6th Day of Harvester, 565 CY
Two Miles South of Laurellinn, Furyondy
"Arrgh!" Zantac cried out, swatting furiously at the air around him. "Dire mosquitoes!"
"Oh, stop complaining," grumbled Cygnus as he kept his horse in a steady trot alongside that of his fellow mage. "There's been a lot less of them since the rain started."
"And I'm supposed to be grateful for a downpour?" the red-robed wizard snapped back, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his robe. "I notice they don't seem to be hanging around you all that much!"
Cygnus shrugged. "What can I say, Zantac? You've just got a lot more to offer them, I guess."
"It is to laugh. You should pen a new spell, Tindertwig. Call it Cygnus' Lame Jests. Causes your foe to double over in pain from your attempts at humor."
Up ahead of them, Saxmund looked over at Nesco, her expression annoyed.
"Do they always have to bicker like that?"
The ranger shrugged. "After five days of listening to it, you still have to ask? Don't worry about it. It's all good-natured."
"My good nature ran out on me a long time ago," Saxmund scowled back. "And Zantac's right. This rain isn't helping. Thank Borofast we'll be hitting Laurellinn soon."
"Always a mug half-empty, Saxmund." Aelfbi Gemblossom, riding in the party's lead along with Tojo, looked back at his companion with a pitying smile. "I thought that away from Garoidil for a few days, you might lighten up a bit more."
"It's kind of dark to be lightening up," Saxmund responded, her gesture taking in the approaching sunset, the rain and the forest all at once.
"Pshaw!" Aelfbi brushed off the complaint with a rise of his hands, encompassing the woods all around them. "This rain is the very life's blood to these magnificent woods! Enjoy the beauty that surrounds you and give thanks!"
"Yeah, thanks," muttered the rogue, her green eyes squinting upwards through the drops of water filtering down through the arboreal canopy overhead. The rest of her words trailed off into mumbling, but no one present assumed them to have anything to do with gratitude.
"At least we'll have a real roof over our heads tonight," observed Zantac. "And none too soon. I want to swap out some spells."
Nesco hesitated slightly before speaking up. "I'm afraid you probably won't be able to tonight, Zantac. Laurellinn is a logging camp, not a village. They don't have an inn. We'll all be bunking with the woodsmen tonight, I'm sure."
"What?" cried Zantac. "You didn't tell me that! I didn't bother to memorize another shelterdome last night, because I thought we wouldn't need one! Just great!"
But Tojo suddenly reined in his horse and held up a hand for silence. The samurai's gaze turned to the right.
"Voices. Not far off," he announced.
The others, silent now, could also begin to hear them. It sounded like a number of men shouting, although the words were indistinguishable. There were no sounds of anyone crashing through the undergrowth, so no attack seemed imminent. Still, they were leery.
Saxmund was the first to dismount, swinging off her horse with accomplished ease.
"Zantac," she said. "Stay here with the horses. The rest of you, come with me."
The Willip wizard sat on his horse, looking agape at Saxmund. It was clear that he found the idea of taking orders from this woman an offensive idea, but Lady Cynewine cut him off.
"Please, Zantac. I think I know what is it and I'm sure there's no danger, but if I'm wrong we don't want hostiles sneaking up behind us. We'll only be a few minutes, I suspect."
"Sure," Zantac muttered as he watched the other four dismount and follow the rogue into the trees, which quickly swallowed them up. "I'll just stay here and mildew."
Hardwood trees and thick undergrowth surrounded the quintet on all sides as they cautiously moved eastwards. The rain made a constant patter on the dirt and leaves of the forest floor. The sun, sinking ever lower behind them, was already all but invisible behind the low veil of clouds that hung above them like a vast grey curtain.
Cygnus threw a light on the tip of his quarterstaff. Saxmund glanced over at the mage sharply but seemed to realize that navigation was more important than stealth at the moment and said nothing.
"We're heading towards the river," noted Aelfbi quietly.
"The same one we crossed at the forest border?" asked Cygnus.
Nesco nodded. "It's the one the loggers use. It's a tributary that flows into the Att. The elves call it Airth Eliarna- the birthplace of azure beauty- but we just call it the Blue."
Gemblossom raised an eyebrow.
"See rights up ahead," Tojo said.
Aelfbi nodded in agreement. "They're lanterns, I think," the half-elf commented as the voices ahead grew more distinctive. They seemed to belong to a number of men shouting encouragement and exhortations to person or persons unknown.
It was less than a minute before the scene came into view. The five paused about twenty yards back from the riverbank.
A number of men stood on both sides of the riverbank, spaced about fifty to sixty feet apart. All wore hooded cloaks over leather armor. While they were armed with swords and hand axes, it was a bulls eye lantern that each man held in his hand, illuminating the river in their midst with crisscrossing cones of light.
The waters, darkening in the twilight, were filled with logs. The trunks of oak, elm, ipt, roan wood and many other hardwood trees were floating downstream, constantly bumping and colliding into each other.
There were men in the river, too, but not in the water.
Moving with accomplished ease, five men clad mainly in leather jerkins were running and jumping amongst the floating logs. Now the party could see that the logs were not floating loose in the river but were attached to each other by ropes attached to sharp, pointed hooks driven into one end of each log.
The men had all converged on a pile of logs near the center of the river and were helping up a companion who had apparently slipped and fallen in the water.
"River pigs," said Nesco, gesturing towards the scene.
Cygnus and Tojo stared at the ranger, but it was Saxmund who spoke up next.
"That's their name for their own, not ours," she shrugged. "The woodsmen who maneuver the logs downstream to the point where they'll be loaded onto carts for road transport south.
Aelfbi frowned as he listened to the shouts of the men. "That man," he said, pointing at the soaked woodsman being hauled onto the logs by his fellows. "He's clutching his leg. It probably got crushed between two logs."
"They have healers at camp," Saxmund reminded him.
"I wouldn't want to make that trip in the rain on that leg," Aelfbi rejoined and without a beat ran forward to wards the closest man on the near riverbank, shouting as he did so. The man spun around, but his posture relaxed as he apparently recognized the cleric in the gleam of his lantern. They exchanged a few words as the others returned to their examination of the chaotic scene before them.
It quickly became apparent that there was another problem. The logs were jamming up and seemed to have been doing so for some time. The focal point seemed to be about a hundred yards downstream of the party's current position, which put it just past the point where The Blue curved around to the right. The lantern men stationed near the river there were shouting.
"Come on, Laertes! They've got Jasper! Get them moving so we can all go home! We're late as it is!"
The reply- an oath laden with profanity- was audible even amid the rushing water, the shouts and the rain. Laertes, whoever he was, Cygnus thought, must have quite a set of lungs.
Then there was an explosion from just out of sight. Fragments of wood flew over the river. Cygnus stiffened, but then heard exaltations and cries of relief from the lantern men as the logs began to move again. Jasper, the injured river pig, had been brought over to the near bank, where Aelfbi swiftly healed his leg, engendering much thanks to the half-elf, accompanied by such hearty back-slapping that the priest nearly tumbled down the bank into The Blue himself.
After ascertaining that all was now well, the quartet began to head back to where Zantac was waiting for them.
But then one of the woodsmen's parting woods had struck Nesco in the back like a flung hatchet.
"Yur brothers, Lady Cynewine. They arrived here this morning. Betcha yur be glad to see 'em, eh?"
"Loggers," was Saxmund's one-word explanation to Zantac as she swung herself back up on her mount and waited for the others to do likewise. Cygnus and Aelfbi gave a brief synopsis to the red-robed wizard when it looked like he was seriously considering a magical assault upon the rogue for leaving him there to wait alone in the rain.
Tojo was silent, but that was because Tojo was usually silent.
Nesco Cynewine was silent as well, but for an entirely different reason.
The ranger kicked herself mentally, again and again. How could she have been so stupid? Bretagne had told her that they were heading out this way. She didn't know how many of Sir Damoscene's patrol would be staying at Laurellinn and how many would be moving on to Ironstead or points further north, but if they'd just arrived today, they wouldn't be continuing on until tomorrow at the earliest. She should have known her group would catch them eventually. She knew Joseph wore plate mail, even if no one else did and that alone would have slowed the patrol down considerably.
Conversation behind her jerked the ranger out of her thoughts.
"So who is this Laertes, anyway?" Cygnus asked Saxmund, who was riding directly ahead of him.
"Never seen him, but from what I hear, he's the teenaged son of the camp commandant. No one you'd want your daughter to date," the rogue added wryly.
"He's someone who's gotten a lot more grief than he deserves!" Nesco turned and snapped at Saxmund.
The clip-clop of the horses' hooves was the only sound for a moment as Saxmund regarded the woman who rode alongside her.
"Of course, you know a lot more about these lands and these people than I do, Lady Cynewine," Saxmund finally replied. Her voice was thin, but her eyes were hard.
"Still, from what I've heard I'd be surprised if you haven't killed quite a few of the boy's relatives already."
The rain was fading as they pulled up by the stockade that surrounded Laurellinn. Everburning torches mounted into the log walls were all surrounded by what seemed to be permanent clouds of gnats and moths. Other woodsmen, including a few that Nesco recognized, were emerging from the forest to enter the camp just as the ranger's party was doing so.
"Let's go!" shouted a gate guard, hurriedly beckoning everyone to enter. "Time to close up shop! This ain't Chendl- we don't charge a fee to get in, tho we might if you all keep straggling! Get a move on!"
"Stuff it, Belston!" one of the lantern men replied, although the smile on the man's face belied his words. "We've been doing real work while you've been counting leaves all day!"
"Hey, I don't make the roster, Cassius! I just go where they tell me!"
"Yeah, well if you see a kobold coming, be sure to call for reinforcements. We wouldn't want you to be end up fighting something out of your league, now!" the lantern man Cassius retorted.
Raucous laughter enveloped the crowd as they pushed past the gate, which was slowly pulled shut and barred behind them.
Laurellinn did not appear to have streets- only buildings scattered about here and there inside an enclosed, roughly rectangular space perhaps three hundred by six hundred feet. Most of the small structures were dark, apparently closed up for the night. One of the few lights came from the smithy, where a blacksmith and his apprentices hammered away, oblivious to the men streaming past them.
"Kind of late for a smithy still to be open, isn't it?" Zantac asked, frowning.
"Lots of shoes needed here," replied Nesco, gesturing to the line of horses being led one at a time into the smithy by young boys, where they were swiftly fitted with new horseshoes fresh from the forge. "They'll do this all night, then head up the road to Ironstead, repeat the process and come back down."
Zantac nodded but couldn't help wincing as he watched the hot shoes being driven with looked like nails right onto the animals' hooves. "Doesn't that hurt them?" he couldn't help himself from asking.
"No," said Nesco, shaking her head.
"Why, Zantac," Cygnus said, grinning. "Could it be that you're feeling compassion for that poor beast that's been carrying your blubber butt around for five days?"
"No," his fellow wizard replied, scowling as he felt the bruises on his inner thighs pulse. "I just wanted to make sure he suffers just like he made me suffer! Those horses know, too. They know when they've got an inexperienced rider on their back, and they love to make them pay for it. Don't tell me they don't!"
"There'd be no point," Cygnus replied as he turned away to rejoin the others, who had already moved on. "There's no room left in your skull for anything other than paranoia."
"Ah, everybody says I'm paranoid, but I know they're all really out to get me." Zantac couldn't keep the grin off his face as he followed after his friend.
According to Nesco, Laurellinn boasted a population of just over two hundred, and it seemed like half of them were heading inside the main mess, a huge cabin perhaps fifty by sixty. Like all the buildings in Laurellinn, it featured a peaked roof to prevent the snowfalls of winter building up and caving them in.
Just as they reached the front door, Saxmund turned to face the two mages.
"Just warning you. This place can be a little rough. A real wretched hive of sc-"
"After all the things we've seen?" interrupted Cygnus with a snort. "Trust me, Saxmund; it's nothing we can't handle."
The woman shrugged. "I wasn't sure how much you'd seen. Kingus detested places like this."
Cygnus stared directly into Saxmund's green eyes.
"I'm not Kingus, Saxmund."
She stared back at him. For a moment, Cygnus thought he saw the corners of her eyes glisten.
"I'm starting to see that now," she replied, her voice sounding even more thin and tired than usual as she turned and opened the door.