Cara raised one eyebrow.

 

“We’re going to be doing what now?” She scrubbed at her ear with a pinky finger. “Because I could’ve sworn you say that you’re going to put us in a broken chariot-wagon in the middle of the river—with no oars, rudder, or sail to speak of? Did you knock your head on a tree on the fall down here?”

 

The last words were spoken in a hiss. 

 

Dayton flinched, his smile receding slightly. “Do you have a better idea? I can’t fight a dragon, y’know.”

 

“Wyvern.”

 

“Giant scaly fire-breathing lizard, then!” Dayton threw up his hands in exasperation. “It doesn’t matter, because I can’t fight it, you can’t fight it, and walking—as you pointed out—is not an option. So we’re going to get this wooden tub into the water, we’re going to load it with our bags, and we’re going to float away to safety while the giant scaly fire-breathing lizard cracks the marrow of my abbot’s favorite mare!” 

 

He glared at her, chest heaving. “Or do you have a better idea?”

 

“No.” Cara sighed and clutched the wall of the chariot-wagon, resting beside her on its broken spokes. “Sorry, you’re right. Let’s get to it, then. You collect the bags, and I’ll sort through it for the important bits. 

 

“We can’t take everything with us, you know,” she added, eying the chariot-wagon dubiously. “Maybe half of the supplies, and most of the clothes. But I can sort that all once you’ve gotten all the bags in one place. Hurry, now. The wyvern ought to settle down to nap after a big meal like the horse, if we don’t make too much noise to remind him we’re down here.”

 

“I hope the mare sticks in his throat,” Dayton said, stooping to pick up a tossed sack by a wild huckleberry bush.

 

“Me, too.”

 

The collection of the tossed luggage didn’t take long, though sorting what would stay and what would accompany them was a longer process. 

 

Dayton flatly refused to abandon the heaviest piece of their cargo—the oak box he’d hidden in the stable dung heap—which forced them to abandon more food and clothing than Cara felt comfortable with, but there was no help for it.

 

Luggage sorted, the next step was to make the chariot-wagon somewhat water-worthy. 

 

The back end was as tall as the front, rising to the middle of Dayton’s chest, but gated. The seal it made was far from water tight, until Dayton spotted a patch of black pitch on a pine tree halfway up the slope. 

 

Cara watched, heart in her throat and stomach at her feet, as he slowly crept up the hill to retrieve a branch, the white of his undershirt glaring out from the rents in his sober Acolyte’s garb.

 

But he came back with the branch and his hands covered in sticky sap. The wyvern, he reported, had not made so much as a growl when he was working at the tree, though he could hear the caws of ravens at the horse’s corpse. 

 

Cara nodded. “Good. Let’s get this sealed up, then.”

 

In the end, it took most of the clothes Dayton had brought as spares and a second trip for more pine pitch to caulk the back end of the chariot-wagon enough to be waterproof. 

 

Dayton’s face boiled with stormclouds of temper by the time they were done, and Cara’s calm command was starting to slip.

 

“Any ideas on getting the thing in the river?” Dayton surveyed the humble craft, loaded with goods.

 

Cara hobbled over, leaning on the stick Dayton had found her as a makeshift crutch. Her shin throbbed with each movement. “I thought you were the one with the ideas.”

 

“I’m all out at the moment.”

 

Cara started a snarky reply, but bit her lip when she saw the exhausted slump of Dayton’s shoulders. 

 

He had actually figured out a way to get them safely out of this mess, at least for the moment. All she had done was get sliced in the leg and order him to sacrifice his best clothes to get drenched in pitch and soaked with water. 

 

She rubbed a knot in the grain of her crutch, thinking.

 

“Do you think you could push the chariot-wagon to the edge of the river?” she said at last. “It’s a slope here, and shouldn’t be too difficult.”

 

Dayton measured the distance with his eyes. “I think so, assuming you’re not already in it.”

 

Cara shook her head. “No, I’ll guard you with the sling for now.” She patted the now-full bag of river stones hanging from her belt. “One good thing about being stuck by a river, at least. We can get me into the boat, or whatever we’re calling it now, when you get to the river.”

 

And so, Dayton further impressed his guardian-Hero by not uttering so much as a word of complaint and pushing the makeshift water craft to the shallow eddy at the river’s edge. 

 

As it entered the water with a soft splash, Cara trained her gaze back up the slope to the road, her hand tightening around the leather thong of the sling.

 

But all she heard were the continued caws of crows and other carrion eaters, and the unhurried flow of the river—with the added splashes from Dayton as he simultaneously tried to hop into the boat while keeping it mostly onshore. 

 

Cara stifled a chuckle and limped to the boat, slapping Dayton’s behind just as he crested the edge of the wall in the boat. 

 

It got him over the final wooden section, but the force of Cara’s blow caused several things to happen at once. 

 

Dayton fell to the sole open section of the newly minted boat’s deck, thumping the planks with a hollow thonk that seemed amplified by the river.

 

The craft grated against the pebbles of the shore, beginning to loosen its anchorage to the semi-solid ground.

 

The caws of the crows ceased.

 

Cara froze.