“Did you seriously bring books on our journey to hunt down a vicious monster no one else has survived meeting?”

Oliver smirked at Rose’s question, but did not respond immediately. Only once he finished his paragraph did he look up. “Yes, I did.”

The petite warden trainee sighed and pouted at Oliver. They were three days out from Correntry, and the tedium of the job ahead of them had begun to set in. Rose was right that, on the surface, their job should be outright anxiety inducing, but they had no idea when (or even if) the attack would come, and the route they’d be following with Hugo and his company would take at least a month in each direction. Two months of riding in a wagon, as they were now, or running alongside it. Two months of being on alert for a possible attack. Two months during which they couldn’t even practice.

Since he had left Elliven with Adeline, training had been a constant in Oliver’s life. Every day was either spent out in the field or in the training hall, constantly pushing his skills to their limit. Even when they couldn’t book a practice room, Adeline had driven him to do some kind of physical training, from weight lifting to running a lap around Correntry’s walls. As far as he could tell, Farris had held her trainees to a similarly rigorous standard, and they had been doing it for even longer than he had. The constant rigor had slowly but steadily helped Oliver’s gifts improve, particularly his gift of the vanguard.

[Gift of the Vanguard]

Level: Novice

Experience: 16%

Defeat foes to grow your skill in the face of danger

[Gift of Wind]

Level: Novice

Experience: 10%

Push your limits to grow closer to the wind

But now that they were on the road, it was impossible to keep up the same pace. Training weights were far too heavy to justify loading on a wagon, and as the trio were supposed to be simple hired hands working for Hugo, practice duels were off the table. If their quarry was watching them, such a brazen display of combat ability might be enough to make it reconsider attacking at all.

There was always the chance that an unrelated monster could attack, but it was unlikely. The warden patrols hunting for the same prey they were had thoroughly cleansed the majority of weaker monsters in the area, and the placid magic of springtime lacked the density needed to create even minor monsters in any significant numbers.

All of that was to say that Oliver was very relieved that he had decided to purchase the two leatherbound volumes that were the heaviest items in his travelsack, even if they were a bit removed from his usual fare.

“What are you even reading?” Rose asked, her tone annoyed. Neither girl had thought to buy something to help them pass the time, and Farris had apparently not advised them of the need.

Oliver lifted the book up to show her its cover, embossed with the title, “The Travels of Elben Trellay.”

Rose read the cover outloud, puzzled. Oliver was surprised to hear a slight hesitance in her words, particularly around the unfamiliar name. “Okay… well, what’s it about then?”

Oliver sighed. He was beginning to think he should’ve suggested that the two buy some sort of distraction for themselves, if only so he’d have the peace and quiet to do some reading. “It’s the collected writings and journals of a ranger, Elben Trellay. She roamed the heartlands for sixty-seven years, and during that time, she wrote about every monster she came across. Their behaviors, abilities, habitats, even the magic they were aligned with.”

“Sixty-seven years?” Beryl called back from the driver’s seat of their wagon. Oliver had been surprised to learn that both girls knew how to drive such a vehicle, but Beryl held the reins of the pair of draft goats hitched to their wagon with a bland confidence. They had been taking turns every few hours. “She must’ve been a dottard by the end!”

Oliver huffed a small laugh. “Not quite. She reached Expert and had a resilience boon that kept her hale and hearty well into her eighties. Apparently she finally passed on shortly after her hundred-and-twentieth birthday. This volume was actually collected posthumously, a grandson trying to ensure her legacy or something like that.”

Beryl responded with a low whistle. “I’ve gotta level up.”

“Don’t we all,” Rose agreed. “So what, you’re looking for our monster in there?”

“More or less.” Oliver shrugged. “It’s a long shot, but I figure it’s as good a way to pass the time as any.”

“What about that one?” Rose asked, reaching for the second tome resting on the wagon floor next to him.

“The Umbral Lexicon,” Oliver explained. “Abridged edition, of course.”

“Of course,” Rose muttered sarcastically as she thumbed through the pages. The book was twice the size of the Travels, which itself was far from a penny novel. “What does the unabridged edition look like, then?”

“It’s four volumes long, each as thick as that.” Oliver shook his head wistfully. “I’d love to own the full set one day. It’s a catalog of every known detail regarding each of the three Darkened Worlds and the outsiders that populate them, as well as an examination of how they impact the flow of ambient magic and the tendencies of each Waste’s connections to them. It’s a fascinating read… if a bit dense.” He admitted the last reluctantly.

“Clearly.”

Oliver raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you have a gift from the Mage? I’d have expected that this sort of study would be nothing for you.”

Rose shrugged, continuing to idly flip through the Lexicon. “Animism is much more about practice than theory. I had some learning to do to master the fundamentals, but once you get the basics down, life magic is a pretty straightforward thing to manipulate. Someone gets hurt, you shove some magic in them until they stop bleeding.”

“That easy, huh?” Oliver asked with a grin.

Rose rolled a pale, slender shoulder in another shrug. The motion drew his eyes to the twirling lines of her brand, a simple staff surrounded by the same swirling wind lines as Oli’s sword brand. “It’s not too complicated, at the very least.”

Oliver huffed a breath and turned back to his book. “Not too complicated…” he repeated, shaking his head. While he had never studied intensely enough to take a Mage’s exam, he was familiar enough with magic to know that it was far from as simple as the girl was making it out. Absently, Oli wondered if Rose was being modest, or if she was actually smart enough that she thought even her magic was that simple.

#

The days rolled by as the wagons trundled down the Flax Road.

Hugo’s Trading Company was a relatively small interest. Hugo, its owner, was a round-shouldered stump of a man that managed to carry a noticeable paunch despite a lifetime on the road. Though at Apprentice he was the highest level member of the expedition, his gift of the merchant and the gift of eloquence bound to the silver necklace around his neck were far from combat oriented.

Including Hugo, the Company numbered just two wagons and half a dozen individuals. There was Harriet, a straw-haired scarecrow of a woman who, at Novice rank, was the Company’s only other full gifted. A professional teamster, her gifts of the rancher and the carpenter earned her the driver’s seat of the second wagon, but her primary job was to take care of both the vehicles and the animals pulling them, four of the oversized, powerful goats preferred as draft animals by those who could afford them. The specially bred draft goats were less temperamental and stronger than donkeys, and significantly easier to keep fed than oxen.

The rest of the staff had not even reached Novice level, and by most definitions, didn’t even count as gifted. There was a pair of sandy-haired youths just a year or so older than Oliver, brothers who were working for Hugo in pursuit of the expertise they needed to get their own gift of the merchant, and a couple of massive, blocky porters, each blessed with the gift of the laborer.

For the highborn Oliver, it was a stark reminder of how rare gifts were among commoners. Many lowborn would only ever earn a single gift, all they needed to accommodate their chosen profession. Some, like Hugo, would augment that gift with an ensouled item in the hopes of leveling up, but that only served to trap them in the lower levels. It would take years of inspired trading, or a stroke of extraordinary luck, for the merchest to accumulate the wealth needed to raise his gift of eloquence to Initiate level. The gift, and its charm boon, were as valuable to aristocrats as they were to merchants, with even Oliver’s own father having the same gift.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

What Oliver didn’t understand was why they didn’t at least make the effort to get a gift from one of the Greater Triad, the archetypes who were the least restricted in bestowing their powers, like the Warrior. Beryl had to explain it to him when he brought it up one day.

“You’re still thinking like a nobleman,” Beryl told him with a sneer. Oliver had never explained his past to the two girls, but they clearly knew his origins somehow. He still wasn’t sure if Farris had told them some of his history or if they had just gathered it from his mannerisms. “You were always destined to be a battle-gifted of some kind, right?”

Oliver nodded, not understanding. “Sure, but still! I mean look at those two,” he gestured at the shape of the two large, sturdy porters walking alongside Harriet’s wagon. “The gift of the brawler or the guardian would complement the laborer perfectly well, and it would give them the ability to protect themselves on the road, and to level up.”

Beryl rolled her eyes. “And when would they train for that? The Mage and the Warrior alike require a starting point–you need to showcase your skill as a warrior, or your knowledge of magic. How many years did you train for before you tried for a gift from the Warrior? How would they afford the cost or time for that sort of training?”

Oliver frowned. “I suppose… but there’s still the Primal.”

“Sure, the Primal doesn’t require any training, but it requires a certain amount of courage. Think about it. What life do you think there is for a porter who breaks his arm or gets crippled trying to earn the gift of earth?” Beryl held up a hand before Oliver could rebut again. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s an uphill battle for them in a way it just wasn’t for you.”

“Or for us,” Rose called out from the driver’s seat.

Beryl acknowledged the point with a curt grunt. “It’s possible they’ll get to Novice one day–a lot of caravaners tend to end up with a gift from the Primal by accident, somewhere along the way. A bad storm whips up out of nowhere, you manage to survive it, and suddenly you’ve got the gift of water. Same for the Warrior blessing the survivors of some monster attacks. But it’s just as likely they’ll never get a second gift, and it doesn’t matter. As simple porters, they make enough money to live comfortably.”

“Not everyone needs to be battle-gifted,” Rose added. “If they were, we wouldn’t be so respected.”

Oliver’s frown deepened, but he didn’t argue. They were right, of course–he had simply never thought about it before. Another symptom of his privileged upbringing.

#

Every few days, the caravan stopped in another hamlet. As the route’s name implied, the Flax Road connected many little communities that specialized in the various steps of making both magical and mundane clothes. Farming communities that grew the highway’s eponymous crop were most common, with sparsely-spaced mill towns built along rivers serving as hubs for both trading and spinning the flax into linen.

In each settlement, they’d set up shop for at least a couple days. Hugo and his employees would use this time for trading, selling essentials like tools, clothes, and weapons, items that the locals couldn’t easily manufacture themselves, as well as luxuries like sugar and spices. In turn, he’d pick up healthy amounts of the local goods. Not just flax, which he could sell at the mill towns for a small but tidy profit, but also reagents and herbs that the villagers had gathered in the surrounding wilds.

These breaks in the routine were key to maintaining the sanity of the three youths. Confident of Hugo’s security within the villages, they’d set off for the local wilds, hoping for the chance to find some minor monsters. More often than not, they found little more than private places to do some real training, but even that was a blessing.

On one of these nights, they found themselves atop a small hill a couple miles from the town they had recently stopped at as the sun was setting.

“Why bother heading all the way back to town?” Beryl asked. The brawny girl gestured around the hilltop. Apparently something of a known spot despite its distance from the village, it boasted a quaint, charred firepit circled by stones, with several conspicuously flat-topped logs surrounding it. “This is a perfect place to spend the night. Better than some cramped little inn room.”

Oliver winced and looked around the hilltop, not quite as impressed with its rustic charms as Beryl was. “Really? We’ve been on the road for days, it could be nice to sleep in a bed for the night…”

Rose and Beryl traded a look, the larger girl rolling her eyes while the slender Rose grinned. Oliver caught their expression and frowned, suddenly self-conscious.

While Oliver tried to put on a brave face, the truth was that the trip was unlike anything he had done before. He had picked up, somewhere along the way, the Beryl and Rose had spent plenty of time on the road, but he had barely left Elliven prior to setting out with Adeline. Their trip down the Lumber Road to Correntry had involved roughing it for a few nights, but as they were traveling along a major trade route, they were able to find accommodations more often than not. The Flax Road had fewer stops along it, and as Hugo tried to maximize their mileage every day they were on the move, Oliver had found himself having to camp out more often than he ever had before.

Rose spared him from defending himself, her grin softening a touch. “C’mon Oli, it’ll be nice! We can get a little fire going, and tell stories. It’ll be so much more relaxing than being stuffed in some stinky inn!”

The pale girl grabbed his hand, her expression earnest, and he felt his cheeks color a little. Finally, he reluctantly nodded. “Okay, I guess we can stay.”

“Great!” Rose’s smile was dazzling when he agreed. “Beryl, you wanna make us a smooth place to lay out our bedrolls while Oli and I go find some firewood?”

It took only an hour to set up the campsite, and soon the three of them sat around a cheery little fire, sharing a bottle of some burning root liquor Beryl had picked up a couple villages back. Rose made a face every time she took a small sip, and the taste of it made Oliver wince with each drink too. But it burned down to his bones in a comforting way, and he soon found himself relaxing like he hadn’t since they left Correntry, the discomfort of the bugs and dirt and another night sleeping on the ground forgotten in the blur of alcohol and wood smoke.

Encouraged by the drink, Oliver soon found himself talking without a thought to his etiquette lessons. “You two mind if I ask you something?”

Rose and Beryl shared a look, and Beryl shrugged.

“Of course, Oli,” Rose said.

“I was just wondering how you ended up with Farris. Living this life.”

Beryl grunted and took a swig from the bottle. “Tit for tat?”

Oliver arched an eyebrow, and Rose giggled at the confusion on his face. “She means we’ll share if you do the same.”

“Oh.” Oliver blushed slightly, his mild embarrassment magnified by the alcohol. “Sure, that’s fair.”

“Okay. Well…” Rose looked around their makeshift camp, as if unsure where to start. Beryl spoke up after a moment instead.

“Our parents were teamsters out of Dela,” the larger girl explained. While Rose’s wandering eyes gave the impression of distraction, Beryl’s gaze was solemnly fixed on the crackling fire in front of her. “The Brass Orchid Company.”

“They were about the same size as Hugo’s company, actually,” Rose commented with a little smile. She was looking up at the night sky as she spoke. “Two wagons, just the four of them and the occasional short-term hire.”

“And us,” Beryl added.

“And us. My parents were the actual merchants. My mom was a weaver, my dad was a trader. Beryl’s dads were the guards and porters.”

Oliver remembered Beryl’s expression when she talked about caravaners accidentally getting gifts, and guessed, “Did they get a Primal gift in a storm then?”

Beryl snorted, and looked up from the fire to give the boy a small, grim smile. “One did, yeah. My other dad was a swiner.” Her eyes drifted back down to the fire and the smile fell away before she muttered, “Not that it did them any good.”

“Monsters?”

“Monsters,” Rose confirmed. “A manticore, we found out later. It was moderate rank, and a strong one at that. None of them were ready for it.”

Both girls fell quiet, and Oliver did the same. He knew better than to interrupt their shared moment of painful remembrance.

“We only survived because a warden patrol happened to be nearby. They caught wind of the battle, and raced over as fast as they could, but…”

“They were too late.” Rose’s voice was empty of all emotion as she continued. “My parents died trying to distract it, to keep it away from us, after it had gone through Beryl’s dads. That was how we met Farris, actually.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Years, now. She took us to an orphanage in Correntry, but she kept an eye on us. Came by every month or so, bought us lunch or gave us some little present she had stumbled on…”

“She blamed herself.” Beryl shook her head. “She never said it, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. She was convinced that if she had been faster we wouldn’t have… that our parents would’ve-” her voice cut off in a hard crack, and Rose put a gentle hand on her friend’s arm.

The smaller girl’s voice was hollow and detached. “When we were old enough for our gifts, half a year or so back, she came again, and asked if we wanted to train with her. To join her. And we were happy to do it.”

“No one should die on the road like that,” Beryl snarled.

“And here we are.”

Oliver nodded. He didn’t know what to say. Slowly, over the course of a few minutes, Beryl took deep breaths, collecting herself. Oliver suspected she was ashamed of the tears she had spilled. The powerful girl had turned her pain into fuel, and pretended it made her strong. He knew the feeling.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Still.”

“Enough,” Beryl all but growled, her voice still thick with the dull edge of her tears. She took another long swallow from the bottle. “Tit for tat, remember. Your turn.”

Oliver nodded. “Right, yeah. Of course.” He had stirred up all of these emotions for the two of them, and he knew that they were asking for a distraction from the memories. At the very least, he decided that he could manage that much.

“So, it was the first day of spring, and I was set to duel this boy…”