Emmaline was in a considerably better mood as she bit into the slice of watermelon Amal provided her. She tried not to think about the fact that she had seen him gut a man with the same knife he used to slice through the rind of the fruit, he DID clean it afterwards of course. There were more people in the hillfort than Emmaline had seen from the road, perhaps a score or more. Mostly they were busy building fires and preparing the evening meal. The sun was just beginning to sink and it wouldn't be dark for another hour or so, but Emmaline knew well that the cold in the pass at night could be as ferocious as the heat during the day, the whipping wind carrying the smell of snow down of the high peaks. The fires were, for the most part, pitiful things. Firewood was in short supply in the pass and most of it had to be brought in, which added expense in both purchasing timber at one end, which the locals of course steeply marked up, and wasted wagon space. The dwarves seemed to be doing business selling animal dung to feed the fires of those guards or merchants willing to shell out a few coins for a bit of extra warmth. Emmaline, fortunately, did not have that problem. It was a simple spell to heat a few rocks till they radiated nicely, a trick she had pulled a few times since they set out for the price of a few coins. It smelled better than the dung fires, but most of the caravanners preferred the stink to magic.

"Poor bastards wont make it till well after nightfall," Heisenbach remarked, walking over towards them with a pair of recently filled waterskins over his shoulder. Emmaline looked up in confusion, wiping juice from her lips with the back of her hand to follow the merchants gesture. Down the pass, a caravan was making its dusty way along the road, coming up from the Border Princes in the opposite direction to their own. Half a dozen wagons struggled over the rough terrain, kicking up a pall of grit, little more than specs at this distance. Emmaline nodded judiciously, as though she were in any way interested, but said nothing to encourage Heisenbach  to stay. The swarthy teamster seemed to spend a fair amount of time around the two of them. Though he obviously enjoyed looking at a woman for a change, Emmaline suspected it went deeper than that. Heisenbach viewed himself as an educated man, and viewed Emmaline, if not Amal in a similar light. She supposed she was educated after a fashion, she could read afterall, and her frequent brushes with the nobility and high merchants in Altdorf gave her the barest veneer of culture. He was lonely, and not just in the physical sense.

"These are bad roads after dark," he continued, undeterred by the lack of response.

"Are there roads anywhere that get better after dark?" Amal asked, pausing to spit a stream of seeds onto the steaming rocks with a sizzle. Heisenbach  gave an avuncular chuckle.

"You have some wits about you, if you decide you want to make a living as a caravan guard let me know," he told the thief, his eyes slipping, surreptitiously he probably imagined, to Emmaline's bosom.

"Was talking to old Gerd, he says there is fighting back west, an army of beast men besieging Nuln..." Emmaline's eyes swam out of focus and she was suddenly looking up at a grand house with fluted columns and darkened windows, at the same time she was staring out over an expanse of ocean from the deck of a ship. Her stomach lurched vertiginously as the hillfort, the house and the ship tried to simultaneously superimpose on one another. Something hard hit her across the face and when she blinked her eyes clear of tears. She was back in the hillfort, Amal and Heisenbach staring at her in shock. She looked down at her hand in surprise. What had happened, she had been on a ship and... smack! 

"Ow!!" she exclaimed, looking at her hand in shock, she had slapped herself, her memory informed her. The snake bracelet on her wrist didn't move, but one of the wood carved eyes gave her a disapproving look.

"Ahh are you ok?" Heisenbach asked, clearly uncomfortable with watching her slap herself. The snake bracelet continued to stare at her sternly. Amal shifted slightly, his posture somewhere between moving to help her or moving to take out Heisenbach . Why he thought that might be necessary she wasn't sure but she pushed thoughts of boats and houses out of her mind.

"Just ahhh.. trying to keep myself awake," she lied, "you know with the..." she nodded towards the fire. Heisenbach nodded, apparently willing to believe that the spell might be draining her. Maybe it was, she was seeing things afterall. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hands.

"Well, I should see to the men," Heisenbach said after a moment. "It can get mighty cold here at night, you might want to think about sleeping under one of the wagons incase there is a frost.