.
The morning air was clear and crisp as the team boarded the wagon for our fourth day of travel. The teamsters had just finished hitching the mountain goat team up and were giving them sugar treats.
These beasts are peculiar creatures. They look just like the Earthly animals of the same name, except they are much larger, as big as draft horses. And unlike mountain goats on Earth, these beasts are monsters and therefore omnivores. They still prefer to graze on grass and foliage normally, but in the wild, they kill and eat natural beasts in order to get mortal mana if they can’t find magical plant life.
That’s what the sugar treats were for. The southern region of Pendor exports tons of spirit cane sugar, and most of it is purchased for exactly this purpose. Monsters who can absorb mana from eating natural beasts or magic plants are the only ones who can benefit from the mana it carries, but most of domesticated flying, riding and draft monstrous beasts are included in that category.
Unfortunately, for me, it’s just sugar. Monsters who take mortal mana a different way, such as vampires, succubi or amazons, cannot digest the mana from plant products.
Teamsters prefer to use monstrous draft beasts in territory where one’s animals must be able to defend themselves against other monsters. And although they tend to be more expensive and troublesome to operate than horses, they have another advantage, which is greater endurance under harness. Even though this was most decidedly not the smooth roads of highly developed Atianus province, we had managed more than thirty miles per day in relative comfort, courtesy of monster physiology and a good suspension. On better roads, the same team could have managed a hundred.
As she boarded the covered wagon, Ceria’s eyebrows rose as she noticed that Dilorè and I were growing our wings.
“You’re not getting in the wagon?” she asked.
I shook my head. “We’re getting close to the border with the Tabad. Dilorè and I are going to scout ahead.”
I had spent a long time the previous night soaking up Darkness mana and stuffing it into my core so I could use my Vampire Cloak continuously in the daylight without repeating the trouble I had encountered in Oste.
“Let me fly ahead, Your Highness,” Lady Dilorè told me.
I sighed. “I’m traveling as Lady Tia? Remember?”
I had fully explained to the party about using my alias. It had been rough, but everyone had begun calling me ‘Tia’, and, to my amazement, I even received a ‘My Lady’ from Ryuu from time to time. Although it was mostly shortly after Allia glared at him for not using it.
Dilorè gave me a gracious nod. “My Lady.”
“I assume this is an attempt to keep me out of danger by stumbling into it first? Still have it in your head that you have to protect the princess?”
She lifted her chin. “No, My Lady. What we discussed last night… I’m sure I felt it again, just now. I think you should try the plan you suggested.”
Not waiting for discussion, she then leaped into the air, her butterfly wings beating rapidly to carry her aloft. Dilorè’s wings are awesome and beautiful. They look exactly like a monarch butterfly, except everything that would normally be orange or white is variations on royal blue. It’s a really striking contrast to her hair, as well.
I shook my head and strolled past the wagon to reach the driver’s box. The head driver was seated there, arranging his reins, as his assistant finished checking the harnesses. He looked at me and gave a slight jolt of surprise.
It took a moment for me to realize his reaction was because this was the first time he was seeing me with wings. He probably had thought I was human up until this moment. I don’t know if it’s my resemblance to a succubus or that ‘charm’ effect the angels described to me, but people do seem to see me as somehow more attractive once I grow my wings.
“L… Lady Tia,” he stammered.
I smiled at him, hoping it would calm him down. “Mr. Bornin, good morning to you. We understand that we are entering tribal territory soon, so Lady Dilorè and I will be scouting in the air today.”
He nodded without words, his eyes still a little large.
Weird. He hadn’t been this tongue-tied yesterday.
Brigitte appeared next to me, on her way to taking the spot behind the drivers, where she had been riding as a lookout for the past three days.
Just before she climbed up, she rolled her eyes at me, leaned close and muttered, “Give the poor boys a break already. Men can only take so much.”
A little mystified, I shook my head again, then walked ahead of the wagon team and took off.
It might occur to those who think about these things that skirts and flying are not a safe combination. Well, that would normally be true. The secret is, the chemises made for women with wings are cleverly equipped with a button that pins the front and back of the chemise together below the crotch. I’m sure the teamsters were still checking out my legs as much as they could as I rose into the air, but their view farther up was blocked.
Does that mean during the time that I didn’t have a chemise, I had been flashing my panties everywhere I flew?
Well… presumably yes, but I had been avoiding flying above people as much as possible until I rose to an altitude where it didn’t matter.
I feel as though we’re returning to how things should be, My Lady, Durandal commented as I began making a wide circle around the area on a search for anything suspicious.
“Why is that?” I wondered while I surveyed the grounds behind the post station where we had stayed the night. It was a long two-story building parallel to the road, with the stables and wagon lot on the opposite side, so there was a large area blocked from view of the road.
We returned to you and I, traveling through the air. We’ve only had a few days together like this, yet I’ve already become very accustomed to it.
I descended into a little dell that was out of sight of the road and buildings. While hidden from local eyes, I began the [Vampire Cloak] skill.
Dilorè and I had planned this move the previous evening. Both of us had felt yesterday afternoon as if we could sense something tailing the wagon.
“Hm. Maybe it reminds you of the ancient times, when you always worked with a wandering holy warrior or knight errant?”
Perhaps. Although, this is the first time my contractor could fly. It’s a new experience, and yet it feels very right, this way. Perhaps it’s because you’re such a good match for me. Being able to wield me while flying matches well with my skills, and only one or two of my past contractors could bring as much power out of me as you do.
“It matters who wields you?” I wondered, while scanning the grounds across the road from the post station’s inn.
Absolutely. I have little pneuma of my own, My Lady. Without the pneuma of a contractor, I have only my mental strength and what power I can draw by employing lower spirits of my affinities. My strength with a contractor is the strength of my contractor.
I wasn’t entirely certain what ‘mental strength’ meant, but I felt the twinge of recognition that meant that Senhion probably knew. It’s like the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue. And that bit about ‘lower spirits’… it was the first time I learned that Durandal was capable of Spirit magic. I filed that knowledge away for future reference.
The sense of being followed that I had felt the previous day had come from a vague aura like a small monster, except without a specific location. It had no definite shape, only a general area, and the only reason I had noticed it was that this vague location did not seem to be stationary, but instead was keeping pace with us from a distance.
Because it was so vague, it took a while to spot it again. I had to wait a while before I could detect that same moving area of vague presence once again.
To facilitate that, I waited until our wagon had passed down the road about a quarter mile before I began following it. I was still in [Cloak], so I had no fear of my slow flight speed looking odd to eyes on the ground.
It took about half an hour before I was convinced there was someone again following, and I was becoming worried about what sort of a high-powered magic user I was dealing with. They were clearly flying; my best guess was that they were at an altitude only a bit lower than mine, and they seemed to be perhaps a hundred paces– a tenth of an Orestanian mile– ahead of me. But I couldn’t see anything with my normal vision and, no matter how hard I concentrated, my fairy sight failed to reveal the traces of manifested mana that would betray the fifty percent of a fairy’s body that wasn’t physical flesh, or the traces of unstable mana and miasma that would give away monster biology.
Having no other options, I began gradually getting closer to the vague presence. It might be anywhere in an area of about twenty paces across… I found myself theorizing that it was some sort of reconnaissance spell employing manifested mana as a medium, or maybe a really clever pixie, or even a group of lower elemental spirits, the beings that Durandal had mentioned earlier, entities lacking a true consciousness, having only a lower animal level cluster of instincts existing as thinly manifested mana, so gauzy and vaporous that even fairy sight has trouble seeing them.
It wasn’t any of the above, though.
A-hahahaha, I spotted her! Durandal crowed in my mind. I almost leaped out of my own skin before I remembered I was the only one who could hear him.
I had to suck my lips between my teeth and clamp tight to keep myself from demanding out loud, where?!
So I thought it really hard, instead. Sometimes Durandal can catch things if I just think them really hard at him.
To the left, My Lady. She flies for a short distance, then drops to the ground and walks until she needs to catch up again.
He had even identified the individual’s sex?
It was solid forest to both sides as we followed a nearby river’s course. We were currently near the center of a broad valley that had a geology not too dissimilar to Tëan Tír.
At first, all I could catch was the vague impression of Wind mana being pulled from the front and pushed behind. Not moving the air itself, like a jet, but just streaming the mana in the air. It was exactly the same process that I use to fly and Grandmother uses to swim. I couldn’t see someone doing it, but I could see the mana with which someone was doing it. It would disappear once again after a short flight, presumably when the person was walking, and then reappear.
But it was broad daylight and I saw absolutely nothing while using normal vision. I concentrated harder on my fairy sight, but it still detected no mana or miasma biology.
Vampire sight uses Darkness mana. It was exactly the wrong light conditions to try it. So, I could only go back to normal vision and watched carefully as I moved closer.
You know the movies where the alien is on Earth hunting people using optical camouflage? And to show where he is, the movie makers just distorted the background with the shape of his body? I began to see that, and I had the position. I vaguely saw a feminine form similar to my own, with bird wings and a human-sized body.
