... wow is this Kassandra's tent. Did she carry him here. He is admittedly not a particularly large guy but an entire unconscious human person is not trivial to sling over your shoulder. She is so cool. 

(He is going to get to be that cool someday, he thinks, gleefully. Life is grand. Time to go live more of it.)

"Good morning!" he chirps, plopping down next to Kassandra. "This must be Ikaros?"

"It is, yes. Say hello, Ikaros."

Ikaros turns a gimlet stare on Hob, but doesn't immediately attempt to peck his eyes out or eviscerate him, so that probably counts as a hello.

Oh wow what a Creature. He wants to fight it and inevitably lose horribly and find out whether talons feel different from knives. ... Right, that was actually insane, get your shit together, Gadling.

"Hello! You are magnificent!" he says to Ikaros, instead of any of that.

Hmmm. Ikaros tilts his head this way and that, examining Hob. Then, deciding he's not a threat and is sufficiently impressed, the eagle goes back to ignoring him.

Fair. He in turn returns his attention to Kassandra.

"Thanks for hauling me off the table last night apparently. I promise that last story was just as interesting as all the others, I've just had a really long week."

"You looked like you could use better sleep than the tabletop could offer. Or a ditch."

"Might'a slept just as long in a ditch, tired as all that, but not half so well, yeah."

"Take it where you can get it. But don't settle, if you don't have to."

"Seems like wise advice, I'll bear it in mind."

"You do that. Are you returning to England from here?"

Huh. He... could go somewhere else, couldn't he. Seventy-four years is plenty of time to get back to London from anywhere in the world, probably, even if he's clearly been envisioning the world smaller than it really is. But in the even shorter term than that -

"Think so, yeah. At home I know how to find a good merchant caravan to sign on with and all that sort of thing." 

"Would you like to travel together? At least that far."

Ooh. That sounds like it would involve, like, a solid 97% less likelihood of somehow ending up at the bottom of the Channel on his way back.

"I would be honored and delighted."

"Then I'll pack up the tent, if you want to try to scrounge up some breakfast for yourself."

"Sure, can do."

Finding food in a sprawling army camp is in some ways easier and in other ways harder than in a town: the locals are gone and the fields are muddy and scorched, but the people in charge of this whole mess are devoting a lot of work, on purpose, to supply chain logistics, because if you don't do that you do not have an army. So hunting (unless, presumably, you are equipped with a two-thousand-year-old magic hunting eagle; Kassandra can probably extract edible creatures from even this environment) is probably out of the question, but in the wake of heroically winning the battle no one is being enormously stingy about rations. 

He comes back quite encaloried and reasonably hydrated, chewing cheerfully on the salty tail end of a dried fish. He has no way to transport liquids but he's now at least got some dry food squirreled into his pockets.

Is the tent also magic, like the eagle, or does it seem to have been folded up in a basically normal way?

It's perfectly ordinary canvas, compressed for transport in the normal fashion.

"No objections to leaving in advance of the army?"

Weirdly reassuring of it.

"I don't think so, should I?"

"Probably not. Any charges of technically-desertion would also be complicated by your technical-death."

"Heh. Too right they would."

North it is then, to Calais and a ship across the Channel.

It's a couple of days' walk to Calais, during which Hob chatters incessantly and enthusiastically about the weather, his family, the wildlife, the soldier friends who think he's dead now, exciting new technologies he's heard about (many of which Kassandra may recognize as things that were invented centuries ago but the English only just somewhat recently started using, such as the compass), cool plants he spots randomly that he hasn't seen before, etc., etc., unless specifically instructed to stop.

Stories for stories. Can't get a fairer trade than that.

... and Westminster Abbey, which has been in progress since before he was born and maybe if he lives long enough he'll get to see it done, and gosh what a neat sparrow he's never seen one quite that shade, and the elaborate romantic drama of the teenagers from his old village who all died shortly after experiencing it but it was really cute while it lasted, and ... 

... ooooh, boats.

"Are they going to be weird at you about women on boats being bad luck, do you suppose, or do you usually find that being objectively terrifying solves this problem?"

"Being objectively terrifying solves a great many problems, and money solves most that remain. And if it comes down to it, the Channel is not so wide and rafts are not hard to build."

It's not... so....

Hob sort of stands there for a minute, staring out across the water. It was raining, when they came across the other way.

"...Huh. You sure can see Dover from here."