Bastion

either, and that made him wonder if they had also lived in the caves, as their hertasi did. The valley had definitely been cleared of anything like a tree at or around the time the bandits took it over, but it had been long enough for trees to have reseeded themselves in several places, making compact little groves here and there.
    He was sure he found the place where the legendary bathing pools had once been. On the one part of the valley wall that wasn’t sheer rock, there was a sloping hill, with six basins built into it. He could see where water would have started at the top, cascaded down to the next two, and then into the last four. But if there had been a spring that fed these basins, it had dried up a long time ago. The basins themselves were more like depressions, partly filled in with soil, and covered with turf and weeds.
    This would be a nice place in summer though, and was not bad now.
    He also inspected the huge pile of wood that had been left for them by the Guard. The bigger logs had been chopped up and split and piled in several pyramids off to the right of the entrance of the cave they were using. Branches had mostly been cut into fire-sized pieces, but there was a pile of uncut ones as well; this was what Bear had used for their curtain poles, and Mags expected there would be other uses for them. It looked like an impossible amount of wood, but he knew from experience that keeping fires stoked used a lot of fuel. His best guess, though, was that there would be enough here to keep them through spring. It looked as if the Guard had dragged every dead tree within easy reach of the entrance inside, and chopped it all up here. There was a substantial pile of wood chips that would make good kindling.
    It didn’t take long at all for the Companions to find the hertasi bathing room. The cave in question was along the same wall as their living cave but deeper into the valley, located behind one of those little groves of trees, but Jermayan found it quite quickly. Mags went in to inspect it as the shadows deepened and the light began to fade from the sky.
    He was glad he had the lantern; it was dark, and although you could hear the spring faintly from the entrance, it was around several draft-killing twists and turns in the tunnel. It was a tunnel and not a natural cave this time; he spotted the telltale signs that someone had been working the rock.
    When he emerged into a small room, he knew immediately that the place was going to take some work before it was usable.
    There had been some rockfall along the wall, which made the footing a little treacherous there and diverted part of the water. But more importantly, the basin—which was rather like a huge bulge in the middle of a small stream—had a thick layer of fine mud on the bottom. Certainly no one had cleared it since the bandits called this place home. And the water was just one step above ice. He hurried back to report to the others.
    “I think maybe they was using it for a lotta things,” he said, after describing what he’d found. “I think washing clothes and maybe watering horses. Diggin’ the mud out ain’t gonna be nice, cold as that water is.” He sat down on one of the wool rugs with his back to a hay-stuffed cushion the size of a horse’s torso. The hay smelled nice; he suspected Bear had packed some herbs in there as well. The cushion rustled a little as he settled himself.
    Jakyr dished him up a bowl of stew, stuck a chunk of bread in it, and handed it to him. “Maybe that portable tub is a better answer then.”
    Mags took a bite of gravy-soaked bread. “Well,” he said, “I can tell ye, as some’un who’s had his arms in cold water in winter, that it won’t be but a couple of moments afore your hands start to hurt like fury. And then you start to get cold all over, once yer arms get cold. We didn’t have a choice back then but to do it, but I don’t think none of us now could work for longer’n a verse in a drinkin’ song afore we’d have t’quit.” He shivered, feeling chilled just thinking about it. “That mud’ll be packed in there good. It’d take candlemarks t’ get it all out. I’m thinkin’ that’s a job for warmer times.”
    Lita gave him an I told you so look. She didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. It was Bear who quickly defused things before they started snapping at each other again.
    “We got a lot of these sleeping caves,” he said. “Any reason why we couldn’t heat up rocks an’