The next morning he awoke to Kitten rigorously scrubbing all their bloodied clothing in the river, the amber water darkening with the dried gore she managed to scour off. When she noticed him awake and watching her, she turned to show him that she had cleaned off his cloak as best she could and lamented that she had no soap to do a proper laundering job.
He was touched by her attempt at saving his already shabby cloak, but he only gave her a simple thanks. Then he offered to carry the drying bundle of clothing, as she wished to visit the settlement of Waymeet after consulting her aged map.
The walk there was laboriously slow on account of her lingering weakness, and they took several short rests as she needed them. Sometimes she sketched an animal or insect that caught her attention while he had a smoke, sometimes she studied her map or some other text and he simply laid back resting his eyes. The traveler kept space between himself and the girl as much as he could.
They found Waymeet indifferent, if not welcoming, to their presence, which the traveler was grateful for. He preferred to stay where people neither shunned nor welcomed him, but mostly ignored his existence. They wandered until they found an unattended cooking fire, and took their place aside it.
He set to work immediately finding supplies they needed: he found a bar of tallow soap drying on a table near a farmer's house, and one of the many roaming fat hens was quietly taken. The traveler noticed a pile of rubbish nearby, kicked some of the rotten wooden boards away, and spied a tiny sparkling in the debris.
He returned to Kitten and tossed the soap at her feet, then sat beside her to pluck and clean the bird. She began asking invasive questions of him again which he dismissed with short vague answers. The bird was soon roasting on the borrowed spit, Kitten examining the leftover entrails.
He gave the entire carcass to her to eat, after it was sufficiently browned and skewered on one of his longer knives. As she ate, he laid near the rubbish pile again and secretly slipped his hand within it, palming the object he had noted earlier and moving it to his pocket.
The darkness came early that night, and as no one had come to claim the cooking fire, they slept where they rested.
