The Duchess Cannot Sleep || ONC 2021

6 | The Morning

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The Borderland Forest
First light
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For as exhausting as the day had been, Reide did not rest at all. And neither did Miss Andreya, he noticed, but unlike him, she at least bothered to pretend.

The beginnings of sunrise filtered through the mist just after the gentle wails of the leafbody birds echoed through the treetops. Reide pondered at the clouded sky with his arms behind his head and sat up when Andreya rustled. She emerged first from under the few layers of blankets he and Stasen had scrounged together as a mess of still-knotted dark hair, followed with a silent breath by the rest of the woman who owned it. Reide's brows raised.

"So you are not a ghoul, after all," he said.

As the lady yawned and shirked her blankets and adjusted her many foreign skirts from her spot beside the campfire embers, she cast him a raised brow of her own.

"You look much more like a lady than a ghoul in the daylight." And a pretty one at that. Reide shrugged nonchalantly. "Also, if Stasen and I had shared camp with a ghoul, we likely would not still be here, which, fortunately for us, we are."

"You have not forgotten I am still a ghoul of a different breed, yes, Mister Hafiless?" She continued her raised brow as she stood and shook out her bedding, and Reide chuckled.

"I don't count immortals as monsters, Miss Andreya. And, please, call me Reide."

Another rustle sounded from under Stasen's branch shelter, which he had built to include the other two but had ended up using alone. "Just because the sky isn't pitch black doesn't mean it's daylight. And daylight doesn't mean you can talk as loudly as you want, either."

"Well it worked, didn't it?" Reide said. "Not only are you awake now, it's light enough you can't go back to sleep, so you'll have to help me clean up camp."

Granted, cleaning camp really only consisted of putting out the embers of the fire, but the man still grumbled a fair amount in leaving his bed of leaves. When that was done, the three of them collected their things and began their trek back through the forest going the way opposite the one from which Andreya had come. Following behind the two hunters, she carried nothing but her aching ankles and her bloodied sheet, which she still held tight around her arms like a sad attempt at a shawl. She couldn't help but wonder what she was getting into.

"Where are we headed again?" She hopped over a root and Reide glanced over his shoulder.

"Stasen's going to head back to the rest of the hunting teams to report our lack of findings while I escort you to a town named Feledir, where we can find a spiritist to answer your questions. Once we're out of the forest, though, we'll be in Isantad proper, which means you'll need to cover your hair and get some different clothes so long as we're near the border."

Oh. Andreya had nearly forgotten her country was more than unpopular with its neighbors. And had been for a long time, so her people had a distinctly Nasavtean look to them, too. She peered down at her fine dress, muddied and torn, and at the detestable rag she'd stolen from the mortuary and decided to wrap around herself. Even if she did not look so Nasavtean, she would still stick out horribly with her zombie-like appearance.

The Borderland Forest, as Torr had called it, was much larger than Andreya was originally anticipating. It was nigh midday when they finally reached the end of it, the sun bearing down on their party from directly above and heating Andreya's hair as she emerged from the trees and stepped straight out onto a gravel road crossing next to the forest. Looking in wonder to either side, the road spanned for miles, branching off and connecting to towns she could hear in the distance past more trees and hills and a beautifully populous landscape.