The Wildhammers needed a hand and Mei Lin had two of them, so she said yes before anyone explained what hauling meant up here.
What it meant was ten kegs of Thundermar ale, lashed two by two onto stubborn yaks, and a road only by reputation. The wind had teeth. A dwarf with a beard the colour of wet rust shouted down the slope that if she dropped one she could swim home in the rest.
His name was Blundy. The low shaman in front of it was a rank, he was quick to specify, not a description.
"Aye lass, Blundy. Afore me was Brundy, an' afore him Blondy. Shaman names. Yer not supposed t' question 'em."
"I was not going to."
"Aye ye were."
She loved them already.
He marked a tally on a strip of hide and waved her at the first pickup. The kegs were scattered through the Thundermar Ruins where the Dragonmaw raid had left them, and the job was hauling what was still drinkable back to the gate at Thundermar. Every pickup meant another cup pressed into her hand.
The first keg was professional curiosity. It had to be tasted, she explained to nobody, in case it had spoiled in transit. Grandmother had taught her to check water before passing it to the wounded. Ale was a sort of water, if you squinted.
The second was for symmetry.
The third was because a dwarf called Bryndis Thundermar fell into step beside her at the next pickup, leaned over the cart, and grinned.
"Yer quality-controlling, are ye."
"Strictly professional."
"Ale belongs to the road it's on. Wildhammer common law. Verdict: drink up, ye great gormless lass."
By the fourth keg the road had a lean it had not previously possessed. By the sixth, Bryndis was teaching her a song about a smith who married a goat, and she had learned the chorus well enough to harmonise, which was the part about the goat.
Around the seventh she remembered Tavish at the Shrine telling her to bring three coats. She was wearing two. The third was tied around the neck of a yak who needed it less than she did. She had taken the warnings seriously and then immediately failed them.
She was, in short, magnificently cooked.
The Dragonmaw ambush did not check first.
They came out of a fold in the slate at a sprint. Three of them, then five, then a sixth who was either late or shy.
Mei Lin put her hand on her shield and discovered her shield had moved. Or she had moved. The world had a wobble at the edge of it she had not authorised.
"Standing up is the thing," she said, possibly to the yak.
She planted her air totem into stone that did not want it and called the lightning down at the lead orc. A perfectly respectable bolt arrived a full pace left of where she had pointed her hand, scorching a black line across a boulder that had done nothing to anyone.
"Wind shift," she announced, which was a lie, but a confident one.
She heard grandmother in the back of her head saying control, very politely.
The second bolt found the orc's shoulder, which surprised everyone present including the orc. Chain lightning ripped sideways across the line, off the lead orc into the second, off the second into a juniper bush, then back to the third like the storm had also been drinking and was picking favourites at random.
"Mist!" Bryndis shouted through a laugh, hammer up, "yer aimin's gone tae ale! Try the other orc, closer to him!"
"That is not how lightning works."
"It is when yer this drunk!"
Blundy went past with a hammer, bored, like the work was familiar. The fourth orc closed. Mei Lin dropped to the slate like a sandbag, put her palm flat, and asked the earth for one short cracked note the way Shen had taught her on Kun-Lai. The slope hiccuped the orc sideways into a rock and he stayed there.
The fifth got close enough that she could see his eyes. A very specific colour. She filed it to ask grandmother about later, then called healing rain across the wagon. It found Bryndis's scalp first, and Bryndis accepted it the way dwarves accept weather, with a swear. It also found a yak, by accident, and the yak appeared to enjoy it.
The sixth orc, who had been late, took one look at the wagon, the dwarves, the Pandaren leaking water and lightning in roughly equal measure, and made the correct life choice. He left.
Mei Lin told the slate he was the most sensible orc she had ever met.
She does not remember the last keg arriving.
She remembers Blundy at the gate of Thundermar, signing for nine-and-three-quarter kegs, calling it the best Pandaren delivery he had ever taken. She remembers Bryndis pressing a cup into her hand that tasted of pine resin and regret.
"Drink this. Worse than the ale, but in a useful direction."
Then she slept the sleep of a Pandaren who had earned every hour of it.
In the morning the inside of her skull had its own weather. Bryndis brought her a bowl of something thick and salty and said nothing about the night before, which was the kindest dwarf thing anyone had done for her.
She wrote one line in her ledger before she could face the daylight.
Ten kegs delivered. Nine and three-quarters accounted for. The quarter is on me. The lightning, apparently, is on the next slope over.
— Mist