By the afternoon of our first day walking, we had departed the grassy inclines north of Enkel Kanindal and entered the pine woods; still on gentle hills, fortunately.

  We followed a path. It was not a worn path, any longer, although it had been, long ago, even long before the Pestilence. Now it was more of just a gap in the trees, although in many spots middle-aged trees had grown up in it. Freydis led the way, with Caiside behind her and me in the rear.

  Caiside did well keeping up with Freydis, despite having to swing on the crutches.

  “Caiside, where are you from originally?” I asked.

  “Far to the west, and south. An ocean city. Fleethaven, it is called.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Near Blygra Bay.”

  “That’s so.”

  “And what are the numbers there?”

  “The same as everywhere,” she said. “Rebounding nicely now, from what they were before I was born. But they had bottomed out for the same decades, before that.”

  “Is this your first time up here in the highlands?”

  “It is. Although Slade told me much about them. I feel like I know them. And it does not look so different here than Wastemoor; although here there is not such a shadow always looming.”

  “Do you mean a figurative shadow, or literal?”

  “Figurative. The Mage always monitoring every movement, dispatching her minions to harass outsiders, that sort of thing.”

  “I see.”

  “Although it is also,” she added, “significantly less – wasty.”

  “Wasty.”

  “Yes. More green here, less waste.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “But long ago these hills were more alive, Slade told me.”

  “That’s so. There were many people here, in the highlands. A number of villages, with these paths and tracks and roads here leading up to them. They say even Enkel Kanindal was far larger, then, with people coming down to do business here. There were enough people around that other denizens stayed away. Even firbolgs kept their distance, if you can believe that. That’s what the old stories say.

  “The most prosperous town was far up there. Forestaende Fall, it was. It was named after a small mountainside waterfall – at first. There’s a song about it:”

  Forestaende Fall,

  a sparkling mountain town!

  A thousand bustling burghers

  who seldom would come down!

  Nearly all they needed,

  the Forestaends could take

  from their dale meadows,

  or their beloved lake.

  The lake had turquoise waters,

  a little island, and

  rock- and largemouth bass,

  and with a beach of sand.

  Even Elves would hike up

  to see the alpine jewel;

  The Forestaends all built their town

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  around that famous pool.

  But then one day one burgher

  walking westward amid rains,

  stumbled on a rock face

  which was showing off gold grains.

  And suddenly the lake and meadows

  of his simple town

  Lacked, for this young burgher,

  and he hewed that rock face down.

  Others joined and soon they all

  were breaking rocks for gold.

  Problem was, the Death Crags Dwarves

  had claimed that land from old.

  Death Crags asked politely

  that the townsfolk let it be;

  but the Forestaends kept cracking

  any veins that they could see.

  “No Trespass” signs went up next,

  and a ring of boundary stones.

  But men with picks kept hauling

  the ore back to their homes.

  Dwarves had words with diggers then,

  and some would flash an axe;

  But the Forestaends ignored them,

  kept on working; turned their backs.

  And then the Dwarves went silent,

  left the Forestaends alone

  to chop the hills in peace and rip

  the gold ore from the stone.

  The villagers turned proud then,

  for they thought that they had won.

  They dug that pit into a mine

  from sun to moon to sun.

  And then one morning came

  and people walked out at day’s break

  as usual, but they saw then

  they no longer had a lake.

  The Death Crags Dwarves had bored a tunnel,

  drained it from beneath;

  and all that water spilled out

  far downhill into the heath.

  The burghers had to move down.

  All their gold did them no good,

  with just a bare rock basin

  where their giving lake once stood.

  So that’s how Forestaende Fall

  earned its name again.

  It once was for a small cascade,

  but now is for its end.

  We allowed ourselves a fire. We were no longer on land that anyone in town claimed, nor even visited very often, but nor were we into the acknowledged territory of the Dwarves, or the real wilds; so we weren’t concerned about drawing attention. We had brought dried venison, but we warmed it up. We warmed up rye cakes also.

  “Can you show me that Elven knife your mother gave you?” Caiside asked me.

  I pulled it out. Freydis carried a similar one and pulled it from its sheath too. They were about as long as my elbow to fingertips. They had some curve to them, and bore engraved Elven letters.

  “How did you obtain those?”

  “Our grandfather,” Freydis said. “He traveled down to Umelthas as a young man. That was when they had put out the call for helpers to dig the canal across their peninsula. He came back with four of these, and some other items; a necklace, a bound bestiary.”

  “Rather a healthier way to obtain such things than how Slade did it,” I said. I held up the knife to catch the gleam of the firelight.

  “Very handsome,” Caiside said. “But I would say it is – more than a kitchen knife, but less than a sword.”

  “Indeed. Just the way we want it.”

  “We won’t be fighting off any crowds of adversaries with those.”

  “We wouldn’t be fighting off crowds of adversaries no matter what we carried,” I said. “Anyone we come across – kobolds, dunters, Dwarves – will either be in a group, or will be able to gather one quickly. And as for Dwarves, if they feel like fighting, we wouldn’t be able to defeat even two of them, certainly, and probably not one. And if we see a firbolg – we either reason with it, or run. And you won’t be running very well.”

  “And if we come across a hill troll,” Freydis added, “it would be just run, no matter what we were carrying.”

  “But we’re not completely unarmed,” I added, “and if we happen to meet some lone troublemaker – a drifter, something like that; probably more likely to be another human than one of these other creatures we’re talking about – we won’t be forced to just, you know, throw jerky at them.”

  “So. Those knives seem to be – right in the middle,” Caiside said. “Enough to stay out of a fight, but not fool yourselves you could win one.”

  “A fair description,” I answered.

  John Bauer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons