John awoke to a clawed toe nudging him.

  “Arise, John Serf. You must leave as soon as you are able. Every minute may make the difference,” Morkal said.

  John shot up from the stone floor. “You don’t think they’ll execute her right away, do you?”

  “We do not know, but the costs of being early are minimal and of being late, immeasurable.”

  John himself couldn’t have put it so poetically, but he got the gist. With children and the elderly coming along too there would be frequent stops. And if Jessica and Sir Hayek were going by horse they might arrive a week before Barleyfield.

  “Before you go we will give you some things you may need,” Morkal said, extending a leather satchel to him by the tip of her claw.

  “We have packed things in here which will be dangerous. To your enemies, and to yourself.”

  He opened the satchel out of curiosity and found a toad staring at him.

  “A toad?” he asked.

  “Our eyes and ears,” Morkal replied, “though that is not all. In addition to the morphine there are some vitriols which may prove useful, several healing potions, and a powerful concoction which explodes upon contact with heat.”

  “Maybe I oughtn’t to be messin’ with that,” he said.

  “It is a dangerous thing. We share your wish not to need it, but wishes so often go unanswered for those the Tapestry does not bless. Put aside your fear and take it.”

  John thanked her and returned to Barleyfield where the entire population was finishing their impromptu preparations.

  Some families had more belongings than others so the main concern was distributing supplies equally. Those whose clothing survived were divvying out spare travel clothes while those who had saved the village granary were baking and handing out barley crackers and dry meal.

  Most important of all was their pooled supply of soap. Their food and clothing were well shy of what was needed for a week-long journey. But as everyone at least had a little bit of soap and some pots for brewing more lye, and the Ankenbauer clan had a good store of tallow, the village expected to purchase more in trade for soap.

  John’s parents were among the handful ready to leave. The only thing they carried besides the clothes on their back were Jessica’s lab coat and rubber boots which Charles slung over his shoulder with the intention of giving them back to her.

  “What’s in the bag?” his mother asked.

  “Some… uh… things?” John said.

  The bag let out a groaning croak.

  Rosemary pursed her lips. “Things?”

  John nodded. “Some of Jessica’s things.”

  “Like what?”

  Toad!Morkal poked her head out of the lip of the bag and glanced around with an unusually lucid expression for an amphibian before hopping up John’s arm onto his shoulder.

  “Jessica’s pet toad,” he said.

  “She better hope we can get some food on the way or it might be frog legs for dinner.”

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  Upon saying this, the toad fixed Rosemary with such an intensely unpleasant stare that it gave her flashbacks of her own mother chastising her.

  “Sorry, I meant toad legs,” Rosemary clarified.

  The freeholders came to watch the hamlet depart. There was something astonishing about a hundred serfs walking off their land. Arguments about who might get what plot if Earl Heinrich sold everything began before Barleyfield was even out of sight.

  Their first day of travel could not be described as quick. They made slower time than a malnourished woman dragged along by a rope. Even the grown-ups struggled against the overbearing heat of late summer. There was talk of setting up camp before making it to Sawcone, but it was decided that wolves were a more pressing danger than exhaustion on this first leg, so they continued on and reached Sawcone a little after midnight.

  When they saw the group emerge from the woods, two guards at Sawcone’s southern gate ran to get a third to confirm they weren’t going crazy.

  “What in the blazes is this!?” a guard called out to the tired hamlet.

  John supposed he was in some way responsible for the expedition, so he took it upon himself to liaise with the guard.

  “Barleyfield,” John said.

  “All of it?” the guard asked.

  “Yes. We would like to camp within the town square for tonight. In exchange we can trade you some soap.”

  “Soap? The hell do we need soap for?” the other guard said, scratching his ass.

  John explained the concept of micro-demons and the three guards decided they needed to confer with the captain of the guard who was literate and might know of micro-demons. When he did not, they turned to the earl’s steward. Fortunately, Barleyfield found in the steward a kind, and opportunistic, ear.

  “I'll tell you what,” said Kenneth, the Earl’s steward, “technically I’m supposed to turn you in for abandoning your land and violating your oath and bond.”

  “But our land was burned!” shouted Erik Whitehill-Serf.

  Kenneth held up his hand. “I understand. But since Earl Heinrich needs his beauty rest after his second feast in as many days, I won’t bother him with this matter in exchange for a little trade.”

  The mention of trade made the Barleyfielders wary. Barter and taxes-in-kind were the basic economic premises upon which their little hamlet was based. Trade, however, was a mystical ritual which only a special caste called ‘merchants’ could conduct. Any Barleyfielder who made the mistake of ‘trading’ with an outsider was doomed to be cheated and swindled.

  “Tell me about your soap. You make it with lye, correct?” Kenneth asked.

  John nodded. “Otherwise known as sodium hydroxide, yes.”

  “Whatever you like. But you see, I have been interested in getting a paper-pulping business off the ground. Quite a bit of soft wood goes through our sawmill and I have oft-wondered how we might produce something with a higher profit margin than our humble lumber. And wouldn’t you know it, lye is a key component. If you were to trade all of what you have we could accommodate you for the night and maybe even send you on with extra supplies. How does that sound?”

  John’s eyebrows shot up. Making sodium hydroxide was trivially easy with proper safety precautions and the right containers. Anyone could do it. Glowing with the pleasure of lifting others up, John was about to tell the steward this before the toad on his shoulder slapped her foot on his cheek.

  “O-Oh! What wouldja give us in exchange for a lesson on how to make as much as ya need?”

  The steward’s eyes filled with delight. Lye production was heavily regulated by the Alchemist’s Guild in Elsifeya City. That Barleyfield would willingly part with such a trade secret hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Horses, wagons, food, water. If you train us on making lye we can set you up to travel in style,” Kenneth said.

  It felt like too much for something as simple as distilling tree leaves, but John supposed this was all part of that ‘trading’ thing townsfolk did. John conferred with the others and they agreed to accept the offer.

  True to his word, Kenneth gave them six covered wagons loaded with supplies and twice as many mules to pull them the next morning.

  As John taught the man and his assistants how to make lye, he got the suspicion that the man's forthrightness stemmed from his obsession with something Jessica had synthesized. Something called ‘flavor crystals.’

  “She lived in Barleyfield, no?” Kenneth asked as he scooped wood ash into the pre-oxidized cookpot John gave him.

  “Er, yes, but she’s not a serf. She—”

  “Is reincarnated? I know. As a student of industry I am forever on the lookout for ways to create profit for Earl Heinrich. Fools will see her make her brews and see witchly magic. The wise see profitable industrial processes. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Maybe?” John replied.

  Seeing that he didn't, Kenneth added, “If you’re going to free her, bring her back here and we can do some more trading. If she can set me up with a workshop to manufacture flavor crystals I will see to it the Earl gives you new jobs working in it and a place to live.”

  This all made sense to John so he told the steward that even if he couldn’t bring Jessica back to Sawcone he would at least try to get the recipe for flavor crystals from her. In good conscience John Serf shook Kenneth the steward’s hand and they parted ways on mutually beneficial terms.