She found the wagon by the smell of campfire bread.
Mei Lin had been walking the road north out of Light's Hope Chapel for most of the afternoon, hood up against the wind that had a sour smell to it because everything in the Eastern Plaguelands had a sour smell, when she came around a bend and saw a fire that was not green, food that was not blackened, and a worgen woman waving at her like they had agreed to meet here.
"You look like you have been having a week," the worgen called. "Come and have a roll. I am Fiona. The bread is honest."
Her name was Fiona. She really did run a wagon-train through dead country, with a small painted caravan and a stubborn old draft horse and a crew Fiona had picked up at random along the road over a number of months she would not specify. The bread really was honest. Mei Lin sat down by the fire and ate three rolls before she remembered to introduce herself, and Fiona only laughed.
The first crew member was Gidwin Goldbraids, a dwarf with a hammer that looked too heavy for him until he picked it up, at which point you realised the hammer was the right size and the dwarf was the right size and only your eye had been wrong. He had crumbs in his beard that he did not appear to be planning to address. "Storm shaman," he said when he heard her name, and grinned. "My favourite kind of shaman." "What's the second favourite," Mei Lin asked. "Asleep," he said, and took her bread and refused to give it back.
The second was Tarenar Sunstrike, a blood elf with sigils carefully painted along his bracer. He bowed to her with a politeness that had clearly been learned in rooms that did not always want him. She bowed back. He noted her shoulders, and she noted his, and they let it go. There would be time for words on the road.
The third was Argus Highbeacon, a human with kind eyes and a holy book at his hip. He had done this road before, and would do it again, because he knew what happened to the road if no one did. He passed her a cup of something hot that tasted of grass. "Sorry about the tea," he said. "It is what we have." She drank it. She had drunk worse. She did not say so.
A fourth, Fiona mentioned in passing, was further up the road and they would pick him up at the next stop. "You'll meet him," she said. She had already decided Mei Lin would like him.
Mei Lin stayed the night. She helped. She planted a small air totem at the edge of the camp so the wind would carry the smell of the bread away from anything walking on the road in the dark. She planted a small water totem for the horse, who needed it after a day on this country. She listened to Gidwin and Argus argue about whether watch was three shifts or four, and she listened to Tarenar not weigh in, and she listened to Fiona settle it without raising her voice, which was the moment Mei Lin understood why the caravan ran at all.
The dead country still pressed in at the edges of the firelight. The spirits on the road outside the camp were the same spirits she had walked past all afternoon, sitting where they sat, unable to be called. The fire did not push the country back. It only made a smaller country, briefly, where one wagon's worth of people could pretend.
Mei Lin thought that was enough.
In the morning she planted a quiet healing rain along the wheel-tracks the wagon would take going east, the way you tuck a blanket on a guest before they wake up. She did not tell Fiona. Fiona noticed everything anyway.
She turned back once at the top of the rise and watched the painted wagon roll on, and she heard Gidwin laugh at something, and she found her own road again.
"I'd take that wagon over a war horse," she told the wind. "Better company. Better bread."
The wind did not answer. She kept walking.
— Mist