The first few days of escorting were entirely uneventful. We took a smaller side road until we reached an old trail called the Urcia Road. Once upon a time, it had been paved with a layer of cement and flagstones, but it had long since cracked, and weeds sprouted up everywhere. Grass encroached along the edges.

  After the first day, we left the forest. Plains of pampas grass and fluffy dandelions rolled across the horizon, and it reminded me of snow. As best I could tell from the angle of the sun, we were travelling almost directly north now, with a slight west bend. But we were still close to the front lines, and we had to stay vigilant.

  There were a few other wagons on the road. Most were Greenway merchants, heading farther west as the season latened, aiming for central Gate. On the second day, we encountered a wandering bard, and Shave flicked him a copper sceat—much to Luiger’s displeasure.

  Every evening, we made camp off to the side of the road. Trench and Elf made a fire, and we were assigned watches. The mercenaries kept their own watches, but Shave didn’t trust them to do a good job of it.

  We were always in pairs, and conveniently, I never ended up with Ticks.

  I’d never seen the ‘Lady Sage’ that we were supposed to be protecting, not even once. Supposedly, she’d snuck out during the night to do her business, but I never saw her or heard her, and I was pretty good at keeping watch. At least, I hoped. I never brought it up with Shave or the others, because I didn’t want them to think I was shirking my duties.

  In the mornings, the other Dupes always woke sooner than the mercenaries and Lady Sage, so we trained as much as we could while one of us prepared breakfast. I got plenty of splinters in my hands, but I didn’t want to fall behind. Hell, I was still catching up.

  Likewise, I figured I needed to work on other skills, too. I had to be close to getting novice [Spearmanship] with how much I’d been practicing, but I was going to need other skills if I wanted a proper merge. However that worked.

  When it came to breakfast, I always tried to help with cutting. Knifework had to be useful. I tried to help with gathering food, and in the afternoons, I practically begged Shave to take me hunting with him. He finally agreed.

  I wasn’t sure which of those skills I was going to get first, and I wasn’t too concerned. As long as I got something.

  On the third day, Shave let me take hold of the hunting bow he’d brought with him. “Try taking a shot,” he said.

  It was a longbow with a tight string, and it took a lot more effort to draw back the arrow than I initially expected. Shave gave me corrections on where to put my fingers, how to hold the arrow, and how my stance should be. I fired a shot, aiming at a tree right in front of us, but the arrow went wide and whistled away into the woods.

  A half hour later, after stopping every few minutes to practice shooting, we found a deer. It was almost a regular deer, except its antlers were covered in fluffy dandelion seeds. It was growing them.

  “Snowhead deer,” Shave whispered. “Take the shot.”

  I held the bow still. He was trusting me with dinner?

  At least Ticks wasn’t here to be mad if I failed. I took a deep breath, lined up the shot, then focussed solely on the deer. I was about to release the arrow, but…

  But it flinched. It hopped to the side, bounding over a fallen aspen log. There had once been a copse of trees here. Shave and I ducked down more, hiding in the tall grass.

  “Don’t focus on just the deer,” Shave said. “You have to worry about more than just it.”

  “I’m not sure if I’m meant to be an archer,” I replied.

  “No one’s meant for anything. It’s what you choose to do that matters.”

  “Funny, coming from a Dupe.”

  “No, lad,” Shave countered. “Just because we were designed as soldiers doesn’t mean that’s all we are. We may have a class assigned to us, but the wonderful thing about the System is that your class can evolve.”

  “If you improve your tier enough, right?”

  “Something to work toward.”

  “But isn’t it at Silver where I get a class evolution?”

  “Something to dream about, then.”

  I took a deep breath, then stood up slowly again, looking over the grass. This time, I took a wider range of focus, thinking about where I wanted the arrow to go, where the wind blew. Instead of just keeping a close eye on the deer and letting everything else fade, I considered the wind, how it made the grass ripple. I tried to keep everything as sharp as I could in my mind with the limitations of my eyes. Everything had to be in frame, not just my target.

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  A gust was coming. The deer always moved when a gust of wind made the grass behind it ripple.

  So I aimed in front of the deer, where I knew it would run. As soon as the wind rippled over the plain, I loosed the arrow. It thudded into the deer’s shoulder, crippling it, and we ran over. Shave drove his spear into its neck and put it out of its misery.

  I handed him back the bow and said, “I was aiming for its eye.”

  “You’re lucky you hit it at all. That arrow wouldn’t have hit at all if the deer hadn’t moved.”

  I grinned. “Or I anticipated the movement.”

  Shave only raised his eyebrows.

  “So…” I asked. “Do snowhead deer drop Presences?”

  “Sometimes. But not often, and we need to get back to the wagon. It’s not worth the effort, seeing how this deer would’ve been no better than a copper. Even if you got a presence for it, it would only be a tiny fraction of a tier worth of Presence.”

  “I see…” I said.

  “So come on.”

  I hoisted the dead deer over my shoulder, straining with effort, then lugged it along as I chased after Shave. We reunited with the wagon farther up the road and stopped to make camp. I dropped the deer down. Ticks would butcher it for us while everyone else trained.

  I itched to check my status. But we didn’t even have a reading slate with us, and according to Elf, a basic slate like that would cost ten gold sceats to ship from Homecamp. You couldn’t just buy one elsewhere, because no other magic users actually needed slates or could use them. I’d just have to make do for the time being.

  It was on the fourth day that I caught my first glimpse of Lady Sage. The curtain at the back of the wagon parted, revealing a slice of a fair-skinned face, a freckled cheek, and a blue eye. She said, “Luiger, I require a progress report.” Her voice was incredibly soft, and I almost didn’t hear her. It was a miracle that the mercenary captain did over the clomping of his horse’s hooves.

  “We are a week out, my lady,” he replied.

  “It is the tenth of Cuttingmonth,” she replied. “We must be at Castle Urcia by the eighteenth.”

  “Yes, my lady. We will arrive in time.”

  “I don’t like how close we are cutting it.”

  “Sorry, my lady. Shall we hasten?”

  “Y—yes. Hasten.” She snapped the curtain at the back of the wagon shut, and I didn’t see any more of her that day.

  On the fifth day, at noon, we reached a marshy fenland with a wooden boardwalk, which wagons could cross with ease provided they travelled single-file.

  I kept up the rear, but I kept glancing behind me. It was just a feeling, but the road was awfully empty. Every day before, there had been a few riders who approached from behind. Today, there was nothing.

  And then I saw a trail of dust. It rose behind us along the Urcia road, but it was too far to the east to have come directly from the road. It rose above the dry fields at the edge of the marsh. “What’s that?” I called out to Shave.

  “Nothing but a cloud,” Luiger grumbled.

  “There are three trails,” Romance said. “And offroad.”

  “Keep a lookout behind us,” Shave told me. “Weapons out.”

  “Could it be orcs?” I asked.

  “I’d say so,” Shave said.

  “If those are truly orcs, then you’ll listen for my orders,” Luiger demanded.

  “Yes, captain,” Shave replied placatingly. I got the sense that when push came to shove, it was actually Shave who we needed to listen to.

  As we crossed the boardwalk, I glanced over my shoulder every third step. The dust trails grew closer and closer, until they stopped abruptly. Whatever was following us had reached the boardwalk.

  I squinted. A horse’s hooves would be clomping, wouldn’t they? But I couldn’t hear anything.

  After three more seconds, six dark shapes came into view behind us. They sprinted down the boardwalk, gaining speed. The summer sun beating down on the boardwalk made the air ripple, and the heat was making my head swim, but I could still make out that something was gaining ground.

  “Shave! Behind us!” I called.

  “Squad, halt!” Shave called.

  The other Dupes and I stopped, but the wagon kept rolling until Luiger said, “Stop.” It scraped to a halt on the boardwalk.

  A moment later, Luiger snapped his horse’s reins, and his mount bounded over our heads. I had to duck to avoid a hoof striking me in the back of the head, and later, lean to the side to see around the horse.

  There were six orcs mounted on the backs of wolves— No, foxes. The foxes had matted black and gray fur, and piercings covered the sides of their shaved muzzles. A bar ran through their nose, which the orcs had attached reins to, and I pitied the beasts. They yipped and howled as the orcs whipped them.

  “Orc raiders,” Shave called. “I need two lines, three men each. Levi, get up here with me. Trench, you too. You two have the spears—your job is to skewer the foxes.”

  “Enough, Dupe,” Luiger snapped. “Spread out. I don’t want anything reaching Lady Sage. We’ll have more chances to kill the foxes if we spread out. Call it insurance.”

  “You don’t need insurance if we kill them immediately," Shave argued. “We will fight better closer together.”

  “Pshh. You six are just Dupes. I won’t put the Lady’s fate up to your meagre abilities. Spread out.”

  The two other mercenaries pushed through our half-formed line, joining their captain at the front. One of them sneered at me, but I did my best to ignore him.

  I just took a tight grip on my spear. Reluctantly, Shave said, “Follow the captain’s orders. If you see a brother who needs help, help him. We’ll pull through this.”

  “Yes, sarge,” Ticks and the others called out.

  I whirled my spear into an upright position and took a wide stance, then spread out, moving forward along the boardwalk until I was behind one of the mercenaries.

  It was now or never. For the moment, I just had to stay alive.