"And that's the story of the Gryphon people." Despite Bastion's protesting, his daughter quickly got over her fear of Rosy. Now, she was sitting in Rosy's lap listening to stories, happy as a clam.
Apparently, Rosy had a surprisingly great affinity with children. All Bastion could do was watch as Rosy 'corrupted' his daughter.
"Alright. Stop here." Rosy called out to Bastion, who was driving the carriage.
"What? No. Why?" Bastion immediately turned Rosy down, so Rosy explained further
"You know as well as I do that they're gonna send Markers after us at any moment. So, we'll drop the carriage, leave our scent on the horses, and take a shortcut across the woods. There's a small river that we can wade through to confuse them." She explained.
"You sound like you've done this before." "What are Markers?" Bastion and Adrian said at the same time.
"Markers are doglike trackers. Incredibly precise. It's incredibly difficult to make them lose their scent, since their noses are magically enhanced. They're essentially my father's go-to move when he needs to find someone, so I've used them before. I don't think we'll be able to totally lose them, but we should be able to confuse them and slow them down quite a bit." Rosy explained for Adrian, answering Bastion's question indirectly in the process.
"Are the king's monsters gonna eat us?" Bastion's daughter asked. She was just a kid after all, and apparently Bastion had exaggerated stories about the king and his subordinates to scare her.
"Let me tell you a little secret, Lily." Rosy leaned in close to the girl and whispered something that Adrian just barely made out, "I'm the king's worst monster by far. The rest of those bad things should be too terrified of me to dare hurting you, I promise."
Adrian wasn't sure whether or not Rosy was joking when she called herself a monster, but it clearly helped the little girl's mood. You could see the 'if this really nice girl is the king's worst monster, then all of daddy's stories were totally lies' realization hit her. Adrian, having been inside the castle, wasn't as sure about that, but he didn't want to scare Lily.
Despite Bastion's mistrust of Rosy, they still ended up doing what she told them to. Since he didn't have much in terms of personal belongings, Adrian changed into one of the extra shirts that Bastion had brought before handing the one that he had been wearing to Rosy, who ripped it into two pieces and tied each around the neck of one of the two horses pulling the carriage.
Bastion and Lily both changed as well, adding their scent to Adrian's, but Rosy was wearing her armor, which consisted of a specially made undershirt, with a leather harness that protects certain areas and holds a bunch of her weapons. The harness also acts as the belt that the sheath that holds Darkreina.
In order to make sure that her scent is as permeable as Adrian's was, she was forced to take eight of her hidden weapons and put them into bags to sling around the horses' necks, since she couldn't part with the custom armor that had gotten her through quite a bit.
"You had all those weapons hidden on you?" Bastion asked, surprised. He was intimately familiar with Rosy's reputation, but seeing how slippery she was in reality still had him reeling. Adrian, on the other hand had once put a blade to her neck and still had the tables turned on him as naturally and easily as breathing. He honestly figured that Rosy still had dozens of hidden weapons on her person, made of different materials for different scenarios.
"So cool!" Lily was quickly starting to idolize Rosy, so quickly that it was actually kind of scary. Rosy ruffled her hair and received a hug in response.
"Alright, let's load up on supplies and head out." Without the carriage to hold their supplies, they were all limited to one bag per person, leaving them only three and a half bags to hold supplies.
After releasing the horses and slapping them on the flanks to ensure that they ran away, the group escaped into the forest, leaving the carriage behind. Someone would almost certainly come by to pick it clean eventually, but that wasn't their concern. While it was technically a loss for Bastion, he wasn't going to be able to continue as a merchant anywhere in the country anyways. Basically, his life was over unless he was under someone's protection.
Since he was going to end up under Resistance protection, it was their loss rather than his, and since their organization was so large, it wasn't likely to be a notable loss for them.
...
"I don't wanna!"
"Get in the water!"
For the first hour of their trek, Lily clung closely to Rosy, to Bastion's chagrin. Despite her young age, she had exceptional stamina, which she used with abandon, climbing over everything and running around like the little kid that she was. Humoring her, Rosy played with her as well, but all the exercise made Lily use up her exceptional stamina in a flash. Once she started showing signs of fatigue, Rosy offered to carry her, but Rosy's offer caused Bastion to throw an absolute fit.
He forced Lily to walk by his side, not look at Rosy, and he'd yell at the poor child every time that she flagged or got anywhere near Rosy, paranoid beyond reason. Scared of her father, Lily followed his commands as well as she could, no matter how unreasonable they got. However, the problem came up when they needed to cross the stream that Rosy warned them about.
Nobody could offer to carry Lily, as the Markers probably had her scent too, she needed to be submerged in the murky water in order to wash her scent off and confuse them. Unfortunately, Lily was apparently terrified of drowning. She'd never seen a stream deep enough to be submerged in, and she was terrified of the rushing water.
Bastion's solution to Lily's fear was to push her in anyways, but Lily's hysterical strength actually slightly outmatched that of her father, leaving them in a deadlock.
"Bastion."
"Get in the water! Go! You're wasting our time."
"No! It's too scary!"
"Bastion!" Rosy roared, clearly annoyed, "She's just scared. Let me try."
"Absolutely not. Stay out of this, Princess of Blood." Bastion ignored Rosy's offer, going back to trying to push his daughter into the water. Neither Rosy nor Adrian were about to intervene.
Then something strange happened. Lily's eyes turned red, and she started to push her father back. The deeper red her eyes got, the stronger she got, until finally, Rosy intervened.
"Enough." Rosy open-palm hit Bastion in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious instantly.
"Why'd you do that?"
"Are you okay, Lily? Your father didn't tell me that you were a vampire." Rosy crouched down to Lily's level, ignoring both Bastion and Adrian.
"It's so scary, miss Rosy!" Lily clung to Rosy and cried.
"It's okay, Lily. We'll go in together. I'm strong enough that toy won't have to worry about a thing, just hold my hand."
"Okay, Miss Rosy!" As all little kids, Lily's mood changed in an instant. Her fear didn't completely disappear, but she clearly trusted Rosy more than she did her own father. Leaving Bastion's unconscious body on the bank, she and Adrian crossed the stream by Lily's side, before she came back by herself to carry Bastion's unconscious body, since she was stronger than Adrian. When she submerged him in the water to clean himself off, Bastion woke up, sputtering, cursing, and freaking out, but he still had to put up with Rosy carrying his body the rest of the way while he regained his bearings.