She doesn't offhand know how old Chesed is, and Ember doesn't sound like she remembers very well anyway. She's not very sure where they are anymore; the snow suggests a little further to the north than they were, but if they're not freezing then the latitude can't be wildly off. So there is one city she thinks she could make it to, if she spends her second kenning.

"Okay. I want to see if I can get us to Kalsgard. I think we're still close enough, and I don't want to risk hopping any further north by accident. It'll take the second kenning. If all's as it should be, we should be able to buy a teleport back to Mendev there. If it's not, Kalsgard is old enough that it ought to exist in some form, and we'll hopefully be able to find lodgings for the night, and maybe some answers. If we get another misfire we'll set up a camp for the night and see if we can think of another plan. Any objections."

"....do I have to get in the bag again?"

"I'll do it, if Korva's teleporting."

Okay. Well.

There's a hill just to the west of Kalsgard. It overlooks the river, and is tall enough that you can just see the sea on the horizon. In Korva's time it is undeveloped, used for sheep pasture. She doesn't know what the city itself will look like, and isn't willing to try teleporting right into it, if it's very different - but the hill, that ought to be there.

She pictures the hill, and she teleports.

Kalsgard is much smaller, and much poorer. Not only the hill but a lot of what's usually city is instead sheep pasture. 

But it's there.

She hasn't been to Kalsgard since she was a thrall. She and the city were both very different, then. But it's hard to fear it, when it's this size, and it's always been hard to entirely hate it, when she learned of it from old sagas the Chelish censors had been unable to see the danger in. Some of the stories would have been from just this period. 

"Well. Kalsgard of the Saga Lands, circa 3824. Let's see what they've got in stock."

And she can lead her group into the city (or the town, it's really more of a town, in this year), and look around or ask around for a magic shop, or failing that anywhere that adventurers gather.

There are taverns. There are absolutely not magic item shops, and the adventurers in the tavern are locals, who handle the beasts of these lands, or go out on the seas raiding. People do use it as a Teleport stopover, but they come, and sleep, and leave, and not more than once a month. No one's here today. 

Nuts.

"Woljif, you prep all your spells yet today?"

"Nah, I got some open."

"Good. Prep a sending." Really it feels like they should have prepped and cast a sending earlier, but Woljif didn't have one before this morning, and they've actually only done, like, fifteen minutes of stuff since they raised Ember and Daeran. "I'm gonna see if I can figure out which cities are worth going to. The rest of you can... order breakfast, I guess, or try to figure out what anyone else here knows if you think you can talk to them without starting a panic. And know old Skald, I guess."

She gets an extremely incorrect salute from Woljif and a put-upon sigh from Daeran, who doesn't even have to do anything, and she decides she's just going to sit down at the bar.

If she's got gold they'll sell her plenty to drink despite the language barrier. 

Korva actually knows old Skald! Sort of! Much better than she knows old Taldane! While the other best and brightest twelve year olds in Cheliax were improving their Draconic or Infernal or doing extracurricular work in Azlanti or Kelish or Vudran, Korva was teaching herself Skald, and the materials she had available for practice were centuries-old sagas. This was... actually kind of idiotic of her, and probably related to her never becoming one of Cheliax's best and brightest sixteen-year-olds, but it helped as a scaffold for modern Skald when knowing that became a matter of the utmost importance, and it's useful in this very specific implausible situation. She's not passing up a chance to try using it.

She does, also, have gold, and will buy a drink.

"My friends and I are from very far away. We need to find a city on this side of the world that's big enough to buy items for magic - a scrying mirror, say. Do you know of any cities like that?"

...Caliphas is pretty sizable? It's in the Tyrant's territory, but there's plenty of living people in the city, and plenty of the dead are witches and spellsages and so on. Iz is a good sized city but you'd be a fool trying to buy items for magic in Iz. 

...what's up with Iz in this - oh, duh. It's in Sarkoris. Not going to Caliphas. 

"How about Kintargo, have you heard of a place called Kintargo further down the coast?" She's not sure she could get to Kintargo in one teleport, but it seems plausible, and it has the advantage of being a place that she's ever been before.

This provokes some heated chatter, but at least one person present who has done some coastal raiding asserts that they've heard of a place called Kintargo.

"Any idea how big it is? Bigger than Kalsgard, or smaller?"

Oh, it's bigger, it's down south where there's long growing seasons and rich lords and lots to raid. 

"Good enough for me. Thank you," she says, and tosses the man who knows about Kintargo a silver. 

"We'll also need rooms tonight, if you've got them."

They've got rooms! Well, a loft over the tavern, but the hay is dry, and one fancy suite for the fancy once-a-month Teleporters that's got Tien furnishings and costs twenty gold because the people who do the Teleport route will pay it.

Tempting. Very tempting. But Dorelinga is always telling her how her soldiers are half starved or armed with repurposed farming equipment or whatever it is this week, and she shouldn't be wasteful. Anyway, it's a little perverse, isn't it, sleeping in nice rooms when the common soldiers get group barracks. (She'd feel this way about her room in Drezen, too, except that she's too busy feeling like her room in Drezen was chosen specifically to tighten Galfrey's control of her.) 

"Hey, anybody got an opinion on sleeping on the hay in the loft for cheap, or a fancy suite for twenty gold -"

Daeran drops twenty gold on the counter and shoots her a look to let her know that he thinks she's a crazy person.

It's a very fancy suite! They want the Teleport-wizards as repeat customers! There's a bath and servants to draw it up, and two Tien style beds with silk sheets, and iron banded through the walls to carry the heat from the fireplace all over. They're served dinner on porcelain.

Well, Daeran is hardly going to give his money to the poor deprived recruits, so she supposes this isn't picking their pockets too badly. Anyway, she's being nice to him for another four hours for having heroically died. 

"All right. Given the circumstances, I think we have to take most of the day off. I do want people thinking about, one, what exactly is going on here, two, any remaining ways that this could be an illusion or a dreamscape or some other kind of deception and how we can see through it under various circumstances, and three, what it implies we should do, if it really is 3824. But in between that - have a bath. Play cards. Whatever."

"You wanted a sending, Chief?"

" - right, I did. Give me a minute to figure out a suitably compact message, and then we'll try to contact Seelah."

She takes a minute. Woljif takes ten. 

Trapped in illusory world, alternate reality, or the distant past. Appear to be in Kalsgard. True location uncertain. Require retrieval. Respond immediately if able.