The sky was barely brightening when we checked that we had everything on us that we might want soon, made sure that all food was secured in the kitchen cabinets that would stop it from spoiling soon and that all other gifts were on living room shelves, and colpsed the house.
Well, I did keep one gift in reach: the creator of a line of sound pyers had been at the festival, and on discovering I didn’t have one, had immediately remedied that—and every musician, singer, storyteller, and several others besides had filled it first. This one had a dark finish that shimmered purple and pink in the early light. Aryennos said it was a Ninye, a make highly popur with musicians for its delicate bance of sound quality, storage capacity, and time between charges, though there was no increased durability as there was with the Vylieth. That seemed fair enough.
At least that was a gift that didn’t make my brain hurt, trying to grasp its origin.
I’d spent much of the night, while Terenei and Aryennos slept upstairs and Heket and Myu slept in the swinging chairs, sitting just outside and experimenting with the new guitar. It was, honestly, a joy to py. I saw some pause to listen; now and then, someone joined me for a short time, dancing, or singing improvised scat over what I was pying, or adding another instrument briefly. I tried not to make anyone feel unwelcome, and I hoped that wasn’t the reason that none stayed long. To be fair, it was very te, and I was quite sure I wasn’t the only one exhausted. Maybe that st bit of music would lift a spirit or two. I’d rather think that, than that I scared them off with my own gloom.
I was still awake when the sky began to pale and my friends dragged themselves out of bed.
Jovra and Andu, who had taken the ornithians to safety during the attack, wanted to say goodbye to Cheer and Peace too.
“They’re adorable,” Jovra said, hugging Peace, who nuzzled her. “Maybe we should look at keeping the horses for more local trips and switching to these beauties for longer ones. But we’d need to keep them exercised enough the rest of the time, I wouldn’t want them bored. Well, we can see.”
“Find someone breeding them near you,” Terenei said. “They’ll be more likely to arrange for you to take them out for a multi-day run if they know that you’ve made friends with them and understand what they need. And if no one is, maybe you can suggest that someone start. They’re only going to get more popur.”
“I have no doubt of that,” Andu said, rubbing around Cheer’s beak.
“Take care in the Highnds,” Thelsan said.
“We have company,” Terenei said. “If there’s any problem with the wagoner in Crystal Pass, we’ll stay there until Zanshe is able to come meet us. We’re not going anywhere alone.”
“Good, but take care anyway.”
Meridel gave me a hug. “I hope you get home to your family. I know Ary will miss you, but family matters. I’m sorry you’re losing a few days with Serru, but that could have been much worse.”
Not quite sure what to say, I mumbled something about missing them too.
Then we were back on the road.
My dispy remained rather fuzzy, and my mana remained low, but it did allow me to switch to my felid form, which was much easier for catching a nap on the cushioned bench along one side of the wagon, leaving the other to Heket and Myu.
I woke up with Heket shaking me and saying my name. I blinked at her in confusion, uncharacteristically disoriented.
“We’re at the inn,” she said. “Come inside. Ask questions once we’re somewhere quiet.”
“Inn?”
“Anezke’s not leaving for Brightridge this te,” Terenei said, accepting the two bags Heket handed him, one of them Serru’s, which made my throat try to close. She handed Aryennos his own and Myu’s basket with Myu in it, and waited until I sat up to give me my own. The portable house and Heket’s mecha stayed where they were, tucked under the seats, but Heket did gather up the bag of camping supplies.
Terenei stopped to pet Peace and Cheer. “I’ll be right back, boys, and you can make friends with Anezke’s horses until we need to go.”
Aryennos was already inside and talking to the innkeeper, a jotun man with silver-grey hair that I wasn’t sure was from age and dark pewter-grey skin. I caught Anezke’s name, and Zanshe’s, but not much else.
“Zanshe sent word she was expecting people coming from Five Winds,” the innkeeper said. “Preferences for beds?”
“We’re flexible,” Heket said.
He nodded, and inclined his head towards the broad flight of stone steps, softened somewhat by a thick runner carpet woven in a geometric pattern. “We do have a restaurant, and we can send meals up to your rooms if you want. They’ll be happy to make arrangements for the little one too, I’ll let them know. Your rooms are at the top and to the left, at the end of the hall. Here, let me help with what you’re carrying.”
It might be just as well I’d gotten used to Thelsan and Donour outside at the festival in my human form. The innkeeper felt enormous to me, indoors and compared to my felid self.
Those stairs might have been dangerously low-friction without the carpet. As it was, I saw small gleams of metal suggesting that it was anchored securely.
It felt like a lot of stairs. But then, the ceiling felt extraordinarily high. I was fairly sure it wasn’t just because I was in felid form. Every building I’d seen in this world had enough clearance for a jotun to stand up, but it would make some sense for buildings in a jotun-heavy area to build on an overall rger scale.
The innkeeper showed us to the left, along a broad hallway. At the very end an open door showed a sparkling-clean toilet and sink, so at least that was close. The doors the innkeeper opened were side by side, the st ones; he set down the camping supplies bag and Myu’s unoccupied basket just inside one room, and tapped the crystal panel by the door that activated all the lumina stones to banish the gathering gloom.
“If you need anything, let us know,” he said. “Including a hot bath in the communal pool or one of the two private bath rooms. And we’re not accepting money from you for the room or the meals. We had friends at the festival.”
“That is really not necessary,” I said.
“That wasn’t meant to be rude,” Terenei said to the innkeeper.
Aryennos was right on his heels, but to me. “Remember about letting people show their appreciation when you do things they value?”
Right. My friends had repeatedly tried to thump that one into my head. It wasn’t their fault it was a hard reflex to dislodge.
No matter how I felt, the innkeeper didn’t deserve to have a kind gesture thrown back in his face. “Sorry. I’m still exhausted and not always thinking things through properly.”
“No harm done,” the innkeeper said. “We’ll make sure you have space to rest. I’ll ask my niece to bring you a water bowl and maybe a treat for the little one, shall I? There’s a pot on the balcony for... her?”
“Her,” Heket said. “And thank you, that would be lovely.”
“I need to get the ornithians back to Anezke’s,” Terenei said. “I’ll be back soon.” He left with the innkeeper.
The rooms were also scaled up, the beds the size of the one in the portable house, and there were two in each room—we would have had ample space in one room. Under each window was a rge pnt in a stone pot, the leaves green with yellow veins, and they had flowers that ranged from buds to full bloom, the hearts of them bright yellow fading through orange to brilliant poppy red at the outer edges. The room was perceptibly warmer closer to them, which might account for what was very obviously a version of a ceiling fan keeping the air moving.
A door linked the two rooms, but also, each had double-doors that were gss overid on the outside with metal mesh fine as ce. When I ventured to investigate, I discovered that they led to a balcony of generous size, with built-in stone-and-metal benches both against the wall and against the stone-and-metal balustrade. The tter was higher than I was used to, and the benches wider and higher. Octagonal stone pnters held unfamiliar greenery, but one of them, near the door, had only a ring of low pnts I knew Myu liked, with bare sandy soil in the centre. Was that the kitty equivalent of a bathroom? It wouldn’t surprise me if it automatically broke down cleanly.
The balcony wrapped around the corner, and when I checked, it turned out that the two rooms shared access to the same balcony.
I was going to start feeling like a child in an adult world at this rate.
The view made me forget that.
I hadn’t really built up any expectations. Different parts of this world, even though they weren’t that far from each other, had different styles suited to local conditions and used different materials abundant in the local environment, so I suppose I had vaguely anticipated stone.
Crystal Pass was certainly made of stone, at least primarily. Roofs were clearly shingled, rectangur or curved or pointy on the bottoms, so maybe ste or some equivalent, but some were darker than others and some were mixed. The bodies of the buildings actually glittered. Some were made of a single colour of stone, some of two or more, but the stone in question came in several pastel colours and all of them sparkled gently in the light of the setting sun, even from here. I was sure this was the first pce I’d been that routinely had three-storey buildings, and occasionally even a four-storey one.
But just cataloguing the material really didn’t do justice to the sweeping artistry of balconies and flying buttresses and arches, sheltered semi-open spaces on top of or on the sides of buildings, the ornate trim in metal and stone of countless colours and styles that adorned every building, many fanciful metal gratings that were often rge and, from the occasional glint of sunlight and ck of obvious windows, probably had gss on the inner face. I saw pces where one could stroll between buildings without ever touching the ground, via raised and protected walkways, and balconies with their own stairways down.
In between were the usual broad and absolutely-ft streets, though these ones looked less like hard-packed dirt and more like stone pieced and fit together into an irregur but smooth jigsaw. There were people, maybe a quarter of them jotun and the rest were a mix of everything else, including several that I would have sworn were neither a cervid nor centaur but had the lower bodies of lmas. I was sure I’d heard lmids mentioned as a Highnds species, so sure, why not? There were the usual poultry and pets. A lot of the dogs I could see were rather husky-like in many colours, or resembled massive Newfie or St. Bernard-types, not the long-legged lean breed of the Grassnds or the poodle-like Shallows breed. Many of the small local carts I saw were being pulled by actual lmas of many colours.
And some way off was Crystal Pass itself, it had to be. A gap sliced through a high steep ridge, its walls vertical, and even from here I could see the crystalline surfaces, mostly white but with gleams and shadows of every colour quartz had ever existed in, which, if I recalled correctly, was basically all of them.
I hoped Terenei got a chance to paint it.
I went back inside, but left the doors ajar. “That’s absolutely beautiful. I really hope I don’t regret being felid-form in the town.”
“Word already spread,” Aryennos said. “Not just to our host. People have been leaving the festival grounds, we passed a lot on the way and even gave one on foot a ride to the vilge between there and here. They’re taking stories with them in both directions. And the post office at the festival grounds was constantly busy, with people sending messages home or making arrangements, and they would have expined. I told you we had to tell the truth, it was the only thing we could do.”
I’d slept through a hitchhiker?
“At this point,” Heket said, “many people know there is an adult newcomer in the area who has healing abilities that outmatched the Moss Queen’s attempted raid and can switch species at least between human and centaur. Something was enough for our host to identify us without that hint. I don’t think pretending is likely to work for long in public. It does not matter any more than it did back at the festival grounds. You will get nothing but gratitude and perhaps some curiosity, even if you were to change in the middle of the street.”
“A lot of curiosity,” Aryennos said ruefully. “We stopped at the post office in the vilge we went through. I had a message from one of the librarians in the Whalesong Landing school, one I promised to keep in touch with, asking whether that was the real reason for my research and when can she ask about a thousand questions. Terenei had one from Jaelis that just said, ‘Safe travels, thank you for protecting Serru, and I hope that cure potion was for real,’ and it came with more than enough money for us to get everything on the list Serru sent Terenei.”
“I didn’t protect her,” I said ftly.
“No,” he said, his tone turning patient. “You protected her from the one thing that she dreaded most, and it’s sounding like the people who love her are very aware of that. Terenei also had messages from half of Serru’s family, who have all scattered back to their own homes after her great-grandfather’s end-of-life gathering, and some of his own family, all thanking you and a lot of them with variations on how much they’d grieve to lose her even temporarily again and they sympathize with you and your family and hope you get home to them quickly and safely. Some of them sent more donations to help with expenses. They know because she woke up in her parents’ house and presumably told them why and it spread around her family and over to Terenei’s. She’s back and on her way to meet up with us. And not trapped by the Moss Queen for a year to two years.”
“That may be easier to believe once you see her,” Heket said. “She’s already on the road. We’ve been brought briefly to a halt. Some of what Anezke is expecting to take to Brightridge and her other stops has been deyed. She expected it to arrive early tomorrow so we could leave by mid-morning but it won’t be until ter and possibly the next day. That seems to be connected to the bridge disruption on the Shallows road. She needs to wait for it—a day or two is better than making a half-loaded trip and leaving people without and then making a second half-loaded run that will dey her normal schedule. She apologized. We asked her not to feel bad and that a little extra time for you to rest and recover is likely a very good thing, and we won’t have to rush first thing to buy everything on Serru’s list. Terenei will stop at the post office to give Zanshe and Serru that news.”
“Peace and Cheer,” Aryennos said, “have been invited to share the pasture Anezke’s horses are in until we can leave, and she’ll bring them inside overnight so they’re warm and comfy. Her brother’s partner is a healer who specializes in animals and Anezke expects her to be fascinated and want to spend time with them and learn about them so I doubt they’ll be bored.”
“So we need to keep busy for a couple of days,” I said. “All right. I’ll try not to sleep too much.”
