I blinked the sleep from my eyes while I tried to untangle my legs from themselves. The rain had stopped in the night, and the fire was still burning low in its pit. The magus fed it a stick and nodded to me.

“Good morning, gefreiter. Are you well?”

I lifted my arm and made a face. “As well as can be expected, sir, thank to you.” It took me a few abortive efforts to find an angle that was comfortable, but I managed to push myself up onto my feet and slowly rise to standing, with a clumsy step forward out from the cover of the low lean-to. The smell of woodsmoke mixed with the scent of the wet scrub and the… fragrance of unwashed clothes and horses, in the quintessential atmosphere of a camp. I took a deep breath, then wrinkled my nose. “I fear my coat has seen better days, though.”

I hadn’t realised I was still wearing the bloodstained garment. It’d dried out some, miraculously, but still had a rank odour about it.Setting my immediate thoughts of breakfast aside, I set to unbuttoning it and trying to figure how I’d remove it without disturbing the bandages. I had no intention of riding for days while smelling like a decaying side of meat, let alone the flies.

“That’s why we had to light the fire,” Kaczmarek’s voice surprised me from deeper into the lean-to. “You passed out, and the magus reckoned we shouldn’t try to get you moving. But also that you’d probably die of the cold if we just left you in your sodden gear. Before you chew me out for lighting a fire in hostile territory.”

I paused with my coat hanging only from my left shoulder. I had been concerned about the fire. Though it was dug into a pit with a bank of stones around the outside and smoke was hardly the most visible on these cloudy nights, the light still stuck out like a sore thumb. I sighed and carried on trying to get the left sleeve off.

“Well, no harm done, I suppose, and I must say I do favour not dying. It was a risk, though.”

Kaczmarek shrugged, crawling out into the open with her mended jacket hanging from her shoulders. “It was already late when we got here, and it’s not like our tracks were hard to follow. Anything that was gonna go wrong would have gone wrong anyway. Waterskins are full, cup of tea would go down a treat this morning.” She pulled the jacket on properly and shivered, stomping off up the slope and away a bit, vanishing just out of sight.

Finally free of my ragged coat, I tossed it aside and mimicked the jäger’s shiver before pulling my cloak back over my shoulders and clasping it tight. I was ravenous, and the fire offered a rare opportunity for hot food—the warmth of the Hauler’s Rest in Tolkirch already seemed a lifetime away.

We were rather hurried, on account of the increasing probability of Torrean pursuit, but well before dawn properly broke we were moving again, after breaking our fast on toasted travel bread and hard cheese with hot, bitter tea to wash it down and heat our insides. There were still signs of our presence in the river valley, but as masked as we could make them; the fire buried, the brush pulled back into place, the boot and hoof prints smudged away. A tracker would still see it easily, but it might escape a passing glance. Maybe.

Forgoing the road, Kaczmarek set out into the grassland again on a random-seeming course that led only roughly towards our destination. At intervals, she would stare down at the ground and mutter, or cock her head and close her eyes as though listening to something, and then abruptly change direction. I assumed she knew what she was doing. Despite her bravado last night her cuts were clearly bothering her—with how much she swore while mounting up, it would be hard not to notice—and I was distracted by my own suffering to boot, though I was striving valiantly not to dwell on it. Unfortunately, every time Munter dropped a hoof with a little more force than usual the jolt pulled at my side and snapped me away from anything to which I was trying to attend.

Gritting my teeth and standing in the stirrups to avoid the jogging trot, I nudged Munter forward to catch up to Kaczmarek.

“Any notion of how long we’ll be riding?” I asked, trying to keep my voice clear.

She shrugged, glancing at the horizon. “Maybe reach the real foothills by the end of tomorrow? We can make camp in the open, then hit the ravines with the dawn.” She shuddered and made the sign of the Mountain. “Heavens help us all with that one.”

I looked back to her curiously. “I’m not too familiar with the Talben ravines myself. Why the great concern?”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Do you want a list?” She snorted.

“Well, yes.” I raised an eyebrow. She hung her head.

“I walked right into that one, I guess.” She straightened, taking her left hand off the reins to count off her points on her fingers for emphasis. “If it floods, you’re dead, unless you’re very lucky, and then you’re dead a little bit later anyway. It’s the rainy season right now, if you haven’t noticed.

“There are no actual maps of the ravines, see point one and also point three, so you can’t tell when you’re about to hit a sheer cliff and a dead end. Very dead.

“Point three, because no-one goes into the ravines because they’re a death trap, there are all sorts of weird monsters and animals in there.

“Point four, there aren’t actually any real roads in there and it’s a blasted nightmare to get around, especially since you don’t know where you’re going, because there are no maps.

“So yes,” she finished, flourishing the hand with all four fingers extended, “I’m bleeding terrified to go into the ravines and the only reason everyone else isn’t is because you don’t know what they’re like or you’re raving madmen.”

I frowned. “I take it you’ve been there before, then?” I wonder if that’s part of the reason she was chosen by the commanders, I thought. Aside from being a good pathfinder and an uncanny shot. Did they expect this?

She grimaced. “Once, yes. And that was one time too many. If there was any other way I’d take it in a heartbeat, but it’s safer than trying to fight through a Torrean garrison in the Talben pass alone.” She looked away for a moment. “Probably, anyway.”

I swallowed. Anything bad enough to give the brazen jäger pause was likely to be unpleasant indeed, but I forced a grin anyway. “Well, jäger, nothing’s stopped us yet!” I said cheerfully.

“That’d be more convincing coming from someone without bandages ‘round his ribs and one hand in a sling,” she pointed out, tone dry. I sighed.

“Touché. But do try not to scare His Highness too much, please. Heavens willing, we’ll be just fine.”

“And Heavens unwilling?”

My frown deepened. “Well, if the Heavens want us to die I suppose it’s not my place to stand in their way, but I should like to think they don’t.”

She huffed a tired chuckle. “It’s just a joke.” After a long pause, she muttered, “I hope they don’t too.”

The silence dragged slowly for a while before I broke it again. “I don’t remember hearing about the ravines before. It seems a little peculiar, if they’re so dangerous, isn’t it?”

“It is a bit weird,” Kaczmarek agreed, “But there are well-known stories from them that people just don’t know are from them. Like you know Gerard and the Palatine Champions, right?”

“I thought that happened north of the Freibergen.”

“Yeah, well, some people say that and some people say it was in the ravines.”

I blinked. The old story of fourteen knights making a doomed defence on foot amongst the crags of the mountains, with the cry of Gerard’s great horn echoing about the peaks calling for reinforcements that never came, was famous and stirring, but not the kind one wished to live in. It was the kind of story where drunk dragoons would heckle the teller, saying “If I were there I should have finished it with two quick volleys of fire, followed by the charge!” Then his friends would pile on to him, ribbing him about where he’d get arquebuses in the second century, and it’d all collapse in a kind of warm heroic glow of patriotic sacrifice, without anyone thinking too hard about it.

“Well, that’s heartening,” I responded drily. “So why don’t people go exploring looking for the site of the battle? Gerard’s horn and sword should still be there, after all.”

She shrugged. “It’s the butt end of the Empire, the weather’s miserable most of the year, and they’d rather go looking close to the capital and the Freibergen, I guess. It’s gotta be less than half as likely you’ll be gutted by a chasm kobold or a goblin over there than here.”

“Kobolds and goblins?” I asked, my focus suddenly sharpening from vague chatter to real dangers. “I thought they were extinct in the civilised world.”

“I mean, look around, gefreiter.” Kaczmarek waved broadly at the fields running uninterrupted to the mountains. “If this was ever civilised, it sure as the Immer hasn’t been since the war. It only gets worse when you wander through the depths of the mountains, you know?”

Sighing, I conceded the point. “So then it’s the real dark past in the ravines? Near halfway to the World Unformed, things crawling in the night, and so forth?” I lifted my hat to push my hair back before realising I didn’t have a free hand. I settled for sliding the hat back, grateful that for once my hair wasn’t plastered to my scalp and face by rain.

“It’s just the bleeding middle of nowhere that no-one goes, I dunno about fairyland or whatever. I don’t know what to expect, it’s been years, I’m just not looking forward to it, alright?”

“Sorry,” I apologised, bowing my head for a moment. “As you say. We’ll see when we get there.”

We rode in silence after that, each cradling our own worries as the jagged line of the mountains loomed darkly on the horizon, low clouds gathered about the peaks despite our temporary reprieve from the rain.