The mess hall was nearly empty when she arrived. She poured tea from an urn on the sideboard, sat at one of the long tables, and waited. Keepers and rangers slowly trickled in to sit in pairs or alone at the tables. An unremarkable ranger lounged against a wall nearby. He leaned on his left shoulder, so she couldn’t see his rank. His scowl said he wasn’t one for small talk and her eyes slid past him. She heard two more soldiers enter from the far door. They spoke in a loud, carrying whisper, and she sank down a little on her bench.

“I’m telling you, the princess is on this detail.” 

“No way! I thought she never left the palace. Isn’t she deformed or something?”

“Or something. She’s probably crazy too. All those royals are. And I’ll be there to document the auspicious moment when she gets eaten by a gaunt.” The men laughed.

So she’d found her scribe. She turned to confirm her suspicions and recognized the scribe uniform: a plain black tunic with a high collar and a yellow armband to set him apart from soldiers in a battle. The scribe was short and stout with a round face and eyes nearly hidden in the folds of his eyelids. In the traditional scribe fashion, he wore his hair shaved at the back. A mech port had been implanted into his neck just below his right ear and a wire was plugged into the port. The wire snaked inside his shirt, presumably down his back to some recording mech.

The scribe was already puffing from the short walk through the keeper compound, and he seemed to be stuffed into his black scribe shirt as if it had been made for a much smaller man. 

Rowan thought of the old adage about facing gaunts in the meadows: you don’t have to run fast, just faster than the next person in line. 

I can definitely outrun that jerk.