Chapter 9-1

The trio – it felt like it was okay to call themselves a trio now – headed up north, in what Anjanette had dubbed Operation: Get The Hell Out of Dodge. Other than the Kendran checkpoint they had to pass through to get out from under the red sky, they avoided leaving any sort of trail – whether physical or in the minds of others. They used aliases, hid in inn rooms when they weren’t camping in the bushes, and never ran scams. After every camp Leonas spent nearly an hour removing all traces of their existance. There was a reason for the sudden secrecy: they were now the hunted instead of the hunters.

“Valgard and his remaining knight are going to be after us now,” Leonas had said. “We don’t need to run into them again, but they need to find us. So we lay low and hope they miss us.”

“Well, we beat them once,” said Milly.

“My arm would like to remind you that even ‘beating’ them was not a pleasant experience,” said Leonas. “So let’s avoid unnecessary fights. Meanwhile, we’ll head in the general direction of Heka where the next book should be located.”

“We’re going to Heka?” said Anjanette. “Sweet! I’m gonna get high and find an orgy!”

Milly blushed, and Leonas chuckled. “Yeah, it’ll be good to blow off some steam after all of this crap. But until then, stay disciplined.”

“You know I won’t,” Anjanette said with a syruppy-sweet tone in her voice.

“Yeah yeah.”

* * *

Derrick & Delia was a long-running series of comedy ilscs about the titular pair of adventurers. It was mainstream, populist fare with nothing interesting or noteworthy, but it was reasonably well-crafted and hence was one of the msot popular things going. It was also the only one of Anjanette’s ilscs that Milly and Leonas could sit through.

They had set up a claustrophobic camp in a forest grove at night, better to hide from any pursuers. The light from the ilsc caught in the twisting tree branches, creating grotesque shadows. As they headed to the coastal nation of Heka the weather got warmer and the vegetation more plentiful. Milly had stopped wearing her heavy cloak and instead just carried it for storage, and even Leonas had mostly abandoned his dressy shirts for more casual wear. Between that and travelling he now looked more like a farmboy than the gentleman merchant he tried to portray. Of course, Anjanette never wore much in the first place, so she didn’t need to adjust at all.

Anjanette sat chuckling at the ilsc, while Milly idly read The Art & Culture of the Cephalod People. Leonas was reading over the latest letter from Ash for the sixth time/. The edges of the paper were creased from being clutched with frustration so often.

“So what’s up with your boy toy?” said Anjanette.

“Remarkably little, and yet he makes a ten-page letter out of it,” said Leonas.

“Sounds like he could use an editor,” said Milly.

“Aw, he just likes you is all,” said Anjanette, gently elbowing Leonas in the ribs.

Leonas shrugged. “To be honest, if I’d known that one night stand would get me so much junk mail I wouldn’t have done it. Anjanette, how do I break this off painlessly? I mean painlessly for me, of course.”

“Come on, what’s so bad about the guy?”

“Just too simple for me,” said Leonas.

Anjanette rolled her eyes and went back to watching her ilsc.

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