When Finn woke up, she found herself staring at the evening sky through gently waving branches and leaves. Her body felt cold and numb, except for where she could feel sticks and stems poking at her.

She took a mental account of herself. Her stomach was twisted up and felt like it was eating itself. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since she left her small encampment where she had been spying on the kobolds, but she certainly hadn’t eaten since then. Her legs and arms were sore when she tried to move them. She had pushed herself beyond her limits carrying Adi, and her body was letting her know it.

Finn tried to sit up, but only managed to flop over on her side, knocking over the mound of leaves that had been piled on top of her. She grabbed a handful of them and brought them up to her face. That explained the poking. It was leaves and twigs, then.

“You slept all day,” a rough voice said from above her head.

Finn glanced up with a grimace to see Adi looking down at her. Her expression was wry with a sort of low simmering danger underneath. Even nude with her long thick hair framing her body where she was crouched by Finn, her expression turned her figure dangerous.

“Fuck,” Finn replied emphatically. She flopped over onto her back and stared up at the sky again.

“I gathered some food, but it’s not much. It won’t last us long, but it’ll keep us from starving,” Adi explained, thrusting a roughly stripped root and a handful of lumpy red berries at Finn. Finn reached out to hesitantly accept them.

When she tried to struggle to a sitting position, Adi helped with a bracing hand on her shoulder.

“I guess we weren’t found, since we’re alive and this looks to be about the same spot I passed out in,” Finn said slowly after popping a few red berries in her mouth. They were tart and had a lot of tiny seeds, but mostly tasted fine. The wide swath of water that made up the river she had been following shined in the last of the sunlight struggling over the horizon.

“I haven’t seen or heard anyone,” Adi confirmed, already curled back up in a small crouch, her knees pulled up under her chin and her feet flat on the ground. She regarded Finn warily, a marked change from the day before.

Adi noticed Finn regarding the strip of root suspiciously and snatched it from her hands, using her short blunt nails to pull the rough brown skin further down. “It’s not the most nutritious or tasty stuff, but you can eat it, and it will sit in your stomach for forever,” she explained, handing the now-skinned tuber back.

It had a very spicy smell, which stuck to Finn’s fingers when she took it back. Finn took a hesitant bite, and the taste smacked her in the back of her throat, making her nose run and her eyes water. Adi gave her a lopsided smirk when she noticed her reaction.

Somehow it was both spicy and sweet? It was a very odd and powerful taste.

Adi watched Finn force herself to gnaw on the root for a few minutes before she ventured the thought that was obviously weighing on her.

“We should keep running,” she said blankly, staring flatly at Finn.

Finn stopped trying to chew on a small edge of the root and looked at Adi askance. “Your dad-” she started to say.

“He’s probably already dead,” Adi said loudly, just below a shout. Her face started to crumple, but she seemed to master her emotions after a second. “It would put us both at a huge risk if we tried to follow the humans. That would be one thing for me, but you have nothing to do with this. You’re just,” her face seemed to struggle against crumpling again, “a good person.”

Finn was quiet, watching Adi struggle with her face for another moment before it settled resolutely into blankness. She chewed on the root again, just for something to do, but wrinkled her nose at the intense taste and put it aside for the moment.

A little voice in Finn's head that sounded suspiciously like Ruven told Finn that she should take the out. If Finn had slept a whole day and the human soldiers hadn't found them, then they wouldn't find them. Finn could make her way back to the court, even if it would take a while, and she could report that the kobolds were taken care of, and it wouldn't even be a lie. And Adi may not have been a knight, but she obviously wasn't helpless in the wild. She knew how to forage for food. They could split here and Finn could live with the knowledge that Adi was likely fine.

That voice was reasonable, and she should probably have listened to it. But, Finn had spent most of her life trying to ignore that voice, and she wasn't about to change her habits right then.

“I guess you’re thinking the situation is pretty hopeless,” Finn said.

Adi’s eyebrows lowered over her eyes, dark and angry, before she looked away from Finn and out over the water of the wide river.

“I understand why you feel that way,” Finn said. “But, I don’t think we need to give up just yet.”

Adi sneered at Finn, an ugly expression that somehow just made her look cuter, like a small dog trying to look threatening.

“We’re lost in human territory,” Adi said, counting off on her fingers, “We have no clothing, no food, and no weapons. We’re in a pretty dire situation, in case you didn’t notice,” she finished with a token show of her row of little sharp teeth.

Finn tried to control a smile, but felt one corner of her mouth twitch up anyway. She could tell that small twitch was enough to piss Adi off even more, as her lip lifted and her brows came down sharply.

“Let’s worry about the equipment first,” Finn suggested, stretching her arms above her head and trying to work out the stiff, knotted muscles in her back. Adi glanced away, and Finn tried not to take it personally. After all, she had been trying not to stare at Adi's chest with only middling success as well.

Sighing, Finn relaxed back into a slouch. “Even if we decide to make for fae territory, we’re going to need clothes and whatnot. We really only have one option on that front.”

“Oh?” Adi replied, still glaring at the ground to the left of Finn’s knee, where she had adjusted her sight during Finn's aborted stretch. “What’s that?” she asked.

“We’ll have to rob some humans,” Finn explained.

Adi’s eyes snapped to hers, big and wide with surprise.

“I thought that would be sort of obvious,” Finn added.

“We’ll be giving ourselves away! While the human army is probably still nearby!” Adi protested loudly, her shoulders coming up around her ears defensively.

“If you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears,” Finn replied evenly.

Adi cast around their small, pathetic camp, as if the answer might materialize out of the air.

“Can’t we source food and other things from the forest?” she asked, even though her expression seemed to indicate she already knew it wasn’t a real option.

“You can source some stuff from your surroundings,” Finn agreed, picking up the stick of spicy sweet root and gesturing toward Adi with it as an example. “But, we won’t be able to make more sophisticated tools ourselves without a lot of time and effort. It would be a lot more efficient to just nick that stuff from someone else.”

Adi looked at the ground, frowning thunderously, obviously rolling the idea around in her head.

“If we’re caught,” she said slowly, “we’ll either be killed or be handed back to the human authorities. We'll be right back where we started.”

Finn nodded in agreement. “You’re right,” she said. “But, consider, if we hit someone who has everything we need, we could be ready to follow the human army within a day or so.”

Adi’s frown looked a little less thunderous at that. “How would we find someone to rob?” she asked. “And, how do we rob them without any weapons?”

“We’ll be sneaky,” Finn said with what she hoped was a confident smirk.

“That’s assuming we even can find some humans to rob,” Adi groused. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, as near as I can tell.”

“So you say, but we do have the advantage of this big ass river,” Finn responded, nodding her head at the water shining in vibrant orange, reflecting the setting sky.

“Oh,” Adi said, recognition lighting up her features. She looked over at the river and then downriver, as if she would notice a settlement where she hadn’t seen one before.

“This river is more than big enough for boats to go down. If we follow it, we should come to a settlement eventually,” Finn said out loud what both of them were thinking.

“It’s the best idea we have,” Adi said quietly, curling into herself a little bit more and looking thoughtful.

Finn nodded in agreement. “We can travel at night when most humans are asleep and then bed down during the day somewhere they can't find us But, we might need to rest a little longer. I don't think my legs are quite recovered from carrying you last night.”

Adi gave her a bit of a dirty look, but nodded in agreement. She stood slowly, grunting a little as she twisted to reach behind her for another fistful of the little red berries.

"Eat up, then."

Finn took the proffered pile of red berries and looked at them curiously. A memory rushed into her mind suddenly. She remembered her and her brother pulling little plump red berries just like the ones in her hand off of an evergreen bush outside the soldier's barracks when they were little kids and whipping them onto the paved path to splatter in little violent shocks of color. It hadn't been especially fun, but the satisfaction of seeing the little berries explode had been satisfying and a good way to pass the time between training sessions. At least, it had been until one of the grandmothers had caught them doing it and pulled their ears so hard that Finn thought she was going to take it all the way off.

"Those berries are poisonous!" she had yelled in a voice like a rusty violin.

She had then gone on to explain in exhausting detail exactly how painful and disgusting their deaths would have been if they had eaten even a few of those berries. None of their protests that they had never even considered eating the berries had been heeded, and in the end the bush and berries had lost much of their appeal.

Finn separated one of the berries out from the others and held it up pinched between two fingers.

"You're sure these aren't poisonous?" she asked. "I admittedly don't know that much about foraging, but I know that some red berries are pretty dangerous."

Adi rolled her eyes, but responded placidly. "They're choke berries. They're safe to eat, even if they don't taste all that good."

Finn's mouth twisted in doubt, but she popped one in her mouth all the same. The taste definitely left something to be desired, but it was better than the root. Despite their bright color, they were extremely dry and mealy, like chewing on slightly sour oatmeal.

Finn wrinkled her nose and shoved the rest of them in her mouth before she could chicken out.

"How'd you learn what was safe to eat? I thought kobolds mostly lived in caves or human houses?" Finn said, around a mouth full of nasty berries. She asked, mostly to distract herself, as the taste was really just awful. But, she needed something to fill her stomach.

Adi looked down at the root that she had taken from Finn and viciously ripped a chunk out of it with her sharp teeth. She chewed pensively for a few minutes before replying.

"We did. Live in a cave, I mean. Or a mine, specifically. But, my dad wanted me and my brothers to learn how to survive outside, too. So, he would take us on these trips out to the surface, and we would camp outside a few days and walk around the mountainside while he taught us the names of plants and what they could be used for," Adi explained, a far off look in her eye.

"That sounds nice," Finn said faintly. And, it did sound nice. She could imagine the thick armed scowling man from her own memories shepherding around two smaller versions of himself plus Adi. Finn imagined he would have been warm and kind and patient while he taught and guided them. All the things she never got from her own father growing up.

"It was," Adi agreed, before tearing another chunk out of the root with a frustrated growl. "It's thanks to him that we're eating at all right now."

Finn looked down at her own calloused, dirty hands and thought about that for a moment. Thinking of it that way, this might be the second time Adi's father had saved her, albeit indirectly.

Tipping her head up to regard a navy blue sky steadily darkening into indigo, Finn said loudly, "Thank you, Adi's dad!"

Adi looked startled for a moment, before her face softened into something distinctly fond. "Yeah," she murmured at a much softer volume. "Thanks, Dad."