My dreams were filled with exotic pipes and rods and me sitting astride them. I vividly recall one, with me making my way across a field crisscrossed with electric wires at hip height, forcing me to raise my dress over my butt and carefully step over them so they wouldn’t touch my girly parts. Which failed every time, but not painfully, only pleasantly.
In other words, I wake up pretty hot and bothered.
And surprisingly comfortable.
I open my eyes and shield them with my hand.
Ah. Still got my head in a dragon’s lap.
His intense gaze penetrates me as he looks down on me. “Done with your recharge? You appear to need hours and hours of rest. How can you function at all? You spend half the day unconscious!”
I sit up and gather my bearings. “Not much I can do about that. You should try it, it’s pretty nice. Sometimes.”
The sun is up, but there are clouds everywhere. The swamp has a thin veil of mist hanging low over it, making it look almost inviting. In the daylight it’s also obvious that there’s a small island in the swamp, a few miles out. I couldn’t see it last night, but now I think that’s a good place to aim for as a waypoint.
Caronerax gets up and peers out over the mire while I munch on still pretty delicious not-sheep meat and the rest of the not-blueberries.
I turn the fur into a pouch and join the dragon on the edge of the swamp. “Looks like we can get a ways out there by walking on the dry patches. Or jumping from one to the other.”
“Then we shall do so.” Caronerax strides ahead, wading through the dirty water to the first little knoll of dry land. I follow, hoping there’s nothing sharp down there in the soft mud. It’s the ickiest feeling I’ve had for a while when the soggy mass gives way and envelops my feet in cold softness. I only sink down to my ankles, which has to be a good sign.
The first dry spot is grassy and pleasant enough, and from there Caronerax can walk from one dry patch to the next with his long legs, while I have to jump. But the less time my feet spend sinking down in the swamp, the better.
It’s not like an unhealthy swamp, with rotting vegetation and all kinds of insects swarming around and leeches biting into legs and horrific things like that. It doesn’t smell great, and the mud has an organic feel to it. I have to assume that things do live here.
We reach the last of the dry patches. From here, there’s only wet marsh all the way out to the little island, which now looks higher than before. There are trees and bushes on it, but it still has to be a couple of miles away.
I turn to look how far we’ve come.
“Caronerax, look!” I point back to the place we spent the night.
“Our spies,” he says wearily. “They have friends on the other side.”
I can’t see anyone. But someone has lit a big fire in among the trees and put some smoky wood on it, and the result is definitely smoke signals. Three round, brown puffs of smoke rise slowly into the air, one big, one small, then one big. They are followed by two more, one a tiny dot and the other a rough triangle pointing down. That’s all.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist like Ashlynn or Mia to guess what that means: ‘Someone is coming your way. Two of them, one small and one big.’
Those signals can definitely be seen from the other shore we’re making for, beyond the little island.
“Pretty smart of them,” I say as I prod the depths of the swamp with the rod. “If they didn’t have friends on the other side, they would have to follow us on foot, and we could see them easily.”
“They are organized,” Caronerax says and walks out into the swamp. He sinks down almost to his knees. And after two steps, his foot comes back out without the boot.
He peers forlornly down into the quickly closing hole where his boot is now being filled with mud. “Being barefoot seems only all too appropriate,” he sighs and walks on. But it looks like this is better — his foot can splay their clawed toes out, and now it barely sinks an inch down.
After one more step, he’s lost the other boot as well, and that helps him