They set out from the cottage the next day with renewed determination. Bron led them on an oblique angle back to the path, so they returned to it far away from the scene of yesterday. Calea appreciated it. She didn’t know what had happened to those men they’d left in the road like so much detritus, and she didn’t want to know.
It seemed that she was always leaving attackers behind in roads and alleys. One dead face was already trapped in her mind’s eye. She shied away from imagining the others, the men buried in stone, the men sprawled in the desert sun. But Calea’s was a mind that saw patterns and fit them together at all times, whether she willed it or not, and now it was far too easy to see them all, one face after the other, dead because of her.
As if to mock the dark turn of Calea’s thoughts and prove just how purposeless they were, the day’s travel went better than expected. Bron seemed to be healing surprisingly quickly, and Calea felt stronger and more able than ever. After her grimness in the cottage, Nyasha bounced back to her cheerful self, full of stories and songs. She seemed to have even softened toward Calea, for some reason, and the two women managed to be more civil toward each other.
The days were difficult. Travel in the rocky foothills leading toward the BurntMountains was slow and painful. They tried to keep up a good pace, constantly chivvied by Nyasha, who told them repeatedly how much swifter she and her papa had been on these paths.
“Are you sure you’re not just remembering those trips with too much nostalgia? Surely the two of you could not have always been such wonderful travelers,” Calea snapped back at her at one point, irritated by constantly being compared to a strong man in his prime and being found wanting. Nyasha shut her mouth and was sullenly silent for a few hours.
However, Calea noticed that Nyasha watched her struggle on the path, and eventually Nyasha seemed to forgive her. “Perhaps I was,” she admitted as they began to set their camp that night beneath a sheltering ridge of rock. “I remember those trips very fondly, it’s true.” For once they were managing to camp in a place where Nyasha and her father had stayed, and that made her smile like a little girl.
* * *
Nyasha loved the campfires. On nights when they were not all too exhausted by the day’s walk, she wanted to share stories. Mostly she wanted funny tales, but the two Jalseians were grossly short of such things. Their lives back in Jalseion must have been very sad and serious, if they were too busy even to notice the funny things that happened in every life.
“Come now, you lived and worked in the Academy, yes? A place chock-full to the brim with Select of all kinds? You must have had eccentrics on every side.” Nyasha grinned at Calea across the fire, hoping she understood that this was not meant as an insult. “Dr. Burdock is the only Select I’ve ever known well, and he’s the funniest little man.”
“What do you mean?” Calea asked.
“I found him to be very kind and considerate,” Bron said almost in the same breath.
“Well, that too,” Nyasha said. “Dr. Burdock is an uncommonly gentle man. But he had such funny habits. I think he told you that his talent with magic was rather weak, and he was best at making things somewhat warmer or somewhat cooler. Well, he took advantage of that. He loved his tea, but he didn’t like to drink it all at once. So he would brew his tea and leave the pot in the common room in the clinic, take a cup with him to his exam room, and sip it a little, then leave the cup there. When it got cold he’d touch it to warm it up, which was a trick that always delighted the younger patients. He’d do that over and over, then go back to the common for another cup and do the same thing with that one. He never got tired of it, and by the end of the day that pot of tea looked dark as a pit.”
She laughed at the look of horror on Calea’s face at the idea of rewarming tea over and over again. “It must have tasted like the worst medicine by the time he was done,” Calea said. Her face was both fascinated and repulsed.
“I don’t know, I never touched it.” Nyasha grinned, hugging her knees to her chest. “I wouldn’t dare. The other doctors always wrinkled up their noses at it, too. Dr. Burdock is a very sweet man, and everyone likes him, but that habit of his is disgusting to anyone who enjoys proper tea.”
They all laughed, Nyasha joyously, Calea hesitantly, and Bron low and soft.
“I hope the young doctor is all right,” Bron murmured a bit later.
“I’m sure the others returned from Jalseion soon after we left,” Nyasha said. “Like I said, everyone likes Eman Burdock. They’ll look after him. But when communications come back, I wouldn’t mind hearing from him. I’ll call or write or something.”
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