The Phantom scanned Jate once, up and down, before shrugging and replying. The question would have been asked in any case. "We're going to visit dwarves," he said deliberately, leaning back in his desk chair, "because they'll have knowledge that we need. That we need if we're going to win this." By 'this', of course, he meant the rebellion in general. "Much as your help is invaluable, Belnarr," he added, bowing to the dwarf, "these are dwarves who have existed through the last five hundred years, even a thousand. They'll be able to tell us the location of the Heartshard - they're the only ones who knew of its last resting place. For a price, I assume," he added with a wry twist of his lips. "We might even gather some ancient history into the bargain."

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Belnarr's only response was a noncommittal grunt. Having firmly planted his rear end on a tall and apparently invaluable stack of books, he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back one trouser pocket too far. The result was a crash, a violent upheaval, books spewing across the room, and a sorely disgruntled dwarf in the midst of it all. "Ye need t'get yerself some better chairs is all I'm sayin'," he grumbled, grunting himself back up and extracting his hand from where it'd mysteriously ended up under the rusty lid of a chest labeled Imperial Vizierial Mead. Sliding on the upset mound of books, he picked up a particularly heavy tome and, in disgust, tossed it across the room...

...where it proceeded to sail with poetic grace over ED2's head and greet Jais smack in the solar plexus. Jais, who had - all of two and a half milliseconds ago - been posing at the door and contemplating who wanted his autograph first. Jais, who squeaked and, the wind knocked out of him, toppled backwards right into Ash, the lucky individual in the doorway behind him. Both young men fluttered to the floor as delicately as paperweights.

"Uh, sorry," said Belnarr.

Jais sniffed, regained his feet, brushed a bit of fluff off his immaculate tunic, and flashed a gorgeous smile at both EDs, stretching his face so that each admirer had enough room to swoon over the little ray of sunshine he so generously bestowed. He offered The Genius a bow so low that his nose came within dangerous proximity to his knees. "My Royal Highness, Duke Jais the Thirty-first, at your service." He paused, then added as an afterthought, "And what a fortunate lad you are."

If only he could see the bit of bat guano plastered to the back of his head.

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"Right, good timing, Jais," said the Phantom, pondering if it was entirely polite to rest his boots - which were somewhat muddy - on his desk. He decided it wasn't, especially in light of Silvryn's presence. To compensate he leaned the chair back on two legs and put his hands behind his head, denying altogether than he felt an urge to yawn. "Right, sit down..." he trailed off. Eledhe occupied the same seat as a messily rolled tapestry, Belnarr had been seated until recently on a pile of books, and the others were similarly occupied with less than ideal perches. "...if you can find a spot, that is."

"Right, so, everybody packed and mostly aware of what we're doing and why?" he inquired of the general group. "I'd like to go as soon as possible. By the way, Jais, I thought you might be interested in accompanying us.

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As soon as Jais had stood, Ash scrambled to his feet as gracefully as he knew how, straightening his jacket. He abruptly came face to face with a piece of bat guano clinging tenaciously to Jais' hair. The thought of telling his friend about it never entering his mind, he stepped to the side so he could see into the Phantom's quarters.

"Right, sit down..." The Phantom invited. After a quick glance around the room, Ash decided he would be safer standing in the doorway.

"Right, so, everybody packed and mostly aware of what we're doing and why?" The young man was about to speak up and say he honestly didn't know what was going on, but he would love to be enlightened, but he kept silent. No need to look like an idiot in front of the ladies.

From the lack of protestation or voiced confusion, the Phantom gathered that very little still needed explaining. "Good, then," he said wearily, snagging his cloak off a chair and motioning to the door. "We're off."



After an extremely uneventful day of trudging through snow-capped mountains - which were majestic and breathtaking upon first sight but afterwards dwindled to being large pointed objects blocking the sky - they'd left the Keep a respectable distance behind. It was hard to tell how far, the exact location of the tunnels not being exactly evident from outside, but from how his feet wanted to drop off, the Phantom decided they'd gone quite far enough for one day. Of course, that could have been because he'd done very little walking lately and he wasn't exactly a seasoned traveler at the best of times, but the sun was conveniently sinking behind the mountains anyway. And maybe with some food in their stomachs the group could find each other halfway tolerable.

The Phantom was not easily annoyed. He was, in fact, quite amiable, and would tolerate quite a bit. But when Jais and Ash seemed to be conspiring in low voices at the tail end of the party and Kjan's name seemed to come up suspiciously often in said conspiricies, and Silvryn and Eledhe were being unfortunately forced to remain in closer proximity to each other than they liked while also finding Jais's company less than ideal...it didn't make for harmony.

However, the Phantom had luckily snagged a bow and a quiver of arrows as a sort of last-minute item upon departing - in fact, he'd tripped over them in shutting and locking to door to his apartments - and his aim wasn't half bad. Roasting rabbits over a hastily built campfire didn't take an overt amount of concentration, either. He was actually somewhat enjoying himself, watching them lazily and wondering when the earliest he could catch some sleep would be. Eledhe found him an extremely frustrating conversationalist.

"Wouldn't it be faster to angle down through Kingfisher Pass?" she said doubtfully, scanning the discarded map at his fingertips.

"Mmm. Maybe."

"You could circumvent having to pass through Caire if you did."

"'S true."

She gave him a wearily resigned look and went away, judging from the fact that his eyes were half-closed that there was little conversation to be had.

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Kjan kicked absently at a loose stone on the ground, finding himself to be quite bored. He'd long ago given up on trying to eavesdrop on Ash and Jais, Silvryn had made it quite clear that she was not in a conversational mood, he didn't dare try to converse with Eledhe on her best of days, and Jate didn't seem to be overly interested either. He'd had a bit of something to do when the need had arisen for a cooking fire, but that had taken all of two minutes to get going and left him with nothing more to do than he'd had before. Compound that with the fact that it was far too cold for his liking, and Kjan was currently beginning to question his decision to come on this expedition.

"If you fall asleep while cooking my dinner, I will take you up on your previous offer," he said casually, coming up from behind and plopping down on a rock next to the Phantom. If the man had looked tired before, he now looked positively exhausted, as was evinced by the fact that his eyes were nearly shut already. "Why don't you let me take over? You can go catch at least a few minutes of rest, and I'll kick you whenever dinner's ready."

"No, no," said the Phantom lazily, indicating the nearest rabbit on a spit over the flames. "I'm keeping an eye on them." His posture indicated that if he'd had a hat, it would have been tipped over his eyes. "Besides, if I get kicked for burning your dinner and kicked awake once it's ready, I might as well not get kicked at all and cook it properly."

The logic of this was irrefutable and, rather satisfied with himself, the Phantom leaned forward to adjust one of his intricately rigged cooking mechanisms and resumed his position with a yawn. "Eledhe seem in a bad mood to you?"

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"Worse than usual?" Kjan replied, giving up on his attempt to get the Phantom to behave like a mortal for once. Honestly, Eledhe hadn't struck him as being in any worse of a mood than usual, though he doubted that was saying much. The mercenary had never been exactly amicable toward him, which may or may not have had something to do with the nature of their first encounter. He considered the question for a moment longer, then shrugged. "Maybe a bit. Between you and me, Eledhe has two moods: homicidal and approaching homicidal. Personally, I've never been able to tell which one she's in until it's too late. So I'm probably not the best person to ask."

"Her eyebrows grew back, though," reasoned the Phantom, poking his precariously constructed campfire. "I don't know why she's still touchy about that."

A small avalanche of hot coals made him make a vexed noise and attempt delicately to reassemble them with a stick. "I learned reams from Eledhe. You remember her help, when the Regent first changed the taxes? That would be...seven, eight years ago, now. You should ask her to give you some pointers sometime, she's very good with that scimitar."

He didn't seem to have quite assimilated the meaning of 'homicidal' and 'approaching homicidal', and therefore didn't realize that what he was recommending might inspire images of a Kjan missing several valuable body parts. "Or Silvryn. You've sparred with me enough, I'm sure."

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"I'd as soon spar with Eledhe as I would adorn myself with raw meat and jump into a tank of ravenous angrio fish," Kjan replied matter-of-factly. "Or, on second thought, I'd take the angrio fish. Greater chance of coming out of it with a few of my vital organs intact." At this, Kjan grimmaced, then poked at the fire briefly with his own stick. "I suppose I could spar with Silvryn, but it's always somewhat awkward acting like I'm trying to kill the heir to the Kytana throne. I'm never able to really fight her for fear of unwittingly committing treason. Well, real treason, that is....I wonder if Jate fences? I hope he does; it's my only hope of getting some much-needed practice in, really. Goodness knows I've beaten you enough times for it to get boring."

"Beaten me?" exclaimed the Phantom indignantly, dropping his stick. "You fantasize, of course." He drew himself up regally, proclaiming in an exaggerated tone of lordly loftiness, "For I am Phantom Grey, unrivaled swordsman, expert combatant - the, the very epitome of grace with a blade, I am!"

Eledhe poked him deftly with her scimitar, making him drop his pose to avoid getting stabbed in the midsection. "Flagrant misuse of a weapon!" he called indignantly after her, which only served to make her smirk larger. "Cad! Kjan, what do you call a female cad?"

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"Cadette?" Kjan suggested blandly from behind his hand, which was currently covering his mouth and conveniently covering a smirk of his own. "I haven't a clue, honestly. Perhaps you can ask one of the teachers back at the Keep when we return. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to aid you in your quest to properly insult your mercenary. Oh, and the meat is burning."

The Phantom's exclamation of dismay and subsequent hurried tending to dinner prevented him from further examining the proper way to insult a female. The rabbit was, indeed, smoking dangerously. In a few seconds of hurried rearranging of coals it was out of danger, and the Phantom was muttering under his breath and nursing burnt fingers. "You're a cad," he said indignantly in Kjan's direction. "It's your own fault if your dinner's burnt."

The rabbits were, however, distributed without further incident, and despite several more instances of burnt fingers, they were quite well done. "No occasion to kick me," the Phantom commented triumphantly to Kjan upon finishing. "Ha."

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...seconds before a rather large boot contacted him painfully in the rear end.

"Occassion t'kick ye, is it? Well, I can kick ye whenever I bloody well please!" grumbled Master Belnarr, the Keep's resident therapist-victim. He trudged over to the campfire and plopped down in a small explosion of snow. Grumbling some more, he tackled snow off his leather jerkin and somehow sniffed some up his left nostril. "Compromise of m'dignity! Prejudice against m'worthy kind! D'ye have any idea how many times I've snorted snow up m'nose today? Or had it thrown at me by some ruddy - You!"

"What?" said Jais, the Keep's resident therapist. Plopping down on the snow between ED2 and Belnarr, he flashed a winning smile.

"That's me rabbit, that is!"

"Wha', 'ish?" Jais swallowed the last mouthful and gestured at the half-eaten rabbit leg. Belnarr nodded so hard his jaw flapped. Jais glanced at the leg, shrugged, and took another bite.

He had no idea a dwarf's eyes could grow quite so protuberant.

"I thought you said two days ago that you'd sooner swallow Kjan's socks than taste this idiot's cooking!" he retorted indignantly. In the spirit of self-preservation, he ducked behind said wearer of socks and hoped for his own health that CQS had his customary stash of blunt objects.

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Ash, smelling burnt flesh, joined the group. "Dinner's done, is it?" That's what his food always smelled like after he was done cooking it.

He cheerfully and unwittingly grabbed another one of Belnarr's legs- rabbit legs, that is- and started eating it. Sitting down in the snow next to the dwarf, he crammed a good portion of the meat in his mouth. Without waiting to swallow, he asked the Phantom, "So, where to tomorrow?"

Jate hurt. And he was hungry. His feet were sore; he thought he might be getting a blister on his left ankle. Longingly, he thought of his gelding safe in the stables back home. Thoughts of his horse turned to thoughts of home. Rich meals filled with greens and meat, soft armchairs, shelves full of books, lamps pleasantly lighting rooms. He would've just finished another bout with his weapons trainer a little while ago. Sighing, he pushed the thoughts aside and came back to the group. Jais and Ash had spent the day whispering together, but they weren't whispering now.

Apparently, Jais had just done something without thought --again, Jate had come to realize that was a common occurrence. He was hiding behind Kjan, the latter with a somewhat bemused smile on his face. Ash was talking to the Phantom and, Jate was pleased to see, eating a leg of rabbit. Approaching the fire, Jate grabbed some of the meat and tore into it.

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going on a journey through my old claims