Exiled Prince and Hi Chapter 51: A village

Chapter 51: A village

He was already reaching for his sword before he was fully awake.

The hand on his shoulder registered as a threat first, a gravefang second, and a person approximately never, and his body had made its decision before his mind caught up with any of it. He was on his feet with his hand on the hilt and his weight forward and his eyes scanning for whatever had co out of the trees this ti—

Laughter.

Not screaming. Laughter. All three of them, various volus and styles — Rei with both hands over her mouth, shoulders shaking, eyes bright with it; Ayra turned slightly away, her own smile contained but losing ground fast; and Kaede standing with her arms folded and a deeply satisfied expression that suggested she had been hoping for exactly this result.

"You were sleeping like the dead," Kaede said.

Renji let go of his sword. Straightened. Smoothed his collar with one hand in what he hoped was a single fluid motion.

"I was awake already," he said.

"You were not."

"I was aware of my surroundings. I was simply resting my eyes."

"You were completely horizontal and making sounds."

"I don’t make sounds."

"Renji." Kaede looked at him with the patience of soone correcting a persistent error. "We will get to the sounds."

He decided not to ask about the sounds yet. He rolled his shoulders instead, which was a mistake — the stiffness hit him from the base of his neck down through both arms like his body had spent the night solidifying into one long complaint. He tried not to let it show and failed.

"Ugh."

"The great warrior," Kaede observed.

"My shoulders," Ayra said conversationally, pressing her fingers into one of them with a pained look that was at odds with her usual composure. "I didn’t think about them when we were rolling down the hill. I thought about them extensively afterward."

"My legs," Renji said. "Everything. All of it."

Rei stood nearby looking, by comparison, frustratingly intact. She stretched her arms above her head and her spine made a single small crack and she sighed contentedly.

Renji looked at her.

"Lucky you, I wish I was a healer," he said.

She had the decency to look sympathetic about it.

They sat around what was left of the fire — low embers now, mostly heat without light — and ate from the remaining supplies. Preserved portions that had survived the carriage wreck, divided without ceremony. It wasn’t much but it was warm adjacent, which was the best that could be said. Around them the forest was doing its morning routine, light coming through the canopy in slow diagonals, the mist pulling back to wherever mist goes when it’s done.

"You know you snore, right?" Kaede said.

Renji looked up from his food.

"Sorry?"

"I said you snore." She said it with the sa tone she used for stating facts. The road goes north. Water is wet. Renji snores.

"I absolutely do not snore."

"You do."

"I have never once—"

"It sounded like an injured animal," Ayra offered, without looking up

Rei inhaled her food.

"Are you alright?" Ayra asked her.

Rei nodded, eyes watering, still trying not to laugh and losing badly.

"This is coordinated," Renji said. He looked between the three of them. "This is sothing you’ve arranged. You sat around comparing notes while I was—" He stopped. "While I was keeping watch. Before Ayra took over. Which was recently and briefly."

"We didn’t need to arrange anything," Kaede said. "We all heard it independently and arrived at the sa conclusion."

"The injured animal conclusion."

"The injured animal conclusion."

He ate the rest of his food in dignified silence, which would have landed better if Rei hadn’t still been making small suppressed sounds beside him.

When the food was gone and the fire had gone from embers to mory, Renji stood and dusted his hands on his trousers and looked around the campsite with the expression of soone who had just had an excellent idea.

"Alright," he said. "Ti to clean up camp.

" He turned and gestured broadly at the surrounding area, which included bags, the remnants of their makeshift shelter, scattered supply wrappings, and general accumulated debris. Then he gestured at the three girls specifically. "I’ll leave the ladies to handle packing. I should scout ahead — check the route, make sure we’re not walking into another situation."

Kaede’s eyes narrowed by exactly one degree. "That is a lazy excuse to avoid packing."

"Scouting is a critical function."

"You want to go sit under a tree."

"I want to ensure we don’t walk into another pack of gravefangs because nobody checked the road ahead." He gave her a very serious look. "Would you prefer that? Because I can skip the scouting if you’d like to have that experience again."

She opened her mouth.

He was gone.

Not running — he had more dignity than running — but he walked into the trees at a pace that made discussion impractical, and within a minute the campsite was behind him and the forest was around him and a very large tree with good roots had presented itself as an excellent place to rest his back.

He sat down. Closed his eyes. Listened to the birds.

The quiet was extraordinary. Nobody was snoring allegations at him. Nobody’s shoulders hurt loudly. The forest made its neutral sounds and asked nothing from him in return.

He stayed there long enough that the quality of light through the canopy shifted slightly.

A shadow fell across him.

He opened his eyes.

All three of them stood in a loose row looking down at him with expressions arranged along a spectrum from gentle amusent to sothing Kaede was pretending wasn’t amusent. Behind them he could see their bags packed and assembled and ready to move. Rei tilted her head to one side.

"This is a strange way to scout," she said.

Renji looked at them. At the bags. At the completely packed and ready campsite that had been apparently cleared and organized without him. Then he stood, straightened his collar, and looked ahead into the forest with the composure of a man whose plan had gone exactly as intended.

"Done packing?" he said.

"Yes," Ayra said.

"Good." He nodded once, surveying the tree line with what he felt was appropriate gravitas. "Good. Thanks to my diligent scouting, I can confirm the route ahead is completely clear. No threats. Safe passage." He turned back to them. "You’re welco."

The three of them exchanged a look. The specific kind of look that requires no words, that carries full sentences in it, that in this case appeared to say we are not going to validate this in perfect unison. Then they picked up their bags and waited.

He led them out of the trees and onto what remained of the road.

They walked.

The forest had a different character in the daylight hours than it did when it was trying to kill them — quieter in the dangerous sense, the trees less hostile, the mist fully gone. Their footsteps settled into a rhythm that took a while to establish and then held, and the conversation ca and went in waves the way it does when people are tired but not miserable, when the worst is behind them and the next thing hasn’t arrived yet.

Renji walked slightly ahead and thought about things he didn’t say out loud.

It was a strange thing, he decided, without having the right word for the strangeness. He had spent most of his life accounting for himself and no one else — where he slept, what he ate, which direction was safest and why, all of it calculated against a single variable. Himself. He’d been good at it. He’d had to be.

Now there were three people behind him who adjusted their pace to his without comnting on it. Who had fought beside him yesterday without needing instruction for most of it. Who packed a campsite and waited for him to lead them sowhere and trusted, apparently, that he had so idea of where that was.

It wasn’t one-sided — he knew that. They’d kept him alive as many tis as he’d kept them, probably more if Rei’s healing was added to the count, which it should be. It wasn’t that he was responsible for them in so absolute direction.

It was more even than that.

That was the strange part, actually. The evenness.

He’d never had even before. It had always been tilted — either entirely on him or entirely against him, never this particular balance of moving through sothing together without anyone keeping score. He didn’t have a na for that. He just noticed it, the way you notice the temperature of a room when it changes.

Ahead through the trees, a gap appeared. Light, more of it than the canopy usually let through. The quality of the forest changed around them — trees thinning, ground evening out, the sounds of birds different in the way they are when there are buildings nearby.

Ayra saw it first.

"We made it." Her voice ca out brighter than she’d probably intended, and she didn’t bother correcting it. "Look — a village."

Through the remaining trees, against the last of the evening light, a cluster of structures sat at the edge of where the forest gave up. Smoke from chimneys. Faint orange warmth in windows. The suggestion of a road that had been maintained by people who cared whether it worked.

Renji looked at it. Then he folded his arms.

"Naturally," he said. "My scouting this morning identified the optimal route. You’re all witnessing the results of that."