"Why?"
"Did you smell those herbs? The man can't tell decent ones from enspelled ones; who knows what else he can't tell."
"I'll remember that," Glines said. Then he paused. "Morgan, about those herbs…"
"Aye?"
"How did you know they were more than they seemed?" He paused and looked at her warily, as if he expected her to draw a dagger and poke him with it at any moment. "That they were… magical?"
"I just did," she said, but she was beginning to wonder herself. First Nicholas's blade, then the herbs.
These were very unsettling events.
"I just did," she repeated, "but it was nothing. I need to go." She brushed unsteadily past Glines, ignoring his offer of an arm. She managed to make it to a tree at the edge of the firelight before she had to stop and take hold of something to steady herself.
No more boats.
The next one might just do her in.
By the next morning she was not much more herself, but she had no more time to devote to lying about uselessly. She heaved herself upright and remained there through sheer willpower alone.
Paien leaped to his feet, looking years younger than his normal self, and greeted the world by ingesting a breakfast that just the sight of made her ill. She contented herself with tea she made from things Nicholas's very unmagical cook had very unmagically stowed in her pack.
"North?" Camid asked as they prepared to break camp.
"North," she repeated firmly.
"Skirt the edge of Istaur," Paien advised. "It isn't a friendly place and we would be well oft to avoid any unnecessary encounters with the locals in our present states. "
"I feel fine," Morgan said, hoping they would mistake the weakness of her tone for discretionary quiet.
Camid grunted, and shouldered his pack. "Well, we have to make at least a brief detour to the docks. "
"Why?" Morgan asked.
"We've baggage to put on a ship back to Bere," he said, pointing at the baggage.
Morgan recognized the uncomfortable lad who had been shadowing them at the tavern in Bere, only now he looked different. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he was bound hand and foot and gagged as well. "Who is that? "
Glines pulled back the lad's hood and Morgan lifted an eyebrow in surprise.
"One of Harding's sons," she noted. "Not the youngest, for he is at the university. Which one is this. "
"Fletcher," Glines said. "He is the eighth, I believe."
The boy would have answered, but again, he was wearing cloth tied about his mouth that prevented him from expressing any opinion on the matter.
Morgan looked at him and for some reason she hesitated. She wasn't one to have pity on souls who should have been safely tucked into bed each night, but she did feel for the lad and his desire for adventure.
"Can he wield a sword?" she asked.
Fletcher nodded enthusiastically.
"Not well, if memory serves," Paien said. "Don't you remember him, gel? He snuck into our camp that one night and spent half an hour trying to merely draw it as he begged us to take him on? "
Morgan looked at the lad. She recognized the desperation in his eye. If she'd had a heart, it would have gone out to him. To be eighth in a line of eleven lads belonging to a man who seemed determined to live forever and spend all his gold so his sons saw none of it?perhaps he was merely burning to escape his unpromising destiny.
"Well," she said, "why not. "
