After Carnelian had left her feeling considerably better because of her confidence in her, Lady Beryn had examined the food stores. This was the biggest problem, even before the infrastructure.

An inventory of weapons revealed most everything here was in disrepair or cheaply made. I can probably manage the people with magic, and we can put my men to use with their magic on some of these projects, she thought as she climbed up tentatively on one of the better standing sections of wall and overlooked her dilapidated town.

We have a few crossbows and longbows to spare; if there are some good hunters, which I assume must be based on the poor state of the staple goods, they can use those to get some food. Since it is winter, one of these structures will need to be converted to a greenhouse, and I will spend some energy every day supplementing us. She had one terra mage among her group of trained soldiers. I shall have him work on the walls.

Eventually, she wanted to install a bell in the town square, but for now, she hopped down, gathering an old rusty cauldron and a hammer to stand in as one, carrying them along with her caelus magic. She beat the improvised bell until everyone gathered up.

“I have spoken to our Lady Carnelian. I have reviewed the ledgers and our available supplies. I am adding additional duties.”

There was a complaint immediately from a woman with soot on her cheek and a clearly bad tooth. “We’re already workin’ hard enough for ya. What matters a clean town when there’s nothin’ to eat?”

A tense silence fell over everyone as Beryn stared her down. She bowed her head and looked away after several seconds. Only then did she speak. “I agree. Food needs to be a priority. How many good hunters do we have?”

About a dozen men raised their hands. Excellent. “Good, you twelve stay with me. Other than my soldiers, do we have mages?”

There were no volunteers. That is highly doubtful, but perhaps there are untrained mages here. “I see. Everyone else, the priorities remain the same. We must get proper sewage management in place and things clean enough to work. Commander Arit, I want you to work on extending and rebuilding a stone wall from the gate, for now.” He nodded. She waited to see if that would get a volunteer, but there was none.

“Finally, I have one more decree from our lord. “We are to find the intruder if we can and capture her… but if we cannot, she is to be killed. Everyone but the hunters is dismissed.”

The hunting group she ensured were armed. “Keep to pairs, I want every one of you back.”

They looked a little surprised, but they nodded. An older man smirked, “We have been poaching in these lands for a long time. So long as you know what you’re shootin’ at, its fine. Its tryin’ to cut trees that make the monsters come.”

“We will eventually need to do that, if we are to repair the housing.”

He just grinned at her in a smug fashion, and she knew that when they had reached that point, there would be a fight on her hands.

She began to mull the possibility over in her mind of staging a fight where she could demonstrate that the “demons” were just magical animals after all. I need to meet one first, I suppose.

She mulled over the idea of how to capture one for Carnelian, and then she decided that it was ultimately a problem for later.

First, she had plans to get a green house going. If she could feed the people, if she could show them how hard work benefitted them, then she believed that they would warm up to her and do the impossible when she asked it.

***

“Will you really do nothing, my lord?” Setsy demanded, hackles standing all along his gray and black back.

The unicorn turned cataract-covered eyes upon the badger. He was meant to have passed on more than eighty seasons prior to this one. A dragon had stolen his heir, and now he lingered on, awaiting the Gods’ mercy to help him, surviving purely through his iron will not to see his kingdom fall apart and his forest wither. His white coat was dull, grayed out, there were bald patches in several areas. His voice was soft, sad, “I cannot.” I can hold the forest together, but I cannot protect it any longer, he thought, head bowing a little under the weight of the feeling of being much too old.

“But if you cannot, then I want to do something about it. A dragon has returned and flies with impunity over our woods, and the town grows. They are sending in groups of hunters. It cannot be tolerated.”

The Moryshin moved his old, creaky body so he could touch his muzzle to the young one’s forehead. “It is for the youth to act, but be sure you do not act rashly. They will kill you if they can, and I fear what the dragon does in the northern caves.”

“The northern caves are out of territory, but the town is in it. I wish to kill the hunters. If we do not let them eat, they will have to leave.”

“My little one, I fear if it was so easy, they would be gone already.”

“No one has really tried to get rid of them since the last dragon was killed. Please, I want to try.”

“You may protect the forest. I will still honor the treaty made with the ancestors of the town. You must not break it.”

The badger growled, and he paced back and forth a bit. Then, he calmed himself. “Very well. I will guard the forest and wait to kill only the humans that enter it.” If it is not enough, no matter the consequences for breaking the old oath, perhaps it will still be worth it to do so, Setsy thought.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

***

Rosalea awoke when the sun shone at with a dim light from the west. She felt really groggy, and if she did not feel so hungry, she might have tried to just go back to sleep. When she stretched, Fen did the same, and both of them had joints that popped loudly.

“It is about the right time to go hunting,” Fen observed.

Rosalea shook her head, “I feel too lazy. We have plenty of food storage, I fell out of three or so trees yesterday.”

Fen seemed to smile and accepted that was fair enough. Rosalea would have been too lazy to start a fire also, but she was cold. She used magic to pull off dead branches from the trees around them, but she noticed there were not as many as she was used to. Fen answered her observation with an explanation, “The mystics cultivate the land around themselves, so they care for the trees.”

Rosalea made a musing noise, and then stretched again, feeling the tenderness in her middle. “Do you think that a mystic will come if we light a fire?”

“It is possible, but that would be helpful if they did.”

Rosalea nodded and put her usual cooking pot over her fire. She called down moisture from the air, feeling a chilly wind that rustled through the trees. I think it is going to snow again soon. She did not relish the idea of slogging through the wilds on foot. Then again, her original plan when selling Hazel had always been to spend more time in her wolf shape and try to cover more ground. “I wonder if Nira is all right.”

As the water warmed, she splashed her face and rubbed the oils off it and yawned. Then she started to add dried bits of vegetables and chunks of saved meat to it to make a soup of some sort.

Fen pushed her head against Rosalea, and so Rosalea called more moisture from the air to provide her companion with a drink.

“So you really did not know that the dragon was there?”

Rosalea watched Fen’s ears flatten. “There was a dragon here when you… when I was younger, but she was killed for harming a mystic. I earnestly did not expect to run into a child of hers or that any dragon would dare to come back here.”

Rosalea rubbed Fen’s head, feeling the anxiety coming from the wolf, and tried to soothe her a bit. She understood the anxiety. She remembered back in the Uryan camp that Taishan’s liana, Vetoka, had seemed intimately connected with the whims of Gods, but Fen had not been able to offer Rosalea much… well, ever. She had not known they were displeasing the Gods while she lived with Kaylar, nor had she foreseen anything so far that had happened, except that Ulric had an old prophecy about her.

Fen still seemed a little miserable, so Rosalea changed the subject, “I thought Kaylar’s brand was going to burn a hole in my palm.”

The wolf perked up a little. “His mark of ownership protected you from some other dragon trying to place one on you. That is definitely helpful.”

Rosalea stirred her soup and checked to see if the vegetables were softening at all. She summoned some spices and cream from earth storage and added them to her pot. “Well, except that this dragon tried to instead just forcibly carry me off. What do you think that was about?”

Fen’s ears flattened. “Ordinarily, when a dragon meets the property of another dragon, they treat it with a certain amount of wariness. Certainly respect… for the main reason one dragon-owned would pass into the property of another would be to deliver a message. Or as a gift. However, we are not in the boundaries of Myraduil, and this dragon claiming any territory within in Dyran is not sanctioned by either country.”

Rosalea was silent trying to take that in. “So, if I was a gift, then having a spell protecting me from a brand would have signaled… what? That I had a message?”

It was Fen’s turn to be silent. “What would be the likely content of a message, if you were bringing one to a place a dragon like her did not belong?”

Rosalea breathed out, “I assume it would have been a cease and desist because the dragons are so rules-oriented. At least, Kaylar really was.” She remembered him being rather clear at one point about the threat to her life if they could not get along. “There is no way that I would be sent alone to deliver such a message, though. So the only logical thing for the dragon grabbing me was assumption that I was spying for a dragon in Myraduil.”

Fen nodded agreement. Rosalea flopped back in the snow, feeling the chill against her back after being warmed a lot by the fire. “Did the dragon ever see your brand?”

“No, but would that matter?”

“Considering Kaylar’s role as eldest on the council, perhaps it would,” Fen observed.

Rosalea huffed, sitting forward and wincing as she flexed her bruised muscles. “How about we just be very careful to stick with forest gods or demons or mystics or whatever they might be, and avoid scaly, possessive magic monsters.”

Fen wrinkled her nose as Rosalea sassed all magical creatures, but did not comment.

Rosalea stirred the soup some more, and she felt frustration. What is the point of any of this? We lost Ulric, and I got told to travel alone, all so I could walk into the middle of a fight between dragons and lesser gods? She felt a surge of frustration. They needed her to accomplish this prophecy so badly, then why weren’t they helping more? How was this making her work any faster toward them?

Silence. No one answered her frustrations, and she kept them to herself. She sighed, and shook her head. Guilt gnawed at her about Nira. If she got away from the people, then I might be able to find her somewhere in the forest not too far from town and still help her. She could easily envision the horse being able to escape not only through the gate, but through just about anywhere in the walls. She did not want to tempt the dragon again, so she did not want to leave the cover of the trees, but still… if she could find or retrieve Nira, then she wanted to. It seemed somehow extra awful to lose Ulric and then abandon his horse to a town like Miron.

“I think I want to go see if I can get and find Ulric’s horse, then we can try to find an elder mystic or whatever we need to get more information. Unless some divine being wants to actually talk to us?” She did not know how much of that challenge was directed to Gods or the mystics. She had genuinely half-hoped one would come and speak to her over the fire.

There was a long period of awkward silence. Fen’s tail twitched, and the wolf shook her head, as if to say, Don’t take Divinity so lightly.

Rosalea ignored that. She had nothing to say to that. Maybe she shouldn’t. She was annoyed right now though. She dished herself and Fen some soup. There was a quietness between them as they ate, and then Rosalea cleaned up and used magic to completely put out her fire.

Fen slowly came to her feet and padded over, nosing Rosalea’s forehead. She was absolutely solemn, and so Rosalea held still. “It has been a long and very worthwhile journey, troubles and all,” she offered. “You are strong, and even if the answers do not come easily to you, I know that you can find them. I hope you always remember that.” Then, she nipped Rosalea’s cheek and spun on her feet and took off.

Rosalea’s cheek smarted from the bite, and she knew Fen intended for her to get back for it. So, she stood, transforming, her clothes, Ulric’s bowl, and the knife dropping away to earth storage as she reached for her wolf-form and ran.

It was not difficult catching Fen, she was deliberately leading them toward the town, where Rosalea needed to go to find Nira. By the time Rosalea caught up with the wolf, her weary, still achy body had made her feel giddy and light-headed because she wasn’t taking as deep of breaths as she should. She had completely forgotten the light bite on her cheek. Even though Rosalea had specifically not wanted to go through the effort of hunting, Fen had them on the trail of a rabbit, and Rosalea took the wolf’s cue to split around the other side, so she could scare it into Fen and gain them both breakfast for tomorrow.

It was that action, every day as it was, that cost Rosalea everything she had left.