The trip down the River Bell was long, slow and easy. The pain in Thornsong’s arm and ribs dissipated with each passing day.

After four days on the river - long enough to get out of the poisonous spill from the uktena - they began to trawl a braided line pulling a carved wooden minnow with a bent copper splinter at the rear to serve as a hook. Pickings were relatively slim, but they landed enough northern pike to keep their food reserves from the Little People from getting too monotonous.

In truth, there was little to do but enjoy the scenery and talk.

“I know why I want to go south - I’m sick of being cold,” Raspberry said. “What about you? Any destination in mind?”

Thornsong watched a bald eagle turning in slow circles overhead. A few huge crows were watching it too from their perch overlooking another languid riverbend, cawing occasionally in warning.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get where I’m going,” Thornsong said. “And that’s kind of the point.”

Raspberry nodded.

“It’s more profound than you meant it to be,” he said. “Do you know where I’d go, if I could?”

“You can go anywhere.”

“No. I’d go back to Beringia. Back to the ancestral land of the almas. Back to the frigid steppe and the berry patches. Back to the moss cakes and the occasional reindeer haunch.”

It was Thornsong’s turn to nod, wistfully.

“Beringia is long gone,” he said. He hesitated, as if he was going to continue, then leaned back against the bullboat’s side and resumed watching the eagle circle.

“The flood changed everything, for everyone,” Raspberry said.

“I don’t know if I want to talk about Beringia much anymore,” Thornsong said. “It was there, and then it was gone, in what seemed like an instant. Thousands of years of history wiped out in a three-day deluge. When the floodwaters turned to salt, I knew it was over. The sea was coming to take back the land.”

“You never actually told me when you left. I know the how, and the why, but not the when.”

“That’s the easiest part,” Thornsong said. “I was young. Very young. Too young to survive in the wilds on my own. But I did. After the burning of my village, I just picked a direction and ran. I ate on the run, I slept with my eyes open, barely risking a fire. Not that I was that good at starting fires back then. It was sheer luck that brought me to the shore, and sheer luck that I followed it east into this world.”

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“My story wasn’t so different,” Raspberry said. “I had no destination in mind. I was exiled. I just had to go. Where wasn’t important to my clan, and it wasn’t very important to me, either.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and reclined opposite Thornsong. When he opened them, they were wet. Thornsong had never seen Raspberry cry before. He didn’t even know if that was something a sasquatch could do.

“I thought about walking into the floodwaters and just letting them carry me away. It would be the ultimate exile for an almas - to be consumed by the water. It felt fitting.”

Thornsong nudged him with a moccasined foot.

“I’m glad you didn’t. You’ve saved my hide more than once.”

“More than twice. More than a hundred times,” he said. He smiled, and the tears running down his cheeks shifted course and disappeared into the thick hair of his chin.

“You don’t have to answer, and I’ll pretend like I never asked,” Thornsong said. “But why were you exiled? I know that you were, but you never really told me directly what happened.”

Raspberry sighed and reached over the side of the bullboat. He let his fingers drag in the water.

“That’s a story for another time,” he said. “But leave it at this - I was born very different from the others in my clan. Very different from other almas, even.”

He flicked his fingers at Thornsong, spattering him with a few drops of the River Bell.

“I was water, while they were stone,” he said. His smile dropped a few notches. “And the almas are a conservative lot. That’s how we’ve endured since the dawn of time. Or how we did endure, anyway. Keep things simple. Keep things quiet. Become like the stones littering the steppe or the withered tree that’s stood through a thousand winters.”

“I feel like I should offer you a bit more of my backstory,” Thornsong said. “Why I do what I do.”

“Hunt monsters? Do you really need a reason? They prey on people. Your people. And you’re good at fighting them.”

“I wasn’t always. I wasn’t always at all,” he said.

The eagle overhead stopped circling and tucked its wings. He fell like a meteor toward the River Bell, drawing up at the last instant. Its wingtips slapped the surface as it struggled to haul a fat trout clear of the water. The crows were in uproar.

“Some of my earliest memories were of monsters,” Thornsong said. “I still dream about them. I hope, someday, that the monsters I kill with my hands will help me to fight the monsters in my dreams.”

“You never need to fight alone,” Raspberry said. “I told you already - I have nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there.”

“And you’ll always have a home by my campfire,” Thornsong said.

They passed the next few days in relative silence, remarking only on the occasional bear fishing by the riverside or puffs of smoke in the distance.

The weather grew warmer by degrees. One afternoon the sun forced Thornsong to shield his reddening forehead with his pack.

“I think we’ve gone far enough south for a while,” he announced.

Raspberry shielded his own eyes and nodded.

“Time to stretch our legs,” he said.