“What is it about frogs that they love so much?” I complained, watching the gnome stroke the ugly amphibian’s head with her finger.
“What is it about them that you dislike so much?” Ket countered.
“You mean apart from the irritating sound they make, and the creepy way they move?”
The sprite laughed. It was good to hear after so long in the stresses of the oppressive forest marsh. It lifted my spirits even further when she called out to Benin and Coll.
“Why don’t I properly introduce you to some of the gnomes?” she suggested. “You’ve traveled with them long enough now.”
The two humans shrugged and agreed, trudging exhaustedly toward the water in the wake of the sparkling sprite. I was about to follow when Bekkit cleared his throat.
“I appreciate the need to rest,” he began, “but we should not tarry overmuch.”
“I’m sending the scouts out this afternoon,” I told him, though he must surely have heard me say the same thing to Ket just a few minutes earlier.
“Every moment idle is a moment wasted. There remains just five days, twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes—”
“And forty-three seconds,” I finished. “I’m more than aware. I’m also aware that morale and stamina are dangerously low. Let them have their rest. We need this.”
“I must—”
“We need this,” I repeated firmly.
I took off after Ket, and to my relief Bekkit did not follow.
Ket was pointing out individual gnomes to Benin and Coll. In their excitement at the prospect of fresh water, most of my denizens had neglected to undress before entering the river, and were now splashing around fully clothed.
Most of them.
“And this, as you know, is Longshank,” she announced, just as the hunter proceeded to drop his pants. Ket squealed and averted her eyes as though Longshank’s privates might somehow start spitting acid.
The pyromancer sniggered appreciatively. “Perhaps you should have named him Dongshank instead. Or Longd—”
“Let’s move over to the fishers,” Ket resumed loudly, her voice growing more and more high-pitched as she led them away from Longshank, who was continuing to strip. My sprite gestured at the nearest fisher. “This young man is named Chub.”
Her usual white glow, already tinged with pink, turned fuchsia when Benin snorted and then immediately began cackling. I couldn’t help but smirk as well at the unfortunate sequence of introductions.
“Why do you call him Chub?” Benin managed to ask. “Seems a bit… judgy.”
“What? He’s a fisher. We named him after the first fish he ever landed: a pale chub.”
She scowled at the now-howling mage and folded her arms. I swooped in to rescue her.
“Chubs were the only kind of fish we had in the Grotto,” I explained. “We named all the fishers after the different kinds. The small gnome beside Chub is Sprat, and the long-faced fellow over there is Bleak. Then you’ve also got Porgy. All different kinds of chub.”
Benin had finally gotten his laughter under control. “What about the last two?” He nodded toward a pair of rotund gnomes fishing further upstream than the rest. Unlike the other fishers, they carried spears rather than rods, both standing patiently in the knee-deep shallows with weapons poised.
“We’d run out of chubs by the time we got to them,” I admitted. “I wanted to name them Bloater and Floater, but Ket was boring—”
“Ket was sensible,” she corrected. “Those two are named Finn and Gill. They’re a little more… practical than the other fishers.”
“The chubs.”
“Yes.”
“By ‘practical’ she means that they don’t throw a party every time one of them catches a fish,” I told the mage. “Which the others do.”
“Every time?”
“Every. Time.”
On cue, a pattering of applause from downstream told us another fish had been landed. The clapping was of standard enthusiasm, suggesting this was probably not a new species of fish, but as usual the other fishers had all dropped their rods into the water in order to free their hands for the celebration. The subsequent splashing while wading out to retrieve their equipment, as usual, scared away every fish within a five-meter radius.
“They’re excited, bless them,” Ket said, clearly sensing my mental facepalm.
“It’s just not efficient,” I told her, not for the first time.
She spluttered. “E-fish-ent. Good one, Corey.”
I glared at her. “Why do you only ever appreciate my puns when they’re not deliberate?”
At least the fishers were getting more opportunity to practice their skills. I’d noticed they’d hit a plateau very early on, and their gains from fishing in the Grotto had been almost non-existent after a time. Now, in new terrain and catching new species, they would level up much faster. They could probably have leveled up their skills further in the flooded marsh, but since most of the creatures that dwelt there were at best inedible and at worst deadly poisonous, I hadn’t wanted to waste their stamina—or risk any member of the convoy consuming their deadly catch.
The abundance of river fish here at least provided plenty of materials to keep my craftsmen busy. The carpenters began to experiment with scrimshaw techniques, carving the larger bones to make new tools and weapons, while the armorer and tanner worked together to try and figure out a way to turn fish scales into armor. And I thought our warriors’ ensemble couldn’t get any dodgier.
The new bowyer—whom I’d decided to name Catgut, after the material that made up bowstrings—also attempted to incorporate the finer fish bones into arrow fletching, though she had yet to succeed in crafting one that would fly as straight as those fletched with the more traditional feathers.
Speaking of feathers, now that the overseer was making them bring every single catch over to me, we discovered something new about Insight and the Augmentary: when I used the ability on multiple different individuals of the same species, it unlocked more detailed information about that species, increasing my pool of knowledge the more of them we encountered. Ket suggested I do it on each of the five owlets, and then proceeded
