Gideon was drinking. He'd smuggled in a bottle of Schalberg Alpenbitter and passed it around to the others in the truck bed. It was a good way to stay warm in the early spring. He knew the place they were going and knew to dress warm for the early spring chill. Of course, he had a military poncho on because he knew that the wind could cut when it got darker, and the poncho...well, he could sleep in one if he had to. It was essential equipment for any sort of camping and like all his other cadet field gear, it was beaten. Under it, he was wearing a fleece pullover, a fleece cap over his blonde hair and a pair of faded jeans, along with his favorite pair of boots, well broken-in. The memory of winter clung to the place well into spring, and the nights got cold. 

"Yo, Setzer, you think you can hit [i]all[/i] the bumps in one pass or what?" he called out sarcastically.

Still, getting rattled around in the back of an old truck, creaking axles and grinding transmission, and the prospect of camping in the cold night was vastly preferable to the fate that would have awaited him if he hadn't agreed to slip out for a party among friends. There weren't any reporters back here. 

It was just as well the Vangars decided to push peace talks now, it meant that he got to dodge the bullet of going to the obligatory visit to Orestia, pose for the obligatory photos...and answer the obligatory questions. The pomp, the circumstance, the PR hacks circling like vultures. The family obligation, and all that rot. He had a contentious relationship with the press corps that covered the Royal Family, particularly as there was a war on and these parasites were clearly the leftovers of the press corps, but they were still annoying. He somewhat hoped a few of the reporters, busily covering the war rather than contributing in a meaningful way, would eat a Vangar sniper's bullet. Maybe they had some common ground. Make peace and hunt the reporters down after the war.

If only.

But it wasn't worth getting upset over or even worrying. Whatever was going on in Orestia, he was forgotten and therefore able to smuggle himself out in this truck with some of the other squadmates. It didn't bother him that Zimmy invited an entire company's worth of people, but most everyone else found somewhere else to be. They would have had to boost a lot more trucks to move that many people...and would have been noticed. This was better, really.

They were in the truckbed with the beer and the camping gear, which was to say good field boots and the other necessities of roughing it. There were elk and some streams with fish here. They'd run out of alcohol long before they ran out of food in what was a typical alpine vista of beauty; meadow, forest and mountain, everywhere one looked. Rough terrain, but Fenris and his father liked to hunt up here, and he'd learned some of the terrain pretty well, for a kid. Even with the hunting lodge torched, it was family tradition to hunt up here.

Rudolf Blackeye, the most infamous of the rebels, torched this place with Crown Prince Petrus in it. The nature of the murder made the Nationalist cause unpopular. Rassvet's two sides came to the table, perhaps shaken by the callousness of the killing, and negotiated settlement. Old story, old news. Rudi's story got trotted out when politics got too partisan in the Kingdom as a cautionary tale.

Rudolf was hanged some ways away. Even by daytime, that particular acre of the wood was an unpleasant place for a magic user to linger. Luckily, it was far enough away and he knew exactly where that was. It was said the ghost still haunted the site of his execution. 

Another slug of the bottle meant the spread of a little warmth in his belly, but he was just sipping at it. Once they got to the campsite, it wouldn't be hard to build a fire, since they had firewood piled up from the last hunting trip, and get this whole thing underway. It felt good to slip the net for what was, undoubtedly, the last time.

He tilted the bottle toward Trent, "Vorslav winter coat."

He didn't always say much to Trent, because the guy was sometimes a little overawed by everyone else's story, but they were going to war after this, and it was best to settle everything on a good note. That wasn't necessarily fatalism, but a realistic assessment that things could go wrong.

Once the bottle was handed off, he moved through the door and into the cab, wriggling through the space to get himself settled into the seat. That took talent, because he wasn't a small guy, even if Setzer had a couple inches on him. He peered ahead into the darkness once he was settled in. 

"Yeah, there's the spot. If you turn left there," he pointed, "That's where the firewood is. We laid some down after last trip." The royal "we" perhaps, or he just meant, he and his family. It was one and the same. But at the same time, royalty had one perk -- this wasn't land that anyone else was supposed to be on. What he didn't tell them was that this was land that even they weren't necessarily supposed to be on. It's not like Gideon asked permission.

The gravel crunched under the wheels of the truck, and there were the skeletal ruins of scorched stone for the curious to gawp over. The jutting spurs of the lodge's remains, scorched by magic, stood mutely, long since overgrown with moss and grass. 

More importantly, they stored wood in those ruins, covered in a tarp and stacked against the remains of a wall. Dry, well-seasoned.