Chapter Forty

“It would be idyllic if it weren’t so…lifeless,” Cinna remarked as she looked out the window of the coach, which was currently passing through a stretch of farmland at speeds that would have shaken a normal cart to pieces.

“Uh…yeah,” Lilia agreed without quite registering what Cinna had said. Cinna gave Lilia a look the latter couldn’t read. Last night had left Lilia sleepy and absent-minded. She knew Cinna could see the redness on her own face, though, and that just made her even more embarrassed.

Her suggestion that she and Cinna share that knight’s bed had been made solely out of concern for Cinna’s health. If Cinna hadn’t explained anything at all then Lilia probably would have slept just fin, not having ever realized she’d accidentally propositioned a princess. But after that conversation the idea stuck in Lilia’s head for the rest of the night.

They’d both taken the chance to bathe using Selberg’s bathing fixtures before going to bed. Separately, thank goodness, though Lilia had needed to help Cinna out of her armor. Still, that had just increased the tension in Lilia’s mind further. She knew her parents sometimes cleaned themselves right before bed, and now she’d finally put two and two together and figured out why. That parallel had caused Lilia to spend the entire night with images of herself and Cinna playing through her head.

On one side of the bed had been Cinna, sound asleep and as still as the dead. Opposite her, Lilia had kicked off the blankets to combat the heat building inside of her and spent hours tossing and turning before finally drifting off to sleep once her exhaustion grew great enough to overcome her insomnia. When she woke up with the morning sun shining on her face she’d tried to bury herself and pillows and go back to sleep, but unfortunately Cinna insisted they return to the road as soon as possible.

Which left Lilia sleep deprived, too embarrassed to admit the reason for it, and awkwardly avoiding Cinna’s eyes even though she really had nowhere else to look right now.

“At this pace we’ll likely pass through the next village sometime around noon. I think we’ll stop there to cook lunch and then resume our journey immediately,” Cinna explained.

“Uh-huh,” Lilia agreed.

“Is the coach treating you well? These cushions are quite nice, I must say. The wheels appear to have been coated in hardened slime much like the layer between the axels and the chassis. Even I hadn’t been aware of that innovation,” Cinna said next.

“Definitely.”

“Even your friends seem to be happy with it. It doesn’t sound as if Mr. Bearbones has moved an inch this entire time. Are familiars capable of napping?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, would you look at that. There must be something moving out there after all. Cyclops just leapt clear off the driver’s seat and into the field.”

“Wow.”

“You do know you can just take a nap if you’re tired, right?”

Lilia blinked, and when she opened her eyes she found Cinna’s face so close to her own that their noses were nearly touching.

“Wha-!?” Lilia screamed, leaping right off her seat. She ended up crouched with her feet on the cushions, her arms pressed against the ceiling. Cinna sighed and shook her head.

“You’ve been acting strangely all morning. Leave keeping watch to myself and your familiars and get some rest,” Cinna said with authority. She pulled away, settling back into her own seat and giving Lilia space to hop back down as well. “I was joking about Cyclops, incidentally. He’s still right where we left him.”

“…what was that about Cyclops?” Lilia questioned, leaning to the right so she could see past Cinna through the little window behind her. It was really more of a slot meant to allow the coach’s occupants to speak to the driver, but Lilia could see Cyclops laying on the bench through it.

“Never mind. Just get some sleep,” Cinna replied. Deciding to leave it at that, Lilia curled up on her seat and closed her eyes. She didn’t know how long it took her to fall asleep or even how long she remained so. Sometime later, though, she awoke to Cinna shaking her by the shoulder.

“I’m awake…” Lilia mumbled groggily.

“Sorry for waking you, but I need you to take a look out the window and tell me what you see,” Cinna informed her. Though confused, Lilia did as asked, blinking in pain as the sun pierced her eyes. Her eyes soon adjusted, though, and she took in the view.

“I see…a lot of wheat,” Lilia observed.

“Not that. Look up,” Cinna insisted. Panning her view to the sky, Lilia searched the blue and white expanse for a few seconds before her mind finally caught up to her and she spotted the thing that was out of place.

“A bird!” Lilia declared. She hadn’t seen a live bird in…she didn’t actually know how long. As soon as that thought occurred to her, though, she activated her soul sight. Unsurprisingly, it appeared to be undead. More alarmingly, Lilia spotted a thread connecting the undead bird to something far away.

“It’s a scout, isn’t it?” Cinna asked.

“I can’t tell if it’s a thrall or a familiar, but…it’s definitely bound to someone,” Lilia replied. “At this distance I don’t think I can tell it to go away or kill it.”

“That’s alright. I wouldn’t have asked you to anyway. Currently the necromancer controlling that familiar knows we’re here, but they don’t know for certain that the necromancer they’re looking for is one of us,” Cinna pointed out. “If you slew that bird it would erase all doubt.”

“Looking for? What do you mean?” Lilia wondered.

“If they’re scouting this far away from the frontline then it must be for a reason. Clearly our encounter with Javert hasn’t gone unnoticed,” Cinna answered. “Dealing with him bought us time, but we’ve been found sooner than I’d hoped. We’ll have to proceed to the Warm Roads without stopping from now on.”

“Oh…so no more hot meals after all…” Lilia muttered, disappointed. Cinna gave her a troubled smile.

“I think we can afford to take a few minutes now and then to cook or relieve ourselves. I meant in regards to stopping overnight. We’ll need to sleep in the coach going forward—and it would probably be best if we did so in shifts, that way one of us is always available to give the horses new instructions,” Cinna explained.

“New instructions?”

“Right now we’re just heading straight down the road. But we could encounter a blockade, a closed gate, or any number of other obstructions. If that were to happen we need to be on hand to guide the horses through or around. Assuming you can’t tell them what to do ahead of time, that is. How complicated an instruction can you give them?” Cinna inquired.

“It’s kind of hard to say. I don’t know the horses very well yet. I haven’t even given them names,” Lilia hedged. “Even with my friends I have to know who I’m talking to. Cyclops won’t do anything that seems too troublesome, so I try to only ask him to do things related to what he likes to do. With Directions I can usually get him to do a lot more, but since he’s so smart he can get his own ideas sometimes. The whole reason we met is because Directions got lost and he thought he wouldn’t get in trouble if he found the way before I noticed.”

“…what about Mr. Bearbones?” Cinna asked, seeming mostly curious at this point.

“He still thinks he’s a living bear. He can be quite silly. But he’s very good at board games like feuding villages.” Lilia shrugged. “There aren’t very many things I need help with that call for a bear. I haven’t tried very much else with him.”

“This is a bit off topic, but…how do you know Mr. Bearbones is male, anyway?” Cinna wondered.

Lilia stared blankly for a moment. Then her eyes went wide as a realization hit her.

“I’ve just kind of been assuming he was! I never really thought about it before!” Lilia exclaimed. “Wait, but I can’t just change his name…her name…? Would he even know who I’m talking about if I started calling him Ms. Bearbones!?”

“I think he’d figure it out,” Cinna said with a sigh. “Let’s set that aside for now; I didn’t mean to cause you an existential crisis.”

“Ex…is…huh?”

“Forget I said anything. Let’s circle back a bit. If you told the horses to, say, circle around a village if the gate is closed and continue along the same road from the other side, would they follow that order?” Cinna asked, getting a bit more specific this time.

“Um…that depends. Do they know what a village is? Or a gate?” Lilia asked in turn.

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Well, I can’t exactly tell them to avoid something if they don’t know what it is. I think familiars are smarter than normal animals, but they still need to know what I’m talking about if I want them to listen,” Lilia explained. She considered what she could do about the problem for a few seconds before continuing. “Maybe next time we find a village I can show them what a gate is and tell them the whole thing inside the walls is a village. Then if we run into a closed gate later we can see what happens!”

“How about this? While I make lunch you can take the time to give the horses a lesson in human settlements,” Cinna offered. Lilia nodded excitedly. In her mind this felt like a necromancy experiment more than anything. She would be determining the limits of familiars’ memory and ability to follow instructions without having spells implanted into them that told them what to do.

“Oh, and if that doesn’t take too long, maybe I could set up some obstacles and tell them to go between them. Then the next time we stop I can do it again and see if they remember how to handle it without being told!” Lilia suggested. “Maybe I can convince my friends to join in. That way I’ll have more examples. If it’s just the horses I won’t know for sure if it’s a horse thing or a familiar thing, but if it’s all of them…uh, but my friends are older, so they might just have more experience. Maybe I should try to find some more familiars to be sure...”

“Now may not be the best time for an experiment that complex. Let’s stick with the gates for now and save the rest until you have a proper workshop available, yes?” Cinna interrupted. Lilia tilted her head to the side.

“I don’t have a workshop, though. I’m just an apprentice,” Lilia pointed out.

“Lilia, you are currently the most experienced living necromancer in Selkarc. Once we get through this you’ll be getting as big of a workshop as you desire. In fact, I know of at least one person that could learn a great deal from you,” Cinna said. She looked like she expected Lilia to be pleased by that idea.

But Lilia barely knew what it meant to be a student. She had no idea what being someone else’s master would be like. As the coach sped towards the entrance to the Warm Roads, Lilia felt like teaching someone was an even more distance concept than her destination. And that was already a place she’d never visited and couldn’t begin to imagine.