“Entad earrings,” said Mizuki. They had a very faint trace of magic about them, a minor disruption to the aether. “What do they do?”
“They let me hear better,” said Bethany, shrugging. “Only a little bit. It’s like… well, like I’ve got ears all over my head, I guess. I can pick up soft noises a bit better and don’t need to be turned toward people. Not worth risking my life over.”
“I could remove the scar for you, if you’d like,” said Hannah. “I’d imagine it was left there through Oeyr’s rapid healin’?”
“Oh, the scar is—well,” said Bethany, “I was going to have it removed, but I liked the look of it, and no one can say it wasn’t hard won.”
Mizuki might have said that it wasn’t hard won, but she really had no idea. Her own three thousand rings and awesome spoon hadn’t felt hard won. It had been scary, but she hadn’t really done all that much. Alfric had taken the brunt of the punishment and done virtually all of the planning and getting the party together, on top of dealing with selling everything. She felt like she owed him and wondered whether she should have offered him some of her share, but no one else had done that, so maybe it was a stupid idea.
“How many are you going to do?” asked Bethany. “Alfric made it seem like this was a serious venture, not just a few local dungeons.”
“I think we’ll end up doin’ quite a few,” said Hannah. “At the rate we’re plannin’ to go, a year of dungeons would be fifty, all told, and if luck is on our side, or I s’pose even if it’s not, we’d get a great many entads from it. There’s lots you can do, if you’ve got fifty good entads to your name.”
“Unless they’re like this?” asked Bethany, gesturing to her earrings.
“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “But if you do enough dungeons, eventually you strike some valuable ore, ay? And by the numbers, we’d be likely to run into somethin’ that we could live off, whether that’s somethin’ productive or somethin’ we could use for labor.”
“Alfric wants to do thousands, I’m sure,” said Mizuki. “Big-city energy. But hearing about how things went for you… I’m starting to think that he’s pretty competent.”
“Well, our little adventure wasn’t all bad,” said Bethany. “I did get the earrings. And the Pedder boys went off to do another two dungeons, but lost the will to do more, even though they were sure they’d get rich off it. Fern nearly died, and then their mother put her foot down.”
“Nearly died?” asked Mizuki. Fernard was the youngest of the three. “Was he okay?”
“You should talk to them,” said Bethany. “It’s been some time. But yes, he was fine, nothing that a cleric couldn’t heal, but it was a near thing, mostly in terms of getting to the cleric. Now, they’d gone in with only four, and it was the Liberfell dungeon, which they shouldn’t have been able to go into in the first place. They were trying to get a better payout, I think. It was definitely something a lot of people were talking about. I’m surprised you didn’t hear.”
“Well, I don’t have magical earrings, not yet,” said Mizuki. She laughed, but it felt weak. The falling-out with the Pedder boys had hit her hard, and learning that they’d risked their lives without her… Well, it was certainly in keeping with their nature, but there was a familiar sour feeling.
“We’ll be careful,” said Hannah. “Alfric is about as good of a dungeoneer as you can get for someone just startin’ out, and he comes from a long line of them, it seems. Most people who go into dungeons pass a simple test from the League, then go off like they know a thing or two, and it’s no wonder they come out injured. We went in and came out with not a scratch on us, and I don’t just attribute that to luck. It was a hard dungeon, come to that.”
“I got a neat spoon out of it,” said Mizuki. “It can change shape to almost anything that’s still a spoon.”
Bethany laughed at that, and Mizuki pulled the spoon out of her bag to show it off.
They bought quite a bit, including some frozen chicken and a fair number of vegetables for dinner, then said their goodbyes to Bethany. It was even more rings gone, enough that there could be a meal for four, plus more food for the days ahead, and Mizuki reminded herself that she was flush with money, and that this wasn’t a thing to worry about.
“Sorry if I was boastin’ in there,” said Hannah. “I didn’t mean to, but I’ve some pride in our party and Alfric in particular. People do die in dungeons.”
“You said it was safe,” said Mizuki.
“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “Mostly people die in the bigger dungeons, in places with more magic floatin’ around. Some of it’s variance, worse than what we’ve seen so far. That you can’t blame someone for. But more than it should be, it’s people who have no business bein’ in the place they’re in. The Pedder boys are friends of yours, or were, I gather, but a dungeon needs a bit of respect. People forget that.”
She sounded almost angry about it, and Mizuki had no idea why that might be, except that perhaps it was a cleric thing, or the fact that Hannah seemed to take strong stances on most things. Some people just had Opinions. For her own part, Mizuki didn’t feel like she had respected the dungeons nearly enough, not for that first one.
If she was going to be a dungeoneer, she wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.
Chapter 18 — The Next Day’s Weather
Isra moved through the woods, following a path the deer normally took. The world was looking different to her, and she didn’t know how much of that was in her head. Did normal people follow deer paths? Could they even find them? She would have to ask, and there was a chance that they would give her odd looks and ask her what a deer path was, as though that wasn’t completely obvious. Of course, most people were oblivious, but she was having to reckon with the fact that they weren’t just oblivious. They didn’t have the same experience of the world as she did.
Other people couldn’t talk to animals, or if they did, the animals didn’t listen very well. She had seen them talk to animals though, like the old woman who yelled at the crows to stop pooping on her roof, or the way that someone like Mizuki talked to her pet cat. Isra had thought that some of this was simply performance, a way to do the same pretending that they did for so many other things, but it was clear now that it was something else. A handful of confusing conversations about talking to animals had been cleared up.
Other people couldn’t predict the next day’s weather. What else did other people not know? What else couldn’t they do? There were so many things about her life that Isra was now realizing she took for granted. Could normal people identify a bird by its song? It seemed equally plausible that they could or they could not. Could they see through a bird’s eyes? The more she thought about it, the more she thought that perhaps they couldn’t. She thought back to all the times her father had seemed oblivious or unaware, and in retrospect perhaps that was simply because he couldn’t see the woods like she did. She was always better at setting traps, always faster to find the deer, always more capable of tending to their garden or finding forage.
Could normal people coax a plant to grow? Isra thought that perhaps they couldn’t. She wondered what would happen if they tried. Other people had gardens though, so why was that? Were they just planting seeds and hoping for the best? Weeding and watering and that was it?