I quickly took a liking to the wagon driver who I was bumming a ride off of. It started with a frank discussion of women's outfits in the marketplace--he was neither fond of the overly-seductive garb some of them liked, nor a prude.

"When I see a woman in a marketplace all but announcing herself as single and eager, I think of my sister," he said as we sat there, the cart rocking slightly on the uneven road. "From the ages of fifteen to twenty she was certain she was going to seduce herself the perfect man. At the age of twenty, she took a job handing the money and records for my father." Haal picked at something in his teeth for a moment, or maybe bit his nail, I wasn't really paying attention. "The funny thing," he said, "was that once she took the job, her face was never pleasant again. She was always annoyed with something or someone. Now whenever I see some young woman with an unworried face I can only see a child, not a beauty, and those are the ones who are most eager to go around showing what's under their silks, you know?"

"Did she find a husband?" I figured I knew the answer, and was more or less right.

"Of course she did! Her face was always rough after that, but she knew what she was saying when she talked. Within two years, she had gotten into an argument with a trader in a tavern about business, and they were married soon after. And not because he had taken her to bed, no," he laughed. "She didn't give him a child for five years after that. No, because he recognized a good woman by what she did, not what she looked like. For a trader, that is what's important."

I nodded, looking out over the arid steppe ahead of us. We were close to the end of the caravan, but there was a good cross-wind keeping the dust out of our faces, for now at least. It had been on us before, and would be again. "The smart money is in smart people," I agreed.

Haal smacked my arm jovially in response. "The smart money is in smart people!" he agreed, loudly. "I like how you talk, boy. The smart money is in smart people."

I liked Haal, but his habit of repeating himself did get tiring.

A while later, our conversation had wound around in some idle circles, and he asked me what I knew they all wanted to ask me. "So why did you leave Aurnal? Surely the capital has many prospects for a man such as yourself, eh?"

I didn't have a good answer, because the only honest answer was that I'd tried to kill the Grand Vizier when he offered me a job... a bit too aggressively. Dumb, I know. So I avoided the question. "I don't like the people there," I said after a little bit of silence. "They are fine for city people, I guess, but I don't like them."

"Ah, some of them can be tricky, I know," Haal seemed to find whatever I said agreeable, maybe just because he wanted to be agreeable in general. "Aurnal is too big a city for me to stay in. The people there always want to be paid the most and get the most for too little coin. You do anything wrong and they frown at you like they're wondering if you did it on purpose. They think everything must go their way, and if it doesn't, oh!" he threw a hand up dramatically. "Something must be wrong, and it must be wrong with you, and not them."

I chuckled, for all that I knew nothing at all about the city. I'd only been there two days--well, a day and a half, maybe. "Some people are like that," I said, thinking to a disagreement I'd had with a maid in the palace. "They always find something to complain about, even if it's the lacing of your shoes."

That phrase made Haal throw his head back in a howling laugh. "Ha ha ha haaaaa!" he screeched. "I like that! Some people will always complain, even if it's just about the lacing of your shoes."

I shook my head, continuing my thought once he'd settled a bit. "So now I'm going somewhere, and I don't know where." I placed my hand on my left bracer, now concealed under the thicker shirt I was wearing. Haal hadn't seen the artifacts, nor had most of the caravan, and I wouldn't be sharing that if I could avoid it. "Somewhere I can find a little place to make my own, I think. Not too far from a large town, but not a city."

"Hm, hm," Haal made agreeing noises. "There is a village across the border, Kurnal, I think. It is on a small trade route, but it is quiet there. I will be heading past that on my way home, but not right away. There is water in Kurnal, and traders stop there as they head into the dry hills to the east, as that is the fastest route to Bur'jaal. Profitable, but not enough to draw trouble. Depending on what you can do, you may find work there."

I fixed the name in mind and nodded. I didn't care either way, and I didn't really want to travel too far. Haal was a character, but I didn't think he was stupid. If there was a problem with the place, he would have said.

Day turned to dusk quicker than I expected. It was an easy day, in terms of me not having anything to do, or a hard day if you want to talk about how the bouncing wooden bench seat wore a flat spot on each of my ass cheeks. We ended up stopping just a bit early because one of the wagons ahead snapped an axle when they hit a gopher hole or something similar. The wooden shafts had no suspension and didn't take abuse well.

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While I was wandering around, I quietly and without any fanfare used my Fabricate power to repair and slightly reinforce Haal's wheels and axles, though I don't think any of the work I did was urgent. I wasn't so much scared of being found out as one of the five Heroes--though also yes, I didn't want them to be able to track me down easily later on--so much as mostly, I didn't want the attention or interest. The way that the palace had treated us, it seemed like Heroes rising occasionally was a big deal and also a very famous legend in the area, and so it seemed best to me to just not get anyone involved.

After having fixed up Haal's wagon, though, I thought about how any of the wagons breaking down would delay us, and ended up silently extending the same courtesy to other wagons, if the crews would let me get close enough. If I had changed anything, it might have been obvious--I couldn't use that power on the broken shaft without giving away the game, for instance--but if I distracted people by asking questions about where they were going, and only fixed what was already there, there wasn't much to notice.

Most of the traders were, frankly, uninterested in talking to a stranger, but there were a few who engaged me, and when I started asked about Kurnal, I was directed back to a group that had turned me down for talking just before, who were apparently headed through to Bur'jaal. The leader of the guards there was a severely imposing woman with a hell of a lot of scars, the sort of physique in general where they generally don't have to tell you twice to do something. I'm sure that if I pissed her off, she could hit me hard enough with her knuckles alone to break my bones, assuming I didn't use the bracers to soften the blow.

Even so, after she'd told me once to leave, I ended up coming back, getting right to the point and asking about Kurnal. She grudgingly called over one of the traders, who broadly speaking had no opinion about the town, just confirming that it was quiet and not of much note to them and that a fair number of traders took the route, but nobody really stayed.

That wasn't much praise, but I wasn't looking for a real praiseworthy place to live, just good enough.

The next day of travel was interrupted by us catching the edge of a sandstorm. We weren't quite in the desert where we were, but nobody seemed all that surprised either to find a massive wall of wind howling out of the sands to the north. Everyone set up shelter quickly enough, me helping Haal, and we all spent a fairly boring hour-ish period of time isolated from one another.

"These storms are much worse in the desert," Haal said not long into our brief stay, "but this close to the edge, they are still blinding and can pick up lighter goods and carry them away. Twice in my life have I pushed through storms along this road, and neither time did I lose anything, but..." he grimaced. "It was a close thing both times. Since the storms are shorter here, not much time is lost, and so I have found it not worth the trouble."

"It must also be painful," I said, hearing the grating sound of sand whipped against the tent.

"Yes," he said, "but each time I weighed pain against money, and the pain wasn't much. The horses..." he sighed. "They were not all that happy, but they weren't bloody messes. Chelli," he patted the head of one of his horses, both of whom were intruding into the tent at least a little as they lay on the ground outside, "she argued with me the last time I did that, telling me that is no way to treat a loyal horse, and she was right." He patted the horse a couple more times, and the horse moved her head just a bit, but didn't otherwise comment.

"You can talk to your horses?" I wasn't sure whether to think of that as a magical thing or a more subtle, empathetic thing.

He shrugged. "Not usually. I have a cousin who can speak with animals; he helps me to buy animals that are loyal. But once you know that a horse is intelligent, that you are not imagining it yourself, you can tell what they are thinking, sometimes, and once a horse knows that you know, they listen to what you say and respond, in their own way."

Chelli moved her head to bop Haal's knee, and he patted her again, but neither said anything more about that.

I suspected, if I'd played around with the bracers, I might have learned to communicate with animals. The green stone bracers had a number of possible uses; I knew that Fabricate was only one of several powers, and the more general shields and telekinesis were only trivial powers. Most likely, on the scale of a divine artifact, telepathy--with people or with animals--was also a fairly trivial thing, but I didn't want to experiment, not there.

The delay caused by the storm was brief, and everyone was eager to get back underway once the winds slowed. And it was slowed, not stopped; someone came around banging on the tents when they were confident we could move on, and we packed up while still feeling the end of the storm, but it was a lot lighter. Still, the spray of sand on my exposed skin burned, and I was grouchy for a while afterwards that I'd had to be out in it. I wasn't the only one, but mostly it was womenfolk complaining, and I mostly kept my peace.

Not that there were many women in the caravan, I realized as we set off. Larger groups brought some of their family along, but most of the smaller traders like Haal were alone, and there were no independent female traders that I could see, and female guards like the one headed to Bur'jaal were fairly rare. Perhaps that was different somewhere, but not in... well, honestly, I didn't remember the name of the country, and I was somewhere between too embarrassed and too grouchy to ask.

Not that anyone really cared. We just kept on traveling, headed for a city I knew nothing about, and then we'd split, and I'd go off towards this new town, probably. In truth... I knew nothing about where I was going, and that was perhaps for the best.