Age of Ice and Blood: A Pathfinder System Heroic Fantasy Quest

Fortieth of Olweje-hamba (Olweje Descending) 1348 A. L. (After Landfall)

The weather holds fair as you sail west into the open waters of the Sunset Sea, though the wind grows ever more brisk with the passage of summer. Still none regret the fact overmuch, as that turning of the seasons heralds the nearness of home after an eventful but profitable journey. Of course not all profits are of the sorts that one can mark in Antonio's ledgers. Esha is as good as her word, learning how to expunge blood and other filth from the day's battle soon after making the jest, something she had been working towards already perhaps.

"Knew we had a woman around for something," John laughs as he looks upon your now spotless tunic. "Why with a spell like that I'd..."

"I would not repeat that in the lady's hearing," you cut him off sternly before he can say something crude. For all the camaraderie of the journey there are some things you would not accept in your hearing.

Mid stride you stop, barely hearing the apology when you realize that you had not asked Esha anything about her heritage. Neither magic nor cursed blood would ordinarily merit the title, you treated her as a lady because she so comported herself as such. So are fine manners and a sharp whit the vestments of nobility or its keys and all the world a pageant play? If so who drives the wagon?

It comes to you perhaps that there is no one, that all of you are hurtling though the dark, blindly trusting and being trusted, but the black thought does not long endure. Did you not find even here under strange stars men and women who would value the same things which are sung as marks of the great and good in your home. Charity and courage, temperance and wisdom, some things there are which most men can agree upon as virtues and while you might not always recognize them for what they are the only ones wholly blind to their worth are those who like Ipsit and his mockeries of man, like the wizard in the woods of Lirman and his chalice of blood, had willfully blinded themselves.

It is thus in a far more congenial mood that Esha finds you that evening just as you are oiling and mending your armor, much needed work for a suit like this, especially amid all the sea spray and salt.

"Don't trust sorcery for the task?" she asks, a challenge, but spoken with a smile.

"I have found that magic can rarely do what the magician cannot hold in the mind and Inge for all she is wise beyond her years has never been a squire with all the duties thereof."

"A squire?" she asks. The word had been in French, as you do not know any word in Anwari to match it.

"When a boy seeks to become a knight they are apprenticed after a manner, that they might learn all that a knight must know at war and in times of peace..." Soon enough and so smoothly you hardly notice the fact you recount your own time as a squire, a fosterling of middling skill and great ambition that had earned you the name 'frog eyes' for the supposed wide eyed look until you had given the little weasel James de Gilbert a black eye of his own, earning yourself three weeks of mucking up the stables. Not that you had regretted the punishment that much in the end, the smell fades from one's nostrils after a while but your love of horses had only grown all the more in those days as more than just the noble beasts that bore knights into battle, but for their own gentle, sweet and sometimes downright silly selves.

It is then, as you recount your first sight of a shaky-footed Sliver as a foal that you realize that this is the first time in a long while that you have spoken so much and so fondly of your childhood, memories faded in the haze of battles and of strife that had come after.

"Can I have that a moment?" the sorceress asks into the soft silence, motioning to the sword you had been cleaning.

You hand it to her, expecting a polish, but as Esha utters the words of her spell and the light that passes over the blade does not fade but lingers, a sharpness upon the edge and purposefulness even without a hand upon the hilt. "There, the edge shall cut more than simple flesh when it needs to now, for a time at least." With a knowing smile she adds. "I had best stay close to you for the aid of it, yes?"

What do you reply?

[] I would be honored for the aid my lady

[] All of us aboard will be glad for such a power given the foes we faced

[] Write in

OOC: Dhampir is flirting, what do? Seriously, this is a interaction as far out of Roland's experience as fighting skull tossing fey. Courtship between nobles in this age tended to be formal, not stilted and certainly not lacking in... er innuendo, but everyone more or less knew the rules.