Dustspawn

night

We’re in Dustspawn for the next couple of days while the caravan takes on lading.

You can’t just walk up to one of these things and tag along like a lost puppy. You pay a fee to be under their protection, which covers the cost of shared guards and scouts, and the safety of numbers in general. There are entire fee schedules—Druma loves its fee schedules—for the things, ranging from how you’re traveling to what you want along the way. Traveling on foot? That’s your base per-person fee. Riding an animal? Takes up more space, spreads out the caravan, and they smell, so there’s a per-animal fee. Pulling a wagon? Harder to defend, and they sometimes break, so there’s a base wagon fee and a per-axle fee. And so on.

You can even get amenities. Don’t want to bring your own food? Your meals can be provided for a fee. Don’t have a tent but want one? There’s a tent rental fee. Don’t feel like walking? There are a limited number of coach spaces. For a fee. You get the idea.

There’s another way to join up, too, and that’s to make yourself an asset instead of a liability. Which meant it was time to put Iskaryn to work.

For all the shit she gives me, when it comes time to rely on her for something serious, she really does pull through. I made a proposal, and she agreed without hesitation (and without an attitude).

“She can serve as an aerial scout,” I offered to the caravan-master. “She can talk, read, and even write, in Sylvan.”

He was skeptical. And I get it. I don’t blame him. Familiars, animal companions, and the like aren’t rare, but ones that can talk are. Literate ones? Even more so.

“Sylvan. How, exactly, does that help me?” he asked,

“I speak Sylvan. And this is Druma. Surely, some of the escorts for this thing do, too.” There’s a subtle art to chastising someone without being overtly insulting. I adopted a concerned tone. “Please tell me you don’t travel through the Palakar Forest without someone who speaks the language?”

He relented, though not before asking Iskaryn and me to prove our claim. We sent her off on a couple of simple scouting tests, and he pulled in a dwarven guard named Thilo, who also spoke Sylvan, to act as a translator. He verified everything, and then it was done.

And because Iskaryn is Iskaryn, after the contract was signed, she wrote “Thanks, asshole” in the dirt.

Thilo, to his credit, only paraphrased. But he did chide me quietly, afterwards. When I apologized, he said, “Just keep the bird in line,” and walked away.

So, thanks for that, Iskaryn. Now I get to be extra polite to Thilo for the rest of the journey.

Being a woman (and one who, even in my current state, draws the eye) with a magical bird traveling the road alone tends to attract attention. Most of that attention is either the wrong sort or the sort I am not currently interested in. Case in point. We’re at this inn called The Mineshaft—Dustspawn is an old mining town, so the decor is a whole thing—and I’m writing this all up. A man I did not want to get to know better came up to me just now and asked, “What are you writing in there?”

“I am just keeping a travelogue,” I said, because I try not to be rude to people (even when they deserve it, which, so far, they did not). Also, I need to travel with these folks for the next week, and it’s best not to make any of them mad at me.

“That’s not a language I recognize,” he said, which was deserving, and is precisely why I write this in Sylvan instead of the common tongue. I wanted to say, “That’s so assholes can’t read it over my shoulder,” but, again, trying not to be rude. So I went with, “Oh.”

The best way to end a conversation you don’t want to have is to smother it in the cradle. It’s hard to respond to “Oh” because there’s nothing to work with. After a few awkward moments of him just looking at me, waiting for me to go on, he gave up and left.

A triumph for the power of “Oh.”