In the four years after that, Isra found a rhythm to her days and to the seasons. She went hunting and foraging, did skinning and tanning, made repairs to the house, went into the market every three days like clockwork, and stored away the rings she made. There were always things to do. When she was fifteen, she made a stone fishing weir across one of the local rivers and, for that entire summer, smoked and sold whatever she couldn’t eat. When she was sixteen, she took a bounty on a black bear that had been rooting around Pucklechurch and brought it across the hex boundary, admonishing it to be good. At seventeen, she’d taken up collecting in a more serious manner, spending much of her free time looking for specific stones and plants, putting the former up on the shelves and pressing the latter in her books.
Seventeen had also been the year that Isra had finally bought a freezer, which had changed things more than she’d expected it to. Being able to keep large quantities of meat in her house meant that she was able to make more on market days and also meant that she was able to do more with larger game. She had always found hunting to be fairly easy, at least in comparison with how much puffery there was about it from other people, and in no time, the freezer was full, and then she was bringing so much meat to market that she couldn’t sell it all.
And through the rhythms of the days and the longer rhythms of the seasons, Isra was mostly happy. When she turned eighteen and celebrated her birthday alone, she didn’t feel sad that the celebration was happening without anyone to share it. What she felt instead was a sense that her life might continue on forever like this, each year the same as the last, and that brought a definite dissatisfaction. Something was missing, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on what. She had started saving up the money after that, without knowing where it would eventually go.
“A party tends to be more than just a moneymaking venture,” said Alfric. “It’s inevitable, with the channel, with how much time you spend together… there’s more than just the individual abilities of those involved and their ability to clear a dungeon, or whatever they’ve come together to do.”
“Friends,” said Isra.
“Well, possibly,” said Alfric. “But if not friends, then at least something like family to each other. The channel is a part of it. Being able to speak to each other at will, even when you’re some distance from each other, means that the people you speak to most often are the ones in your party.”
“You can’t leave family,” said Isra.
“Of course you can,” said Alfric. “But I agree, the bonds of a party, especially a short-term one like we have now, are far easier to break.”
“And this is what you want?” asked Isra. “This is what you came to Pucklechurch to create?”
“No,” said Alfric. “I came to find a team, and it seems that I’ll be more lucky than I thought I’d be, especially if you really are, somehow, a druid. But a stable party inevitably becomes something more. Dungeoneering runs in my blood, as I think I’ve mentioned, and growing up, the members of my parents’ parties were like aunts and uncles to me.”
“They didn’t adventure together, your parents?” asked Isra.
“No,” said Alfric. “With their skills, they would have been doubling up on a role. It was better for them to each have their own party.”
Isra wondered what that role was, but Alfric didn’t offer it, and she had some sense that his thoughts had escaped him.
Isra hadn’t known her mother, and her father never spoke much of the old days. They had both been from Tarbin though, had escaped, in her father’s words, and back there, they had been people of some means and education, which Isra had been slow to understand as she got older. Isra’s father had trained her and taught her, and sometimes it felt like that was the only way for them to relate to each other. Her father had been somewhat short on affection, at least in comparison with what she saw from some of the children in Pucklechurch.
Yet even as she got older, Isra hadn’t felt a longing for other children or a keen loneliness that she sometimes read of people having in stories. A party was, in some sense, unwelcome, as was the channel, having people able to speak into her head at their whim. She enjoyed being solitary, and whatever it was she found disagreeable about living her life as she had over the last five years, she was fairly sure that joining a party was not the cure. That was especially so when the party had these particular four other people in it. Hannah spoke too much, and Mizuki had the wrong kind of energy, and while Verity had a grace and poise that Isra could appreciate, there was something alien about her, perhaps because she, like Alfric, was from the city.
Isra did like Alfric though, or at least had come to appreciate the way he operated. He was very direct and straightforward. He hadn’t made any comments on her appearance nor asked about her headscarf, and he exuded a competence and professionalism that the others did not. With Alfric, there was little in the way of frippery or filler. He hadn’t lied to her about obvious things, in the way that people sometimes did.
There was wildlife all around them as they walked, especially as the farmland became less prominent. Alfric, like most people, pretended not to see or feel it. A family of long-legged skinks hid beneath a hedge, a stub-necked squirrel raced up a tree, and a flock of night birds sat motionless on a tree, waiting for the sun to fall. Isra looked at the plants too, trying to see if there was anything they didn’t have in Pucklechurch. Most of the trees were the usual mix of ash, larch, birch, and aspen, but there were a small handful of the migrant trees that moved a foot a day, and some of the wild puckleberries and burstberries were of different varieties. Isra thought about what Alfric had said, about druids being able to see the world. But if she were a druid, then what did he see when he looked around him?
“Do you want to talk about the fact that you might be a druid?” asked Alfric, several miles later.
“You said that it happened only when a woman birthed a child alone in the woods,” said Isra. “My father was with us.”
“Yes, I was thinking about that,” said Alfric. “But I don’t know enough to know whether that’s only the typical case, or if there might not be some other ways for it to happen. We’d have to find someone knowledgeable to discuss it with. Perhaps if there’s only a single parent, that’s enough.”
“Perhaps,” said Isra. The exact methods to produce a druid did not interest her at all. “You think I should find another druid.”
“I do,” said Alfric. “They’re the subject-matter experts. They would be able to tell if you really were a druid, or if you might be something else, and they could give you some insights into how to increase your power. Though…”
“Yes?” asked Isra.
“Druids aren’t usually,” he paused, “hunters.”
“No?” asked Isra.
“They’re typically vegetarians, I think,” said Alfric. “I’m not sure why. Of all the people with some kind of aetheric talent, druids are probably the ones I know the least about. For obvious reasons, they’re rare within the city. I don’t know how far you’d have to be from Dondrian to be able to be a mile away from another person, which I think I read was the minimum.”
It sounded horrible to Isra. She often spent some time in Pucklechurch on market days once she was done selling what she had, visiting either the temple to make her prayers, or the library for a fresh book, or the stores to pick up things she couldn’t make herself, especially anything metal. Even that small amount of people sometimes felt suffocating by the time the day was through. Once, Isra had come into town during one of the large regional celebrations and been immediately overwhelmed by the crowds of people from who-knew-where. She’d lasted thirty minutes before stalking back off into the woods.