This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“The bathroom is just down the hall,” said Mizuki. “If you need to take a shower, there are towels there too, and I can loan you clothes, if you’d like, but I doubt I have much that would fit you.” Verity was quite tall, and Mizuki was… ‘short’ wasn’t the word she preferred, but ‘small’ sounded too childish. “Don’t worry about using up the water, the tanks were meant for a pretty large household.”

“A shower sounds like a lot of work,” said Verity, staring at the ceiling. “I ate too much and drank too much.”

“It was only two glasses,” said Mizuki. She was standing in the doorway, looking over Verity, who wasn’t moving from her spread-out position on the bed.

“I have a bad head for drinks,” said Verity. She sat up, propping herself up with her elbows. “Thank you for all this. You really didn’t have to.”

“Oh, I know,” said Mizuki. “But a spinster likes some company every once in a while.”

She almost, almost made a bigger offer, to say that Verity could move in, but Verity flopped back down, and Mizuki came to her senses.

Mizuki went to her own room, which had belonged to her parents until four years ago. She no longer felt self-conscious about sleeping there, but it was a large room and felt somewhat cold with just her in it. She made kissing noises, which sometimes got Tabbins to come, but she wasn’t sure her fat oaf of a cat was even in the house.

“The truth,” Mizuki said to herself as she undressed for the night, “the truth is that magic can’t get me the things that I want and dungeons can’t either. Being alone was fun, but at some point, it stopped being fun. I want a family again.” She said the words at barely more than a whisper, so that Verity wouldn’t be able to hear from next door, but saying it out loud made her feel better, like she was at least being honest with herself.

Isra ended up renting a room at the Angry Plum, the larger of Pucklechurch’s two taverns, taking a room across from Alfric. She insisted that the materials from the book be taken out and distributed between their two rooms, which took a fair amount of time given how slow the storage book was and how many ordinary books were contained within it. Alfric got to glumly watch, once again, as the book provided descriptions of the books that said nothing about what information they contained. He tried to keep up his well-practiced stoicism, but his eyes went to Isra every once in a while.

On a base level, Alfric understood it. If she didn’t trust him, then she didn’t trust him, and trust had to be earned. But emotionally, it felt like a second punch to the gut to follow up the first. Not only was she going to escort him for what was really just a job for a single person, but she was insisting on making sure he didn’t run off in the night. Obviously if he wasn’t trustworthy, he would just leave, and obviously she had to prevent that, but it still stung, and he wasn’t sure that he’d handled himself as well as possible.

Once the guild message had been completed, he’d stayed up later than he would have liked to admit staring at the ceiling and rehearsing conversations to himself, both things that had already been said and things that he would say the next day.

When he woke up and got dressed, he was surprised to see her outside his door, ready to go. She was wearing different clothes than the day before, brown, but with a crimson head scarf. Her gold piercings had been returned to their places on her face. She moved into his room without a word and began loading the storage book once more. When she finished, she moved to put it in her pack.

“Let me take it,” he said. She raised an eyebrow. “I’m almost certainly stronger than you,” he said, hoping that wasn’t cause for offense. “No sense in you taking the burden.”

“Fine,” she said. Alfric loaded the book up, making sure that it was secure. There was still plenty to carry, mostly those pipes, and they split the load, with him taking more.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “No, I need to fill my waterskin, but yes, after that.” He’d decided on taking his sword but leaving behind most of his armor, including his shield, which Hannah had mostly repaired the day before. The load would be heavy enough without adding more.

They set off down the road together. It was six miles east to the hex border, which would be marked with white pillars, and then once they had warped, there were another six miles to go to the next hex border, and finally, they would arrive in Tarchwood with a second warp. It would have gone faster if Alfric had been traveling by himself, thanks to his stride-lengthening boots, but he wasn’t terribly concerned about the time, and he hoped that he could make an impact on Isra, who seemed to be the second-most-capable warrior of the group. Besides, there was a lot to carry.