Alfric faltered. “And… do you?”
“I do,” replied Isra, with more conviction than she felt. There were
rather a lot of rings stored away that formed the basis of an unexamined
plan. She hadn’t quite decided what the plan
“Then I don’t want to dissuade you. But why are you going into the dungeons with us?” asked Alfric.
Isra hesitated. “It’s good pay for not much work,” she said. “Like you said.”
The entire year following her father’s death had been a blur. She wasn’t entirely sure how, at thirteen, she had survived it. Her father had friends, and they checked on her from time to time, but none of them had tried to take her in, and she hadn’t made the request. Instead, she hunted as she’d been taught to, foraged the verdant forests, and narrowly made it through the winter with the foodstuffs she had put up with her father. Her father had died in late summer, before they could harvest the autumnal bounty, but the work they’d done in spring and summer had been with the anticipation of feeding two mouths rather than one. It had been enough. That had been the time of the horrendous theft, but the thief had left the food, at least, alone.
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.
