After some time, a woman's face appears in his field of view. She's tall, brown hair flecked with dirt and drying blood, unadorned surcoat daubed with more of the same. Not visibly wounded, like the way he is steadily becoming less of as the minutes pass. She stares at him.

"You should get up if you're not going to die," she says at length. (Her English is accented, not like the French or the Latin of the church, but some more distant land.) "They'll be piling the corpses soon. You don't want to be at the bottom."

Well that's.

Sure.

An occurrence.

That could happen.

Sure.

"Yeah," he says, a little bemusedly, peeling himself off the ground. "Right. 'Course."

His helmet is a lost cause; his armor is no longer worthy of the name; his spear is probably somewhere within a quarter mile, but god knows where more precisely than that. He's still here, though, so.

He shrugs, and stands up in his damp gambeson, and holds out a muddy hand in greeting. "Hob Gadling. Uh. M'lady?"

"Kassandra." She shakes his hand briefly. "Is this your first brush with death, Hob Gadling?"

"On reflection I must admit I am not entirely sure." He has, in the past twenty years, now that he's thinking about it, smacked his head on a remarkable number of things, recovered from a possibly improbable number of minor stabbings, etcetera. "But - the first time I've been sure of it - yeah." Handshake, fascinated headtilt. "It is my absolute pleasure to meet you, Kassandra. I don't suppose you, also, met a... mysterious faerie or something of the sort?"

She is very pretty. And also very armed. Hob has ... roughly zero experience with coping with this combination of facts and may be staring a little.

Kassandra does tend to provoke that reaction- arming sword on her left hip, rondel at her right, spearhead in its leather sheath crossing her back, knives in both boots and up her sleeves. A well-defined muscular body, hands that know how to kill a man in thirty-six distinct ways, legs that add a further sixteen, a face that is, entirely literally, a classical beauty.

She's used to it by now. Two hundred lifetimes of accumulated experience.

"A 'mysterious faerie'? Not recently, no. Have you made a bargain with such a creature?"

Evidently yes, but -

"Um. I don't... think... I agreed to anything?" Concerned pause. "When you say not recently -?"

Heh.

"Before you were born, if you are only as old as you seem, Hob Gadling."

Well, in for a penny. "I'm fifty-nine," he says, with a wry smile. Under the prodigious quantity of mud he looks like he might possibly have recently been politely introduced to thirty. "But much the same to you, sounds like."

"You could say that. If you were prone to understatement."

"Can't say that I am! More of a wild exaggerations person, really. Much more fun. Can't place your accent, you from uhhhh - " he rifles through his brain for his extremely limited knowledge of locations other than England and lands on "Castile or something?"

She laughs. "A valiant effort, but the wrong side of the Mediterranean. I am Greek."

He has... ever... seen a map that went that far south-east. Maybe once. From a distance.

"Oh wow. That's - wow. Greece." He says this with the sort of starry-eyed breathless fascination that a modern person might associate more with places like Antarctica or possibly Atlantis. "What brings you all the way here?"

"I've a mind to travel west. See the lands across the ocean."

Under the circumstances she clearly doesn't mean Ireland, which as far as Hob was aware up to this moment is the west-est you can go. He's learning all sorts of things today.

" ... across the - that sounds like a hell of an adventure!"

"Yeah. I heard some interesting stories last time I was in Constantinople."

"Oh? Love to hear a story or two, if you're not in a rush! Perhaps you would allow me -"

(he pats himself down and realizes with a sigh that someone took his coin purse while he was unconscious with his ribcage in bits)

" - alas, I cannot buy you a drink. Terrible start to a friendship, sorry about that."

"Perhaps I could buy you one instead. Although... did you have any other possessions besides your purse you might want to keep hold of?"

Hob is a peasant soldier. He does not, as a rule, have the ability to obtain many nonconsumable objects, nor to retain ownership of any he cannot carry on his person and defend with violence. This isn't none, but it's not a lot, either, and he would not have thought that anyone would bother to take anything other than the coins from his not-a-corpse. On reflection this was obviously stupid; he himself got several of the items of clothing he is wearing that way.

He blinks, and checks - it would otherwise not have occurred to him to do so for some hours - and his face falls.

" ... apparently yes. This is going to sound stupid probably but I had. Um. A rock?" 

"A unique rock?"

"Maybe? I think I could definitely tell it from a similar one? Sorta grey-reddish, about so big?" He gestures with a hand.

It's not an enormously valuable rock. It's a flattish, palm-sized raw chunk of common british jasper, worth at best a few coppers to a jewelrymaker. It would not be difficult to find a very similar one lying around in a field or forest. But it wouldn't really be the same one.

She hums thoughtfully, and her face goes a little blank. (Far overhead, a circling eagle screams out a hunting cry.)

"...I think I have it. Next to the priests' tent, where their assistants are dividing the spoils of the fallen."

................ oh. Okay.

Hob blinks rapidly as he attempts to assimilate this very cool and also terrifying occurrence into his rapidly disintegrating model of the world, and nods, shifting his trajectory thataway. It's still mostly dark, and he's quiet with his armor off, and covered in mud besides; he thinks he probably won't be noticed, or at least won't be recognized, if he's fast.

"Shan't ask how you'd know," it's not polite to accuse a witch of witchcraft to her face, is it, "but thank you."

"You are welcome, Hob Gadling. Do you wish for my assistance?"

"I think I've got it! Just gotta go look extremely uninteresting for a few moments here, and, you know, I can't really imagine you not being incredibly interesting?" Grin. "If I'm not back sharpish I expect I won't turn down a heroic rescue, though."

"As you say. I will watch and wait."