Vanyel stretches. "Mmm. We'd better head to bed if we want to leave at a sensible time tomorrow morning and make it to the Rethwellan border in one go." 

"Okay! Good night."

Zz.

Dara cheerfully questions Tarinda about fashion and houses and modes of transportation in her world while Vanyel wakes up slowly and looks slightly grumpy about all the chatter, and then they can make a timely departure. 

Tarinda can draw stuff for her - it looks kind of like she's tracing from a perfectly realistic image - till it's time to move. Here's Cory in a dress that looks like someone killed a giant butterfly and turned its wings into fabric! Here's Proster in his fancy evil-looking robes! Here's Tarinda's castle, and Proster's castle, and a zoomer!

"Wow, you really live in a castle. Do lots of people do that?" 

"Sure, why not?"

"Well, I mean, they take up a lot of space for one." 

"I guess maybe fewer people do it on Earth but there's actually lots of room even there if you look everywhere, which we can because we can control the weather and manage the indoor climate even more precisely than that and float castles on the ocean and stick them up on mountains without them being hard to get to at all."

"Floating ocean castles!" 

"I want to hear more about the era before Sing became the only surviving smart machine," Vanyel says, before Dara can jump in with more questions. "What were the goals of some of the other ones that got built?" 

"Well, only Sing has all the details and putting it into words is a very lossy process 'cause AIs aren't made of words, but we know some things. Sugardream is the reason Sing doesn't do really fancy stuff with brains, they did a thing where they agreed Sing was probably going to win and Sugardream agreed to let it without a fuss if Sing took some of its goals as its own, so Sing did that, and now it needs to be really confident even for Sing before it can do certain brain stuff. I remember hearing Sugardream would also have been more talkative, it would kinda make friends with people during the Quiet War insofar as an AI can be friends with people."

"What, um, sort of fancy brain stuff." Vanyel looks unsettled. 

"It's kind of hard to explain with the words Page has, I'm sorry."

"That's all right. Maybe we can get more words along the way." 

They ride. Dara keeps a conversation going. 

Tarinda is happy to chatter. Her accent smooths out with practice.

They reach Mournedealth, on the Jkathan city of the border with Rethwellan, a couple of candlemarks before sundown. Its main traits as a city are the fact that no one is allowed to ride a horse inside the city walls, some weird rules about who is allowed to stay in which inns, and its status as the best place for hundreds of miles to hire on mercenary companies. It's full of mercenaries. Also everything is built of wood and it looks absurdly flammable. 

"It was fun staying here on the way down but we probably could make it to the first inn in Rethwellan," Dara says.    

"By 'fun' she means there were plenty of attractive men for her to try to seduce," Vanyel says, smirking. 

Dara does not look embarrassed by this comment at ALL. 

"I'm not planning to seduce anyone and I'd like to be getting along a bit faster if it's all the same to you."

"Seems good. We'll keep going." 

They have to walk alongside the Companions through the town itself, which is loud and crowded (and very smelly), but it's not that big and once they're past the wall on the other side, they can cross the official Border in the saddle. The Rethwellani border guards seem a little surprised and curious to see Heralds and Companions this far south, but keep the questions to a minimum and soon they're through. 

True to her word Tarinda seduces no one! She is getting really antsy, actually.

Vanyel notices, and can guess why. He suggests they can ride even past dark if they want, since he can just cast a mage-light for them, and then they'll make it to the next town over. At that pace they'll be across Rethwellan in another four or five days. And once they're through Rethwellan and at the top of the Comb he'll theoretically be in Mindspeech range of Haven and can ask Savil to collect them at the border with a Gate, or even do so directly from the mountains if she has a Gate-location there. 

"You'd also be welcome to split off from us and try your luck obtaining help from the Rethwellani government," Vanyel says to her. "I understand why you're impatient. I'm sorry Valdemar is so far away." 

"I want to know if your - person - can help me, but if he doesn't I'm definitely going to have to peel off," she says. "Not necessarily with a government, they'd mostly be useful for money and I can probably make money anywhere with reasonably free trade."

"I can't tell if you mean Randi or Leareth but I guess either of them." Vanyel nods. "I understand. I think Rethwellan is good for trade and I could probably convince Savil to Gate you back as well."