Chapter Five
The rest of the trip across the Rebevins Desert was without major incident, although they had been forced to lose the better part of an hour after Quiesh had decided she wanted to go hunting for a particularly challenging drake that had been harassing her for part of the trip, something the three of them had just needed to accept and ride out the chase that took them whipping through the air until the griffon got the drake caught in her beak, snacking on her just as they started to transition from the desert into more wooded areas.
The transition meant they were headed more towards civilized lands, with settlements across the ways, and that meant they would need to be on the lookout for flags. As part of her responsibilities with them, Arkady and Yasha had taught Sophia the twenty standard signal flags that could be flown, including which ones could be ignored and which were high priorities for them to go and deal with. It was helpful, as it let the two mages have additional time to rest and recoup their energies, as well as spend time getting to know Sophia one-on-one.
Yasha and Sophia had formed an immediate bond beyond the instant sexual attraction, both artistic souls at heart. They had spent much of the time talking about Sophia's life with the circus and Yasha's memories about palace life, something she rarely regaled anyone with, including her own husband, not that he was at all bothered.
Sophia and Arkady had connected about a great many other things, with Sophia's interest in Arkady's time as a soldier getting him to open up a little about old war stories, things he also generally did not bring up, but Sophia's interest was so genuine and moving that even the dwarf's stony exterior had to soften a little over time.
They were still following the thinnest of threads that led from Sophia westward, occasional pulse of light throbbing through the cord whenever he glanced at it to be sure it was still there. It stretched out far towards the horizon, and Arkady was starting to wonder if one of his initial guesses had been correct.
It
did
look like they were heading to Gom Weydan, or at the very least
towards
it.
Arkady had decided he would unearth that particularly difficult gemstone when he got to it, and not a moment sooner.
The Charopy Forest, which they were currently over, stretched across no less than five separate kingdoms, and was often fraught with peril, which was why Arkady had been loathe to fly across it. He suspected they were going to be waylaid more often than he wanted, as the Charopy Forest held all sorts of dangers within it, and so they expected to see more than a handful of flags during their time crossing the expanse of woodland.
As they'd begun to fly over it, Yasha and Arkady had made the decision that they would take no additional work during this particular leg, but that they also could not ignore general distress beacons. There were three levels of those - in need of help eventually (a yellow flag with a black X and a blue cross in the center), in need of help soon (an orange flag with a black X), and the urgent/dire need of help flag (a red flag with two tall slender chevrons in white), as well as the specific magical distress flag (a black flag with a red circle and a white X overlaid atop one another). Only the last two were going to be significant for them to stop, and the others would be able to wait for mages that had more flexibility in their schedules.
To cross the Charopy Forest by air would still take three days of flight and Arkady had guessed they would have between three and five stops across the land, but it turned out they only made one, although that one would turn out to be something of a doozy.
Towards the end of each day, Quiesh would find some high, secure place to perch and lay down, and would spend about six hours resting during high night, to regain her strength and to avoid some of the more dangerous large sky predators that would come out under starlight. The griffon was more than adept at avoiding them when they needed to travel at night, but if the option to travel exclusively by day was available to them, it was something the griffon always preferred, and the two mages knew it was good to let the griffon get her way whenever possible. She did plenty of work for them, so the least they could do was return the favor.
On the beginning of the third morning, Arkady made the fatal error of getting his hopes up that they would cross the Charopy Forest without having to stop, and when he saw the magical distress flag a mere half an hour later, he logically knew that his thoughts hadn't manifested it into being, but it damn well
felt
like it had, as he sighed with a heavy spirit and moved up to the front of the platform so he could tell Quiesh they needed to land again so soon,
They were somewhere within the Kingdom of Chetfield, a place that Arkady had no particular love of and that neither Yasha nor Sophia had ever visited. Chetfield had begun its existence as a bandit haven, a sort of lawless, unruled common area that several bandit factions had simply agreed to work together and eventually they settled down and formed the Kingdom of Chetfield when the factions had agreed upon a battle royale to settle who would be the first ruler of their newly established country. The bandit Olverna had become the Queen and had actually turned Chetfield from a chaotic collection of troublemakers into a legitimate nation.
Their residents were a little rough'n'tumble for Arkady's tastes, however, and they tended to be more impolite than he preferred, but he decided that he would manage and they would get these people past whatever problem it was they were dealing with.
It looked like the village they were landing at held perhaps a few hundred people, a little large for a village but certainly not large enough to be a city. A township, maybe, Arkady thought to himself as he brought Quiesh down to land at the edge of it, letting her walk up towards the heavy wooden gate in the massive fence that surrounded the perimeter of it. They could've simply flown over it and landed inside of the border, but Arkady suspected it might have made them more nervous than he could tell they already were. The tension he could sense from the guards at the gate was denser than a lot of rock he'd worked with as a young man.
"You've got the flag flying," Arkady said as he hopped down from the platform atop of Quiesh, moving towards the door. "We are here, to answer that call. Will you grant us entrance?"
"And you are?" a voice atop the gate shouted down, sounding rather disinterested, what with it apparently having been an emergency.
"Threadbinder Arkady Gormansson, eighth rank, along ith my wife, Threatbinder Yasha Summervale, twelfth rank, and our companions, Sophia Burngrave and Quiesh, upon whom which we travel," Arkady said patiently. "Will you let us inside, or shall I simply remount and fly away from here?"
"No no, Master Mage, just wait one moment," a different voice said, and then the gate began to open as quickly as they could get it open for them.
Once the gates opened, Arkady led Quiesh into the walls, only for them to close the gates behind them again almost immediately, although this Arkady could understand, as it was more for the protection of the city than to keep the four of them inside, as they could simply fly away any time they wanted. The villagers weren't paying them as much attention as Arkady might have expected, but he took that as a sign they were worried about other things.
What he assumed was either the village elder or the mayor came out to meet them, a human woman in her mid sixties. She was dressed meagerly, but with utilitarian eyes to her clothing, probably a farmer or a craftswoman when she wasn't tending to the needs of the village. There was a good mix of several races in the township around them, but he saw mostly humans and elves, which didn't come as a big surprise to him. "Ah, Master Threatbinder, welcome, we are glad that you are here," the woman said. "I am Wrafti, Mayor of the township of Reeganly."
"Threadbinder," he corrected. "The Threatbinder is my wife, Yasha. Whose services are you in need of?"
"To be honest, I'm not certain," she said with a frown. "We need someone to solve a problem we're not entirely clear on how we stumbled into."
"Let's start with the obvious then," he said, as Yasha and Sophia were slowly climbing down from Quiesh's carrying space. "Who's the opposition? Who are we up against?"
"As far as we can tell? The pixies."
Arkady shook his head with a deep sigh. "Mmm. I suppose that tracks. Walk us through it."
Over the course of the next hour, Wrafti walked them through how the people of Reeganly had had a very tenuous balance with the pixies who also lived within the forest around their township. The two had often failed to see eye to eye, with the pixies accusing the villagers of throwing their waste into their sacred lands, and the villagers had accused the pixies of poaching their cattle and attacking their children. It was the latter which had necessitated the raising of the flag, because Wrafti showed them one of their children, covered in tiny spear marks, none of them serious but each of them definitely enough to raise alarm and concern.
It was enough that it ensured they would go forth and settle the disagreement, although Arkady had a feeling he would be returning to the village with a list of demands they would need to relent to. Pixies, while often known for being pranksters, weren't so bad as that nobody could work with them, so he suspected there had been bad actors on both sides making things worse for everyone.
They left Quiesh feasting on mutton provided to her by the villagers as the trio headed out into the deep woods, Sophia staying between Arkady and Yasha, watching around her, but full of questions that she couldn't stop asking the two mages. "Should I be concerned for my life?"
"It's highly unlikely you'll be in any danger," Yasha said. "The pixie people are, by their very nature, not violent or aggressive, so for them to be acting in this way, well, let's just say I'm sure they'll have a list of things the villagers will have to agree to as well."
"Have you two had much dealings with pixies before?"
"I haven't," Yasha admitted. "A few encounters here and there, but mostly that was sort of periphery to my old life, where their courts and ours would occasionally intermingle. But beyond that, I've not had all that much to do with them. I know my husband has."
"Aye," Arkady said. "We had a small cadre of pixie soldiers helping us defend Lingham, although they were all slain in that fight. Very brave souls. But that was long, long, long ago. And time has not been particularly kind to the pixie people. Where once they were united into a single kingdom, over the past few millennia, they have become fractured and disorganized, a hundred courts in place where just one used to do. That's made them more difficult to deal with, but at their core, they aren't all that different. They just need to be reminded of that sometimes. Speaking of which, we're approaching their trading post, so let me do the talking, and whatever you do, don't accept any gifts. You hear me, Sophia? Take nothing from anyone, no matter how insistent they are."
