They stayed at the miller's for nearly a week. That was for a variety of reasons. The first was because the normalcy of spending time with the miller's family was helping them put the trauma of the event behind them, but it was also because Kayla was still weak. She probably didn't need her bandages anymore, but Simon had no intention of taking them off until they were away. People would talk.

The kids weren't his only reasons, though. There were two other reasons that overshadowed even that very good one. The first was that he wanted to help the miller out since he'd been such a good sport about this, and looking around his place in the light of day, it was clear that things weren't going well for him.

The final and most important reason was that he needed to figure out how to take these kids where they were going. Normally, that would be easy; Simon could see the covered bridge they'd need to take from the hilltop across the River Gellin. For anyone else, that would have worked, but for Simon, that bridge led to a troll attack sometime in the future, which made that a no-go.

So, while he discretely consulted his mirror map and chatted with the miller's family, he paid for their keep by fixing a number of joists in the old man's mill and even whipped up some plasters to address the worst of the cracks in the thing to slow down the decay. While a few days wasn't enough to fix it completely, he definitely helped. Simon could have welded all of those closed with words of earth, of course, but he was trying not to lean on magic for everything and had used more than enough for now.

The break was good for all of them, and when Kayla felt better, the miller gifted them half a dozen loaves of bread before they were on their way once more. Eddek wanted to visit the remains of their caravan again, but Simon told him that wasn't going to happen.

He'd already gone back to the scene of the slaughter on the second day and put as many of the corpses as he could find on a funeral pyre, which was the most he could offer to the dead. Even after that, though, crows still soared above the area, and Simon had no wish to let that memory dig any deeper into the heads of the survivors.

"There's nothing there we need," Simon told him as they made their way toward the river. It was true, but not the whole truth. Besides, anything of real value would have long ago been picked clean by other travelers.

"What if I need a sword to fight?" he asked. "While I appreciate your help, Sir Simon, and my father will make sure you are richly rewarded, we must be ready!"

Simon responded by giving the boy his hunting knife. It was more for fileting and skinning, but he couldn't exactly give the boy his dagger. It had several enchantments on it that would complicate things.

"That will do for now," Simon told him. "We'll see if we can find you something more fitting in the next town. I'd like to get horses, too, if we can find some for a good price. We've got a long road in front of us."

He thought about offering Kayla his bow, but despite how fearfully she looked at the woods they were approaching, she had no interest in fighting and clung to him like a child now and then. In some previous encounters, Simon could recall her viewing him with suspicion, but all of that was gone. Whether that was because he'd saved her life, though, or because he hadn't shown off any magic yet, he couldn't say.

Maybe seeing my magic is half the reason she fell in with that crowd a decade from now, he thought morosely, becoming even more determined not to reveal himself to her.

Horses would be helpful, though, because they certainly had a long way to go. It was nearly two hundred miles of hiking, much of it through mountains, even after their detour to the next bridge, which he did not bother to explain. While the children's caravan would have covered that in a week, and Simon could walk in less than two, as slow and out of shape as they were, he was pretty sure it would take a month.

Still, it was good for them, and eventually the fatigue of hiking, combined with all the chores involved in making meager dinner and camping arrangements, overpowered the memories of what they'd been through. Kayla took to it pretty well, especially after her bandages came off to reveal she wasn't as horribly scarred as she thought she'd be.

"It's a miracle!" she proclaimed.

"Not a miracle," Simon said before offering up elaborate lies about careful stitching and the right use of herbs.

The truth was that no mundane healing could have fixed this without skin grafts, and this world was a long way from sterile operating theaters. Still, with magic, by the time she finished growing in a few years, he felt confident that those three pink lines would be all but gone.

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Perhaps a healing device, He considered that evening. Something crystal-powered with words of lesser healing that you rub against such a wound to help erase it like a hot stone massage. He didn't have the tools now, and there were questions about how it would know exactly what to heal, but with a word of order, he thought it likely that he could make something work.

There were always a hundred ideas in his head of what he might work on next, but every time he built something new, he worried about what might happen to it when he died. It was a question worth worrying about since he died fairly often. One day, something would kill him, and he'd leave whatever he had on him where anyone could pick it up. While most things simply wouldn't be understood, there was the possibility that the words etched on them might inspire any number of warlocks, causing that much more evil to circulate in the world despite his best intentions.

Of course, his reliance on them concerned him, too. If I build a magic-powered gadget for everything, how long will it be before I'm herding slaves beneath a pyramid for blood sacrifice? He considered as he fell asleep that night.

For now, all of those questions were safely theoretical, and he spent the day chatting with the children and the night sleeping with one eye open to make sure they stayed safe.

They made it to the next bridge and the village of Ifrin's Crossing. It didn't have any horses for sale, but he was able to find a short sword for Eddek and better shoes for Kayla, which sped her up remarkably now that she wasn't trying to make do with torn slippers. He bought tattered blankets for the both of them and a donkey for their supplies, too, but he let the children name it, lest it end up as Daisy number four.

They chose Lazy because of how reluctant the beast was to move. However, Simon judged that to be a bit too cruel to the poor girl and named her Liza instead.

"But it's a donkey!" Eddek protested as they continued on their way toward the growing mountain range. "It can't understand us!"

"She can't," Simon agreed, "But she hears the tone in which you speak and knows disrespect when she hears it. You should be careful; the kick of a donkey is a powerful weapon. Never give her a reason to use it on your skull."

Simon couldn't tell them that he'd been killed by a donkey before, but he kind of wanted to. Kayla understood his point, but Eddek didn't, which Simon supposed was common enough. The divide between the rulers and the ruled was stark in some parts of the world. Still, nothing that Eddek told him about his culture was half so alarming as the Magi in the northern lands.

The biggest problem in the Kingdom of Charia seemed to be the very geography. The mountains simply made it impossible to get anywhere in a straight line. Simon already knew the answer when he asked the boy why his father had sent him so far south instead of taking a more direct way, but he wanted to hear the details.

"The mountain roads are much more dangerous," he explained. "It's merely five nights between my father's valley and the capital, but every one of them would have been infested with goblins or worse. Really, only armies can move safely in the night."

Simon understood that, making it all the more ironic that they'd made a nearly two-week detour just to find themselves the victims of monsters once more. The world was a dangerous place. Simon needed no reminders about that.

Still, it seemed Charia was much more dangerous than the fertile fields and forests of Brin. Civilization pushed monsters back, but in the wild places between civilizations, they flourished, and Simon spent an afternoon wondering if his best use of time might just be spent giving up on the Pit for a life or two and doing some serious monster hunting.

The boy hadn't heard of vampires but spoke about werewolves, ogres, griffons, and other abominations in the nightly stories they traded around the campfire. He even knew a wicked tale about Castle Grevenstone, though it sounded more like a lich or strange form of zombie than the vampire that Freya had become.

It was there, in one of those story sessions, a week into their journey, that Simon discovered something he should have known from the beginning: Kayla couldn't read. Literacy wasn't exactly common in the world, but that didn't do anything to reduce Simon's shock at it.

"Why would a servant learn to read?" she asked him. "Maybe if I was the head cook or something, or I had to deal with the house's account books, but a handmaid? There's no need."

While logical, that reasoning hurt Simon and resolved to teach her how to write at least her own name before they arrived at their destination. Lessons became mandatory between dinner time and the period when he told them the tales and myths of Ionar, but she didn't complain too much.

Indeed, none of them had much to complain about. They'd had good weather, decent food, and, thankfully, not a single goblin or bandit attack, though Simon didn't expect that luck to hold once they got into the mountains.

What was more unexpected was that after a few days, Kayla looked forward to those lessons more than the stories themselves, much to Eddek's dismay. This caused Simon to increase his goal from her name to the entire Charian alphabet. He enlisted the boy's help with that since he still occasionally mixed up various alphabets.

Eddek was not very enthused by that, but when Simon carved two wooden swords and promised the boy lessons of his own before dinner, he agreed. In Simon's experience, lessons in combat were the one universal bribe that he could offer young men to ingratiate himself with them.

In all his lives, only his reluctant art student, Bertrand, had not been tempted by them. There was an almost universal appeal there, and Simon enjoyed exploiting it in nearly every life. While he'd recently had a second childhood that wasn't a miracle that any of his companions were ever likely to endure, so he wanted to give them the best experience he could.

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