Chương 70: 29-1.Food, Fluid, and First Choice

After finishing our resupply, we didn't linger in Silver Pine Valley. The reasoning was straightforward enough. On one hand, I'd just spent the better part of an hour nearly settling accounts with those checkpoint guards all the way back to their ancestral memorial tablets. Staying in the village would only give both sides ample opportunity to reconsider why they hadn't thrown the first punch. On the other hand, Olivia's double-decker feed wagon solution was, at its core, emergency triage—not a cure.

If we actually wanted to make it all the way to the royal capital, we'd need at least one more resupply before the city gates. And the only place for that was Moba Town. I led the two wagons slowly out from the valley's mouth to the old campsite beyond. The place had clearly hosted merchant caravans before—compacted wheel ruts and old fire pits marked where travelers had once stopped to breathe.

The wind was just as bitter, but at least the air didn't carry that particular flavor of "stay one minute longer and we'll find another reason to charge you ten copper coins." Once the wagons were secured, I pulled out the map and called Jessi and Matthews over.

"Let's run the numbers again." Jessi dropped onto an overturned barrel, arms wrapped around her knees, gnawing on a strip of jerky she'd materialized from somewhere unknowable. Matthews did what Matthews always did—surveyed the ground, checked the wind, inspected the wagons, and only then deigned to lower his gaze to the map in my hands. If this man ever died in the field, his corpse would probably verify the terrain was defensible before stiffening. I spread the map flat over an empty feed sack.

"The situation's clear. We can't stay in Silver Pine Valley, and their resupply pricing is like scraping meat off someone's own ribs. From here, we either stretch what we have all the way to Saint George, or find somewhere in between to restock." Matthews extended one weathered finger and traced it slowly southward along the ancient road.

"I still say we take the old road," he said.

"Fast. Flat. Those ancients may all be dead, but they knew how to build. The snowmelt won't bog the wheels as badly. Easier on the axles."

"Downsides?" I asked.

"Resupply's a nightmare." His answer was clean and sharp.

"If you want comfort, don't take this road. If you want to reach the capital quickly, you have no choice." I nodded. Very Northern Reaches answer. No real choices—just the one that sucks slightly less. Matthews' finger came to rest on a small ink mark.

"Moba Town." He tapped it.

"Only place worth stopping. I've been through before. Caravans, horse traders, salt dealers from the south, fur merchants from the north—they all pass through. Things aren't necessarily cheap, but at least you can buy them."

"Meaning after that, we're running on stubborn luck and prayer," I said.

"More or less." Jessi tore off another bite of jerky and pointed casually at the other side of the map.

"The climate changes past there, young master." I looked up at her.

"You've been that way?" She made a sound somewhere between a hum and a scoff, and for once, that perpetual sticky-sweet troublemaker energy dialed back a fraction.

"Of course I have. Back in the capital, people used to hire kids like us to go south and collect glass."

"Collect glass?" I frowned.

"The kind buried in the sand," Jessi said.

"Red pieces fetched the most. Green was cheapest. If you were lucky enough to dig up black glass, you got to be group leader. On a really good day, you could pull in several low-grade silver coins." I looked at her and didn't say anything for a moment. I'd heard about that region before. Further south used to be a vast dry-hot basin—in older times people had simply called it the Burning Sea.

The climate had shifted since then, the old desert had retreated, and what it left behind wasn't yellow sand but layer upon layer of hardened earth, stiff as dead ocean waves frozen mid-crash. Some said starfire had fallen there once. Others claimed the furnaces of the Old Civilization had detonated beneath it. Still others whispered that the ground itself was too full of things that couldn't bear daylight, and that was what had scorched the sand into glass.

Legends like that, in the Northern Reaches, served exactly two purposes. First: frightening children. Second: making money. Jessi was clearly the second type. She chewed her jerky with the practiced ease that only comes from having been genuinely poor.

"But there's one thing you absolutely cannot forget." She dropped the careless act entirely, her voice going flat and serious.

"Water. Bring enough. The standard is—whatever amount you think is enough, double it." She meant every word of that. I held her gaze and nodded.

"Understood. I'll go over it with Olivia." The words were out before I'd fully processed saying them. I stopped half a beat. Jessi looked up. Sure enough, that smile began spreading across her face—slow and slick, like something you could fry an egg in.

"Oh—" She stretched the syllable luxuriously.

"Already going to her on your own initiative, are we? Young master falls fast." My eye twitched.

"... I won't deny it." Jessi's eyes lit up like she'd just found a coin purse stuffed to bursting. I cut her off before she could drag that sentence somewhere I'd never recover from.

"I mean her competence."

"Sure, sure, young master." Jessi grinned like she'd just pickpocketed someone at a street corner.

"The more you explain, the worse it sounds."

"Then how about you just stop talking?"

"No."

"The sincerity with which you say that makes me want to throw something at you." Matthews, hunched over the map beside us, had apparently developed immunity to this. He didn't even twitch an eyebrow. He simply added, with perfect practicality:"If we're heading for Moba Town, we'll need to travel through the night. This stretch is relatively flat, but the snow's packed heavy. Keep an eye on the axles and horseshoes."

"Then we move." I rolled up the map.

"Every extra hour we spend here is gambling our horses and stomachs against someone else's tax ledger." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. After we'd sorted out the plan, I went to find Olivia. She was beside the double-decker feed wagon, head down, cataloguing the rough fodder and horse salt we'd just taken on. She'd already sorted which sacks to open first and which to load at the bottom.

When I walked her through our decision, she glanced at the map, asked two questions—remaining water capacity, daily consumption per horse—and then, after only a moment's thought, produced a list of items to add. She specified which sack to open first, which to save until after Moba Town, with the kind of precision that left nothing to interpretation.

In that moment, I understood completely why people say a truly capable household manager doesn't make you think she's impressive—she makes you slowly stop bothering to think for yourself. Dangerous. But gods, it's convenient. We were back on the road before the sky had fully darkened. The double-decker feed wagon was, as expected, more temperamental than the old patched cart.

The new wooden frame had been nailed on hastily, the binding ropes had already been retied twice, and the driver had to climb down every so often to check the fastenings. But the improvement was visible—at least from the outside, we no longer looked like a miserable band of mercenaries dragging junk across the wilderness. We looked more or less like a convoy that actually intended to arrive somewhere alive. Once we were on the night road, fatigue stopped hiding.

Driving through the day and keeping your eyes propped open through the night—after long enough, even the rhythm of hooves striking frozen snow starts to sound like some kind of murderous lullaby. I sat up front with the reins, feeling like someone had hung two sacks of wet salt from my shoulders. The cold wind pushed in through my collar, crept up the back of my neck, worked its way into the gaps between my bones, and very patiently carried away every last ember of warmth and alertness I had left.

That's how the Northern Reaches wind works. It's not in any hurry to kill you. It just very patiently takes away everything you need to stay alive. The covered wagon ahead occasionally let out a faint glow through its paper window, blurred shapes moving against the light. Alvira was probably still awake. Olivia almost certainly hadn't slept. As for Jessi—if she hadn't already crept out to startle someone, she was probably genuinely unconscious. We pressed south along the ancient road.

The mountain shadows on either side rose like buried beasts, motionless beneath their snow, only occasionally shaking loose a curtain of white powder when the wind gusted hard. Along the roadside, relics of older ages lay scattered—half-collapsed stone pillars, boundary markers with crumbled corners, old irrigation channels entombed in ice with only their outlines still legible. Everything was very quiet.

Quiet in the way that something which once mattered has been quietly, thoroughly erased by wind and weather, until not even the memory of its importance remains. I found myself thinking about the glass Jessi had mentioned. Red. Green. Black. Could it be that those fragments—the ones dug out of the earth by children's hands and traded for a few inferior silver coins—had once been corners of some world that nobody remembered anymore? If so, that was a bleak sort of ending.

A civilization's last remains, reduced to a sorting game for orphans who needed to eat.... Then again, a lot of people living today weren't ending up with much more dignity than that. We traveled for nearly three more hours through the night before finally stopping at a sheltered slope. It wasn't a proper waystation—just a section of old stone wall that had half-collapsed, forming a windbreak hollow just deep enough to be useful.

Not far ahead, a long-dried shallow well sat with its rim crusted in ice, like a white eye that couldn't quite open.

"Rest. Fifteen minutes." When I dropped off the wagon, my legs didn't entirely feel like mine. Matthews and the drivers went immediately to check the axles and the foam gathering at the horses' mouths. Jessi poked her head out of the covered wagon wrapped in her cloak, wearing the expression of someone who had not slept nearly enough and was actively looking for someone to blame for it. Olivia climbed down as well.

She checked the sky first, then the dark smear of horizon in the distance, and finally said, quietly:"Another half day forward, and we should see the outskirts of Moba Town." I followed her gaze. There was nothing to see in the dark. Just that faint grey-white line at the edge of the sky, like whatever was waiting on the next stretch of road hadn't quite decided which of us to come after first. I exhaled a breath of white vapor and slapped some feeling back into my frozen hands. At least Moba Town was ahead.

And until then, we still had this one small moment to breathe. When the brief stop ended, we were moving again "quickly."

"Quickly" is perhaps generous. It was more accurate to say that a group of people whose souls had already checked out of their bodies were using sheer obligation to collect themselves piece by piece and reassemble onto the wagons. Fifteen minutes of rest means nothing to someone who's slept properly. For people who could no longer reliably distinguish day from night, it was roughly equivalent to God taking pity and letting you take two extra breaths before the noose tightened. I settled back into the driver's seat.

The moment my fingers touched the reins, the leather felt cold enough to have been passed directly from a dead man's grip.

"Move out." Matthews nodded and went to pat the necks of the lead horses. The animals exhaled clouds of white, ears pressing slightly back—clearly tired, but not yet tired enough to dump us all in the snow and head home on their own. The newly modified double-decker feed wagon looked, if anything, slightly worse in the dark than it had in daylight. There was nothing to be done about it.

Hastily added planks, re-knotted rope fastenings, a layer of waterproof oilcloth thrown over the top—the overall aesthetic fell somewhere between "functional enough" and "one strong gust away from complete structural failure." But Olivia had been right. Ugly didn't matter. What mattered was that the horses had something to eat. In a convoy, the deciding factor was never how many people could fight—it was who ran out of fodder first. That thought made me glance back.

Olivia hadn't returned to the covered wagon to sleep. She stood beside the double-decker feed wagon in her cloak, speaking quietly to two of the drivers. The wind was too strong for me to catch all of it, but I didn't need to—she was almost certainly dividing up which rough fodder sacks to open first, which concentrated feed to hold back until morning, and how to rotate the water skins to keep the horses from going mad with thirst before we reached Moba Town.

I used to think "capable of managing a household" was the kind of compliment noble families deployed to advertise their daughters as marriageable. I take that back. This wasn't household management. This was field surgery on a convoy that was actively bleeding out. Alvira had apparently noticed as well. She leaned half out of the covered wagon door and delivered, without warning:"Seen enough?" I turned around.

"What?"

"You've been looking back since we started moving." She had her arms folded, her voice utterly flat.

"Keep staring like that and the horses will learn to blush before you do."

"... Is there something about elves that makes you constitutionally incapable of not making everyone sound like a deviant?"

"No." Alvira's expression didn't shift a millimeter.

"You're just particularly easy to work with." Then she shut the door. Leaving me alone at the front of the convoy, in the wind, with ample time to reflect on what it felt like to receive targeted psychological damage from a teammate. Wonderful. One who could hold a convoy together. One who specialized in precision strikes to my dignity. My prospects for this journey to the capital were looking better and better by the hour. The night road after that was harder than the first half.

The snow hadn't stopped, but it had stopped falling and started infiltrating—fine and dense, the kind that didn't pile up so much as seep into every gap between you and warmth. The world had gone very quiet, leaving only the dry scrape of wheels over frozen earth and the occasional impatient snort from the horses. After long enough, the rhythm became hypnotic, like an invisible old woman sitting on your shoulder, patting your back in slow, soothing intervals, murmuring gently: Sleep now.

Sleep, and you won't have to drive anymore. And if you sleep, you'll never have to drive again. That was the most insidious thing about the wind and snow of the Northern Reaches. It didn't come at you like a wolf pack—no sudden lunge for the throat. It wasn't like bandits, who at least gave you something to curse at. It simply worked, quietly and persistently, grinding down your anger and your stamina and your judgment until there was nothing left to grind.

I'd been driving for nearly an hour when my eyelids started to feel genuinely heavy. I was in the middle of calculating whether to ask Matthews to take over when I heard light footsteps approaching from behind. I turned. Olivia had walked up alongside the wagon. She was holding a wooden cup in both hands, a thin curl of steam rising from its rim.

"Drink something," she said. I blinked, looped the reins around the wagon hook, and took the cup. Brought it close enough to smell.

"What is this?"

"Hot water." A brief pause.

"With a little salt and dried ginger." I looked down at the cup. Something complicated moved through my chest.

"... You thought of that too?"

"If your hands seize up from the cold halfway through, the entire convoy suffers for it." Olivia's tone was even, matter-of-fact.

"It's more efficient to keep you functional than to wait for you to collapse." Practical. Almost cold, the way she said it. But somehow—I could hear it anyway. She was looking after someone. She just didn't know how to make it sound like she was. I drank. Salt. Ginger. Heat. Not particularly good. But the warmth sliding down my throat felt like something coming back to life inside me, one degree at a time.

"Thank you," I said. Olivia nodded. Her gaze didn't move away immediately, though—it settled on the horses ahead.

"The front-left one," she said.

"Its gait's been breaking rhythm." I looked where she indicated. She was right. The brown horse's left foreleg was landing a half-beat late compared to the others, and it had been pulling at the reins with restless, irritable energy. Not catastrophic—not yet—but left alone, it would become a real problem.

"You noticed that?" I said, surprised.

"It ate less than the others last night." Olivia said.

"When I put out feed just now, it went for the water first instead of the fodder. It's fatigue, not just hunger."... Was that level of observational precision entirely normal? I was beginning to suspect this young lady hadn't simply been raised to manage a household. She'd been raised to take apart everything in it—people and horses alike—diagnose the problem, and put it back together before anyone noticed it had been broken.