sixthiterationlogs | and if you go into the woods today...

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The woods
WHEN: 9th October, morning
OPEN TO: Margaery Tyrell + Everyone
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Ongoing

It has been nearly a week and a half of rain. The torrential downpour, seemingly something unheard of south of the tropics, had lessened, but only to a different kind of rain. Not as hard, not as heavy, but mostly steady and always there. While Kate has been interested to see how far what stores she's made last and what the taste is like, she's running low and has no wish to see everything gone.

The noises of the Inn are also driving her to distracted, so many people. As if the many rooms of the place are just a trick to lull her into nearly having privacy and quiet before something starts up again. Add to that her kitten, her new chickens, and trying to keep them separated.

Kate needs to get out.

Fortunately, Miss Margaery's been feeling similar. So when the rain seemed to fade into a drizzle, the two young women had dressed in their coats and taken baskets and bags, and left the town before anyone could protest too much. All Kate said was to Miss Riza, telling her that she and Miss Margaery expected to be back well before lunchtime. They'd head directly west, because that area hasn't been too heavily foraged as yet.

(Really, Kate had wanted to head over the river and away, but she's not an idiot: she's not risking that bridge in this weather.)

They'd walked, but most of their talk was quiet, brief. They'd gathered from one area, moved along to the next. The rain has come back, but they ignore it. It is only when Kate is thinking they should return that she suddenly straightens. She turns. She looks. She frowns.

She'd been paying attention. She's been running through bush and scrub since she could walk, and she'd been paying attention. But...

"Which way did we come from?"

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After being confined for several days, dealing with the frustration of the downpour and the fall out from the earthquake, escaping into the woods was a welcomed relief. Kate hardly needed to extended the offer, Margaery had been ready to explore on her own. Reason, however, whispered at her and reminded her how foolish it was to go off without another person. She needed a partner, and in truth, she wanted pleasant company. Kate was that and more.

The silence had been comforting, allowing them to work and focus on the different plants they collected. There had even been a bush of wild grapes, though they looked as though they would be sour. When they returned to the inn, she'd find a way to make them edible. Her thoughts had been lost in what she could do and what she could create with them, when Kate asked the question that seized her heart into her throat.

Margaery looked over her shoulder. She'd been paying attention as well. Neither had gone further than they had before, the area had been familiar to them. Suddenly, it was almost as though they had walked into an unexplored wilderness. She realized with dread that she had no idea where they were or could spy any sign of their previous trek.

"No," she murmured, gripping her bag tightly. "You don't remember?"

"No, I remember." Kate looks at Margaery and then, very deliberately, she turns around. Carefully, moving her feet instead of twisting at the ankles, not letting herself move fast or frantic. "We came from the east, which should be there, along the deer trail. But see? I'd.

I'd swear that there's a tree there now." And not a path, so much as a gap in the bushes. But she wouldn't have gone through that narrow a gap, surely.

There is a deer trail, but it's south. She didn't get turned around that much.

She's too much a girl from the bush to start doubting herself now, not with mysteriously appearing ruins and the like.

"I remember," Margaery said, staring up towards the sky as she searched the pine trees for a particular marker. "The deer trail had a crooked pine tree with a broken branch." But she couldn't find it. While it had been visible among the canopy before, there was nothing now. There was no sign, no indication of where they had come from.

She rubbed her arms nervously, feeling a measure of panic bubble in her stomach.

"It had to be this way," she said, pointing to what she believed was the East. "The sun was on our backs when we first started."

First rule of the bush, don't panic. Panic makes you stupid, panic gets you into trouble. Panic, and you make mistakes and you might just wind up dead because the bush honestly doesn't give a shit.

So there's fear, there, a flash of it to sharpen her senses, and there's irritation she's trying to keep a leash on. Anger makes mistakes, too.

"All right," Kate says. "We pick up our work and we'll walk over there, together. And let's see if we can find our way back."

She doesn't run into the rest of it, how they'll only search for a short time and then take shelter and hope people find them. She has a knife on her, she'll carve her and Miss Margaery's initials in the trees as a mark, a direction, for a search if they can't get out.

They'll be fine, if they don't panic.

Margaery knew so little about survival in the woods. Her entire life had been spent in the hills of the Reach and the capital, King's Landing. This was the first that she ever had to think of such things, and unfortunately, she was not able to guess what the right actions were.

Had she been thinking clearly, she would have collected some pebbles and left makers of their trail as well. But it never crossed her mind. She trusted Kate to know what to do.

Her mind was focused instead on the direction she believed they had come in. "We haven't been out that long. We can't be that far from the village."

"We're not." This is said firmly, but not unkindly, as Kate looks at her. She knows that Miss Margaery is a lady, a genuine aristocrat, and for all she's been pulling her weight here, this isn't what she's used to. If Kate doesn't want herself to panic, she doesn't want to have to run after her companion if she panics, either.

"We're not that far away, and it's an enclosed area," she goes on. "And there's a few markers we can use to find out where we are if we hit them, all right?"

It was comforting, strangely. That grim determination and confidence in Kate helped keep Margaery in control of her emotions. She could hold it together, so long as someone seemed certain that they would find their way out of the woods.

She was right, they were at least in an enclosed area. All they needed was to follow east and they'd reach the village again. She believed that firmly.

"We'll hear the sounds of the village soon and we can follow that as well." She said, leading Kate in that direction.

"Or the river," Kate adds. "It'd be different if the village had construction or the blacksmith's workin'. But if we miss the village because we got turned around, the river runs through the area."

And so, they walk. Kate's careful to make sure that they walk together, neither of them getting too far in front or behind. There's a cold prickling down her spine, instinct that something is wrong.

This feeling seems to be confirmed when, by her estimation, they walk past where they should have seen the crooked pine without a sign of the bloody thing.

Margaery stopped in her tracks, staring up at the tree lines. There was nothing, no sign of the pine that she had seen everyday. There should have been a trail leading down to a gathering of strawberry bushes, ground that had been weathered and trampled by various wildlife.

But nothing was there. It was as though they were in a completely different and foreign forest.

"Do you hear the river?" She didn't and that sent a wave of ice through her blood.

"No." It's short, clipped; different from the rolling way she normally talks. "Not yet. Shit." A confirmation and not a welcome one that they are lost.

Kate sighs, annoyed, and tilts her head up to look through the branches and leaves, towards the sky and its gentle, drizzling rain. This isn't her kind of terrain. She's a girl of hill country and the bush, of eucalyptus trees and earth that turns to dust. She knows rain and storms, but she doesn't know this strange land where even the shadows are backwards, let alone the plants, the birds. The smells.

She's lost, and she doesn't know this area or this land well enough to risk trying to get out herself.

How was this even possible? She had walked the trail every morning, but suddenly it was removed, almost like magic. Her mind traveled back to what Finnick and Annie had said. Was someone behind this? Was this some sort of game.

She shivered, her scrubs becoming damp from the drizzle. The wind rustled through the branches, chilling her skin. She rubbed at her arms, glancing around, trying to keep her panic under control.

"We need shelter."

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and if you go into the woods today...

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