“Kin to mushrooms,” he said, a grimace of a smile playing on his face, like he had a fishhook caught in the corner of his mouth. He made amusement look positively morbid.
“I… yeah,” Bianca nodded, trying not to back away suddenly. The firelight dancing across his tusked grin was definitely not helping with her heart rate. She returned her gaze to the basket, though only a few mushrooms were left in it. “I like finding them all over the Warlock’s Coast. It makes new places feel like home, y’know?”
He didn’t answer, and for several moments there was only the sound of the wind and the fire before them, crackling as more fat sizzled off the giant rat. Maybe it was a little silly to talk to an orc about mushrooms. The Hyphae troupe could talk endlessly about all the different variations and species and where they’d spotted some, but that was easily interesting to most halflings. And Silvan forbid– if there was a pair of lookalike species, that would spark debates for weeks.
“Do you have uh, friends in the area? Or family? Are uh, Dhane and Garac there?” Bianca tried, looking earnestly at her orc companion.
The light from the fire flickered across his stoic face.
“There’s a camp. Northwest. Some other rangers in the wood.”
“Oh! That’s nice. It’s so good to have people to keep you company. Were you all hunting for food?”
“No.”
Bianca huffed a breath. This guy was like making conversation with a wall.
After a few moments, he added, unbidden, “There were some… betrothal rituals I wanted to avoid today.”
“Like a friend’s? Or ex lover?” She asked a little too quickly. It was hard not to have a nose for gossip in her own acting troupe, where there was always someone being cheated on or broken up with.
“My own.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
It looked like a touchy topic. His face had darkened somehow even more than its usual less than cheery state. His hands had curled into fists. Bianca quickly tried something else.
“...Did you end up bringing down that huldira? From before?” she asked. Those in her acting troupe with training in stage fighting often liked to dissect the choreography of a fight they’d seen, even spontaneous ones. “How many, uh, arrows did it take?”
He shook his head. “I wounded it, but it got away.”
Suddenly, the impenetrable dark depths of the Whispering Woods seemed that much more hostile, with the thought of a wounded, angry huldira skulking about.
“Oh. Are you going to… get it tomorrow?” she tried, hoping that it might be that simple. The beast seemed a lot more ferocious than any game she’d eaten, but maybe it wasn’t unusual for this neck of the woods.
“I was never going to kill it alone. We were tracking it so a larger hunting party might stand a chance of bringing it down.”
On that, Bianca scooted a little closer on the log to her orc companion, allies or not.
This forest might become home if she didn't make it back to her acting troupe’s camp. And considering this evening’s events, she would not make it very long.
Bianca felt a pang of guilt for Horace – the poor old thing didn’t deserve to get eaten by a vicious monster.
She wondered if they were worried about her, if they had realized she was gone too long. Would they look for her? Or was she one less mouth to feed as their supplies ran low? If she could find her way back, would they care about all the brushes with death she’d had today, or just that she came back empty handed? It wasn’t like she was bringing a lot of value to their shows. Anyone could open and close the curtains on cue.
“You were looking for these?” Tanis asked, suddenly a conversationalist. She followed his gaze to her near-empty basket of foraged mushrooms. “Before.”
She nodded.
“I know a clearing full of them, stone’s throw from here.”
Bianca couldn’t disguise the hope that leapt into her chest. If she could bring some back with her, then she wasn’t useless. Her head whipped around. “Will you show me?”
3
“HOW FAR CAN YOU ACTUALLY THROW A STONE,” Bianca griped, because they had been hiking around the mountain deer paths over a half hour, tripping over roots and rocks in the dark, trudging through slick snow and ice. It was hard to keep up with him, seeing as every step he took spanned about the distance that three of her’s would take. She’d gotten tired of calling out to him to slow down or wait up, and had resorted to holding onto the end of his cloak.
