The military has numerous guiding principles, some written, some merely spoken, and others only acknowledged. On the merely acknowledged front, first come first served meant I got to the garrison barracks before anyone else, so I had first pick of where to bunk down for the night. Admittedly, my position in the Syr command structure was rather nebulous, but rank did have its privileges. Beyond that, between the amount of time I spent blazing trail for the convoy and the fact I wouldn’t be here long, I didn’t expect anyone to object to me absconding with one of the handful of single rooms used by junior officers and senior enlisted types instead of setting up in what I would’ve called the squad bay back home.

  When someone finally knocked on my door, I looked up from my place on the floor and sat the bolt carrier group I’d been cleaning on the mat in front of me. “Yes?”

  Tomas leaned in through the doorway. “Ah, I’d wondered where you got off to. Nice room, all things considered. Any idea when we’re heading out?”

  I smirked before picking up the bolt carrier. “That eager to head out?”

  The youthful energy in his face dimmed and Tomas shrugged. “Not really, no. Having been out that way once already, I’d be perfectly fine staying here if it weren’t for why we’re going.”

  Absent-mindedly giving the carrier a few strokes of the brush in my other hand, I studied the bard’s face. “Any particular reason for that?”

  “Aside from how long a walk it’s going to be? The closer you get to the riverlands, the more unnatural everything feels. You stop seeing homesteads, then you stop seeing wildlife. Felt like the only reason the trees were still there was because they couldn’t just pick up and go, too.”

  I looked up at Tomas. “Where was this?”

  “If we follow the path we talked about yesterday? Well north of where we’re going, a few days, maybe a week, by foot. Crossed through there trying to follow the slavers last fall. Hungriest I’ve ever been. Nuts and berries might make a decent snack, but let me tell you, they only go so far.” Tomas grimaced. “And what comes out the other side when that’s all you can find? No thanks. Never. Again.”

  Having experienced what too many berries produced, I couldn’t help but smirk a little. “Fresh water?”

  Tomas’s expression brightened a bit. “Oh, water isn’t a problem, at least where I was. Seemed like there was brook or stream every time I turned around. Bit of a bother, really, but if all you’re looking for is something to drink, we just have to make sure to boil what doesn’t run fast and clear. You did say those odd bottles of yours filtered water, yes?”

  I acknowledged the question with a nod. “Yeah, dip one of them in a stagnant swamp and you’d still be good.”

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t have to test that, then,” Tomas said with a small shudder. “I’d hate to be that far from home only to find out something went wrong.”

  “You and me both,” I agreed. “If you stop by after breakfast, I’ll show you how to properly clean that shotgun. It’s pretty easy compared to this. Also, I’ll apologize right now, we’re going to be carrying a pretty significant amount of weight. On the plus side, we’ll be using my backpacks so it won’t be nearly as hard as it would be otherwise.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll only get lighter as we go along,” Tomas said with a grin of his own and pushed off the door frame. “I’m going to check in on Millwall and see how he’s doing. Heard the locals had some place we could eat, too.”

  I lifted a hand in a short wave and went back to cleaning. A short while later, Millwall showed up with everything I’d left on the convoy. After I tipped them off, he departed with Tomas to find their evening meal.

  I’d managed to finish cleaning both the rifle and my pistol before I felt something darken my doorway. When I looked up, no one was there. Just as I shrugged and started to go back to inspecting my other weapons, Fiachra stepped into the doorway.

  “Samuel,” the mage said with a nod.

  “Settled in already?”

  “About as much as I’m going to.” Fiachra sighed and produced a several small bags from inside his robes. “These are for you.”

  I winced as I stood and took a moment to painfully stretch my legs before accepting the bags. “So these are?”

  “Things I hope will make your journey easier.” Fiachra pointed to the larger, red-stained bag. “Dehydrated kain fruit. You’ll want to soak them in water first, but you could tuck one in your cheek if needed, though I wouldn’t unless absolutely necessary.”

  “Let me guess, they’re remarkably sour?”

  Fiachra grinned. “More than that, they’ve been prepared as emergency rations. You’re intended to drink the water as well, so putting one in your cheek will likely be—” He paused in thought momentarily. “—overpowering. They won’t be filling, but two a day will keep you alive.”

  “Do they also have the burn the fresh fruit do?”

  “Only for those with affinity for magic.”

  I eyed the bag warily. “So that’s why. Nobody told me.”

  “It’s common practice to test children for aptitude by giving them a fresh fruit,” The mage noted with a wry grin. “You’ll find those less useful for restorative purposes in that regard. Fresh is best.”

  As I sat the sack on the corner of my bed, he nodded toward one in my hand. “The smallest contains an artifact we recovered from the Lord’s manor.”

  The remaining bag went next to the dried fruit. When I tugged open the miniscule thin cloth pouch, a small metal object rolled out into my hand. Shaped somewhere between caltrop and jack, someone had carved a number of odd, winding patterns into its surface. I looked up at the mage. “And this does what?”

  “It makes a remarkably annoying keen when exposed to water. Keep it in that particular pouch in specific. When you need to clean your clothes, put them in a container with water, and toss the pouch in. While not nearly as thorough as a decent wash, it’ll be better than you can do by hand in the field. As for the leather bag, you’ll find a sealed bottle filled with thick oil. Add two drops to half a bowl of water and let it dissolve. The resulting compound will nullify most scents for a time, but you’ll want to wash before reapplying. While it’s not sticky, it can leave a bit of a film.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Also,” Fiachra noted while he dug into his robe. He produced a very familiar cube from within. “Last but not least, my personal detection cube. I’m sure you remember the details, but in case not, streaks come from the source of magic. Color tells type, brightness and speed dictate strength. If there is no color, move away from whatever the source is and stay away.”

  When he sat the cube in my hand, I eyed it for a few moments as small multi-colored sparks erupted on the side against my palm. “Personal? Make it yourself, then?”

  “Aye. One of my first creations, a test by my master. I’m still bothered it lights up near you, but nothing to be done for that now.”

  “I can’t explain it either.” I grinned while I laid everything out on the bed. “You know, I half expected a wand that shot fire or something like that. Utility items are always welcome though, don’t get me wrong.”

  The mage chuckled. “Oh, trust me, if Tomas were remotely compatible, I have at least two wands I’d send with him.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “But not me?”

  “No,” the mage said with flat finality. “I have little doubt they’d do something on command, but what that something would be?” Fiachra visibly shuddered. “I’d guess equal odds that instead of a stream of flame you’d get a stream of flower petals, a shower of pretty bubbles—”

  I managed a sheepish grin. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  Fiachra’s brow came down as he finished the thought, “—an equal volume of spiders, or maybe just discharge the entire wand in one go, producing who knows what kind of destruction. I’ve seen a wand fail before, almost full charge. Left a crater deeper than I am tall. Once the smoke cleared, the largest piece we found of the poor sop who held it was the end of his boot lace.”

  I blinked. “You know, put that way I can appreciate your reluctance. Still, if could throw the wand and set it off directly, it’d be a hell of a weapon.”

  Fiachra regarded me quietly through narrowed eyes. “Wands are not disposable objects, Samuel. They’re far too expensive, far too time intensive to just throw away like that.”

  “How much are we talking?”

  Fiachra sighed. “A talented Sage can produce a quality wand in month if they have materials on hand. Depending, I’d expect those materials to cost anywhere between fifty and a hundred gold. It’s not like you can just whittle a length of wood out of a tree, lacquer it with whatever you have on hand, and you’re off to the races.”

  I held up both hands. “Relax, man. I honestly didn’t know. Not from around here, remember?”

  The mage rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I suppose apologies are in order. Your sister has a very peculiar approach to expanding her knowledge.”

  Jenna? Peculiar? Nah! “Oh?”

  “Please don’t misunderstand me, it was refreshing at first to find someone who shared my insatiable need to understand, but I suspect I now know how my master felt.”

  I had flashbacks to when I first became an NCO and the moment I realized that maybe, just maybe, I had been one hell of a pain in the ass when I was a kid. “That bad, huh?”

  “I can only repeat ‘I haven’t had the time to dig deeper’ so many times, Samuel. I’m still technically only an apprentice, but some of the questions she’s asked hadn’t even occurred to me until they came from her lips, and the more I think about them, the more embarrassed I am that they didn’t occur to me first. If I didn’t know for a fact she’d never seen magic before, I’d suspect was teaching a victim of mind erasure what they’d already known.”

  “Mind erasure? That’s a thing?”

  Fiachra nodded. “Temporary memory loss, usually quite shallow from time of infliction, but advanced casters can target specific sorts of memories quite deeply. Either way, the litany of questions leaves me feeling as if I’m being dragged behind a sprinting horse.”

  Voices echoed from the squad bay as I chuckled. “That’s hurricane Genevieve for you. She’s been like that since she was a kid on any topic she found worthwhile.” It took me a moment to find a way to translate physicist as a concept to the local language. “Our father studied the natural sciences, and he likened teaching her to watching a woodpecker go after grubs in a tree, except he was the tree.”

  The mage slow blinked. A smile erupted on his face right before he laughed. “Yes, precisely that. She’s left enough holes in my head at the moment, thank you. Speaking of, I’ll be turning in for the night presently. I have some reading to do before you depart, but make sure you see me again. I might have more concrete information for what you may face in the weeks ahead, but to be bluntly honest, as I said before, very little scholarship has been done.”

  “It’s conjecture at best, I get it.”

  Fiachra answered with an appreciative smile and nodded on his way out.

  I expected Jenna to stop by, but she didn’t show up until the next morning, maybe a half hour after I finished Tomas’s introduction to basic firearms maintenance. I almost missed the hesitant rap of her knuckles against the doorframe.

  “Hey Sam. You busy?”

  I looked up from the absolute mess of items littering my floor and couldn’t help but smile a little at the memory seeing the way Jenna stood at the door tugged out of nowhere. It’d been years, but she’d come to my door early one morning after apparently staying up all night glued to one Dad’s introductory physics textbooks.

  “Not really, no.”

  She leveled an unamused glare in my direction.

  “I’m just trying to figure out how to split everything up and pack it properly. It’s not going to take all day. Did you need something?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. I ran into Aoife on the way to breakfast. She asked me to tell you that you and Tomas can leave when you’re ready.”

  I nodded and returned to eyeballing the stacks around my feet. “Yeah, I expected to hear that today or tomorrow. I’m surprised you’re not talking Fiachra’s ear off.”

  “He’s with Aoife. Meeting with the mayor or something like that, so I figured I’d stop in and check on my brother. That’s a hell of a hike you’re going to be off on.”

  “Depends? One of the guys in my last unit was a through-hiking maniac before he joined. Compared to the Pacific Crest Trail, this is miniscule.”

  “How long’s that one?”

  “Goes from the border with Mexico up to Canada along the mountains. Only twenty-six hundred miles.”

  Jenna’s eyes bulged. “Twenty-what? People actually walk that?”

  I grinned. “Yep, and since you pass through the mountains, you really only have a six-month window unless you’re really know what you’re doing. Fuck all that though. If I wanted to do that kind of shit, I would’ve gone for Tenth Mountain instead of the Rangers.”

  “Kinda puts everything in perspective though, doesn’t it?”

  I yawned. “Yeah. What I’m expecting to take two months by foot would be an hour and a half by Blackhawk or a day in a Bradley.”

  Instead of standing in the doorway and fidgeting, Jenna evidently decided to go sit on my bed and fidget. “You worried about anything?”

  I chuckled darkly. “Fuck yeah I am. I’m about to walk three hundred miles, one way, across hilly, forested terrain, who knows how many small streams, and a big-ass river. Most of it won’t have roads, and if Tomas is to be believed, a good chunk of it doesn’t even have wildlife we could hunt and there’s some creepy ever-present fogbank. On top of that, God knows what might be stalking around out there.” I paused a moment before adding, “And I’m doing it with a hand-drawn map, no topo, no GPS, no artillery, no logistics other than what I can carry, and no fucking air support. Even if everything goes perfect, it’s still going to suck.”

  When Jenna spoke up a few moments later, her voice was noticeably softer. “I guess I’ve been so busy with Fiachra that none of that really occurred to me. I’m sorry, Sam.”

  Her sudden shift in tone tore my eyes off the clutter and up to her face. She sat with uncertain eyes, a stiff sneeze from tears. Goddamnit. Mentally kicking myself the whole way, I picked my way through the scattered gear and over to my sister so I could give her a hug.

  “It’ll be okay, Jenna. I’ve spent literal years training to deal with shit situations. Besides which, not only will I have Tomas with me, I’ll be writing you every night.”

  Instead of an immediate comment, she hugged me back even harder. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you, Sam.”

  Hearing the incipient grief in her voice, I mentally kicked myself even harder as I patted the top of her head. “I’ve got a pretty long track record of being what happens to other people instead of the other way around. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Jenna sniffled as she sat back and looked up at me. “I— I know I can’t go with you.”

  I shook my head. “Look, you’re doing everything you can right now. Probably picking Fiachra’s brains right out of his head, I bet. Speaking of, how’s that going? Can you cast magic missile yet?”

  Her eyes blinked away moisture over a sudden smile. “No, but—”

  I waited a moment after she looked away. “But?”

  “I— Wait, no, give me one of the artifacts Fiachra gave you.”