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A drop of icy water landing on Martin’s temple startled him awake. Only a faint amount of light shone through the thick canvas walls of the tent, though it was bright enough to where Martin noticed droplets of condensation clinging to the ceiling. Though Namo seemed to be contributing the majority share, their combined body heat had turned the tent into a sauna. Speaking of whom, Martin looked to his right to see Namo still sleeping on her side, back facing him, as she had when they drifted off together. The mere sight of her placid form, illuminated at the edges by the blue light of the rising sun, instilled an airy feeling in his breast. The cotton blanket draped over her side and front like a veil of temptation. Martin’s eyes trailed down the crease of her shoulder blades and the curvature of her spine before the blanket concealed her tail and rear, the latter of which he presumed was covered in the same tawny fur of her fluffy tail and legs.

Martin wished he could admire the faun’s sleeping form longer, but his mind warred with the notion that he was turning a platonic appreciation of his friend into something unseemly. More urgently, he recognized the call of nature, and hastily donned his parka before gingerly extricating himself from the tent. As he lowered the first footstep onto the ground outside of his tent, he froze—all but literally—in his tracks before placing his bare feet in the inch of snow that covered the ground, his boots, and his rucksack. He struggled to keep his pained groans quiet enough to not wake Namo as he placed his other bare foot into the snow, which worked in tandem with the frigid wind to dive off any residual grogginess in an instant. Martin brushed the majority of the powder off of his boots and slipped them, sopping wet though they were from the quickly melting snow, over his bare feet. His feet throbbed in protest, but time was of the essence. The man didn’t even bother lacing his boots as he ran to a nearby shrub to relieve himself.

Immediate bodily urges satisfied, the man wandered back to the tent to put on socks, cursing under his breath the fact that his boots were soaked. Should’ve put them in the tent. The man was at least grateful there wasn’t anything in his rucksack that would be permanently ruined by getting wet…Except his journal.

Martin continued the quiet litany of expletives directed at his absentmindedness as he grabbed his day clothes from the tent, stealthily so as not to wake his companion, and dressed. Once back outside, socks already sopping wet in his boots, Martin brushed the snow off of his rucksack before he pulled out his travel journal. Thankfully, the oilcloth bag was thick enough and the overnight temperature cold enough to where the snow hadn’t managed to penetrate the water-resistant fabric; in other words, his journal had mercifully survived the night. Martin breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled out the bloodstained letter from Ms. Arbour that he used as a bookmark. Today was as good a day as any to catch up on logging their journey so far. Martin looked past the tent, in the direction they were supposed to be heading, according to his compass. The ridge above him seemed to taper off not too far from where he had pitched the tent. While Namo enjoyed a bit more sleep, he figured he could take a short walk up the hill and see what lied at the top, and began the steep hike up the slope.

What he saw upon reaching the crest of the ridge nearly defied description, and it was all the man could do to keep from dropping pen and journal. The ridge before him opened up into a broad valley like the serving bowl of a titan. The sun had begun cresting the hill in the far distance and shone a deep orange glow on the basin; already the snow had melted in much of the center and western slope of the valley, revealing blooming alpine wildflowers beneath, stitched in a tapestry of purples, oranges, and blues almost as far as his eyes could see. The flower field extended so far into the distance from his vantage point that Martin guessed that they could travel a nearly a whole day through the field before reaching the far side. From the flowers near his feet, Martin spied pollinating insects fluttering sluggishly from blossom to blossom, steadfast in their duty despite the near-freezing weather. The tiny creatures often appeared as multicolored sparkling glints in the dawn light as they tried to sneak in another meal before hibernating for the colder half of the year.

In the distance to the southeast, the snowcapped mountains cast long shadows over the southern reach of the valley, leaving a diminishing blanket of white intact snowfield as the sun arced higher in the sky from its position on the horizon. The fiery ball illuminated the mountains themselves from the eastern side, creating a glow that belied the likely frigid environment at the elevation of the spindly, jagged peaks. Beyond a shadow of a doubt that these were the tallest mountains Martin had ever seen in his life. He wondered how long it had been since humans had traveled through this place, if ever. Brushing the veneer of melting snow off of a nearby boulder, Martin sat and flipped open his journal. He had to remember this scene, this mountain vista, and began sketching the landscape before him in a near-manic frenzy. He couldn’t hope to replicate the tapestry of color, pattern, and texture unfurled before his eyes, especially with only a single pen, but he could certainly try. Perhaps the exercise would create an association for the memory of holding Namo close the previous night, to help him remember it more vividly.

As if summoned by his very thought of her, he heard in the distance a cry from the faun herbalist. “Martin?” Concern tinged her voice.

“I’m up here!” The man turned from his seated position and shouted down the hill. He couldn’t see her from the rim of the valley, but hoped his voice would be loud enough for her to hear. Sure enough, before long, Namo’s hoofsteps in the snow accompanied the rustling of the wind and the occasional mating call of a lizard-bird on the wing. She gasped as she crested the hill, marveling in the kaleidoscope of color of the valley. “It’s… it’s so beautiful.”

After she savored the vista before her for several minutes in silence, Martin felt the faun woman looking over his shoulder. “Oh wow, Martin! You’re an amazing artist!” She said, utterly sincere in her praise. “It’s almost like looking at the real thing!” Okay, Martin conceded, maybe she’s indulging in a bit of flattery.

“Thanks Namo. Just reliving the past, for a moment.” Martin said cryptically, reminiscing for a moment about his early days of landscape sketching that had originally caught the eye of Ms. Arbour. “I couldn’t not draw the scenery with how gorgeous it is. I’m also going to try and plot it on the map if I can, he said, gesturing to the rucksack where the map was furled. “This spot isn’t on it and I can’t even imagine humans having been here anytime recently, considering how far it is from an active human settlement Maybe I’m wrong, though.”

Namo regaled Martin with a dream she had the previous night while the vagabond finished the sketch: something about the two of them riding on horseback together and exploring the world. Namo had not ridden a horse before and, despite concerns that her wide hooves and long, extra-jointed legs would fit poorly in stirrups, she still wished to try at some point. Martin found the notion a bit ridiculous, though he supposed it was mostly because a hoofed animal being ridden by a sapient hoofed creature just felt strange to him in some way.

Martin took several minutes to triangulate his location using the relative angles of the rising sun and the setting moons using his sextant and a mental stopwatch to track the change in position of the three celestial bodies. Based on this information, he was able to roughly estimate the position on their map as near the west-central portion of the blank part of the map. He scrawled “alpine valley” on the map before thinking of a better idea. Turning to Namo, he said: “If you could name this place, what would you name it?”

The botanist took a long moment to think, before saying, a bit quietly, “Bokato’snmuope.”

It took a couple of repeats for Martin to do his best transcription of the word onto the map. “Okay, so what does that mean?”

Namo was caught off-guard by this question, judging by her stammered response. “I-it, um, I don’t know what the best words are in Monuunkep. It means s-something like Valley of the Heart that is Excited and Free from Worry.”

“So, like, happy-go-lucky?” Martin asked.

“I ain’t sure what that means, but it sounds like that might be a good translation, I s’pose.”

Martin wrote “Happy-go-lucky Valley” underneath the Kepmuun term. It was a bit cheesy, but it was her choice and he respected it. As if to signal her approval, a growl from Namo’s stomach snapped the pair out of their wistful gazing over the vista. “We should eat and keep moving,” Martin offered, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

As the pair crossed through Happy-go-lucky Valley and descended down the far side of the meadow, the former footpad replayed the interactions between the two of them over the past several days. Back in Benuun, Namo had fallen asleep on his chest, all but wrapping her arms around him. Nevertheless, as much as he realized it had been an intimate gesture by human standards, he had rationalized it away as a gesture necessary to help console her through the initial stage of her grief over losing her dear friend Uno’opan. Their sleeping arrangement the night of the snowstorm was an entirely different matter, as much as Martin attempted to convince himself otherwise. There was simply no justifiable reason for why the man would have responded to her lying next to him by pulling her closer and spooning with her that didn’t require him to confront his changing feelings toward the faun.

Martin looked at the faun walking in front of him as she walked the human through a lesson in beginning Kepmuun. She exhibited a slight bounce in her step as they descended the alpine meadow into a more sparsely vegetated grassland, the mountains they had been using as their landmark still to their west. Despite belonging to different species, Martin had begun to regard the faun as uncommonly attractive, and downright beautiful, even among other Akepmuu: the way her silver-flaxen hair framed her face when she brushed it down, the dark freckles along cheeks and neck like a drunken footprints through sand, even the dark patch of moist skin at the tip of her nose were all traits that Martin had begun to find deeply endearing. As the days passed on their travel southwest, Namo resumed sleeping separately. Martin considered that the faun preferred to sleep in the open air, even when she risked being rained on. The thought made him grapple with additional worries that perhaps she felt uncomfortable by his actions, or that she didn’t—wouldn’t—want to sleep together again. Martin tried his best to squash both of these worries—they were irrational, irrelevant, and selfish.

Be that as it may, over the following days, the dancing butterflies gave way to gnats that gnawed at his insides. Martin needed to talk with Namo about his deepening feelings for her, but was at war with himself as to the exact nature of those feelings. Merely a month ago they had been strangers, and while they had gotten to know each other quite well through the time they shared during their travels, Martin worried about a future somewhere between hypothetical and inevitable where their time traveling together would be at an end.

The following days brought banter, singing, and more botanical and linguistic lessons, as they continued across the shrub-dotted grasslands. Namo encouraged Martin to not forget about the little plants: even many of the grasses bore unique flowers, as she showed the human. She squatted down and beckoned Martin closer. “It’s small and cute, but super useful, don’tcha know? This little tuft here,” she said, gesturing to a thumbnail-sized structure including a stem that had feathery branches along it ending in dozens of minuscule flowers, “this is the flower of the plant. But it’s not bright and flashy because it just uses the wind to spread its pollen. No bugs needed!” As if to illustrate the principle, she wiggled the grass back and forth, not that the flowers were large enough to have visible pollen. “This flower, with all of these stalks and stems, is called a panicle.” She pointed to all of the substems along the main trunk of the tiny stem that served as the main stem of the flower. “Basically, if you have lots of stems, and only one flower each, then that’s a panicle.”

The man tried to mentally note the term he just learned, but felt distracted by trying to wrap his head around how he felt for the antilocaprine woman before him. “Panicle, got it. I’ll try to remember,” the man offered, not wanting to invite suspicion. Namo was thankfully none the wiser, as she continued describing the natural history of this particular family of plants.

By the evening of their thirteenth day of travel since leaving Uat’sn, the pair had gratefully descended into a lowland temperate forest. Unlike many of the wooded stands the pair had traveled through previously, the high, closed canopy of spruce and fir was accompanied by a dense undergrowth of shade-tolerant shrubs, including vines snaking along and over other bushes, lined with prickles and nefarious in the way they appeared to be choking the life out of the plants they were growing over. A gentle rain filtered through the trees, beginning shortly before they found the narrow trail that led through the forest.

Namo had remarked that they were lucky to have found the trail in the first place, considering they had spent the past two weeks making their own trail, in a manner of speaking. Martin agreed; the only reason they were able to locate it was thanks to a single torch illuminating the vicinity near where the trail crossed the ecotone between the forest and the surrounding grassland. The good fortune of finding the trail was welcome news considering their rations dwindled and Martin’s gut-scouring cravings for alcohol were almost tangible, though his tremors and headachiness had thankfully grown increasingly more manageable.

The pair made their way along the muddy trail through the foreboding woods when Namo, distracted by examining the branches of the trees above them while singing a standard rousing march Martin had probably heard a dozen times since the pair started traveling together, accidentally kicked something off the trail. They stopped as it clattered aside with an unmistakable sound of rattling glass. Curious, Martin asked Namo to help him find it. It didn’t take them long to find the glass bottle rolled under one of the prickly bushes.

Martin extricated the bottle from the tangle, getting his shirt and rucksack snagged in the process. “Ope, lemme help ya with that!” Namo exclaimed, carefully unhooking the recurved prickles from half a dozen places along the side of his rucksack while Martin freed his shirt. Martin concluded that these choking vines were utterly diabolical, but emerged relatively unscathed with the bottle in hand.

The man held out the bottle and turned it around. The damp paper label had faded in places, ink bled in others, and in others entirely shredded, but nevertheless the larger text remained legible in the fading daylight. It was all Martin could do to not drop the bottle in horror as he spun the smooth green glass in his fingers, reading large block letters:

JOPLIN’S

~SAWMILL GOLD~

Steam Beer

“Oh wow, Maa’ko, look at that! You remember her, don’tcha? She was the bartender lady at the bar we went to way back in Fordham!”

Sure enough, amidst the text of the label was a photograph of a stout, dour-looking woman with drooping jowls and a narrow, hawkish nose doing her best to proffer a smile for the photograph: it was none other than Mrs. Margaret Joplin, the owner and proprietor of the bar Namo and Martin had spent the night at in Fordham. She was positioned among a group of men and women who were likely lumberjacks, but given the resemblance, may also have been other members of the Joplin family.

The other people in the photo weren’t important. What was important was the fact that this bottle of beer from a single establishment over one thousand kilometers away had somehow made it here, to a dirt trail halfway across the continent. And, judging by the condition of the paper label, relatively recently, too. What’s more, Maggie herself had mentioned that none other than Fadina Afzal had visited the bar just a day prior to Namo and him.

“Maa’ko? What’s wrong? You’re making a murder face at the poor woman!” Namo placed a reassuring hand around Martin’s arm. The electric sensation jolted him out of his brooding with a flinch.

“Namo, you remember who visited Joplin’s Bar the day before we did, right?”

The woman thought for a second, chewed on her lip for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t. Who?”

Martin thought back to the conversation he had with Maggie. He couldn’t remember if Namo was privy to that conversation, but regardless, he gave her the benefit of the doubt, especially since that evening was the first time she had visited a human settlement.

“It was Fadina. Fadina visited the day before we did, and left for Benuun later that day.”

Namo gasped and squeezed Martin’s arm tighter. “Y-you don’t mean that this—“

The human nodded his head gravely. “I can’t be sure, but who else would have been traveling from Fordham recently enough to where this label is still even partially intact? It’s a lead, even if it is fainter than faint.”

“I s’pose we should keep goin’ then if we wanna catch up to her. I wonder how far ahead of us she and her buddies are. We better be careful.”