“There has to be an easier way,” Madoc muttered under his breath, but nonetheless, he continued to gather leafy stalks of the plant Kieran had pointed out, laying them neatly in the basket Kaveri had made.

Nearby, Kaveri happily splashed about in the shallow water near the wooden bridge. Those quick clever paws found the most astonishing things in wet mud, sometimes things she ate when Lirit's phase meant she needed it, sometimes local coins or more interesting treasures that could be sold when they next reached civilization. A nomadic life was turning out to have complications that had never occurred to Tyrel.

Tyrel himself, fox-form, nosed around the edge of the more wooded and brushy area that bordered the river and road. Sometimes things were dropped near paths, too, not only over bridges. His memory for scents was very good, so once Kaveri or Kieran had shown him a plant that had some value, he could spot it again. Either way, it was some help, sometimes.

Grass, young maple, that bright green plant with the white flowers and acid scent, grass, young maple, prickly brush, old scent of rabbits...

Kieran's experience and Kaveri's various skills had so far been consistently better at providing goods and services they could sell than anything Tyrel or Madoc could offer. Between settlements, when Sanur was brighter than Talir, Madoc's bobcat form allowed him to hunt quite effectively. Tyrel, on the other hand, two-thirds of Madoc's size, was better suited to catching mice, although perhaps a rabbit or ground-nesting wildfowl if he got lucky. When Talir was bright, Kieran's lethal hunting skills were infinitely more efficient.

It was certainly a lesson in humility. At least over the winter, when Kieran had found them a couple of rooms to rent in a town, the brothers had been able to work off some of that frustration and contribute. Most of it had been unskilled physical labour, which was new and not entirely welcome, but they lacked the necessary local references to get short-term jobs as guards or armed escorts. Even in those, it was sometimes humiliating, when potential employers eyed the two of them and immediately assumed that Madoc was several years older and Tyrel lacked the strength and stamina to pull his own weight. One had clearly considered himself generous that he was willing to offer Tyrel the sort of clerical job that was normally done by women. Both had been too dispirited to even respond to sporadic flirtations by co-workers of both sexes, and it had nothing to do with the unfamiliar social dynamics.

Squirrel cache, bird droppings, white-flowered-thing, dead branch, mouse hole under branch, old scent of weasel...

Already deeply unsettled by the changes in his life, Tyrel found that his current level of dependency fed into his often morose reflections. People on this side of the Valdet River knew about the forts and cities, far more than the forts knew about them. To them, the forts were filled with belligerent thugs and the cities were amoral and avaricious, all existing in a mutually-parasitic co-dependent mire. It wasn't a perspective Tyrel could really refute.

Not long after they'd crossed the Valdet, they'd been in a tavern to have a hot meal and a bath and sleep in a bed, paid for by the sale of one of the bits of jewellery he and Madoc had brought from Dunnval. It had been too crowded to find anywhere to sit together. One of Tyrel's neighbours at the table, a jovial and outgoing man whose clothes and build suggested that he enjoyed luxury but kept physical exertion limited, had begun a conversation not only with Tyrel but others nearby as well. When they'd finally gotten as far as introductions, the jovial man had taken Tyrel's as a hilarious joke: Tyrel wasn't looking to start a fight despite the limited elbow room and intermittent jostling, he was having a friendly conversation without bragging or threats, so he couldn't possibly really come from the forts. Another had conceded that it was a good way to advertise skill with weapons, if he had it, but warned that it would probably backfire.

Tyrel never admitted again to where he'd been born. But the memory replayed itself constantly, and the sting never seemed to fade.

Here, the forts and cities were considered a lesson in what not to do. They had no collective name for themselves, but others called the area Plegamond, which translated into one local language roughly as uncivilized. The term didn't include the Forest and its forager tribes.

Owl pellets, white-flowered-thing, young maple, old human blood, linen with old human scents, mouse piss, big shiny active beetle...

Kieran kept reassuring them that they'd learn more skills, that they had plenty of time, but whether that much time was really a blessing, Tyrel hadn't yet decided. And why Kaveri didn't outright hate both him and Madoc was an absolute...

Wait, what?

Tyrel jerked his thoughts back to the task at hand, but it took him a moment to track down the source of the smells. The overhanging boughs of the mature maples blocked Talir's light here. He ventured far enough towards open ground to be able to see Talir and change back to human, and returned.

The linen, carefully extricated from the dirt and leaves, turned out to be a handkerchief, very fine quality but now badly stained by exposure. He'd detected faded but still perceptible smells of a woman and, even more faintly, a man. Probably Kieran could pull more detail than that from the scents.

Near it, not deliberately buried but with more leaves and dirt drifted halfway over it, was metal. Unearthed, the gleam of gold showed through the soil covering the hilt, all the more yellow in his faintly topaz-tinted night vision. Most of the blade was harmlessly dull, but it bore a lethally sharp point with edges for a finger's width up each side, and there was no obvious sign of rust on the polished steel. No cross-guard at all, and the hilt was so intricately worked it didn't even look like a hilt anymore, no good at all for grip or control. Not all the stains on the blade were from lying out here, though. Useless as it looked, he'd smelled blood traces on it quite distinctly.

He took both down to the water's edge. Kaveri looked up and came over to investigate, chittering inquisitively as she sniffed at them.

“Found them in the trees,” Tyrel said. “Whoever owns them is probably not coming back now, they were underneath enough leaves and dirt that they've been here for a while.”

Kaveri changed back to human, kneeling in the shallows, currently in her preferred next-to-nothing wrapped loincloth and halter. “I think you're right. And that's a wonderful find. There's always someone willing to buy rags, but that knife looks like it's worth a lot.” She gave him a quick one-armed hug.

“It might be best to wait a town or two before we try to sell it,” Madoc said, joining them. “Just in case it's recognized and someone wants to reclaim it. Our word that you found it won't mean much against a local saying it was stolen. Well, clean it up, and let's take a look. Unless you want to try to use whatever smells are on it to track down whoever left it behind?” The final question's tone was unmistakably sardonic, and probably directed more at Kaveri than Tyrel.

“Or whoever got stabbed with it,” Tyrel said. “There's blood on the blade. You'd probably only get one shot on sheer surprise, but I bet this little toy could put a hole in someone that'd get their attention.”

“True. It's long enough to kill, if you hit just the right spot and had some luck on your side.”

“For someone not a fighter,” Kaveri said thoughtfully, “it might give them a chance to get away if they were attacked. You could hide the blade of that in any of a few places, especially in upper-class women's styles around here, and it would just look like an ornament.”

“The other thing smells like a woman, mostly,” Tyrel said.

“I don't suppose we'll ever know what happened to whoever it used to belong to or whoever the blood belongs to.”

“At this point, who cares?” Madoc asked. “Poking around would probably get us no answers and a lot of trouble.”

Kaveri sighed. “Agreed, although it would be fascinating to understand the story behind it. Kieran said there's a trade city associated with this garden we're on our way to, and that should be far enough away for no questions. Well, let's clean it up and see it properly.”

The chance find had the potential to bring them a substantial amount of ready coin, which made travelling more comfortable and more interesting than simply staying out of sight and moving steadily east. So why didn't Tyrel feel any better?