The Northern Woods

Summer 217
Isendel

It is night in the woods. Impossible to tell exactly where, and it doesn’t really matter. The trees are close together here, and smaller. It’s a new growth forest, overgrown, with crowded trees and a thick cushion of pine beneath the snow. Vanja assumes they’re still in Isendel, but out here it may as well be a time before cities and baronies. A time before people altogether, when this northern land was ruled by giants.

Vanja would like to see a giant. Supposedly they still lived, in Jorung.

Now, Vanja is sitting several yards away from the fire, at the edge of their makeshift camp. She has the first watch tonight. She keeps her back to the fire, and from this far away, she can barely feel the additional warmth. It’s fine, though. Vanja has always been comfortable in the forest. It’s good, too, travelling with Bax. Vanja is good with her axes, but a thrown spear has better range for a hunt. She has a full belly, and she’s warm enough, and that is a good thing.

by Kate QuimbyNow that some time has passed, it isn’t so cold, even this far north with snow still in a thin layer over the earth. Vanja sits on a stone, and only her boots make contact with the still-frozen earth, pushing through the dusting of snow still on the ground. Closer to the fire, it has melted altogether.

At the edge of camp, in her quilted padding, and her thick cloak, and a few furs over her legs, Vanja is comfortable. It is quiet out here. Peaceful. The only sounds are the popping of the fire and, beyond, Bax’s steady breathing. It would be easy to sleep, but she stays awake.

Vanja scans the darkness beyond the camp. There’s nothing to see, and she’s tempted to call on the River to cast light into the forest beyond, to be far-seeing in the truest sense, but she will save that for if she hears something, if she senses movement. For now, it’s better this way. Keeping her back to the fire, her eyes have adjusted to the dark.

She drinks tea, made with mint, and chaga mushroom, to keep herself awake. She saves her energy.

Vanja keeps her hands busy. She uses her whetstone to hone her axes, replacing them carefully on her pack, keeping the handles and the leather straps away from the wet of the earth. She sharpens her knife, too, and helps herself to a piece of wood, about the thickness of her wrist. It’s pine, like most of the trees here, and it is an easy thing to carve. Vanja scrapes away the bark and starts to shape the wooden core. She pushes the knife away from her, with the edge of her thumb, and the wood curls away from itself in long ribbons, dropping to the ground between her feet.

Once the block is smooth, she starts to shape it into something. She thinks at first that it might become an animal, the sort of figurine she would carve for her nephews. But the wood doesn’t want to be that.

She carves sharp planes, instead, and flat sides. She uses her sanding stone on the surfaces, to smooth them even further. It’s a shape, with 8 equal planes, and sharp angles. The shape that appeared in the sky, those five years past, that Jorunguns call the ship, its 8 hulls always turning in on itself, its oars, invisible, but so long that it can fight the flow of the River, and stay unmoving in the sky.

Vanja blows the last of the wood dust from the surface of her ship-of-8-sides, and looks at it. She holds it up, aligning it with its sister shape in the sky. The shape is odd, and unnatural, and not for the first time Vanja thinks how it doesn’t look like a ship at all.

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The Northern Woods