The main road in Leuthernia seemed more accustomed to visitors than the path we had been on previously. Villages - real villages, with people living together - were welcoming to us, and happy to have a scribe available to help with documents, accounting, and writing notices for the other villagers. When I stopped to help someone, Drifter waited patiently, sometimes even getting roped into some manual labor himself. The swordsman's muscles were as good for hauling sacks of potatoes as they were for combat, as it turned out.
Wandering village to village became more pleasant with this new, more welcoming attitude. We would refresh rations with what the villagers were willing to sell, and if they were willing to lend a bed we would alternate who used it. Beyond that, there was little to see or discuss that I hadn't already seen or attempted to discuss. At first the rocky lands of Leuthernia were an interesting change to the prairies of my home, but they were also mostly moss on flat rocks.
It was not yet summer when we found the landscape around us more swamp than stone, and large stands of trees sprouted from the landscape. The lands of Beornia had no well-defined border with those of Leuthernia as the bulk of the land between the two was virtually unusable, but at some point the mayor's home in some nameless village was flying a Beornian flag, indicating that we had probably crossed the border somewhere. The residents were not the friendliest that morning, so we moved on.
My goal, and I presumed Drifter's as well, though we failed to discuss it, was Faraton, a small town near the edge of Beornia's influence with decent trade and inns. Most of the traffic going to Leuthernia from the rest of the continent passed through Faraton as a matter of course, and the petit stature of the town spoke volumes for how many people visited the northern realm. Still, I was running out of paper, and I was eating into my stablest rations at an increasing pace, so it was time for a proper shopping excursion.
And, though I had originally bailed out of civilization to avoid talk of the Contest, I was itching to hear if there were any developments. I had a hunch that I had a solid stake in the game but no data to support it.
Beornia was a wide swath of boreal forest that tapered into a narrow strip of fertile cropland. Most of the population naturally settled in that tiny area, preferring to be crammed into a temperate environment than spreading out in the cold. The capital, Beorne, had one foot in the woods and one in the plains, and it would be weeks yet before we could reach it. Faraton, by contrast, was likely within a couple days of leisurely walking.
Walking a few hours past the village brought us to a roadside inn where our patronage was more appreciated. The innkeeper, a stout middle-aged man named Georg, made a vachon roast at the behest of his other two guests and gave us a good price for a couple plates of it. He brewed ale in the basement and that, too, was affordable and surprisingly good. Much of my time studying in Barrington was spent in these backwater inns around the city, a half dozen of us drinking two watered-down ales for the price of one. In contrast, Georg's ale was full-bodied, strong enough to make my throat tingle, and cost less than what I drank as a poor student. The fire in the common room was roaring, the conversation flowed, and even Drifter seemed to be at ease.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The other guests staying here were surveyors from Beorne. It seemed the ill-defined border was getting some more definition with the aid of a fault trace passing through the woods. We noticed it as an odd rocky step down in our path, forgotten until conversing with the surveyors, but it turned out to be a long shift in the crust that ran most of the way across the continent. It had appeared a few dozen years prior after a massive earthquake, and it grew steeper by a miniscule amount each year.
As an aside, the aforementioned unfriendly village was to the north of the fault line. I was curious to see how they'd react when the crown inevitably decided their problems were not Beornia's problems.
All this to say, we confirmed that Faraton was a day and a half away on foot, and there was another inn further along that we could stay at for the night, so we left after our hefty brunch and continued through the woods.
Our next sign of civilization was a real fork in the road and a signpost with directions. A few paths were cut into the trees along our journey so far, but here the cobbled road continued west for seventeen kilometers towards Lumberton, east for forty-one kilometers towards Treeville, and south for thirty-three kilometers towards Faraton and one-hundred and seventy-two kilometers towards Beorne. To the north, with an unmarked distance, was Leuthernia, leaving the village along the way consistently unnamed. A makeshift addendum to the south marked the Leafy Wolf Inn at a distance of six hours, time apparently being a unit of distance for locals.
The Leafy Wolf Inn sat at another crossroad, this one splitting off into six directions and being popular enough to support a small grocery and a workshop for the local communities. Three wagons were parked near the inn, and a stable housed several horses and oxen being cared for by a lanky teenager.
Georg's inn felt large and spacious with two floors, but the Leafy Wolf had three and felt claustrophobic. It was clearly a gathering place for the rural communities of the area. It was early in the evening, a couple hours past when hunters and farmers would be done their work for the day, and they had all trudged over to have a few drinks and chat about whatever. Merchants and their guards mingled with the rougher folks, exchanging stories and news and jokes and whatever else. The ruckus could be heard from outside, but even then we didn't expect the overwhelm that hit us once we opened the doors. The change from weeks in the quiet north was a shock to the senses.
We manoeuvred through the raucous country folk to find a couple of open spots at a corner table, where a couple of ornery-looking guards turned out to be welcoming and friendly. A barmaid came by with beers, and she let us know that a bit of roast turducken and potato-leek soup was still available if we were hungry. We ordered our food and yapped with the guards for the evening.
