After three days in Esbolva, Wirrin was as relaxed as she’d ever been and knew more about scapegoating as a historical phenomenon than she’d thought there was to know. She would have stayed longer, but after two and half days of naps, food, and sex, Bilar had gotten more work.
So, on the fourth morning after she’d arrived in Esbolva, Wirrin crossed the bridge over the Boclas river and started south along the bank toward the wetlands. Technically, she was already at the wetlands, but for the first day of walking, Wirrin was passing the tree farms.
She stopped early in the evening on the last of the good road along the riverbank. The road had been uphill all day and Wirrin’s legs were tired. But mostly she stopped to watch the river divergence for a while before she went to sleep, now that she was above the dykes that kept the tree farms a bit dryer.
In the morning, Wirrin followed the broken road past most of the trees before she started to look for a likely place to strike off into the wetland. The road along the western bank of the river was in much better condition, as that was how most people travelled to Yantava, if they were going south.
Wirrin stopped for lunch before striking off into the wetland. She’d found it much more difficult to actually cook once she was in the marshy land, so she treated herself to a well-spiced meal before setting out.
The Esbolva wetland was much more properly called a swamp. The closest it got to drying out was when parts of it froze in winter, and despite the local logging industry it was dominated by spindly and partially submerged trees.
That was even more true of the Yasagolk wetland near Louyava, and of the Toravan wetland. They were all more rightly called swamps. But they weren’t the Tertic Swamp, the weren’t The Swamp. So they were all called wetlands.
Despite what Wirrin considered to be mild temperatures, she’d worn her autumn leathers for her trip to the wetland. And she’d stocked up on mint to stuff into her clothes against all the bugs in the pine-heavy wetland.
The wetland was immediately humid compared even to the side of the river. Condensation dripped from the trees with a pleasant, omnipresent patter. This close to the pine farms, the mint was still fairly heavy on the ground. It was one of the easiest ways Wirrin knew of navigating the wetland.
Where the wild mint still looked healthy, the ground was generally solid enough to walk. Everything was damp, of course, that was the nature of the place. The mint was brown and grey with fungus, but Wirrin knew what to look out for, at least this far north.
Her boots were made for snow and mountain-climbing and kept her feet dry even where the ground was flooded, but not too deep. She’d freshly oiled all of her travelling clothes before leaving Esbolva and other than the dripping in her hair, she stayed dry that first day, stamping through the mint.
Wirrin woke to a feeling that was becoming familiar. There were no people walking about her, no cart coming up the road. It was little things like frogs and lizards and birds, crawling and hopping around before it was time to move north or hibernate. Their movements shook the ground, even as gentle as they were.
Dawn was barely colouring the horizon through the masses of spindly trees. Something had woken Wirrin. She placed a palm on the ground and tried to concentrate. The ripples of nearby water moving, shook the ground under her hand.
But there it was. Wirrin drew her knife and stabbed it through the head of a heavy, brown spider only a few centimetres from her leg. Most likely it had simply been curious about her body heat, but Wirrin didn’t much like spiders.
There was that rumbling in the back of her head, distant and quiet.
Wirrin took a deep breath and pressed her other palm to the ground. She focused on that feeling of the earth shaking. The feeling came from anywhere her body touched the ground, but she found it easier to focus on her palms.
Frogs and lizards and rats and birds shook the ground. Even fish, swimming lazily in the cold streams, shook the ground with their presence. Distantly, something big swished along one of the deeper streams. Wirrin couldn’t feel any more spiders nearby.
Breakfast tasted of mint, even though Wirrin hadn’t added any.
Wirrin walked slowly, watching the ground. She had been surprised by spiders before in swamps, but she wasn’t exactly looking out for them. She was trying to feel the ground as she walked, trying to feel everything that moved around her.
The sensation came in waves, as if every step sent out a ripple. Soon enough, Wirrin was barely paying attention to the skittering animals and bugs. She was admiring the hills and valleys of hard ground that hid under the soft surface of the swamp.
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Wirrin almost tripped on nothing several times through the morning. This sense of the world around her was more than enough to warn her of obstacles. But reconciling what she saw with her eyes with what she felt in the ground was difficult.
By the time she stopped for lunch, Wirrin felt as if she’d been awake for days. Her head ached, she felt dry and nauseous. She took shallow, even breaths and kept her eyes closed, sitting in a particularly dense patch of the mint.
She made a small fire and filled her kettle with water she’d taken from the river. She’d paid Outolt for a month in advance to leave most of her mountaineering gear and clothes there so that she could carry more water.
She’d drunk boiled swamp water before with minimal issues, but she wanted to avoid it if she could. A month was much longer than she expected to take, but it was better to be safe.
After a couple of minutes rest, she got up to find a willow tree and chipped off a good double handful of bark to boil.
By the time she added peppermint to the steeping willow bark, the nausea had all but subsided along with the headache. But she could still feel worms digging through the soil beneath her, despite her lack of focus. Better to be safe.
Even with peppermint, the willow bark tea was bitter. But as she stayed seated, the rest of her nausea and headache faded away. She filled one of her smaller waterskins with the remains of the tea, diluting it by about half in the process, and finally had a small lunch.
It was a very pleasant break, despite the headache. The ever-present dripping from the leaves and branches gave the rusting and rumbling of the small animals a nice ambiance. The evergreens and ground plants gave a nice, soft greenness to the bare branches at the end of autumn.
This was what had attracted Wirrin into the Toravan wetlands when she was young. And with all the mint, as well as the cold, the insects were quiet and basically left Wirrin alone.
After about an hour and a half, Wirrin got back up from her lovely spot and set off into the swamp again. She walked faster this time, not concentrating on the rumbling in the ground. She could still feel the little animals and the water and the roots of the plants, but that sense of hills and valleys buried under all this soft ground was gone, no longer distracting her from what she could see.
Evening was pulling down when Wirrin spotted her first landmark. It was a rocky outcropping poking straight out of the ground, covered in moss. About as tall as she was. She had remembered it from when she’d explored the wetland in her youth, and it was one of the only geographical features on the survey map she’d been looking at.
The rumbling of everything moving around seemed to intensify. Wirrin would have said it got louder, if it weren’t so firmly in her own head. As it grew, she could feel the hard ground beneath the wetland again, a spike of it protruding in front of her.
‘This was as far as we ever made it,’ Mkaer rumbled through her bones. ‘Naertral refused my help, when the so-called Gods came.’
As it never had before, Mkaer’s voice brought that headache back with it, much milder than this morning.
‘One of your mages made this?’ Wirrin thought. She could feel the way it spiked through the hard dirt below, down deep to solid stone.
‘A short fight,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘That I lost.’
The rumbling and rattling started to fade. Wirrin concentrated on it. ‘Why would Naertral refuse your help?’
The voice was no less deep, rumbling, thunderous, but it seemed strained. ‘We were not… firm allies,’ Mkaer groaned and grumbled. ‘We two were opposed in our power… if not our interests by the time of the so-called Gods.’
Even with Wirrin concentrating, the rumbling faded. She let it go as the headache intensified again. She took deep breaths against the returning nausea and took her tea from her bag.
Just that much was more concrete information about the Fiends than Wirrin had ever been able to find before. It had been a struggle even to know all six of their names.
Despite how faint the rumbling was, Wirrin thought to it again. ‘I doubt Naertral will oppose your presence this time.’
There was no response.
There was enough light for Wirrin to keep going, but she set herself up in the lee of the outcropping, putting a cup of her tea on to reheat as she rested against the moss. It was pleasantly soft, and the first time since she’d entered the wetland that the trees weren’t dripping on her.
Wirrin closed her eyes and felt the bugs lazily crawling through the moss and the rodents and lizards and snakes and fish waking up with dusk to hunt around for food. They were all keeping clear of her, so she didn’t pay too much attention.
The headache was already fading by the time the tea started to rattle in the cup. Wirrin just held the cup in her lap and stayed sitting with her eyes closed.
Instead of concentrating on that feeling of the earth rumbling around her, Wirrin sat with her tea and let the feeling wash over her. She listened to the worms and bugs and animals and fish. She listened to the distant crocodiles.
The headache continued to fade, slowly, as she sat there. The tea helped, when it was cool enough to start drinking. It started to come back, though, if Wirrin found herself concentrating on anything.
She sat there until the tea was cold again before she banked her little fire and started cooking dinner: some pemmican, some dried vegetables, some rice.
In the morning, Wirrin started heading south, deeper into the wetland. She swiftly left the crawling mint behind, wading into deeper mud and skirting streams and puddles.
She tried to keep that open awareness of the rumbling in the ground, not focusing on it like she had the previous morning. It turned out to be a massive help, of course, in finding which parts of the wetland were more easily traversed. She couldn’t avoid all the mud and water, but this sense of the ground made her travel much quicker.
Even just a half-day into the wetland, it was much harder to find a good place to stop for lunch. But she had expected that, and she hadn’t brought much food with her that needed to be cooked to be eaten, other than the rice.
She sipped on her tea skin, though the headache thankfully hadn’t returned, and ate cold meat and vegetables, seated in the low branches of a barren tree. She still got dripped on, despite there being no foliage above her.