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Camilla sat on the grass, her back leaned against a stump, and took another sip of water. She wasn’t doing anything much at all at the moment, just sitting and watching the potatoes grow as clouds meandered by.
The clouds were wispy and white. She had quickly learned the difference between these and the dark, powerful ones that precluded a storm. She and Palamedes had so much to learn—it was exhilarating.
The best angle to hold a saw as she cut down trees with Pyrrha to build their little shelter, how to follow the tracks of one of the small furry creatures they could eat, how to aerate soil for seeds, when a storm was coming, when the temperature was about to drop, when the red sun would set each night, how to wash clothes in the stream nearby, how to fish.
They’d always known so much, but only about the things that mattered in their old life. Necromancy, swordfighting, politics, history.
Different things mattered now.
Things like trapping, then killing, then skinning, then properly tanning the hide, then sewing it into the inseam of a coat. Pyrrha said that winter would come to this planet and it was good for them to do as much as they could now to prepare—before they needed to have warm clothes, or dried meat, or broth for stews.
Even with everything that there was to do, there was still time for quiet moments like this. Camilla took another drink of water, closed her eyes, and relished in the soft breeze that ghosted across her face.
Somewhere, a timer went off.
Palamedes woke up. He was reclined on the ground, a crumb-strewn cloth beside him that indicated Camilla had finished eating her lunch. Good. One of the shocking things about being in her body was how hungry she got, pangs of it shooting insistently in a way his own frail body had never seemed to earn. The muscled body he now shook into motion certainly earned its meals.
While he had always known Camilla honed herself into masterful shape, it was only when he could feel its effects from the inside that he truly understood the wonder.
Palamedes sprung easily up on her fit legs and went inside the cabin to fetch his notebook. It was a crude thing, pages hewn from the thin, pale bark that covered some of the trees. It wouldn’t last more than a few years even with the best preservation efforts, which physically hurt his Sixth instincts. It would die anyway. Mortality was inevitable now, but in those scant years before it decomposed in his hands, he would find a better way to preserve the knowledge.
Palamedes took his fragile child and went into the woods, finding his camouflaged seat and tucking himself into it. He carefully opened the notebook to the latest page and continued where he’d left off, documenting the local flora and fauna. Were berries edible or toxic? Did the creeping vines give him rashes, or did they soothe burns? What were the insects that tucked themselves into grooves and under leaves?
As time passed and his noisy entrance fell out of the memory of the forest, creatures began to stir from their hiding places once more. Palamedes’s rough charcoal pencil scratched against the page with quiet fervor, taking fast notes accompanied by sketches. He documented the shape and parts of the creatures, noting potential uses or hazards.
He busied himself with the task and tried not to think about what was happening several lightyears away, in a bloodsoaked section of the universe. He tried not to think about Dulcinea’s ashes, sifting through his fingers; the first and only time he’d held her, and he hadn’t even known it.
Nona was teaching Noodle commands while Pyrrha worked on the fence a couple hundred feet away. Pyrrha was very confident that this fence would bring them to the “next level of civilization” that they needed. Livestock was her goal. Of course, even if she could coax some of the various docile medium-sized creatures into her growing enclosure, they would need protecting from the medium-sized ones with sharp teeth.
That’s where Noodle would come in! At first, when the suggestion had been brought up, Nona’s eyes had gotten big and wet, and she had thrown her arms around the dog and cried and cried, begging Pyrrha not to put him in danger like that. Pyrrha had patiently explained that she didn’t expect the dog to fight any wild beasts off. She just wanted him to be able to tell when something was near, and bark as loud as he could while herding their creatures into the barn that was currently just a foot high foundation but was definitely going to exist properly one day.
Right now they were working on the barking. Nona instructed him to lay still in the middle of what would be the enclosure while she went off to the edge of the woods.
She lurked there for a minute, noting with pride that his eyes attentively tracked her movements. His tail was wagging, which meant that he knew what a good boy he was being, which made her smile harder. She went over behind a tree and picked up one of the large animal skins that was piled there for the training.
This was one of the shaggy creatures Pyrrha wanted to raise as livestock. She draped it over herself and crouched down, remembering very hard the way she’d seen them move their ponderous limbs and moving hers in the same way as she crawled out from the treeline. She paused in plain view, keeping an eye surreptitiously on Noodle.
He was sat up with his body practically vibrating with focus, tail thwapping excitedly on either side of him. He didn’t bark. Good boy!
Nona lumbered back behind the tree and quickly swapped the skin out for a different beast. One of the dangerous ones, that Pyrrha had taken her on a day long hike to track down and see. The older woman had explained “wilderness survival skills” the whole time and Nona listened with wide eyes.
They had spent three hours watching a family of these beasts as they lazily basked in the sun around their den. She’d watched the mother set out for a hunt as the moon rose. Pyrrha had wrapped Nona in a big fur blanket when she’d shivered, and she’d dozed as her guardian kept watch.
Pyrrha nudged her awake a bit before dawn. The mother had returned, slinking in with a small feathered docile beast in her powerful jaws. They’d watched silently as the kittens tumbled over themselves to get a bite, and then all settled down with full bellies to sleep as the first edges of the sun broke over the mountain in the distance.
The first time Pyrrha and Camilla killed one she’d cried all day. She’d refused to even let Camilla tell her a bedtime story that night, even though she loved the stories Cam could tell. When she was still sulking two days later, Palamedes had sat down with her and told her about different creatures he watched.
He’d started innocently enough, talking about the way they snuffled for mushrooms or groomed each other, the way the birds called in the mornings. Then, when she was truly enraptured in his words and not thinking about the dead skin drying outside at all, he talked about the fish that ate bugs, and the feathered beasts that ate the fish, and then the furry beasts that ate the feathered ones, and then he made it all the way up the cycle to Pyrrha killing the clawed beasts that ate the hooved.
Nona had cried a little more, but she understood the lesson. Now it hardly hurt at all to throw the skin over herself. It helped, even, to remember the family of creatures and pretend to be one, crouching much lower to the ground than before and making her movements lithe and graceful. She slinked from behind the tree, darting not into the open yet but just to the next tree over. There was a moment of silence, and she tried not to get mad at Noodle.
Instead, she moved her arms and legs like she remembered the mother doing, and wished only she had a tail she could flick back and forth lazily to complete the impersonation. She tensed all her muscles and made it to the next tree in one great leap, which was a sign of how far she’d come in strength training and made her quite proud of herself.
She was rewarded further by a loud and sudden barking. She giggled and peeked out to see Noodle running around in a tight little circle, howling his head off, tail like a helicopter blade sweeping in rapid circles of good-boyness.
She swept the animal fur off her and ran over to him. Pyrrha beat her there, which was good because Noodle needed to train barking until Pyrrha came and could fight off any creatures—if she needed to. Pyrrha reached Noodle first and fed him a piece of dried meat from her pouch, and he was so excited he flopped to his back and squirmed in the dirt.
Nona joined them, beaming, and Pyrrha flashed her a smile and kissed her forehead, which made Nona glow from the top of her head where the kiss landed to the bottom of her toes.
“Good work, kiddo. We’ll get him to earn his keep yet.” She winked as she said it, and Nona rolled her eyes. Pyrrha was still pretending to be mad that she had snuck the dog on board their ship right before takeoff without telling anyone. But she couldn’t just leave him behind! And soon Pyrrha couldn’t even pretend to be mad about it because she was right, Noodle was proving to be very useful to them.
She gave his belly a rub and he squirmed blissfully some more, all six of his legs kicking when she hit his favorite spot.
There had been a lot of long talks about the decision to come here, and Nona had been really sad to leave all her friends behind, but all the memories of before were starting to soften around the edges, so it was easier to think about it as something in the Past. Plus, it was much nicer here. There were less creases of worry on Palamedes and Cam’s face, and Pyrrha looked over her shoulder a lot less, and Nona was allowed to be as loud as she wanted, as long as she was within sight of the others so she didn’t attract any of the large-sized creatures.
Very secretly, something she only thought about at night sometimes in her most selfish moods, Nona was also glad because it looked like as long as they stayed here, which was shaping up to be a very long time—at least until everyone was done fighting about necromancy which Pyrrha said had already been ten thousand years without break so should take at least a couple years more—Nona could keep having this body.
She liked having a body very much.