I'm making progress in my journey.
Small progress.
Embarrassing progress by any reasonable standard, but I had stopped applying reasonable standards to myself somewhere around the second blister.
'I'm improving,' I thought, shifting the sword on my hip.
'Unfortunately.'
The road had narrowed into a forest path, trees pressing in from both sides, roots crossing the dirt in irregular patterns that caught your boot if you stopped paying attention.
I had stopped paying attention twice already.
The air was cooler here, and the surroundings were quiet.
Birds chirping could be heard somewhere above, but not close.
'Birds go quiet for a reason,' I thought.
Then I heard the sound of a branch snapping.
Two of them came from the left.
Grey, low to the ground, the same breed as yesterday's wolf, but moving in a pair with the coordinated intention of things that hunted together regularly.
A third shifted in the undergrowth to the right, not committed yet, waiting patiently.
Yesterday, I had panicked and reacted.
Today, I panicked slightly less and reacted faster, which was a growth.
I threw the rope, which went for the nearest one before I had finished the thought, wrapping its legs cleanly, dropping it mid-stride.
It hit the path and scrambled uselessly, bound too well to do anything about its situation.
'One,' I thought, and pushed my focus toward the second.
The rope pulled back and swung for the second wolf's neck.
It caught it, not perfectly, one loop instead of the clean wrap I wanted, but good enough to make it immobile.
The animal's jaws snapped shut on nothing as it shook its head violently, trying to work free.
'Two,' I thought.
'Now the third-'
The rope was slightly off target..
My focus split three ways and promptly fell apart.
The second wolf's loop slipped.
It still had one pass around its muzzle, but it was working fast, and the third wolf had committed now, coming from the right with its head low.
'I'm fucked.'
'Can't hold three at the same time.'
I backstepped, trying to keep the second binding tight while tracking the third, and achieved neither particularly well.
Then a blade caught the third wolf across its path, not a killing blow, a redirect, precise and unhesitant as the animal stumbled sideways into a tree and stayed down.
She stepped onto the path and sheathed the blade before I had processed that she had drawn it.
Looked at the two wolves I was still managing, one fully bound and one half-escaping, and finished the half-escaping one with an efficiency that made it clear she had stopped as a professional courtesy rather than a necessity.
"Two," she said.
"You held two."
"The third slipped," I replied.
"I know."
She walked up while I was coiling the rope back, and she didn't stop at the distance people usually stopped at.
She came inside it, close enough that I registered her presence as warmth before I registered it as proximity, and looked at my hands.
"Your grip changes when you split focus," she said.
"You tighten up, and it breaks the intent."
"I didn't know I was doing that."
"You weren't supposed to."
She reached over and adjusted my hand on the rope without asking, pressing two fingers against my knuckles until my grip loosened into something more open.
"Like that. The skill doesn't need force, but your attacking direction."
I was aware, with more attention than was useful, of the scent of her, something clean and faintly resinous, like a forest after rain but warmer.
'Focus,' I told myself.
'On what?' a less helpful part of my brain replied.
"You hesitate on the second target," she said.
"You confirm the first is secure before you move. That's how you plan during the fight to close the gap."
"How do I fix it?"
She looked at me, a longer look, like she was checking whether the question was genuine or defensive.
"Trust the first bind," she said.
"If the skill placed it, it holds. Stop trying to make sure."
She picked up a stone from the path and, without warning, threw it directly at my chest.
"Bind it."
'Ah fuck.'
I got the rope up as the stone hit it and deflected rather than being caught, which was not binding it, but it was something.
In the meantime, she picked up another stone and threw it faster.
This time, the rope moved properly, wrapping once around the stone and pulling it off its path.
It dropped at my feet.
"Better," she said.
Better.
One word that somehow landed with more weight than a full sentence of praise would have.
She threw a third stone without warning.
I caught it clean without breaking a sweat.
"Not useless," she said.
We walked together for a while after that, not by agreement exactly, just in the way that happens when two people are going the same direction and conversation has already started.
She didn't offer her name.
I didn't ask.
It felt like the wrong move with someone like her, pushing for information she hadn't chosen to give would close something that was currently open.
"The cave south of the Devil's pass," she said eventually.
"What are you actually going for?"
"Something inside it."
"Helpful."
"Something that would make my journey a cakewalk," I said.
She made that small sound again, the non-smile.
"People say that before until they reach that place."
"You've been there?"
"I've been near it." She paused for a second.
"Near is far enough to know what waits inside isn't interested in your reasons for coming."
We reached a fork in the path where a girl sat on a milestone looking lost in the specific way of someone who was not lost but processing something difficult.
Young, maybe eighteen, healer's satchel over one shoulder, the small staff across her knees.
She looked up when we approached, and her eyes landed on me with brief open curiosity, not the assessment from the woman beside me, just simple, uncomplicated interest which she didn't know how to hide.
"The eastern road to Merin's village?" she asked.
"Left fork," the woman said, without breaking stride.
The girl nodded, glanced at me once more, and started walking.
I watched her go for a moment.
'Different,' I thought, without being entirely sure what I meant by it.
At the tree line where the forest path opened back onto the wider road, the woman stopped.
She looked ahead at the path, then back at me.
A pause, brief, the full stop of someone choosing words with some care.
"Stay alive," she said.
"I don't like wasting time on dead men."
She turned and took the side road without looking back.
I stood at the tree line and watched the path she had gone down until it curved and she disappeared, and I thought about the rope and the stone dropping clean into the loop on the third throw, and the way she had adjusted my grip without hesitation, two fingers against my knuckles, and the word better landing heavier than it had any right to.
'Not just survival,' I thought, and wasn't entirely sure what I meant by that either.
I turned back to the road south.
The trees ahead were older, closer together, the path between them darker than the stretch I had already walked.
Something about the quality of the silence changed past that point, like the forest was paying attention to things coming through it.
'If this is just the road,' I thought, adjusting the rope at my belt and walking forward anyway.
'What the hell is waiting in that cave?'