“Oh, will you two shut up?” Dann groaned. “You’re hurting my head. There should be a stream about half an hour’s walk east. If you can be quiet until then, maybe some water might be able to uncloud my head.” Rist and Calen laughed at Dann’s sudden outburst, but agreed to follow him through the dense foliage as he led the way.
It didn’t take long before they heard the burbling of a small rivulet through the constant haze of forest sounds. Calen stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. If he focused, he could pick out each of the sounds on their own. The sweet chirps of small birds as they went about their day, oblivious to the world outside their own. The buzzing and clicking of the thousands of insects that ruled the forest floor. The cracking and snapping of branches broken under the weight of rabbits, deer, and the occasional kat flitting between the trees.
“Calen… Calen!” Dann’s voice pierced through the wall of sound. “Will you stop daydreaming? I’m thirsty, and we need to get to the cave before it gets too late. We don’t want to be wandering through here in the dark.”
Calen opened his eyes, let out a soft sigh, and jogged after Dann and Rist. The few deer who were drinking at the rivulet when the boys arrived disappeared into the brush almost as soon as Calen laid eyes on them. Dann and Rist knelt down at the water’s edge and dipped their waterskins in. A welcome silence replaced their usual back and forth as Dann continued to mope over his foggy headache.
“Well, so far, so good,” Calen said as he hunkered down beside Rist and dipped his waterskin into the rivulet. “No wolfpines in sight, none of the kats have taken a liking to us, and we haven’t eaten any poison berries.”
“I like the positivity,” Rist replied, “but we have a long way to go yet.”
The sunlight waned as they made their way through the forest. Calen’s stomach ached. He had eaten nothing since that morning, when Ella had given him a morsel of cheese and bread. And judging by the fading light drifting through the canopy, that was quite a few hours ago. Dann took down a pair of rabbits with his bow as they hiked through the trees, but that would not be much meat to split between three of them.
None of the animals seemed to pay them much heed at all as they traipsed their way through the forest. They spotted the occasional kat watching them from a distance, but they never came too close. According to Dann, they were only young, which worried Calen a little. Those “young” kats were already nearly the same size as Faenir. They hadn’t seen a single wolfpine either, which Calen wasn’t exactly disappointed about. The wild ones were not as friendly as Faenir was.
Dann seemed to have recovered from the mead-induced body ache that had plagued him earlier in the day, and slowly, he became less brusque.
“How long until we reach that cave, Dann?” Rist called out from a couple of feet behind the pair in front.
“Shouldn’t be more than a half-hour at this rate,” Dann called back.
Where to camp had been a topic of discussion many times in the days leading up to The Proving. They needed somewhere that had shelter from the elements but was also close to a water source. Having a source of water nearby was crucial. Not just for drinking; it would also be the easiest way for them to find dinner without having to go too far. There were fish in the river, and deer or rabbits needed water just as much as they did. A bit of patience, and they would be far from hungry over the next few days.
“I can see it just up ahead,” Dann called, picking up his pace. He gave a short shrug to his right shoulder to shift the two rabbits that dangled there into a less precarious position.
Calen lifted his head from the forest floor and saw the trees open up slightly into a rocky clearing. A stream meandered through its centre; it was quite a bit larger than the rivulet they had stopped at earlier, but its pace was far more lackadaisical.
On the other side of the stream, Calen saw what they had come for. The mouth of a small cave, nestled into the jagged rock face, smothered by the dense forest around it. It could easily have been missed by someone who wasn’t looking for it.
Without a word, Dann leapt from the bank of the river, landing deftly on a rock that stuck out above the surface of the water. “Tonight is going to be cold enough without our clothes being wet,” Dann shouted back when he caught Rist raising an eyebrow at him. Rist looked at Calen and shrugged. With Dann at the lead, they made their way across the stream, hopping from rock to rock.
“Ah, fuck!” Calen yelled as his foot slipped on the slick surface of a flat stone covered in green and brown moss. It was all he could do to stop himself falling headfirst into the water. He let his shoulders sag and resigned himself to slogging the rest of the way through the languid stream. The smirk on Dann’s face only made it worse. When he reached the other side of the stream, Calen kicked out at the air as he tried in vain to shake the water out from inside his boot. He should have known Dann would make it look easier than it was.
The cave itself only stretched back into the rock face about twenty feet, which suited Calen fine. He didn’t want something sneaking up behind him from the depths while he slept. The walls were overgrown in patches, thick with green moss and small purple
