Irene had volunteered to help Sir Gunnar skin one of the squirrels since the fire was taken care of and Felix was managing it. In the meantime, Leaf was plucking the bird of its feathers while Phillip sought a stick to roast the game and Sir Sven was pulling out all of his cooking supplies.
When their travel teams were assigned, Irene was thrilled that Sir Sven would be going along with them. Not only was it nice to have another archer on the trip, but he also cared the most about seasoning the food. Everyone who went with him was guaranteed a good meal. When they were out on the road for months at a time over the summer, she had surprisingly missed his cooking the few times she had tried it.
It led her thoughts to drift to whether or not the knights would be more aggressive in their pursuit of an apprentice if the winterization went well. She had always expected that Sir Sven may ask her one day. Sir Gunnar seemed to like Felix because he was one of the oldest knights and Felix had been around since he was a small child.
On the other hand, Sir Phillip seemed to like Leif even though the apprentice would probably prefer Irene’s father to be his knight. Her father was always resistant to it. She had a feeling it had to do with her grandmother’s insistence that warriors must be self-sufficient.
However, she also didn’t mind that all of them traveled together the way they were without picking favorites. They equally protected one another that way and it felt comfortable not to have to burden oneself with one knight but learn equally from all whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Sir Phillip soon arrived with sticks and with long pieces of strong grass. They tied the carcasses onto the sticks so that they could put them into the soft ground and occasionally turn them as the fire cooked them.
Irene cleaned off her hands with a cloth and her eyes followed the knight who was walking away from the group. She was surprised to hear Sir Gunnar utter something as he walked towards the edge of the forest.
She stood up, wondering what he was going to say, but he soon turned to her.
"Follow me," he said. "Let them deal with the meal."
She dutifully followed, feeling a bit paranoid to be walking through the forest when it was still early in the morning. However, she soon discovered what the knight was trying to show her.
The forest was shallow and she could easily see the beginnings of a purple morning just breaking over the horizon. The girl gasped as she looked out and her pace became much quicker, not wanting to miss the most beautiful sunrise she had ever experienced in her life.
The closer she got to the other edge of the cliff on the plateau, the more she crouched before she was sitting down in the wet grass. She was uncaring that the morning dew was making her pants wet because they would soon go to sleep anyway and it would be the warmest part of the day during her rest.
The expanse in front of Irene revealed a frozen sea and snow-covered plains that went to high mountains even further north than where they were. She always thought the northern mountains were the highest in the world, but the white ones she observed seemed even more than that.
The view was making her heart race and her eyes couldn’t stop moving, never settling on a point because of how entirely overwhelmed she was.
Her family’s former home. She was finally seeing it with her own eyes.
The desire to explore it for herself one day struck her and her eyebrows lowered. It was her dream to do the journey with her father amid summer so that it would be the mildest it ever got up there. However, he complained a few times that the iron hand hurt whenever it was cold outside. Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on novel·fire.net
A very negative train of thought began to creep in but Sir Gunnar had the most perfect timing.
"Your father says there are ships still at the water’s edge. They freeze in the ice each winter and are thawed out every summer," he explained. "I have never been able to spot them, but he’s insistent that he could."
His footsteps came closer to the girl and he crouched down next to her.
"Never a sunrise one," he continued. "Almost makes the journey worth it."
Her voice was quiet but she agreed. "It does."
Her eyes continued further north away from the frozen ocean and she squinted when she swore she saw a large amount of movement toward the base of the white mountains. Her eyes then widened when she was almost certain that there was something there.
"One of the dangers of those mountains during winter are the constant avalanches," Gunnar explained. "Whether from monsters or simply the weight of the snow, no one is quite sure."
Irene finally turned to the knight.
"Wyrms?!" she exclaimed.
The knight chuckled and shrugged. Perhaps he was only saying that to get a rise out of her.
A short time later, Irene thought she had memorized the view when there was a voice coming from the forest.
"Get over here and eat or there’s going to be nothing left for the two of you!" Phillip shouted. "We want to go to sleep."
At the mere mention of sleep, Irene couldn’t help the yawn that fell from her lips and caused her freckled nose to wrinkle.
In no time, they were back with the others and she realized just how exhausted everyone looked. They were a reflection of how she felt so she imagined she must look like hell as well.
When Irene was finally able to sink her teeth into a squirrel leg, her eyes widened and she couldn’t help the "mmm" that she produced.
"Thank you for this meal," she uttered to anyone who had helped, but it seemed it was everyone because everyone nodded in response.
The sense of community felt particularly strong that morning and they were all finally able to go to sleep. The goal for the next day was to get the last of the straggler monsters and hope that they could make it down in one day since going down was so much faster than climbing up.