Chapter 67-Vera-kinda long? (Patreon)

Think I got the tone right one this one. Let me know what you think. There will be one more Vera chapter tomorrow.

The Silverfin Lake region smelled different from the basin.

Back home the air carried pine resin and turned earth and the particular sharpness of stone broken recently enough it still had edge to it. Out here, past the mountain line and three weeks of terrain Harold had called varied in his notes — which turned out to mean nothing like what you're used to — the air came off the lake in slow rolls that smelled like deep water and green things rotting pleasantly into mud. Warm for the altitude. Humid in a way that made leather straps stick to skin and bowstrings feel wrong in the hand.

Lynn had complained about the bowstrings for two solid days.

"It's not the bowstring," Maggs said on the second day, not looking up from her blade.

"The bowstring is—"

"It's the humidity. Adjust your draw weight."

"You can't just say 'adjust' like that fixes—"

"Try a lighter pull on the arrow. Test it."

Lynn tested it. She stopped complaining. They'd all adjusted in their own ways, Dorrin wrapping his grips tighter, Tresh oiling his spear shaft every other night, Vera recalibrating her javelin throws by feel across a week of morning drills. That was the Silverfin region. You either adjusted or you went back, and nobody on this team was going back.

They'd been here five weeks.

*

The first week had been the hawk, and finding them had been the easy part.

Harold's list was specific: Stonebreaker hawk. Bone-plating on the ventral surface. Possible armor penetration perk on kill — not guaranteed. He'd underlined it twice, which from Harold meant I'm not joking and I don't have time to explain why.

The first hawk had left Dorrin with three talon gouges along his forearm and a look on his face like a man reassessing several life choices. The second had driven Tresh into a tree. The third had nearly taken Lynn's drawing arm off before she put an arrow through its eye from four meters — close enough that the fletching had blood on it when she pulled it back.

They'd stood around that third hawk for a moment in the particular silence of people recalculating their situation.

"Harold said 'possible,'" Dorrin said finally, pressing his sleeve against the gouges. "He did not say difficult."

"He implied we were capable of it," Tresh said.

"That's not the same—"

"It's the same."

"He could have said difficult."

"Then you'd have complained before we left instead of after," Vera said.

Dorrin opened his mouth. Closed it. Went back to looking at the hawk. The plating on its chest was dense layered calcium, almost structural, and it had deflected his spear on the first two birds like he was pushing against stone.

"What are we doing wrong," Lynn said. She had her hand pressed to her draw arm, checking for damage. It was a real question, not a complaint — she'd asked it with her chin down, eyes on the hawk's chest, already working the problem.

Vera noticed. She noticed because a month ago Lynn would have said what is that thing even made of and moved on. This was different. Three hawks in and she was asking the right question.

"The center is solid," Vera said. "Every hit goes there and bounces. We need to find the edge."

"Maggs," Tresh said, "you've been quiet."

Maggs crouched at the edge of the hawk's body and traced the ridge line of the plating from center outward, her finger following the structure. She didn't respond to Tresh. She did this for a full minute while the rest of them waited.

"The deflection is worst at the center," she said, without looking up. "The edges have less layering. They'll hold less."

"That's what Vera said," Dorrin said.

"I said it with more detail."

Tresh snorted. "She's right, that's more detail."

Maggs stood, looked at the hawk one more time, and went to sharpen her blades.

Vera watched her go and felt something click into place. She'd been approaching the hawks as a direct problem — how hard, how fast, what angle. Maggs had approached it as an architectural problem. The same question from a different direction.

She made a note to write that in her journal that night.

*

Maggs got her perk on the fifth hawk, both blades driving upward at the angle she'd described — catching the ridge of the plating rather than the center, riding it, punching through into the tissue beneath. The system notification arrived before the bird finished falling.

PERK ACQUIRED — Armor Penetration (Uncommon): 

Bladed attacks against plated or hardened targets have a 8% increased chance of finding gaps or weaknesses in armor.

"How did you—" Tresh started.

"The edges," Maggs said, as though that fully explained it.

"You said that. I need a bit more than—"

"You didn't listen."

Tresh looked at Dorrin. Dorrin looked back at Tresh with the expression of a man who had grown up with Maggs on the team and had made his peace with this exact dynamic.

They spent another nine days getting the rest. Vera took hers on the eighth, driving a javelin along the angle Maggs had found, and felt the perk settle into her like a door clicking into a frame she hadn't known was there. Lynn went last, on the eleventh day, third attempt at the specific shot — arrow angled up and in, lower plate from below — and when the notification came she sat down in the dirt and stared at nothing.

Dorrin went over. "I'm fine," she said.

"You can sit."

"I know I can sit, Dorrin, I'm sitting."

He sat beside her anyway, which was a Dorrin thing to do, and they stared at the dead hawk together until Tresh started field-dressing it and the smell made sitting there considerably less appealing.

"Eleven days," Lynn said quietly, before she stood up.

"Yeah," Dorrin said.

"Next time Harold puts something on a list, I'm asking how many days."

"He wouldn't tell you."

"I'd ask anyway."

Dorrin looked at her sideways. "Would knowing have changed anything?"

Lynn thought about it. "No," she said. "But it would've let me complain more accurately."

*

That night Vera sat on a flat stone at the edge of camp and wrote in her field notes by firelight while the others talked behind her. She could hear Tresh explaining to Dorrin, for apparently the second time, exactly why the hawk's plating wasn't structurally that different from the scale-rats back in the basin, and Dorrin disagreeing with the specifics of the comparison in a way that was mostly just Dorrin keeping Tresh talking so he didn't have to sit with the quiet. Lynn was asleep. Maggs was sharpening. The rhythm of the whetstone had been the backdrop of every camp since the first week, consistent as a heartbeat.

Vera wrote: Day 18 away. Hawk perks complete. Five for five, eleven days. Maggs found the method on day two; I should have asked her to look at it first. Noted.

She paused, then added: Dorrin took the worst of the early hits without once making it about his hit count. Lynn asked the right question on day three. Tresh talks too much when he's nervous and he was nervous the whole first week, which I don't think he knew I noticed. Maggs doesn't get nervous. Or she processes it somewhere nobody sees.

She closed the notebook.

Tomorrow was the fish.

*

The Silverfin lake held a species with no name in any language any of them knew — Harold's notes called them silverscale runners with a footnote that said local name, probably wrong, check with whoever you trade with — and they moved through the shallows with a speed that didn't look like fleeing. It looked like a creature that moved fast the way some people breathed, direction changes so fluid they looked like water redirecting itself.

The first morning, Lynn had stood in the shallows with a net for forty minutes.

"It went through the net," she announced to everyone on the bank, water up to her shins, holding the net up with an expression of genuine offense.

"How," Tresh said.

"I don't know how, it was there and then it wasn't — it was in the net and then it was not in the net."

"That's not how nets work."

"Tell the fish that, Dorrin! Go ahead, it's right there, you tell it!"

"It's gone."

"Because it went through the net!"

Vera sat on the bank with Harold's notes and read the passage about runners for the third time. Speed is the obvious problem, Harold had written, but the real problem is that they read direction changes. Don't chase. Let them come to you.

She looked up at Lynn, still standing in the shallows with her net and her grievances.

"Stop chasing it," Vera said.

"I'm not—"

"You're leaning forward every time it gets close. It reads the lean."

Lynn looked at her. Then looked at her feet, her stance, the angle of her shoulders over the water. Her mouth pressed flat in the particular way it did when she was annoyed at being right about something she'd gotten wrong.

"Fine," she said.

She went still.

Not patient-still — Lynn didn't do patient, exactly. This was wanting-still, controlled hunger, the way she went quiet before a long shot when she'd decided she was going to make it regardless. Vera had seen it twice before, both times right before she'd threaded something technically impossible. It was the version of Lynn that didn't need encouragement because it had already decided.

Maggs tried to match her, thirty minutes standing motionless in the shallows while fish moved around her knees. She lasted forty minutes before she stepped out, dried her feet, and went to check her blade without explaining herself.

"Ha," Lynn said softly, from the shallows, not looking up.

Maggs didn't respond. Maggs not responding was its own response, and Tresh caught it and looked away with his shoulders shaking.

By the end of the week they'd all gotten the perk, standing in cold water to their knees each dawn.

PERK ACQUIRED — Current Reading (Uncommon): 

Enhanced reaction speed and spatial awareness in fluid or fast-moving combat situations. The holder processes incoming threats 8% faster when multiple attack vectors are active simultaneously.

Tresh spent an hour in slow sparring drills with Dorrin afterward, testing what it felt like from the inside. "It's not faster thinking," he said, when they stopped. "The thinking already happened. You're just catching up to what you already knew."

"That sounds the same," Dorrin said.

"It doesn't feel the same. Here —" Tresh grabbed three pebbles off the ground and held them out. "You throw. All three, different angles, whenever you want."

"And?"

"And you'll see."

Dorrin threw all three at once. Tresh's hands moved — left, right, right — and two pebbles bounced off his palm and the third glanced off his wrist.

"That one hit me," Tresh said, looking at his wrist.

"You said two different angles."

"I said different angles. I didn't specify."

"Getting hit still means you reacted," Dorrin said, sitting down. "You got the third one on the wrist instead of the face."

Tresh considered this. "That's a significant upgrade, actually."

"I know."

"My face is very important."

"Is it?"

"Ask your mom."

“That’s your aunt!”

Maggs tested hers by standing in the center of camp while the other four threw small stones at her from different angles. She deflected every one without shifting her feet. Then she said "enough" and walked away to sharpen her blades, and that was the end of the experiment. Nobody had asked her to run it and she'd run it anyway, satisfied whatever she'd needed to know, and moved on.

That was Maggs. Vera had stopped trying to figure out the whole of her and started just watching what she did.

*

The plant monster had been Dorrin's idea.

"It was on Harold's list," he said, which he said to every objection, and the objections were substantial.

Lakebloom — sessile predator, lake margins, looks like flowering aquatic plant until something warm passes within half a meter. Paralytic secretion on the trailing fronds. Do not let it touch skin. Possible perk on kill: resistance to paralytic and slow effects, mana-based. Worth getting.

Worth getting was doing considerable work in that sentence.

Dorrin had found the first one by accident, stepping into the shallows to fill his water skin, and pulled his leg free before the fronds closed properly. He stood on the bank for a full minute looking at it.

"That's in the water I've been drinking from," he said.

"The fronds are the dangerous part," Tresh said, reading Harold's notes over his shoulder. "The water's fine."

"The fronds are in the water."

"Yes, that’s what I’m saying."

"I've been standing in this water."

"You weren't warm enough to trigger it standing still," Tresh said, then paused. "Probably."

"Oh, probably, just probably."

"I'm like ninety percent sure."

"That's not—Tresh, that's not a comfortable number."

"Ninety is a good number! That's nine out of ten!"

Lynn, from ten meters up the bank, arms crossed, watching all of this: "I'm not going near it."

"Nobody asked—"

"I'm telling you preemptively. I don't care what's on Harold's list, I'm not going near the grabby plant."

Vera looked at the lakebloom, trailing its fronds in the current, flowers open to the sky, entirely indistinguishable from an ordinary aquatic plant except for the part where it wasn't. She looked at Harold's note: worth getting.

"Lynn," she said.

"No."

"I'm not asking you to go near it. I'm asking you to cover us from the bank."

Lynn's arms uncrossed. That was different from going near it. "Bow?"

"Yes, please"

"Okay,but only because you said please," Lynn said, and nocked an arrow, and stood on the bank for the next three days covering operations she did not participate in with a face that communicated exactly how she felt about plants that grabbed things.

She eventually got the perk when a lakebloom looped one frond around her ankle while she was walking the bank's edge, and she killed it reflexively with a thunderous yelp before it could close, and stood there looking at the dead plant.

"I still hate it," she said, and she was already bouncing on her heels when she said it, grinning at her own notification like she hadn't just been one slow step from a paralyzed leg. "Why can't they all be that simple? You just — it grabbed me and I just stabbed it. That's the whole thing."

"That's the whole thing," Tresh agreed.

"I want more enemies that are just 'it grabbed me, I stabbed it.' That's the right amount of enemy."

PERK ACQUIRED — Mana Resistance (Uncommon):

 Passive resistance to mana-based paralytic, slow, and binding effects. Reduces duration and effectiveness of such effects by 8%.

"Worth getting," Vera said.

"Don't," Lynn said, still grinning.

*

The poison perk came from a bottom-feeding lake creature that looked like an armored slug the length of a man's forearm, slow-moving and apparently harmless until something disturbed it and it released a contact venom that caused affected tissue to go numb from the outside in.

Tresh had found this out by stepping on one.

He'd spent an hour with his left hand not working — the slug had gotten his boot but a thin smear of venom had crept through a gap at the ankle — and he'd sat on a rock with his hand in his lap, squeezing it every few minutes to check if feeling had come back, his mood getting progressively worse.

That evening, Dorrin sat across the fire from him with the expression of a man doing mental math on whether to speak.

"The good news," Dorrin said, "is that it's probably a perk."

"I know it's a perk," Tresh said, not looking at him.

"A good one."

"I know, cousin."

"Worth the hand."

"I know, Dorrin."

"Harold said—"

"I know what Harold said," Tresh said, looking up from his hand finally. "Ask me how I know."

Dorrin decided this was a good time to go check whether the fire needed more wood. It did not need more wood, but he added some anyway.

Vera, across the fire, watched this without comment. She'd noticed the way they did that — Dorrin talking Tresh through his moods by making himself a target for them, absorbing it without taking it personally, the easy shorthand of people who'd known each other long enough that friction didn't leave marks. They'd grown up together, she thought. You could see it in how they argued: no real stakes, just structure.

She'd never had that. Growing up she'd had a sister who'd died before Gravesend and two parents who had died during her time in the Army. What she'd built with the Thornwalkers was closer to it than anything else she'd found, but it was still something she was learning how to hold.

Tresh flexed his hand, found the feeling coming back, and looked at the fire. "It's a good perk," he said, quietly, to nobody.

"It's a great perk," Dorrin said, from across the fire.

"You can stop."

PERK ACQUIRED — Contact Venom (Uncommon): 

Melee attacks and blade surfaces apply an 8% contact venom. Upon contact with exposed tissue or gaps in armor, the venom causes progressive numbness and loss of coordination in the affected area.

Dorrin spent two evenings testing it on training targets, working out how much mana made the effect useful versus passive. He settled on a low sustained charge — not enough to cost speed, enough that every cut landed something extra.

"It's like fighting someone who's already won," Tresh said, rubbing his forearm after their second session. "Damn annoying."

"I haven't won," Dorrin said.

"You're acting like you have. You just stand there and wait."

"I'm waiting for the cut that'll land the venom right."

"That's the same thing, jerk."

"It's a better strategy."

"It's a smug strategy."

"Effective and smug," Dorrin said, and the grin finally broke through, the one he'd been losing the fight against since the session started.

Tresh threw a pebble at him.

Dorrin deflected it.

"I hate this perk," Tresh said, meaning the reaction perk, and he was laughing when he said it.

*

The campfire that night was a good one.

They'd found a hollow in the rock shelf above the lake's eastern bank, three walls of stone and a ceiling of overhanging granite that blocked the wind and trapped the heat and gave them, for the first time in three weeks, a fire they didn't have to bank down out of caution about who might see it from the water. No threats in the immediate territory. No pending hunts. Just the lake below and the sound of it, and the fire, and the five of them with nowhere to be until morning.

Lynn had her boots off. Tresh was lying on his back with his arm over his eyes. Maggs sat with her back to the stone wall in the exact posture she always sat in, which Vera had started to think was less about vigilance and more just how Maggs held herself when she wasn't doing anything else.

Vera was writing. Field notes, mostly, the day's observations sorted into usefulness. She did this every few nights rather than every night because every night felt like too much self-consciousness and every few nights felt like enough.

Dorrin was doing something at the edge of the fire.

She heard it before she smelled it — the specific knock of metal on stone, familiar in a way she couldn't immediately place, and then the smell arrived and she looked up and her pen stopped moving.

"Is that coffee," she said.

"Might be," Dorrin said, not turning around.

"Dorrin."

"It might be a local herb that smells very similar to—"

"That's coffee."

He turned around with the expression of a man who had prepared several defenses and decided none of them were worth it. He was holding a small camp percolator, the kind made for two cups at best, and the steam coming off it was unmistakable.

"Where did you get coffee?" Vera said.

"I have a rich inner life," Dorrin said.

Tresh had lifted his arm off his eyes. Lynn was sitting up. Even Maggs had shifted — not much, just enough that she was facing Dorrin instead of the wall, which for Maggs was basically the same as jumping to her feet.

"Where," Vera said.

Dorrin set the percolator down carefully and picked up a camp cup. "Harold keeps a bag in the supply pack he sends with us on long deployments. For morale, I think. It's just sitting there every time I go to the warehouse to resupply the kit and I've been very responsible about it up until now." He poured the first cup and held it out. "It's been five weeks, Vera."

"You stole Lord Harold's coffee."

"I borrowed Lord Harold's coffee from a bag Lord Harold put in a pack Lord  Harold sends specifically so we have access to things Lord Harold thinks will help us." He shook the cup gently. "Come get your coffee."

She got up and took the cup. The warmth of it went through her palms and she held it with both hands and breathed the steam in before she sipped it and the taste landed and she closed her eyes for one full second.

"Oh," she said quietly.

"Yeah," Dorrin said.

"That's—"

"I know."

He was already pouring the second cup. Tresh was on his feet, not running but moving with considerable purpose. Lynn had her boots half on before she remembered she didn't need them and sat back down.

"Dorrin," Tresh said, taking his cup, "I want you to know that this elevates you significantly in my estimation."

"I've been waiting for that my whole life," Dorrin said.

"I mean it. This is a real contribution."

"Thank you, cousin."

"You're a good man."

"Thank you."

"A great man, even."

"You're getting your own cup, Tresh."

"I know, I'm just saying." Tresh sipped it and his shoulders dropped two inches from where they'd been carrying them. "Oh that's good. That's really good. How does he have this out here? Where does he get this?"

"Lord Harold has access to many things," Vera said, sitting back down with her cup. "That's established."

"His whole operation runs on two things," Lynn said, accepting her cup from Dorrin with both hands, cradling it the way you cradle something that might be the last of its kind. "Potions and coffee. I think the potions are for everyone else and the coffee is load-bearing for Harold specifically."

"If we run out of coffee Harold stops functioning," Tresh said.

"I think that's correct," Lynn said.

"Then we've endangered a critical strategic asset," Tresh said, looking at Dorrin.

"We have," Dorrin said, sitting down with his own cup. He looked entirely unbothered.

Maggs had her cup. She'd taken it without comment at some point, and now she was sitting with it held in both hands, the steam curling up past her face, and her eyes were half-closed in a way that was as close to openly content as Vera had seen her since they'd left the Landing.

"Lord Harold's going to notice," Vera said.

"Lord Harold notices everything; he’s actually annoyingly competent." Dorrin agreed.

"He's going to know it was us."

"He sent it in the pack so we'd have it. He just wanted us to ask first." Dorrin looked into his cup. "Probably? I don't know that’s a future Dorrin problem."

"Did you leave any," Vera asked.

A pause.

"A polite amount," Dorrin said.

"How much is a polite amount?"

"Enough that when he sees the bag he'll think 'well, at least they left some,' rather than 'I'm going to find out who did this.'"

"And does it accomplish that?"

Another pause, longer this time.

"Ummmm, it's close," Dorrin said.

Tresh made a sound into his cup that might have been a laugh or a groan. Lynn was grinning while Maggs took a slow sip and did not weigh in on whether Harold would be annoyed, which was either because she didn't care or because she'd already reached a conclusion and saw no need to share it.

The fire settled and popped. Below, the lake moved in the dark, the sound of it steady and low, and the smell of coffee mixed with woodsmoke and the particular alive-and-cooling-off smell of stone that had held heat all day and was giving it back. Vera had her knees pulled up and her cup against her chin and she was looking at the fire and not thinking about Harold's list or the relic or the road north.

"I want to say something," Lynn said.

"Go ahead," Vera said.

"I just—" Lynn turned her cup in her hands, looking at it rather than at any of them. "I know we've been out here nearly two months and most of it's been hard and a bunch of it's been terrible, specifically the plant, but right now it's good and I want to say it's good out loud so somebody else hears me say it."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"It's good," Tresh said.

"Yeah," Dorrin said.

Maggs looked at Lynn over the rim of her cup. "It's good," she said, and coming from Maggs that was considerable.

Lynn nodded, satisfied, and drank her coffee.

Vera looked at the four of them — Tresh stretched back out with his cup balanced on his chest, Dorrin with his ankles crossed and his face relaxed, Lynn with her toes pointed at the fire, Maggs with her back to the stone and her eyes half-closed — and she thought about what she'd been quietly trying to figure out for five weeks, which was whether she was actually leading them or just making decisions in front of them while they followed.

She thought it might be the first one. She was starting to think it was actually the first one.

"Harold's going to make me apologize for the coffee," she said.

"He's going to make me apologize," Dorrin said. "It was my idea."

"You're going to tell him that."

"I'm going to absolutely tell him that. I already have the speech prepared."

"What's the speech."

Dorrin straightened slightly and adopted a tone of considerable dignity. "Lord Harold, I want you to know that at the time I felt the morale benefit clearly outweighed the cost, and I stand by that assessment, and also if you'd like to be angry at someone I am available."

Lynn was laughing now, quietly, into her cup.

"And then?" Vera said.

"And then I give him the apologetic face. I've been told I have a very good apologetic face."

"You do," Tresh said, from behind his arm. "It's annoyingly sincere. Remember when we had to fool that game warden?"

"I do, thank you."

"It shouldn't work as often as it works," Tresh said. "That's a design flaw in people."

"I prefer to think of it as a gift," Dorrin said.

The fire burned lower. Nobody moved to add wood. The hollow held the warmth well enough and they were all awake and content and there was no reason to make it last longer than it wanted to last. Some fires were worth not stretching.

Vera finished her coffee and set the cup down and looked at the lake in the dark below them, the water moving, the far bank a black line against a slightly less black sky.

Tomorrow they'd go back to work. Tonight was tonight.