Once the horses had been fully prepared and the saddle bags that Halt had packed the night before had been attached, she was about to ask about her weapons when Halt pulled her dirk and daggers from one of the saddle bags. The enchanted steel had been freshly and meticulously polished and shined when she pulled each weapon from its sheath to inspect it.
"Thank you," she said, sliding the last dagger back into its sheath. "Could you hold them for me for now though?"
Halt nodded and took the weapons back from her, slipping them back into the saddle bag. "And your pack as well?" he asked, remembering her words from earlier.
"Yes, thank you." Astrid slid the pack from her shoulder and handed it to him.
Weighing the bag in his hand, he raised an eyebrow at her, "This is terribly light for one who has traveled so far."
She smiled at his words and shook her head. "It may feel light, but appearances can be deceiving. I have an entire armor set in there." She spoke with certainty, though with a certain degree of urgency and eagerness to leave.
Gilan mounted blaze as Halt secured her pack to Abelard's saddle and mounted himself. It was then that she closed her eyes and called her feline form, her body morphing quickly into the black and white striped tiger. Throughout the change, Gilan and Halt couldn't help but sit transfixed, watching her body lengthen and shorten and listening to her bones creak and pop and snap. When it was over, she shook her wide head and stretched out her paws in front of her, then pulled herself forward and stretched her back legs, her body popping a last few times.
She glanced at them once she had finished, her large, infinitely cobalt eyes flicking between them. "Again, Gilan, you really must stop staring with your mouth open. One day, a bat will fly in and make its home in there."
A smile touched at the corners of Halt's grim expression as Gilan shut his mouth with a click of his teeth, but it was gone just as quickly, though not before she had seen it. "Shall we go?" he asked, gesturing to the northwest, the direction they needed to travel.
Astrid nodded and so did Gilan, and the two men nudged their horses, setting off at a swift walk. She kept up easily, even as they moved into an easy trot when Redmont was just a smudge on the horizon. Sooner rather than later, they were tugging along at a mile-eating lope, a nice pace that was maintainable for hours.
At first she had enjoyed the push and pull of her muscles and body, but several hours into the day, she began to grow bored with the continuous rolling country side only broken by the occasional farm or copse of trees. She began counting her strides in twenties in all of the different languages and dialects she knew, first in the elven language, Sithri, then in Araluen, the Skandian dialect of Araluen, Galician and its minor dialects, the language of the Temu'jai, Nihon-ja, the desert nomads, and then the language of the people from Picta to the north. Topping it all off, she counted in each of the Hibernian dialects, then went back and started again, working her way through the language reel once more. In total in one reel, she counted eighteen counts of twenty.
She managed to entertain herself that way for quite some time, until they paused for a midday meal when the sun first began to sink down the sky. She took one extra stride, finishing out her count of twenty in Nihon-jan, before slowing quickly to a stop. She padded up to where the two rangers had sat in the tough hearty grass and lay down on her side in the back, though she kept her upper body propped up on her two front shoulders. She flicked her long striped tail behind her as she laid her head straight down on her paws.
Gilan took out one of the stiff bags that they used to water the horses and filled it for her to drink from, then held it before her thick nose.
Sniffing the bag cautiously, she nodded and nose her way to the water and began to lap it up quickly. The pace of the run wasn't any sort of problem, nor was the physical length, as she was only out of breath but not tired. What got to her was the time she had to spend in her own mind while she ran, thinking about anything and everything to keep herself occupied over the monotony of the run.
She pulled her nose from the bag when she could feel her tongue hit the bottom of it and licked the moisture from the fur around her mouth. "Thank you," she said, her breath mostly returned. She set her head down on her paws again and watched the men as they ate a cold bit of dried fruit, smoked and dried meat and some nuts.
Not one of them spoke, just sat content in a comfortable silence for roughly twenty minutes until Halt finally spoke. "We should head out again; we still have several days ahead of us."
After that, the two rangers mounted up and she followed them as they resumed their trek at the same loping canter.