Page 47 of Into the West

Briada and Ivar were talking, but she couldn’t hear them. It didn’t really matter; neither of them looked at her for a reaction or an answer to anything, so they were probably discussing the camp and what provisions to make for guarding it. She went back to watching the sky. Bay would certainly alert if something came over the hill, and his senses were far superior to hers. But he probably would not pay attention to the sky; dogs were seldom attacked by anything overhead. Really, what could successfully attack a mastiff the size of Bay that could also fly?

Those terror-birds, and that’s about it, I think. Can you call them “birds” if they have four legs? But they also have beaks.

Whatever they were, she sincerely did not want to actually see any with her own eyes. Adventures were all very well when they were safely confined within the pages of a book. You could close a book and keep all the danger inside it.

But even in books, the heroes make mistakes, and there isn’t always a happy ending.

That thought would never even have occurred to her before. My life has turned into “before” and “now,” hasn’t it? It’s good. This is good. This pace, this intensity. I think I like it, I really do. Not out of pretense or rebellion, but out of simple satisfaction. Gathering, helping, investigating things from beetles to balms, and every step is a genuine adventure. This is living what we’ve imagined heroes in stories doing, standing majestically against a new vista in warm orange light, their amazing clothes whipping in the wind. This actually makes more sense to me as a way of life than being in a castle. It’s doing things, it’s being with people who are there to be with you, and feeling good to do so, big task or small. And there’s genuine danger, don’t ever forget that there is danger. Forget danger for a moment, and it’s the moment you die. Ah! I think I like that. But still, even if I didn’t really feel or quite believe it, we were in as much danger before as we are now. Not heighten-the-tension danger like in a book, but tensing-you-up, react-to-every-sound-and-shadow fear. It’s like sharpening the edges of your thinking and whirling it around your heart a while. But of course, there was one other consequence of all this tension and excitement. It’s tiring.

All she had to do was look at her own life to understand that. When her father had died, the Emperor had ruled that neither she nor Isla could inherit, and had given away her home and lands to a stranger. And she was lucky, in a way, that the stranger had come with a wife, or she might have found herself married to that stranger, with no one to protect her.

A different kind of danger perhaps, but the difference, in the end, between being murdered by your husband for your lands and being murdered by a terror-bird is rather moot. Dead is still dead.

They rounded the curve of the river, and indeed, to her relief, the roar faded to a murmur echoing off the sides of the valley. And there on the river she spotted a goose.

She didn’t even think about it; out of pure habit, she Fetched it; Bay leapt up, seized its neck and broke it, and dropped the whole goose in his master’s lap, waiting for praise. Ivar made much of him, and Delia slid down the front of the barge and went inside to stow it in the kitchen. With no fire in the stove, the inside of the barge was as cold as the outside, and the goose would keep.

When she came back out again, it was to discover that Ivar and Briada had each shot more geese on the shore, which Bay had gone to fetch. “There’s dinner sorted,” Ivar said with satisfaction as she took one goose from Bay’s mouth and the other from the deck of the barge.

“And the mages will need it. I’ll cook it if you’ll clean it. Just gut it, don’t take the feathers off,” Delia offered, just as she spotted a little red bit of ribbon tied to a branch ahead. “Bay can have the innards and the head and feet. I’ll cook them separately for him. And there’s our camp.” She pointed to the ribbon.

As the mages slept off their exertions, the rest set up the camp, starting the cookfire inside a crescent of boulders with plenty of room for people to sit between the rocks and the fire. Once the fire was ready, Delia took the heads, innards, and feet of the goose while Bay watched with interest and put them in a pot to simmer together beside, but not in, the fire. She needed the bones to soften so they weren’t dangerous for a dog to eat, and that meant long, slow cooking. She had noticed that there was clay between the rocks of the riverbank, and she scooped out enough clay to cover all three birds about a thumb-width thick. She wet the birds down, stuffed them with herbs, salt, and some onion, dripped in a bit of wine that was going off, then coated the geese in clay. She made sure the clay worked down into the feathers and smoothed the clay over the encased birds until they looked like large stones. Then she put them on a bed of coals, and raked more coals over them. Then she found a nice flat rock, cleaned it well, and put it at the fire to heat up to make flatbreads.

Normally she wouldn’t have rendered the feathers useless by coating them in clay, and normally she would have cooked the geese on a spit with a tray to catch the fat, but this was the most foolproof way of cooking them that she knew. There was very little chance of them burning or drying out this way. They already had more goose quills for arrows than they would ever use, anyway, and the feathers from three geese weren’t going to fill more than a quarter of a pillow.

Venidel emerged as the sun neared the horizon. Endars followed shortly after. But Jonaton and Sai did not appear until she had broken open the hard clay and pulled the pieces away from the birds. The feathers came off with the clay, the skin broke, and the air filled with an aroma that was virtually identical to the geese Sai cooked. And that brought everyone to the fire.

She gave Bay his cooked heads, feet, and innards, and he slurped the entire concoction up in no time.

The four mages were still looking a bit shaky, so she scolded them into sitting down and fixed plates for them: flatbread, goose breast, and pickled carrots. Sai tasted the goose gingerly, then with more enthusiasm.

“Who taught you how to cook goose in clay, rich girl?” he teased.

“You did,” she reminded him. “All that magic must have erased your memory.”

He looked as if he was trying to think of a good retort, but shrugged, gave her half a grin, and just dug out another sliver of goose from the breast and ate, slowly, chewing carefully.

Jonaton looked even more exhausted than Sai, but then, he’d been doing the work of three mages. He would stare at the food in his lap, slowly pick out a bit that was about bite-sized, slowly put in his mouth, and slowly chew. Alberdina set aside her own dinner and moved over to where he was sitting. He slowly raised his head and looked at her.

“Headache?” she asked.

He nodded and winced.

She left for the barge and returned with a bottle. She took his cup of water and poured some of it in. “Drink,” she ordered, and he did, the whole thing, down all at once.

Alberdina snatched a hot flatbread off the stone and spread a thick layer of jam on it, rolled it up, and handed it to him. “Eat that,” she ordered.

He did, chewing slowly, as the sun sank and the wind got colder. Ivar raked the fire closer together now that she didn’t need the coals to cook the birds anymore, and they all slid down the boulders to use them as shelter against the wind.

Jonaton went back to his goose, but he was looking much better. It was hard to tell in the flickering firelight, but she thought he was getting his color back.

“Next time take me or Endars,” Venidel said sternly. Or at least, he tried to say it sternly. It was a little hard to believe him being stern when he had just the barest fuzz of beard coming in and everyone else, except for her, was at least a decade older than he was.

“The better idea would be to ask Sai’s brother to join us from the convoy,” Amethyst observed. “Two very senior mages on one end and three mages on the other should even out the strain.”

Jonaton sighed and the last of the pain lines eased away from his eyes. “I was fine—well, almost fine—until I lay down. As soon as I relaxed, it felt like someone had hit me with a bag of hammers.”

Sai stopped chewing long enough to shake his head and say, “You know, youngster, the fact that you only feel like someone hit you with a bag of hammers is a tribute to how strong and skilled you are.”