The square white stone pilrs marking this Quincunx site were more or less twins of the first set, although the red dot among the bck was the one on the bottom instead of the right. And, of course, the surroundings were different.
“Is there a shelter near here too?” I asked Serru.
She nodded. “There is, that way.” She gestured farther ahead. “It has all the usual, we’d be fine there for much longer than I expect this to take. Just be sure to stay on the road and don’t take shortcuts, and you’ll find us.”
In the Forest, shelters were hard to see if their clearing and garden weren’t right on the edge of the road, and water sources didn’t always allow for that. That meant they had short roads and signs simir to those of settlements, except that they were rounded squares and bright orange painted in bck with two stylized images, a tent in the lower left and a shelter in the upper right.
Well, at least my friends would be reasonably comfortable while they waited for me.
“You, um, should probably do this as your real self,” Aryennos said. “Just a hunch, based on what I’ve read about higher magic and the Quincunx.”
“Figures.” I gave Serru an impulsive hug first; I was considerably taller, but she snuggled into it without the slightest sign of reluctance or discomfort. “Try not to kill Aryennos before I get back.”
“I’m the least of his worries,” she said drily, but she smiled. “We’ll both be here waiting. It’ll be fine, we’ll see you in a couple of cycles, and you’ll be a step closer to home. Off you go.”
I took a deep breath, and nodded.
On two feet, I followed the narrower forked road past the Quincunx pilrs.
It didn’t look noticeably different from the road we’d been on for the past couple of days. There was still the same flora and fauna I’d been observing and asking questions about.
I hummed Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ to myself as I walked, as usual just going with whatever song happened to come to mind and felt right.
I wasn’t expecting to come across anyone else, however.
In the middle of the road, but not moving, was a wagon. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Romani caravans, or maybe of the wagons in Western movies that snake-oil salesmen used—rge, with an arched top, and windows, all brightly painted.
There were two equines hitched to it, horselike but with long ears, so maybe mules? I really didn’t know much about the subject. One was a dull antique gold, the other dark reddish-brown. The gold one stood pcidly; the dark one’s muzzle nearly touched the road, its head hung so low, and the ears were limply back.
A grey-haired man was on one knee beside the dark mule, stroking its neck and murmuring to it reassuringly.
Obviously, something was wrong.
No matter how badly I wanted to get to my destination, it would still be there.
“Hello? Are you okay? Do you need help?”
The man looked up sharply, and a broad smile of relief spread across his face. “Ah, stranger, your timing couldn’t be better! One of my friends, here, seems to have eaten something she shouldn’t have, and it’s not sitting well. I could make her something that’ll help her, but I don’t have everything I need for it. I don’t like leaving her long enough to find the ingredients I need. Do you have a little time?”
I kept my sigh to myself. “Absolutely. You’re not going anywhere until this gets sorted out, and as my friend Grace says, animals suffer just like people do. What do you need?”
“There are six different ingredients, and they should all be present in this area. One of them is a handful of clean sand. I also need frost nettle, blue watercress, chameleon ginger, and honey spider. Two of each but three of the spider. Plus one shaggy snowcap mushroom. Oh, and as much applegrass grain as you can find.”
I knew all of those, they were on Serru’s list of useful items she could sell.
“You’re sure about the shaggy snowcap? That’s the bad one. Fringed milkcap is the safe one.” Serru had given us a highly detailed lesson on how to tell those apart under absolutely any conditions, and demonstrated at every opportunity.
“Only bad when not used properly. I’m sure.”
This was going to take time. Applegrass grain was simple and common, but it was the only one. Honey spider was a fungus that grew up in trees. Chameleon ginger grew alone, intolerant of others of its own species, and digging up the taproot wasn’t easy: it ran deep and its spindly little tendrils anchored it with surprising tenacity. I’d need a stream to find the watercress. And picking frost nettles was tricky, if you didn’t want to get stung by a million little prickers that felt remarkably like frostbite.
I really wanted to get to the Quincunx.
Wait, maybe I could just heal the mule directly?
I gestured to bring up my dispy, but it flickered and vanished. Frowning, I tried again, and again it glitched and shut itself down.
Maybe I was just too close to the Quincunx site and it was causing interference.
Serru, I knew, had at least most of that list on her, but she was quite some way back and I wasn’t sure that leaving the area, crossing back and forth through those stone pilrs, would be a good idea—I had no clue whether they were simply markers or actually defined some special space, but the way my magic was acting, I was starting to suspect the tter.
And, luck being what it was, I had none of those things in my own bag. I must have given them all to Serru because they were of no immediate use and she’d be the one able to sell them for their proper value.
I resigned myself to having to do this the slow way, nodded, and set off.
It felt like it took hours.
I found a stream and followed it until I had the watercress, and an extra for good measure. Unsure how much sand he needed, or why, I scooped up three generous handfuls when I found a sandy spot at the edge of the stream. I found a rge patch of applegrass but it wasn’t in seed; I had to keep looking until I found one that was at the right stage, and when I did, I gathered half a dozen handfuls. The first honey spider I found was too high up a tree for me to reach with my staff, so I went on, but found only one that was lower, so I ended up climbing trees to get at two of the higher ones. Digging up the first ginger left me tired and soil-streaked; I almost didn’t want to succeed at finding another. I picked the frost nettle by taking my work shirt out of my bag and using it to protect one hand while I cut the base of the nettle with the knife in my other hand. The shaggy milkcap that kept Forest mushroom fans on their toes was actually the easiest of the lot. I finally found that st chameleon ginger, wearily dug it up, and made my way back in what I was fairly sure was the direction of the road.
It wasn’t, and after a couple more tries, I spent a long moment just standing still taking deep breaths to convince myself I wasn’t lost.
But I found it.
Also, I heard a mule make a loud raucous sound I assumed was a bray. That helped. A lot.
I could see what Serru meant about people getting lost in the Greenelk Forest, though.
I returned to the man at the wagon, and began to unload my finds, neatly arranged, on the narrow band of grass along the edge of the road.
He brightened. “Oh, well done! I can make something with this that’ll have her back to her normal feisty self in no time. Just a moment.” He patted the mule on the side of her neck, and ducked around into the wagon from the back, returning with a broad round... I didn’t know what to call it. A tray, maybe, with a shallow lip around the outer edge? The metal had a yellow gleam that I would normally have thought was gold, but that thing would weigh much more than he could carry that easily, if it was solid gold. On it were a stone mortar and pestle, and a prosaic wooden cutting board and knife, and a fairly rge wooden bowl.
He set the tray on the ground next to my collection. Once he moved the other items, I could see the inner surface of the tray; it had symbols all over it, circles and lines and other things, inid in a wild rainbow of vivid colours.
The handful of sand went in the exact centre, in a slightly concave circle, with stray grains nudged in to join the rest.
With a few swift cuts, he severed the first ginger root into sections and tossed them into the mortar. “Grind that for me, would you?” He held it in my direction.
Too curious to protest, I obeyed, watching while he deftly diced the honey spider up small, sliced the nettles into thin ribbons, roughly chopped the cress, and quartered the shaggy milkcap. After a moment, he checked on what I was doing, nodded, scraped the mushed ginger onto the tray at one precise location, and added the other one to the mortar for me to do the same again. The other ingredients he pced on the tray just as meticulously, except the applegrass grain heads. Most of them he beat carefully over the bowl so the seeds fell into it. Once the final ginger was added, he inspected the whole thing, nudging every ingredient into order if so much as a tiny fragment had ventured out of pce.
Then he held a hand over the tray and closed his eyes briefly, forehead furrowed in what I thought was concentration.
Light flickered and shimmered over the tray, and everything on it disappeared.
What remained was a single gssy bottle of blue-green liquid.
“How do you get a mule to drink a potion?”
“That’s where the applegrass comes in. She’d be on her deathbed before she could resist that, and possibly not even then. All I have to do is pour this in the bowl with the applegrass...” He did so, and swirled it around between his hands. “And then offer it to her.” He walked over to the stricken mule and set the bowl on the ground, practically right under her muzzle. While he fed the other grain heads to the golden mule, we both watched the darker one snuffle at the bowl’s contents, then begin to eat.
When she finished, she raised her head, ears erect and facing forward. The gold mule nuzzled her.
“Good girl,” the man said warmly. “It’ll take her a little time to recover completely, but she’ll be right as rain, now. Thank you, stranger.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “That was... educational. And interesting. I’m gd I could help.”
“Good luck on your journey.”
“Thanks. You too.”
Well, so, I’d done my good deed for the day. Now I could get on with reaching the Quincunx.
It didn’t actually take me much longer to reach it. In fact, it was a wonder I hadn’t stumbled right into it while gathering pnts.
The surrounding scenery was different, but this was the same as the first one. Two head-height rough, un-cloned stones fnking the road, check. A rge circle of simir stones, check. A stairway disappearing downwards underneath a sort of structure made of rge ftter stones, check.
What, I wondered, would this one do to me? The first one had given me a centaur form and a HUD with healing magic. This one could do anything.
I didn’t bother fishing around in my bag for my lumina stone, just trusted that it would have the same softly-luminous walls as the first one and that there would be nothing to run into on the way.
As before, I found the way forward halted by a barrier of unfinished stone. I remembered the words on it:
Speak your goal and enter. Pass this door and be forever changed.
Well, that was old news.
I id my hand in the indentation meant for that, and said, “I want to go home.”
The sb of rock tilted away from me at gcial speed, with that deep, almost subsonic grating sound, until it formed a ramp angled upwards. Past a curtain of fine leafy flowering vines I could see light.
It admitted me to a circur room.
This one wasn’t white and gold; it was dusty rose and indigo blue and bright copper. The floor was all tiles painted in a multitude of patterns that were predominantly those colours; the rugs on the floor and the tapestries on the walls echoed them, in every possible shade, barely-visible to near-bck. I saw wide backless couches with scrolled ends, or possibly just upholstered beds, scattered around between an abundance of wooden shelves filled with books and gss bottles.
In the centre was a single pedestal table that appeared to be gzed ceramic like the floor tiles. Rugs surrounded it.
I approached the table.
There were two columns of square tiles. They fnked a barred recess that held a golf-ball-sized sphere of brilliant light. That was all.
I studied them in perplexity. There must be a reason, something I was supposed to do. The column on the left was a mixture of body parts, clothing, what might be food, something that could be an empty bowl; the one on the right was made up of pnts. The tiles were rge enough, despite their number, that I could see the multi-coloured images clearly.
Was I supposed to match them up?
The tiles didn’t move, but when I touched the tile with rosemint, then the one that showed a teapot, a glowing line appeared linking them. That was Serru’s favourite tea, and apparently it was extremely popur; while it was an unfamiliar fvour, it was certainly growing on me. I was certain that that was the correct match for that one, at least.
All right, so apparently I needed to find the partners of all of these. The left-column symbols must be suggesting the difference between dyes, medical uses, culinary uses, and... wait, Serru had said that goldenglow could be fermented and the result used to paint pottery before it was fired to give it a warm yellow colour, that must be the empty yellow bowl, not what it held but the bowl itself. And fiery vender could be dug up and the roots cut small and boiled into a slippery goo that made a very effective all-purpose soap, but boiled thicker and mixed with misty mallow it would cool into a solid that was easier to carry while travelling...
Apparently I’d picked up a lot more from helping Serru than I’d realized.
I tapped the st pair with my heart in my throat. What would happen if I got them wrong?
I didn’t find out. The bars withdrew to either side, freeing the tiny sun to float upwards, pausing at my eye level.
I took a deep breath, hoping I was ready for this, and reached out to cup my hand around it.
Skin met sphere and it grounded itself through me.
I looked down at my glowing hand, the rose-tinted light spreading up my arm and into the rest of my body even more quickly than my pounding heart could have driven it. It filled me and then some, the heat was beyond feverish but without discomfort, and while I probably should have been scared, there was no room for that.
The instant before I passed out, I knew I was going to, and hoped the dreams would be kind ones.
