The last morning at the camp, before anything comes down. Alexis has his notebook open on one knee and waits until the four of them are close enough that he doesn’t have to raise his voice.
“I’ve made a list. Two halves. The first half is things I need from you.”
He turns the notebook around long enough for them to see there’s a full page of it, then turns it back.
“The three of you. I’ve watched Rask these last weeks and I know what I’m getting. Gus, Carm, Red, I want the same from each of you before we walk. What advancements in your specialties?”
“The shield. We start at the knight’s cairn. Rask’s old shield is the other way to solve this, although it went with the horses, which is its own problem and further down the page.”
“Red’s armor. Rebuilt, replace, or we just move on with a more free-moving Red?.” Alexis moves on, but with a clear expectation that Ethelred will let him know.
“Food. Gus. Going north. How many days around for us to get from here to a place where we can easily get more food? How long do you need to get us the food we need?”
“The nature of Frostpass is an unknown in this when. I’ll put the ring to it after this to assess this.”
Alexis turns the page over.
“That’s what I need. The rest is what I want to know, and it’s in the order we’ll walk past it.”
“The tree that put me to sleep. I want to know if it’s still there, and whether it still has the same nature it had in our other time.”
“The undead knight and his horse. This relates to Red’s need for a shield, but I’m also curious to know the reality of this knight in our new when.”
“The Monastery site. An hour on the ‘old’ site. Notes, not digging.”
“When we are. The garden is less than a day past it, and further from Frostpass. We can look at Red’s bomba tree and see how tall it’s got. Carm, if a prayer gets us the same answer faster, I’m open to that.”
“The horses. Everything we didn’t carry in was on them, and we left them in the ‘old’ place. Rask’s shield. The glaive. So: are they here at all? If they are, then the road we took to Nodden-Torr got walked in this world too, and most of what happened to us happened. If there were never any horses, we’re standing somewhere I understand a lot less than I thought this morning.”
“Felsby. We’ve never been, but there’s a lot there.” He counts it off on his fingers. “Ingvar founded it. Bandesingh raided the town to end Torr’s line, because the sword had been Torr’s grandfather’s. Torr-van mended Dauntless there after the place had already fallen. There were gnolls under it digging for that sword, and when Bandesingh learned it was out of his reach he spent them on his working.” Alexis gives a shrug and a nod off to the side. “That’s a great deal of Bandesingh in one town.”
Alexis closes the notebook on his finger and looks between them.
“Anything to add?”
