Arvid appeared spectacularly unimpressed with my social commentary. “This used to be the Acadian border with the Syr. Any particular reason you’re out this way?”

  “Yeah, we’re heading to Annesport.”

  The knight blinked a few times and then frowned. “You are aware there’s no way through the Sea of Mists, right?”

  “That’s partly what we’re going to check on, yes. We’re also aware that most people sent out that way tend to not come back at all. If you know anything about the area, we’d appreciate whatever you’d be willing to share.”

  After several seconds, Arvid glanced to Issac and then said, “I spend most of my time on the Kharkan border. All I have is tavern tales. A sea of mist so wide you can’t see the other side. Strange beasts, stranger land. Crossing the hollowed lands to get here was bad enough. Miles and miles without another person, even animals.”

  Issac nodded. “I’m a bit more well informed, but that’s largely what I know as well. Rarely, you’ll find brigands and slave-takers who’ve claimed to traverse the mists, but as far as I know those are just stories told to impress the bar maids.”

  “Any particular group? Might want a chat with them at some point.”

  Issac made a show of laughing, but I caught the quick flick of his eyes up to Tomas. “Unfortunately, it’d be a waste of effort on your part. The Kenyon clan had a bit of an accident toward the beginning of this last winter.”

  “An accident?”

  “Aye, they all turned up dead,” Issac replied as his eyes drifted to Tomas.

  It dawned on me that this Kenyon group might be the people Tomas had taken the slaves from. “People normally turn up dead like that where you come from?”

  “Only when they piss off the wrong people. Given their habit of stealing people, I’d venture that’s what happened.”

  “Stealing from people?” I asked.

  “That, too. They made the bulk of their money with slaves. Primarily shipped them off to the Kharkans. If the Alliance existed then, it would have viewed the Kenyons as a problem. You ask me, whoever did the deed saved us a lot of trouble, but they certainly angered a number of influential families at the same time regardless.”

  I nodded. “Interesting. Well, I suppose you’re as eager to reach your destination as we are to return to it. Would you mind doing us one last favor?”

  Issac nodded.

  “When you get to the Green, tell the mayor you ran into us out in the Fingers. I can’t say they’ll reward you for it, but I’m sure they’d like to know we at least made it this far out if we don’t come back.”

  Tomas wandered down from above carrying the drone as the group passed out of sight above us. “So, that was interesting. What do you want me to do with this?”

  “I’ll show you how to disassemble it and set things to the charger here in a minute,” I answered while sitting back on our rucks and reaching for both the message book and the pen next to it. Opening the book, I pointedly flicked my eyes in the direction the group had ridden, slowly shook my head, and pressed my index finger to my lips. Quiet, let them get farther away.

  Recognition bloomed on the bard’s face. “Ah, right.”

  I glanced down at the book, noted the page hadn’t changed, and added to my last entry. Update: Riders are a knight, three unknowns, one caster presumed officer. Now heading toward the Green currently from previous location. Unit unknown, red and green checkerboard colors, claimed to be scouts from the Free State Alliance. Knight has multiple weapons, mail. Unknowns have a mix of swords of varying length and ranged weapons, wearing mostly leather. Officer equipment unknown other than the robe. FSA is a recently established organization weeks to our north and apparently expects hostilities with the Kharkans soon. Almost certainly mapping routes for possible FSA army back-door advance against the Kharkans. Good chance they can be negotiated with.

  I snapped the book shut and pocketed my pencil before looking up at Tomas. “Okay, let’s get that disassembled and get out of here. We’ll have to keep an eye on our backtrail for a bit.”

  A short educational moment and a few hours later, we crested yet another of these godforsaken fingers. The next finger, probably only a few hundred yards out, had an odd outcropping at the top with the remains of a fallen tree lying a short distance away.

  I paused long enough to glance up and try to figure out where the sun was in the overcast, but the best I could figure is it was somewhere close to noon. Happy the nonstop mist so far hadn’t progressed completely to rain, I stepped off. Behind me, Tomas grunted as he reached the top, muttered quietly under his breath. The next thing I heard was the sliding scrape of feet slipping on rock and I jerked around to find Tomas on the far end of what was a less than graceful recovery.

  “You okay?”

  “Damn near slipped, but I think I’m good.”

  As acrobatic as that almost looked, I’m not sure I believe that. Keeping the doubt off my face, I merely nodded and turned back to the path.

  A minute of silent focus later, we reached the bottom of the dip in the path, and I glanced up at the outcropping ahead of us, mostly stretching my neck in the hope it’d help with the low-level shoulder pain that had been creeping in since we left camp. I couldn’t see much of the outcropping from where I was, but what little I could see suggested it was actually a pile of larger stones and not a solid feature like I’d originally thought when I spotted it from the last rise.

  After grumbling to myself over the weather a few more steps along with way, I cocked my head over my shoulder to make sure Tomas could hear me. “If the terrain keeps getting worse, we’re going to need to shift to walking at the bottom soon. I’m starting to think that betting this doesn’t get mostly vertical in the next few miles is a bad plan.”

  “It actually does, but we’ve got a good distance ahead of us before it gets that bad,” Tomas huffed a few moments later.

  When I reached the top, I stopped to let my breathing even out. Tomas had regularly lagged behind any time we climbed a finger, but this time he was much further back than I expected. After a handful of steps, I realized his gait had a subtle stagger to it that wasn’t there a few minutes ago. Pulled a muscle? Probably.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Biding my time, I turned toward the outcropping and studied it for a few moments before glancing up the path ahead of us where more of the same awaited. Some of it was actually part of the finger, but based off the differing sizes and color variation with the smaller rocks, someone had to have carried them up here and then stacked them against the waist high section jutting up out of the dirt atop the finger. I couldn’t tell why, nor could I readily explain why so many of the smaller rocks were scattered around part of the base.

  “Is it okay if we take a break, Sam?” Tomas asked as he got close. “Think I pulled something.”

  I started to shrug but winced instead when the motion sent a burning sensation down my left shoulder and upper back. “Sure. If it helps any, my shoulders aren’t liking this much more than your leg.”

  After checking for snakes, I shrugged out of my pack by the fallen tree and leaned it up against the log. When I looked back, Tomas’s eyes were locked on the rocks, slightly wide and subtly haunted.

  “Tomas?”

  “I—Give me a minute,” he muttered. Quickly dumping his pack, he stalked over toward the rocks and immediately began hefting the loose single stones back on the pile while muttering something that sounded hateful under his breath.

  When he chose to stand mostly motionless after setting the last stone on top, I stepped closer. “Something I should be aware of, Tomas?”

  “Not really. It’s just, I’d hoped—”

  The way his words simply just stopped got my attention. Tomas’s face was red, both from exertion and the fact his eyes were starting to tear up. I looked back at the rocks and blinked when I noticed a pattern in how the stone had been stacked. Fuck. It’s not just a pile of rocks, it’s a cairn.

  Seconds passed before I finally succumbed to my instinctual reaction to other people’s grief. When I laid a hand on his shoulder, Tomas went rigid for a heartbeat but slowly relaxed without any objection.

  “Who?” I quietly asked after a minute had passed.

  Tomas shook his head and stepped back. I followed him back to our packs where he unstrapped his lute and nearly collapsed onto the log. A few minutes after I joined him, he quietly said, “When I killed the slavers, I thought I was doing the right thing. Same when I set up the escape.”

  The pain in his voice made it quite clear my best path forward was simply shutting up and listening.

  He plucked a few strings and adjusted the tensioners. After tuning a few strings, he forced out another sentence. “But now that I’m sitting here again, I’m not so sure.”

  Another minute passed while Tomas alternated between tuning another string and long moments with his eyes on the cairn. “It was late in the year. I knew that. I told myself if I didn’t free them then, they could be sold or killed before I could come up with a better plan. I told myself that I might not be able to get back in, that I either had to do it right then or it wouldn’t happen at all.”

  My mind raced, trying to connect dots and fill in unspoken gaps, but still I remained quiet. A bad plan executed now is generally better than a perfect plan executed too late.

  “Considering it was a minor miracle I managed to sneak in, I guess that last part’s probably not wrong.” Tuning complete, he plucked a few strings and strummed a chord before lapsing back into a distant stare. “As well as it started, it didn’t occur to me how it’d turn out, you know?”

  “It seldom does,” I quietly noted. “I’ve had a few missions that waited until the last minute to turn into a pile of shit.”

  Tomas chuckled darkly. “Wait until the last minute? We didn’t even get to the gate before I started to realize how badly I fucked up. Everybody had bruises, cuts. Broken bones, even. Some could barely walk. A few simply couldn’t, and not just because they were too young. I was such an idiot then, Sam. An idiot with delusions of grandeur.”

  He somberly nodded to the cairn. “They died because of me. Died because I couldn’t plan ahead, because I thought good intentions meant something. They trusted me.”

  I spared glance for the cairn and when I looked back at him, he added, “That’s just the ones that made it this far. There are more,” he tossed his chin out past the finger, out north. “These are just the ones who made it this far. Far enough to get away from the slave catchers, but not far enough to be safe when the snows came in. There’s a cave at the bottom of the finger we sheltered in.”

  Tomas laughed darkly. “Sheltered. That makes it sound like we weren’t nearly stacked on top of each other trying not to freeze as we starved.”

  Suddenly, Tomas’s random plucking shifted into a halting melody and for a second it looked like he was trying to play something only half remembered. The moment his tearstained eyes narrowed in focus, I heard something I only half remembered myself, something that sounded vaguely like the popping and hissing of a record player dragging across the empty section of a record.

  Before I could say a word, Tomas began to sing. “And I'm alright. Yeah, I hear you.”

  The moment the first word left his mouth, my ears popped from the sudden pressure shift and a deep chill settled on my skin. I blinked, hearing instruments that clearly weren’t here with us and I knew exactly what song this was and where I’d heard it.

  I wasn’t nearly the weeb Jenna was. Unlike her, I didn’t read manga, insist on watching anime in the original Japanese, or look down my nose at people who preferred English dubs over subs. I still understood the Japanese lyrics perfectly and couldn’t resist the compulsion to add my voice to Tomas’ while he sung the song for the closing credits to the Frieren anime.

  Focused as he was on his performance, Tomas suddenly seemed completely at peace and unaware of anything other than the song woven by his fingers and the lyrics loosed upon the air. “There's meaning in everything, even the days that come to a halt. Now that I finally understand, I've caught up to you.”

  Eyes closed, Tomas’s voice cracked on the last line while I stared, wide-eyed, at the tree towering over us that hadn’t been there when he’d started into the song. “I'm whispering our lullaby for you to come back home.”

  As the bard took a deep, steadying breath, every last flower on the tree stretched open as their color filled in with a vibrant purple.

  Tomas opened his eyes, squinted at the trunk in front of him, and his head slowly went up as a look of awe came over him. “It’s beautiful.”

  [A Trait has increased in rank.]

  “Uh, Sam? Where’d this tree come from?” Tomas asked as the notification faded from view.

  I never got any other notices before, what’s up with this? Splitting my attention as I answered, I triggered object query. “That was all you.”

  CTRL-ALT-DEL – (Rank 2): This character has access to the following realm magics: Object Query, syslogd.

  Babel’s Gift – (Rank 2): Provides translation services for all communications. Second rank allows user to select input and output languages for both spoken and written forms.

  Huh. That notification had to be from syslogd.

  Tomas faintly chuckled. “Really? Wait, do you think that was—what’d you call it? MTV?”

  I nodded and glanced over. Tomas looked even worse for wear than he did coming up the hill. “Yeah. How are you feeling?”

  “Shit, actually. I feel like I just sprinted to the Green and back just now,” Tomas answered and yawned. “You wouldn’t happen to have any kain fruit left would you?”

  “Yeah, not many though.” I pulled dug through the cargo pocket on my left shoulder. After tossing the tiny remaining bunch at him, I cast my eyes to the south, toward the Glade and the faint line of trees in the distance. “I wonder if it’s worth our time to detour back toward the crater. Might be more fruit in those trees out there.”

  Tomas chewed for a few seconds and spat out a pit. “As many as we’ve gone through the last few days, I’d think so, but I’m not looking forward to lugging all this shit with me. How ‘bout this? I know what they look like and where to look. Give me a bit to rest my leg and get some energy back, I’ll head out with the shotgun. It’d be faster than both of us going.”

  “You sure?”

  Tomas grinned. “Just need a bit. If I leave soon, I’ll probably be back by nightfall.”

  I mulled it over. He was certainly right, it would be faster, but at the same time he was selling this pretty hard, using what I’d started to call his used car salesman voice when he was trying to be especially persuasive. “Rest first, we’ll see. Not that I don’t trust you, there’s no telling how problematic that leg is going to be. I saw the tail end of that slip; it could be pretty bad.”

  The bard shrugged and popped the last fruit into his mouth. “Fair enough. You wouldn’t happen to recognize this tree, would you?”

  “Yeah, actually. I take it this place doesn’t have a version of it?” When Tomas shook his head, I added, “It’s called wisteria. It’ll grow in sand, clay, dirt; just about anything so long as it’s got decent drainage, really. Just needs a fair amount of direct sunlight and plenty of water.”

  “Sounds like a weed,” Tomas noted.

  “It kinda is. Invasive as hell.”

  “Hmm. Well, there’s basically nothing but grass and scrub along the Fingers so it’s not going to ruin anything. At least it’s beautiful.”