Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Two — Message Delivered
Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Two — Message Delivered Before we could take off again, I had to do a few quick things. The Redemption had a bunch of supplies on board, but we were lacking a lot of essentials. Water wasn’t as much of a problem on the ground when there were plenty of streams to draw from, but in the air we’d have to use magic to pull water out of the air and that was both tiring and inefficient... also I couldn’t do that spell yet.Food was also a minor concern. We had plenty of hardtack and such, and some sylph MREs still, but those weren’t exactly tasty.Other than that, we needed a few knick-knacks to make the ship feel more like a living space, like a small carpet before entering the crew compartment so that we wouldn’t track mud in.With that in mind, and with Awen telling us that while her oil-making gizmo was working it was also really slow, I checked my money pouch to make sure I had a good amount of change, then I set off.Amaryllis stayed behind to contact Sylphfree and Calamity was sitting on the ship, looking around and sighing wistfully.It was weird, heading out all on my own. A few metres away from the Redemption and I paused, looking back at the ship and second-guessing myself. Did I really need to head out? I could stay with my friends...But no, they’d be fine without Broccoli for a few minutes. And I’d be okay too. It wasn’t like I’d lose sight of them, what with the airship’s balloon towering above the camp.So I headed out, though maybe with a bit of a hurried pep to my step.The first stop was the small market-ish part of the camp. The hunters didn’t seem to have much use for a market, what with most of them being here as part of a job, but there were still a few carriages of hangers-on who came with supplies and stuff to sell to a hunter in need at a steep mark-up.That’s where I found most of the things I was looking for. Different fruits and grains wrapped in a sort of papery leaf and tied up with long strips of tough grass, a tiny bit of salted meat, because I was pretty sure Calamity ate meat and so did my friends.I got lost looking over some pelts, then poked at a big bucket full of long, sharp-tipped feathers that were plucked from a cockatrice. They were part feather, part scale, almost.With a bulging bag full of stuff, I started to head back to the ship when I overheard two cervid talking.It wasn’t my fault that I eavesdropped. With ears as big as mine that was naturally going to happen, whether I wanted it to or not. Most of the time I just ignored it, or listened in on tiny snippets of other’s lives, aware, in that little moment, that they had entire lives going on that I wasn’t part of, a whole heap of stories I hadn’t heard, from the mundane to the extraordinary.“Come on, I can help,” a rather small cervid said. He didn’t look young, at a glance— he just wasn't a very big guy. He was tailing after a cervid woman with a thich gambeson on and with a few spears hooked to her side.“No, Deiter, you’ll only get yourself in trouble.”I blinked. “Wait, Deiter?” I asked.The couple were deeper into the camp already, so I had to jog to catch up to them. It looked like the girl Deiter was talking to was giving him an earful.“Hey! Sorry, wait up, please!” I called out. The two of them half-turned, as if to see if I was talking to them. I bounced up ahead of them and smiled my best smile. “Hi! Sorry, my name’s Broccoli, Broccoli Bunch, and I was recently over at, uh, Riverstart.”Deiter winced, hard. It was almost a physical blow the way he flinched back. His companion though didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, and?” she asked.“Right, sorry. While we were there we ran into this... nice... lady who was looking for Deiter.”The cervid woman quirked an eyebrow, then half-turned to Deiter. “A wife you haven't told me about?” she asked. She didn’t sound angry, so I imagined they weren’t in a relationship.“What? World no! That’s probably my mother. She, ah, lives in Riverstart,” he said. “Just a quiet old homebody, wouldn’t disturb a fly.”He was really bad at lying.“Anyway, she was worried, so she asked that if anyone saw you, they’d, uh, ask that you write a letter or something. I understand that sometimes you want to make space between you and your family, but if they’re not terrible people, then maybe stay in contact... I guess? I don’t know how families like that work.”He glanced to the side, biting his lip, then seemed to rally himself. "Uh, yeah, sure. I can do that," he said. “Thanks for the message,” he added before slipping past me.I blinked after him, but I wasn’t about to pursue if he clearly didn’t want to continue chatting. I gave a wave in goodbye to the woman he was with, then stepped aside. “Well, that’s not how I expected all of that to get resolved,” I muttered.Maybe the anticlimax was good though. One less thing to worry about. With that done, I hitched up my bag of provisions and headed back to the ship. The day was carrying on, what with all the travelling and exploring we’d been up to.I had picked up some food from the marketplace, not provisions, but already-cooked meals that a cervid chef was preparing over a big cast-iron pot that had to outweigh me twice over.Juggling four bowls (which I had to pay extra for, but I figured they might come in handy,) I returned to the Redemption and climbed up the gangplank onto the ship. “I have lunch!” I called out.That got everyone’s attention.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.We ate sitting on the deck right in front of the wheel, and my friends filled me in on what they’d been up to since I ran off. I, of course, told them about meeting Deiter and how we probably didn’t have to worry about that particular sidequest anymore.“Ah, well, I’ve managed to make a whole gallon of oil, and I think it’s within the engine’s burn tolerance. I don’t really have a way to test that, but mixed in with our other fuel, it should be fine. It only adds up to about a tenth more fuel than what we had to start with, it’s really not a lot.”“So our range is going to be very limited,” I said.Awen nodded. “If we fly high enough, with less wind resistance, and don’t push the engine too much, we might be able to fly for six or seven hours.”“Which won’t even get us a quarter of the way to Sylphfree,” Amaryllis pointed out.“Is that where we’re headed next?” Calamity asked.Amaryllis nodded and tapped the ring Caprica gave us. “The sylph want us back. Besides which, what can we do against a properly large installation of pirates? Invite them out for tea and hope that they’ll give us the delegates back?”“I guess,” I said. I really did want to burst onto the scene like a big hero and save everyone, but Amaryllis was probably right. Just the four of us and one tiny boat wouldn’t exactly win the day when it came to fighting a whole heap of pirates. “So, we’re returning to Sylphfree?”“To Goldpass, actually. It’s in the northernmost end of Sylphfree. A little further on the map than the capital, but with fewer mountains to navigate around it’s actually quite a bit closer,” Amaryllis said.“Ah, we can’t go that far,” Awen said. “Not unless the wind is with us the entire way and we find more gas for the balloon. Or we could walk, I guess.”Amaryllis sniffed. “I thought of that, of course. We’ll be meeting a group of sylphs in mid-air this evening. They’ll track us by the ring. I told them to bring fuel for the Redeemed, and you know how good they are with following instructions. I’ve no doubt they’ll bring plenty.”Well, that settled it. “We should head towards them, then,” I said. “We’ll cut the amount of time it takes to meet them short, and if they don’t show up, then we can always just land as soon as we start running low.”Once lunch was tucked away and we cleared the deck of anything that might get in the way, we were pretty much ready to head out. Calamity asked for just a few minutes to say his goodbyes, and since we weren’t in any big rush, we of course let him climb down the boat and go chat with his friends.He came back soon enough, and I couldn’t tell if he was more sad at the goodbyes or excited to get going. On the ground Savan and a few of the hunters stood by and waved as we weighed anchor, started up the engine, and then lifted off the ground with only the slightest of lurches.We floated straight up for a while, letting the wind carry us as it wanted as long as we were still rising. It was coming in from the south, which was neither good nor bad, really, though it might be troublesome later when we had to head due east.Once we were high enough that the hunters below were nothing more than pinpricks and the air had that familiar chill that came from being so far off the ground, we adjusted the sails and took off east-bound.Calamity asked Awen a question about the ship which launched her into a long-winded, rather one-sided discussion that had too many technical terms for me to follow it entirely. Calamity was listening intently though, and I think he was hoping to learn as much as he could.The flight continued at an easy pace for the next couple of hours. We didn’t want to push the Redemption much, so we allowed the wind to carry us along with just a nudge from the main propeller in the right direction.By the time early evening rolled around I found myself a bit restless behind the wheel while regretting not bringing something a bit warmer to wear.“I see something!” Amaryllis called out from ahead. She was in that little basket at the very front of the ship, with the repeating crossbows. “South a few degrees.” She pointed and I squinted that way.It took a moment, but eventually I caught on to what she was seeing. Three vague forms so far off they were little more than shadowy smears at a higher altitude than we were at.Wyverns? If so, then that was probably the sylph we were supposed to meet. My identify skill marked them as wyverns soon enough, and Awen whipped out her telescope and confirmed that they were being ridden.We adjusted our sails and after checking to see if we still had a good amount of fuel, we picked up the pace and pushed against the wind a bit. Soon enough, we crossed paths with three familiar wyverns.I recognized Greencrest, of course. A girl ought to not forget the first wyvern she flew on. There was Bloodfang too, but the third wyvern wasn’t one I knew. I imagined the rider was different too, though it was hard to tell the riders apart with all the gear they had on to protect them from the cold.“What now?” I asked Amaryllis.“Best to land, I don’t fancy transferring things in midair,” she said.So we landed. It wasn’t hard to find a big, flat space on the open plains. Once we dropped anchors and cut the engine, the wyverns circled around a final time and landed nearby.I saw Winnow pulling down her hood to reveal a professional smile. “When you set out you were on foot. Now you come back with a trophy ship. Paladin Bastion must be right about you three and your capacity for shenanigans.”
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Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Three — Hopping the Border
Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Three — Hopping the Border The wyvern riders dismounted and immediately began unpacking the saddles strapped to the almost-dragon’s sides.Winnow was the only wyvern knight I recognized, the other two were new, so once we landed I hopped off the Redemption and bounced over, only stopping once I was just outside of the wyvern’s ‘I can nom you without stretching’ range. Just in case.“Hello!” I cheered. “I’m glad you found us. Was the flight okay?”“It was fine,” Winnow replied. She grunted as she flew up and back and hauled out a large metal can from the satchel she was working on. “We have your fuel, and a few other supplies as well. You’ll be surprised to know this isn’t the first time we have to do a refuelling.”“It isn’t?” I asked.“Oh no, it happens several times a year. Some cheap merchant or noble who wants to show off their ship forgets to bring enough fuel, or because of bad weather an airship will burn a lot more fuel than it accounted for, and it runs out. Then we get sent over to resupply because they landed somewhere too precarious for a proper ship to land.”Winnow handed me the canister. It was a sort of jerry can which sloshed with every motion. “Thanks! I’ll bring this to Awen.”“We have a few other things too. We weren’t sure in what kind of shape the ship you found would be in.”“It’s not that bad. I think it could use a bit of love, but Awen seems excited to get onto that,” I said.Winnow nodded, then looked over at the ship and shook her head. “A proper Snowlander boat. You’re lucky you’ll be escorted, that crossbow emplacement on the front wouldn’t be allowed in civilian hands.”“It wouldn’t?” I asked.“Oh, World no. There’s pages and pages of documentation required to even just carry any kind of large ranged weapon on a ship, let alone having it installed and ready to use like that. The only ships with fixed weapons placement allowed in Sylphfree skies are part of the air force, and if it was up to them, even the wyvern knights would be reduced to delivering strongly worded letters.”I giggled at the mental image of that. The Beaver had Awen’s auto-crossbow on it, but it had been tucked away when we flew to Sylphfree. And Bastion had been onboard to distract the inspectors. Maybe we’d narrowly avoided a heap of trouble there. Or Bastion knew and did us a favour?I made a mental note for later: Extra hugs for Bastion.“So, once we’re back in the air, we just follow you?” I asked.Winnow nodded. “That’s the gist of it. We’ll escort you back to Goldpass. If the wind keeps up, the trip shouldn’t take too long at all. We’ll have to fly the wyverns slow.”“We could stop for the night,” I suggested. “We don’t have a big crew to begin with, and even with the fuel you brought, it might not be enough to coast through the entire night.”Winnow hummed. “We’ll think about it. We’re meant to have you back at Goldpass as soon as possible, but while I’ll always follow my orders I take exception when they fly in the face of proper safety precautions or common sense. If slow is safer, then slow it will be.”With the gangplank lowered it wasn’t hard to get the fuel aboard. It was exactly what Awen was hoping for, and she recruited Calamity to help her empty the can into the ship’s bunker-which is what she called the tank under the deck where the fuel went.The other wyvern knights unloaded a few more cans and I hopped over to help them carry the containers aboard. With two cans per wyvern we actually had enough to fill the bunker right up to the quarter mark.“We should be able to make it all the way, I think,” Awen said. Then she turned towards me and locked her eyes onto mine. “But we absolutely can’t head off in another direction for a side quest.”“Why are you giving me that look?” I asked.Amaryllis sniffed, which was like a huff, but even more disdainful somehow.“Hey!”“If that’s all,” Winnow said past our team drama. “We’ll be taking off again. If you need to communicate, you should have some flags aboard, right?”“Oh, we do,” Awen said. “Ah, but they’re Snowlander. I don’t know if they’re the same?” We ended up checking, because even Amaryllis wasn’t sure, but as it turned out semaphore flags were pretty much international, which I supposed made sense. It wasn’t exactly a language with its own dialects and nuances.Winnow gave us a quick salute, then she and the other wyvern knights quickly inspected their barding, mounted up, and took off.Getting the Redemption up into the air was a bit more involved, but we weighed anchor and started up the engine without too much trouble. I helped trim the sails, then got behind the wheel again. I kinda missed Clive. The old harpy knew how to pilot so well that I found myself wishing he were here to point out what I was doing wrong.In fact, I missed the Beaver Cleaver as a whole. The ship had become home at some point, though I guess that was bound to happen. You could only have so many adventures, share so many meals, and sleep in one place so much before it inevitably became ‘home.’The Redemption felt different, but that wasn’t a bad thing. It’d become part of our family or it wouldn’t. Time would tell.“Broccoli, why are you hugging the wheel?” Amaryllis asked.“Reasons,” I said.The flight was pretty easy. The wind turned a little and was coming almost directly from behind us, which just made us move a bit faster. I was worried about the poor wyverns, of course, but they just floated off way above us and eventually started to fly in long ovals that intercepted our flight path and then ranged out ahead.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.As night came around we dipped back down and found a place to settle behind a few big hills which conveniently kept the wind at bay. The Redemption had enough buoyancy that we could stay afloat without doing more than idling. The wyverns settled down nearby, and we joined them for a quick meal before returning to the Redemption and putting those bunks to use.The night passed easily enough, I got middle watch, which was annoying-but it was my turn, so I did my part, standing on the deck and looking out into the hillside for trouble while also practising my magic a little.I had a lot of spells to learn, but not much time to knuckle down and learn one well, so I practised my mana manipulation, then I made myself bigger and smaller using my new Proportion Distortion skill. If I was ever going to use that in a fight, then I’d need to have it down to second nature. It was strange to feel like the ship shrank and grew around me, instead of feeling like I was the one whose size was changing.Amaryllis woke up to take her turn, but she just stood there and stared at me. “Broccoli.”“Hi, Amaryllis,” I said.“I know how you’re that size, but I don’t understand why.”I was currently no taller than Amaryllis' knee, if I were standing on the deck. Of course, because I was on watch, I was standing on the railing which was plenty wide enough when I was smaller.“I’m practising,” I said.“Are you... wrapped up in your own ears?” she asked.I hugged my ears closer. I hadn’t figured out how to make them shrink with the rest of me, so they were still as long as normal, which meant they reached down to my feet. Obviously, I’d wrapped them around myself like big warm, furry blankets.I snuggled deeper into the ear fluff. My tail also didn’t shrink, so I had a sort of fluffy beanbag to flump onto. “Yes,” I said. “They’re warm, and it’s cold out. I’d make myself all big and cover you in my ears, but they stay the same size when I embiggen myself, so they end up looking tiny.”“I see,” Amaryllis said. She rubbed her eyes clean. “Go to bed, Broccoli.”“Okay!”The next morning we had a quick breakfast of hardtack and tea while the sun hadn’t quite risen yet. By the time it did though, we were already rising up and the wyvern knights were circling around.Technically, we were right on the edge of Sylphfree, but according to Amaryllis that depended on whose map you looked at. The Trenten Flats claimed the area just as much as Sylphfree did. Neither group had any use for the land, so it was mostly just another thing for the two nations to argue over. It did mean that the wyvern knights could relax a little bit. They were over home territory, and no longer camping in a foreign land without permission.We crossed over increasingly hilly terrain, taking a rather circuitous route that confused me a bit. Fortunately, Calamity was there to explain.“All of the land to the northeast of the Greenstone is dangerous. No one smart travels there if they can avoid it. Not much in the area anyway, so it’s not a big deal.”“That sounds weird,” I said. The evidence was impossible to miss though; a huge swathe of the grasslands and hills were utterly bare, revealing dull brown dirt. There wasn’t a speck of grass or a tree to be seen for kilometres. Off in the distance, a great billowing cloud of dust had been dragged up by the wind and was rolling steadily east.Calamity said that no one knew what made the Greenstone or how it worked, and no one seemed eager to find out.Eventually, a bit before noon came around, we were back in the mountains of Sylphfree and swinging around mountaintops which were taller than the height we dared bring the Redemption to.Goldpass, when it finally came into sight, was revealed to be a surprisingly small city. It didn’t even have a wall, and was instead just a sprawl of multi-floored homes packed tightly in a valley surrounded on three sides by mountains.A wide, but shallow-looking river passed by, with tributaries joining it from the various mountains so that it was quite wide before the river just... stopped. It was only as we got closer that I realized the entire river tumbled into a big cave-like crack in the ground. Did it fall into an aquifer? An underground river? It was weird.The city had an airshiport to its south which was mostly occupied by commercial ships, though there were a few sylph military vessels parked there as well. And, in the middle of them, a very familiar ship.“The Beaver!” I shouted.“The what?” Calamity asked.He followed my pointing finger to the Beaver Cleaver. The twin-hulled ship was sitting at port, its prow, with its two top-hatted ducks, looking mighty and proud. The balloons were different, no longer the patched-up ones we’d been using for so long, instead they were replaced by two sky-blue balloons, with a paler blue below.The wyverns cut out ahead of us and dove towards the port, and I saw Winnow gesturing towards an open landing berth just across the dock from the Beaver. Of course, we immediately started to drop down and prepare to land.I was practically bouncing on the spot. I was so excited! Were all of our friends there? We had so many new stories to share!The Redemption came in for a nice, gentle landing, with all four of us doing our very best and with a bit of help from some dock-working sylph who flew over with ropes to tie us down with.By the time we were secured, there was a small crowd waiting for us. Mostly guards, but in the middle of them was Caprica, and by her side, Bastion.
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