mountains in front of them. I even see a couple small towns, brown-blue smudges streaming thin lines of wood smoke from their positions in alpine valleys.

One of the valleys, presumably a usable mountain pass, doesn’t just have a settlement. It’s dominated by a forbidding castle, stony bulk blocking the pass and a line of walls stretching from cliff face to cliff face.

This makes me wonder if Liv can see all the way across the ocean. Normally I’d say that there’d be too much dust and moving air in the way and you wouldn’t be able to get a usable image, but with Perception stats like hers, who knows?

Also, why are we hand-carrying a message to Stonehill when semaphores would work so much better with this geography and with people with Perception scores and telescope spells? The bandwidth wouldn’t be immense, not like the modern internet, but there’s no way that a telegraph equivalent is out of Heather’s expense budget. A semaphore tower here would have more bandwidth than a single telegraph wire did back home!

I’m going to be really annoyed if it’s some dumb fantasy-setting cop-out, like “there are giant angry birds that eat you if you try to wave flags where they can see them.”

“There are giant angry birds that eat you if you try to wave flags where they can see them,” Liv calls back from the front of the cart.

“I refuse to believe that,” I accuse, trying to set her on fire with my eyes. “I know you’re messing with me this time.”

“Northeastern glitter-hunter,” she replies, turning so I can see the delighted grin spreading across her face. “Relative of the Saga Dragon. There’ve been no fewer than fifty-seven attempts to set up semaphore lines in the history of the Republic.”

“What, that’s—” I protest, “You know what, no, back up, I want to know how you managed to use exactly the words that were in my head. You said you weren’t telepathic.”

“Not at alllll”, Liv sing-songs at me. “I’m just starting to get a good idea of what words you use. Also,” she giggles, “sometimes you mutter angrily to yourself.”

“Thirty-six of those attempts included plans to deal with the glitter-hunters,” Heather adds while I splutter. “Causes of failure have included: insufficient funding, the executive board being consumed by angry draconic grandparents, the executive board being bought out by angry draconic grandparents, the executive board being stricken by a virulent but oddly contained strain of the spontaneous combustion plague, the company turning out to have been a sting operation by the northeastern glitter-hunters themselves, and failure to file a proper environmental impact statement with the Bureau of the Wild.”

“No!” I say, outraged. I stab the cart with an angry finger to emphasize my wrath. “That’s a cheap cop-out and I will. Not. Accept it in my isekai adventure novel’s worldbuilding.”

“The northeastern glitter-hunter is a magical cross-breed between a Dragon of the Saga Gift, a particular species of magical tree, and the common magpie,” Ji contributes, stone-faced. “It is well known that Spirit Beasts whose ancestry includes both plants and animals can demonstrate especially jealous behavior. As signal towers resemble their mating signals, these crossbreeds, properly called semaphauna—”

He’s cut off by Bob cracking up, shortly followed by Agnes and then the entire rest of the cart, including the merchant and his party.

I fold my arms across my chest and glare at all of them. “That was a miserable pun. It was worst. You are the worst.”

“Environment’l impac’ statemen’,” Bob wheezes out, setting off a new round of laughter.

“Hoy,” shouts Chase. “Keep it down back there!”

I wait for the laughter to calm down, still glaring. I wait until Liv is looking at me to narrow my eyes, focusing the destructive power of my angry-gaze. “Of course you realize,” I drawl nasally, “This means war.” I wait for her to be suitably threatened before I continue. She just sticks her tongue out at me, which means that her suffering will be multiplied twofold.

“Anyway. Really,” I say seriously. “Why didn’t we send that message by semaphore?”

“Oh, no wonder you were thinking about it,” Liv realizes, at least moderately apologetic. “We did! But the last mile is always unreliable. Sometimes it can take a day or two for someone to receive a message, even if you pay for them to send runners to find the recipient. The letter’s a backup plan.”