Everyone needs to pause the adventure and spend some time organizing their inventory, right? Look for unnecessary items that are taking up space, make sure you aren’t running low on anything that you thought you had lots of.

  The tents of several kinds, food preparation gear, food supplies, medical supplies including not one but two colpsible stretchers, extra bnkets, rope and basic climbing gear Zanshe knew how to use, dry firewood, and miscelneous other odds and ends covered an impressive amount of Zanshe’s front hall floor, once it was all unpacked and sorted out. Zanshe had no hesitation about pulling items out of Serru’s bag to add to the rest, though that made me wince.

  She produced a sturdy leather bag with metal leaves on it, about the size of the human satchels, and had us put all gathered pnts and mushrooms, sand and minerals, into it—not to leave behind, because she acknowledged that I might find things useful and also Serru would be annoyed, but just to make sure that they weren’t cluttering up other bags. I did keep out the items that were on my alchemy-upgrade list.

  Around checking on dinner, Zanshe verified that we all had a weatherproof coat to wear during the day and something warm for under it, that we had extra practical dry clothes in case we got wet, and that our boots were adequate and that Heket had a pair for herself in case she encountered conditions that needed them. I honestly expected to fail on part of that, but that shopping trip had apparently included ‘get Nathan a warmer sweater and a shirt with long close-fitting sleeves for under it and a heavier pair of woven trousers and more socks and a pair of gloves’ which meant that Zanshe was satisfied even though my bag acquired a bit more human clothing to clutter it.

  She counted through what we had, with her own considerable contribution included, so efficiently that I could practically see the wheels turning and the calcutions falling into pce in her mind. She made us each take two winter-weight tents, an ornithian tent, an extra bnket, a coil of rope, a dozen travel bars, and a mini-first aid kit of Quickheal, Anodyne, Ointment, Cleanse, and two Bandages. Accidents could happen to bags, she said. I had one stretcher, and she had the other. I hoped we didn’t need them at all.

  I hadn’t actually known about those mini-kits but I approved. It was minimal but enough that even if you had no training, in an emergency you could seriously increase your odds of surviving long enough for the rest of the party to reach you.

  Heket had bought herself a backpack in Crystal Pass, a goldenrod-coloured one that had wider straps and small pockets on each side and a heavier construction than Terenei’s, but wasn’t much rger; apparently that was what felids did when waist-bags weren’t able to hold enough. She swapped all of her things and Myu’s into it while we were doing the sorting. She couldn’t put her mecha into it, for much the same reason as the portable house, but Myu’s basket would fit inside. Somehow. Well, my guitar fit in mine.

  All in all, the episode was a startling contrast against the friendly, welcoming, and elegant jotun woman we’d been greeted by, but then, why shouldn’t she have multiple sides?

  “We should be fine,” Zanshe said finally, as we left mecha, house, camping gear, and gathered-item bag near the door. “There are vilges, of course, and individual homes, but that’s only useful if you’re able to reach one. If we get a snowstorm while we’re three hours from the nearest shelter, or a rockslide cuts us off and someone’s hurt, that won’t be much help. Or the nearest could be only a retively short distance away but that distance could be all or mostly vertical. Alternative routes are problematic in the Highnds.”

  “Serru’s been extremely clear that this is the stretch she was the most cautious about,” Terenei said. “We’ll take it seriously and listen to anything you say.”

  “Absolutely,” Aryennos said fervently.

  “Good,” Zanshe said cheerfully. “Dinner should be ready. The dining room is over here beside the kitchen.”

  The dining room had, instead of hanging birds and lizards or statues or more pnts, fascinating wall art that were made of multiple thin yers of metal of different natural colours with areas cut out to show the yers beneath; I saw a bird on a branch, a forest framing a flower, a goat on a ledge, a felid musician with a hand-drum. The colour palette might be limited, but they made up for it in shape and texture and shadows.

  Dinner was fish in some kind of dark sauce that brought out the taste beautifully, rice and cooked vegetables and fresh sad, and ftbread with subtle spices in it. Myu had her own setting at one end of the table, with a mat to sit on and a pte of diced-up fish on a bed of grassy-looking green stuff that she chewed on as well and a bowl of milk—I had to bite my tongue and remind myself that milk was fine for cats here. I’d had enough of it in felid form.

  I could only call dessert an absolutely decadent salted caramel cheesecake with a chocote crust, although that wasn’t exactly it. Zanshe ughingly admitted she’d bought in town from the local expert rather than baking it herself. When I asked about felids and chocote, I just got confused looks, so clearly that particur issue wasn’t a thing here any more than milk was.

  It probably should not have been a surprise that Zanshe had a room with luxurious soft comfortable furniture and one of the sort of boxes that worked as a video projector.

  She only had one spare bed, although it was, like hers, jotun-sized. Terenei accepted her offer that someone could sleep with her, Aryennos and I took the spare room, and Heket assured us that there was more than enough room for her and Myu to be comfortable on the jotun-sized couch in the living room we’d just been in.

  Which meant that in the morning, on the way down to an equally luxurious and satisfying breakfast that was, for any practical purpose, pancakes with fresh fruit and sweet syrup, I felt well-rested for the first time in days. My mana had finally reached maximum, even.

  Zanshe had done a rather drastic style change. Her knee-height bck boots had intimidating treads, and jingly blue metal discs and clear crystal beads dangled from the folded-down edge of the wide blue-lined cuff at the top. The trousers tucked into them were leather that shaded from dark blue at the top to a green that almost reached neon-bright just above her boots, and there was at least a substantial fp-covered pocket on each thigh, possibly more. Her long-sleeved sweater reached past the wide point of her hips, something soft and drapey that looked like it was comfortable without being bulky, knitted in several blues and greens and yellows; it included a hood she could pull up over her neatly-braided hair, which had three cords supporting dangly shinies threaded through it. Over it she had a leather vest, bright blue with multiple neonish-green pockets and yellow-green stitching, and brassy buttons fastened it up the front; it cked sleeves, but had a sort of loose short fp over each shoulder that would probably deflect moisture off her sweater at least somewhat.

  All that colour and the sparklies were probably going to make her very easy to see against the colours of the Highnds. I very much doubted that was an accident or that it was for fashion purposes.

  All in all, it looked like the outfit of someone much more ready for rough terrain than the rest of us were.

  We gathered up the st couple of odds and ends, including collecting pyers and medical monitor from the charger, the usual heavy metal box that did its thing in no way I could understand.

  It all made a substantial pile, especially considering that these were all bags of holding.

  Zanshe had her own bright-green bag made of heavy fabric, which had a single wide cross-body strap but was meant to rest against her back and fastened along the side with multiple csps; she simply picked up the yellow-and-blue bag with the camping gear and slung it the opposite way, hung the rust-coloured bag of gathered items on one shoulder, and picked up the house by the handle. “Can you get the rest? Let’s be off.”

  Terenei took Serru’s satchel, I took Heket’s mecha, and Heket took Myu in her arms. All in all, not so bad, as we wound our way through Brightridge to the stable where the ornithians had spent the night, warm and cozy.

  Anezke’s horses were already gone, presumably so she could do the next leg of her deliveries, but the owners of the stable were helpful and before long we had stowed everything securely in the wagon. Zanshe suggested that we loop a rope across the front of the underseat space to reduce the odds of things just sliding out or otherwise moving if we hit bumps or slopes; we tied one end to a rear support, wrapped the rope as tightly as we could around each of the other supports up to the front, went across and back down the other side, and tied it off on the opposite rear support. It wouldn’t pass in an aircraft, but it should be some help.

  We greeted Peace and Cheer, and made sure they’d eaten well; they danced back and forth in pce while we got them harnessed and hitched to the wagon. It didn’t look like stress; they struck me as being in good spirits and full of energy that was starting to tilt towards boredom.

  Terenei clearly agreed. “They’re loving the exciting parts of this trip,” he said, climbing up onto the front bench. “They’re much less enthusiastic about the parts when we tuck them safely in a stable until it’s time to move again.”

  “I hope,” Zanshe said, “they’ll settle for exercise and scenery in pce of thrills and danger.”

  “I think so. Everyone in. You have long legs, Zanshe, where are you going to be comfortable?”

  “It doesn’t look terribly crowded in the back or on the front seat. How about I sit up front for now so I can give directions more easily? At least until we’re out on the road.”

  “Sounds good.”

  So Aryennos and Heket and Myu and I took the back, and Terenei waited until Zanshe was settled beside him before clucking to the ornithians.

  “Got a question,” I said after a moment.

  “Yes?” Heket said.

  “We’ve been paying for inns and shopping trips and meals. Or at least trying to, recently. What about the pces Cheer and Peace are staying? We’re doing something to show them how much we appreciate it that they’re safe and happy, right? And Anezke helping us get here alive?”

  “Nami and Sumi offered them space because they’re my old friends and I asked. They understand that it was important that they had a good pce overnight. Besides, the children loved having them there.”

  “In Crystal Pass and here,” Terenei said, “I gave them each a gift of their choice of one of the paintings out of my current book. In Crystal Pass they asked for one I did of the ds there, the animal healer absolutely adored them. Here, they liked the one you saw me do of the sunrise in the Forest near Ottermarsh. I would eventually have sold them in Coppersands, or maybe somewhere else, or traded them for something else, anyway.”

  “Anezke did a favour for me,” Zanshe said gently. “Which I arranged. I have no doubt she knows you’re grateful but I asked and that is between her and I. Previous and ongoing retionships affect what would be polite to show appreciation. Is it that different, where you’re from?”

  “I... yeah.” I sighed. “It’s massively complicated. I’ve been thinking about it at lot and I’m sure I’m still missing something. A lot of people at home will get really offended if you try to offer them anything except a thank-you in return for something they’ve just done for you. And it’s pretty much obligatory to dismiss any offer of payback and insist that it was a small thing and there’s no need. It’s considered rude to brag so I think it might be connected to that.”

  “It seems to imply the opposite, however. If someone needs help with something they cannot do, and you can and do step in, then they are understandably grateful. To tell them that it was a small thing for you is, in fact, a form of bragging—the thing they could not do, you could, so easily that it has no value to you while having a great value to them.”

  “Huh. That’s a really good point.” I considered that. “I’m fairly sure that other cultures in other times, and we have had a lot of cultures, there are six continents with people on them and thousands of years even on the ones that most recently got people, have had different approaches.”

  “Six continents? That’s a lot of people.”

  “And a lot of history,” Aryennos added.

  “You are definitely not wrong,” I said. “And staying fed and healthy and safe is a lot more difficult so there are a lot of different approaches. Even within my culture, or my own little section of my culture, it’s a massively complicated subject.” Charity. Open source. Creative commons. Who pays on a date. What to offer a neighbour who watered your pnts while you go on holiday. “I think my brain might leak out my ears if I try digging too deeply. It feels good to be altruistic and do things for other people without it being an exchange, and I think that’s what most people would say.”

  “And that is completely and wonderfully true. It does. But perhaps a part of that is to allow the person you have given a gift to feel that same joy in giving.”

  “That’s... huh. That’s not quite the same as what I’ve heard, that it’s polite to let people make clear how much something means to them.”

  “They can both be true, can’t they?”

  “Oh, absolutely.” I pondered that. “Maybe part of it at home involves trust and honesty. We’re very bad at trusting each other and we tell a lot of social lies to protect ourselves or make others feel better. Sometimes people do things for hidden reasons, to try to manipute someone or gain something without being upfront about it. I would be really uncomfortable if I helped someone and they felt obligated to give me anything at all when they might not be able to without hardship and when they might be exaggerating the value to them to be polite.”

  “That would certainly make it more awkward to simply accept a gift at face value.”

  “But somehow we still have concepts like random acts of kindness and pay-it-forward, which means basically that if someone helps you when you’re stuck, instead of repaying the one who helped you, you help someone else who’s stuck, so possibly it isn’t hopeless yet and we’re still people who care about other people. At least some of us.”

  “You’ve interrupted your life,” Terenei said, “not expressing your music or art or dressing how you please and letting it interfere with a retionship that matters, for the sake of helping other people with medical emergencies. I doubt you’re the only one. It’s sad that it’s necessary to do that, but there are people willing to do that, and you have said things that make me suspect that responding to emergencies in your world is even less safe a job than it is for wardens and can lead to personal harm or death. That doesn’t sound to me like no one cares about anyone.”

  “We do get paid,” I pointed out.

  “Enough to be worth it? Enough that you couldn’t find a job that pays at least the same amount and that is easier?”

  “Um. Maybe.”