Chapter 27: I Just Wanted To Go For A Walk! 2
The woods behind the cave were quiet in the morning.
Neve moved through them slowly not to hurt himself, looking at everything his new medical memory could now name and identify. Plants along the path that he had walked past a few times without knowing what they were.
He gathered as he went... a handful of this, a few stems of that, things that would be useful through winter stored carefully in his inventory as he collected them.
The forest smelled green and cold. The kind of cold that wasn’t here yet but was coming. He could feel the edge of it in the air.
He told himself he would remind Cael about the bamboo. They would need to keep the fires going through winter and a good supply of dry bamboo was easier to manage than raw wood.
He was thinking about fire management and inventory organisation when he heard the river.
He followed the sound.
It appeared between the trees... wide and clear, moving fast over smooth rocks, cold enough that he could feel the temperature change just standing at the bank. He crouched and looked at the water.
It was clean. Very clean. And there were fishes in it, moving slowly in the shallower section near the bank.
"Oh," Neve said.
He had not had fish since he arrived here. He had not had a lot of things since he arrived here. But fish, if properly cooked fish, with salt, over a controlled fire, it was something he had thought about more than he had admitted to anyone.
He crouched lower and looked at the water.
"If I could catch one—"
"Are you trying to steal from my pond?"
Neve flinched so hard he nearly went in.
He caught himself with one hand on the bank and turned around with his heart beating so fast that he could hear it.
The man standing behind him had brown wings folded against his back and feathers worked into the braiding of his hair, crossing his arms with the expression of someone who had caught exactly what they expected to catch.
Neve looked up.
Above the man’s head, clear and glowing, the favourability meter appeared.
{Sorin — 0%}
Neve looked at it, looked at the so-called Sorin before looking at the meter again.
’Ah, fuck! Not now,’ he thought desperately. ’I have two rooms being dug, a pending mission and a lot of important things I have to do. So there’s no freaking way this can happen. Not now.’
He stood up and arranged his face into something polite.
"I’m sorry," he said. "I wasn’t stealing. I was just looking."
Sorin tilted his head and leaned forward slightly.
Neve held his ground.
Sorin leaned closer and inhaled slowly. His expression shifted. The caught-a-thief energy changed into something more like confusion layered over interest.
"You smell like a female," he said. "But you’re marked by another beast."
"I’ve heard that," Neve said.
"I’ve never encountered a male that smells like a female." Sorin stepped slightly sideways, still looking at Neve with the focused attention of someone examining something they couldn’t categorise. "Are you a new tribe? Some kind of..." His eyes moved to the red ears. The tail. The face. He stopped. "How can a man be this beautiful. Are you a fruit?"
Neve closed his eyes for exactly one second. He didn’t know why everyone treated him like a fruit.
"I am a red panda," he said. "Not a fruit. A red panda."
Something changed in Sorin’s expression. "Red panda." He said it slowly. "The secretive tribe. The ones who don’t interact with other tribes." He looked at the mark on Neve’s neck. At the ears. "You’re a survivor then. From what happened there."
Neve kept his expression neutral. "Something like that."
He still didn’t know what had happened to the red panda tribe. He had been adding it to the list of things he needed to find out for days now and the list kept getting longer and everything else kept being more immediately urgent.
"The eagle tribe is across this river," Sorin said, jerking his chin toward the other bank. "We control the sky above this territory and the water below it." He looked at Neve one more time, something still working behind his eyes. "The winter festival. All tribes come. I imagine we’ll see each other there."
He spread his wings once, casual and enormous, and crossed the river in two beats and was on the other bank and gone between the trees before Neve had fully processed the wing span.
Neve stood at the riverbank and looked at the fish still moving slowly in the shallower water.
"That was my future mate," he told the fish.
The fish did not respond.
He stood there for another minute and then kept walking.
.
The field appeared without warning.
He came around a wide tree and there it was... an open stretch of ground, more space than he expected, with things growing in it that made him stop completely.
Carrots. He was almost certain. The leaf formation was right. And those — onions, from the smell when he crouched close. Potatoes, broad-leafed and sprawling. Other things he couldn’t name but his general knowledge placed them as edible root vegetables of some kind.
He crouched in the middle of it and looked around.
He might have made a sound. Something small and overwhelmed.
He had been working with the complete absence of vegetables since he arrived here. Fruit was available and he had been surviving on it but fruit was not everything.
He had been thinking about the stockpile mission and what thirty per cent meant and what the remaining seventy would require and this... this field... was a significant part of that answer.
He pulled the kitchen knife from his inventory and started digging.
He worked without looking up.
Carrots came out clean and bright. Onions in clusters. Potatoes that were bigger than he expected, the soil here clearly doing something right. He stored everything as he went, inventory filling steadily, his hands getting dirty in the specific satisfying way of actual useful work.
He kept finding more.
He kept going.
He was deep in the section of things he couldn’t fully name but was reasonably confident about when he looked up and the light had changed.
Late afternoon. Nearly evening.
Six hours.
He had been in this field for six hours.
He stood up fast and looked at the sky through the trees.
"Cael," he said to himself. Then louder, to nobody: "Cael is going to come looking for me."
He looked at the field around him. At what he had taken versus what remained. Still plenty. More than he had expected.
He looked at the section he had been working in.
’I hope nobody owns this,’ he thought. ’Because I just spent six hours harvesting someone’s crops and I would really prefer not to be a thief on top of everything else I currently am.’
He looked around for any sign of ownership. Markers, structures, anything that suggested maintained territory.
Nothing obvious.
’Meh! It’s probably fine,’ he told himself.
He started walking back fast.