NOVEL NEXT Ch. 72: Hidden Agendas
They continued on their way without further fanfare. It was a quiet hike. Cass spent most of the walk chewing on the pain-killing root she found and scooping up other interesting plants with Foraging. She found a handful of herbs that were supposedly good for blood loss and others for accelerated healing. All of them went directly into her Bag.
That evening, Cass set camp again. Alyx gathered firewood and Cass lit it with Elemental Manipulation. She found more reeds along a river they’d passed and spent the cloudy twilight weaving new sleeping mats for the two of them.
For dinner, they had the awful sweet potatoes and herbal tea brewed from the healing herbs Cass had collected that day.
Foraging has increased to level 6.
Foraging has increased to level 7.
Beacon of Hearth and Home has increased to level 6.
Herbal Concocting has increased to level 3.
On the whole, Cass was feeling a lot better by the time she was curling up on the makeshift bed, her wounds in far far better shape than she had any right to expect them to be.
Just as Cass was about to nod off, Alyx spoke up from the other bed.
“Hey, Cass, can I ask you a question?”
Cass sat up and looked across the fire pit to the other woman. “What’s up?”
She frowned in confusion. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’?”
Cass nodded.
Alyx sighed but didn’t immediately say anything. She held the pommel of her new sword. She fiddled with the end, her lips pursed in thought. Finally, Alyx asked, “What do you want from me?”
Cass cocked her head to one side. “What?”
“What do you want from me?” Alyx repeated. “I don’t have anything to give you. I can’t pay you back for saving me repeatedly or for giving me these boss rewards.”
Cass glanced down at Salos. He just yawned and shrugged.
“I—I mean—” Cass stuttered. She didn’t know how to answer her. How did she say, ‘I’m lost and alone and it was the right thing to do?’ Like that, she supposed. Instead, she said, “You’re welcome?”
Alyx looked down but nodded slowly. “Do you know who I am?”
Cass opened her mouth to answer her name was Alyx, but Alyx continued before she could.
“You must think I’m more important than I actually am. I told you my name is Alyx Veldor. Maybe you recognized my last name and thought to yourself, ‘that makes her a descendant of Grand Duchess Kahryn Veldor. She must have wealth and power and if I help her she’ll have to pay me back with power, money, or favor’.”
She looked up, meeting Cass’s eyes, searching them for confirmation.
Cass had no idea what she was talking about.
“Well, I can’t do any of that for you. I might be a daughter of that house, but I’m a (bastard?). My father would rather see me dead than inherit a thing from him. All I can do to repay you is offer you my sword, but I…” She bit her lip, looking away. She took a deep breath. “I cannot do that. There is something I must do. And I can’t be tied to some stranger to do it.”
She looked up at Cass again. She was waiting for a response.
But what could she say? She hadn’t known Alyx’s circumstances.
She hadn’t planned on being rewarded.
There had been a hope that Alyx might have a house she could crash in while she and Salos got their bearings.
There had been a hope Alyx could be a friend in a world that scared her.
But favors? Money? It hadn’t even occurred to her.
How did she explain all this to Alyx though? Not without first explaining how she was from another world and very lost. Without undercutting what was clearly hard for Alyx to talk about with Cass’s story.
Cass stalled, grasping for anything. “What do you need to do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Alyx swallowed. “I do mind.”
Cass nodded. Reasonable. Fair.
But that left her where she started.
Cass forced herself to say something. “I just need a place to rest after all this. I’m not from around here, as you might have guessed. I—” She remembered Salos’s warning about saying she had no support and cut herself off. She wanted to trust Alyx. Alyx seemed nothing but sincere. But, she also seemed to think Cass had some unknowable objective.
Alyx frowned. “That’s all?”
Cass nodded.
She sighed. “Why pretend that's it?”
Cass raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not an idiot, Cass,” Alyx said. “No one does what you’ve done out of the goodness of their hearts. At every opportunity, you’ve done everything in your power to put me in your debt.”
“What?”
“You saved me from the spider,” she began, ticking off her fingers as she spoke. “You then offered to let me come with you to fight the Lord, effectively offering me the Depth’s Lord’s reward buff. You gave me loot from the Caretaker when that entire encounter belonged to you. You didn’t abandon me to the Herald. You even went out of your way to make sure that I would participate in that fight so I would be eligible for the treasure afterward. You didn’t hold the treasure back once we earned it.”
Cass frowned. None of that had been calculated. “Should I have not done all that?”
“That isn’t the point.” Alyx let out an exasperated sigh. “You can’t claim you don’t want something after all that.”
Her stomach twisted. Did she seem so untrustworthy? Maybe she had been playing too much too close to the chest?
“Is that really what you think?” Cass asked in a whisper. Maybe she needed to explain everything.
“Don’t treat me like an idiot, that’s all I’m asking,” Alyx said.
Cass nodded. What was the harm? Alyx wanted to know. “Alright. I can do that.”
“Cass, don’t do it,” Salos chirped. “She will not believe your insane story.”
But Cass had already started. “I’m not from this world. I’m from another one.” She started slow but every word that followed picked up speed until they were gushing out in an uncontrolled torrent. “One without magic or stats or monsters. And, I just want to find my way home, to my family, because they saw me get kidnapped and probably think I’m dead. But I don’t know how to get home, so I just need somewhere safe where nothing is trying to kill me for five minutes while I figure everything else out.”
Alyx raised an eyebrow at that. The silence between them stretched on. “Really?”
Cass nodded.
Alyx snorted. “Fine.”
“Fine?” Cass asked.
“Fine,” Alyx repeated, the word no less curt the second time. She fell back on the bed. “I’ll do my best to pay you back. You don’t need to invent a sob story to compel my obedience.”
“What?”
“You understand my options to pay you back are limited. I will get you the Herald of the Pass. That doesn’t make us even, but it's the best I can do for you.”
Cass shook her head, completely lost. Alyx was upset though. Cass looked to Salos. Maybe there was some nuance in the translation she was missing?
“She doesn’t believe you, idiot.” He yawned. “I told you. She thinks you’re still treating her like an idiot. Probably cursing you under her breath for not even inventing a believable story.”
“Tell her I’m telling the truth,” Cass said.
He shrugged. “What would your animal companion vouching for you do? She’ll just assume, rightly, that I’m in on it too.”
“But—”
“Goodnight, Cass,” Alyx called, as sharp a command to shut up as Cass had ever heard.