More carriage-trundling!  'Trundle' is such a lovely verb, especially when you add the present participle to it.  In Lictic the verb for the thing a moving carriage does is 'kabbabunk' which lacks some ineffable grace of the English.

Haroun tries to explain why it takes money to move Bella between their next destination of Relis and the academy of Cowcorn, or alternatively his family's home in Pigbridge.  The kingdom is broken up into duchies, counties, and baronies, and each of those has very little incentive not to tax the traffic that crosses their territory for everything it will bear.  If one territory tried to extract less, that would just give their neighbors a chance to extract more.  The Adventurer's Guild, Merchant's Guild, and magical academies like Cowcorn have enough pull to protect adventurers, merchants, and students from the worst of it.  If you're not affiliated with any major power structure, you're the equivalent of an uninsured patient in the American healthcare system; people will gouge you harder just to establish a higher base point for negotiating with the bigger players.

Bella says she was expecting the money to be more for inns and stabling the horses and eating on the road.  Haroun replies that bread isn't that hard to make.  Bella resigns herself to eating a lot of bread.  Haroun replies that stew isn't that much harder to make, if you have a permit to make it and a permit to sell it.

If you do sign up with the Adventurer's Guild, of course, they will soak you for everything they think you can get away with, at least until you get up to A-rank or S-rank and are a power in your own right.  But the graduated fees and structures would allow somebody who already has high combat potential - like Bella, whether she's comfortable with that or not - to sign up for the Adventurer's Guild, pay a minor fee to go on a first-floor dungeon run where she'll be observed to make sure she can handle herself before she gets her E-rank guild tinplate, and then Bella can turn in a few minor bounties on first-floor monsters, without having to rank up past E to the higher fee schedule.  Even after taking into account the city's cut, the baron's cut, the count's cut, the duke's cut, the king's cut, and the fee for all the paperwork somebody needs to fill out before and after the dungeon run, that should get her enough money to make it to Cowcorn given the lower passage fees for adventurers, plus enough to stay at an inn a few days while she talks to Haroun's professors.

...Or possibly Bella would consider signing up to learn at Cowcorn for a while?  Magister Sting could probably manage that, if Bella exhibited her strange knowledge of 『Language』or demonstrated rate-of-change-math.  Magister Sting would certainly manage it if she found out who Bella really was and wasn't otherwise a demonic spy.  Magister Sting might deduce it anyways if Bella shows sufficiently foreign knowledge; she's sharp like that.

After an hour or two, the conversation winds down.  Bella hasn't learned everything she wants to know from Haroun, and the converse is no more true; but Haroun is mentally exhausted and needs a break, and Bella feels the need to write in her notebook.

The carriage reaches the gates of Relis, the sun setting behind them as they do.

More carriage-trundling!  'Trundle' is such a lovely verb, especially when you add the present participle to it.  In Lictic the verb for the thing a moving carriage does is 'kabbabunk' which onomatopoeias the same concept, but lacks some ineffable grace of the English.

Haroun tries to explain why it takes money to move Bella between their next destination of Relis and the academy of Cowcorn, or alternatively his family's home in Pigbridge.  The kingdom is broken up into duchies, counties, and baronies, and each of those has very little incentive not to tax the traffic that crosses their territory for everything it will bear.  If one territory tried to extract less, that would just give their neighbors a chance to extract more.  The Adventurer's Guild, Merchant's Guild, and magical academies like Cowcorn have enough pull to protect adventurers, merchants, and students from the worst of it.  If you're not affiliated with any major power structure, you're the equivalent of an uninsured patient in the American healthcare system; people will gouge you harder just to establish a higher base point for negotiating with the bigger players.

Bella says she was expecting the money to be more for inns and stabling the horses and eating on the road.  Haroun replies that bread isn't that hard to make.  Bella resigns herself to eating a lot of bread.  Haroun replies that stew isn't that much harder to make, if you have a permit to make it and a permit to sell it.

If you do sign up with the Adventurer's Guild, of course, they will soak you for everything they think you can get away with, at least until you get up to A-rank or S-rank and are a power in your own right.  But the graduated fees and structures would allow somebody who already has high combat potential - like Bella, whether she's comfortable with that or not - to sign up for the Adventurer's Guild, pay a minor fee to go on a first-floor dungeon run where she'll be observed to make sure she can handle herself before she gets her E-rank guild tinplate, and then Bella can turn in a few minor bounties on first-floor monsters, without having to rank up past E to the higher fee schedule.  Even after taking into account the city's cut, the baron's cut, the count's cut, the duke's cut, the king's cut, and the fee for all the paperwork somebody needs to fill out before and after the dungeon run, that should get her enough money to make it to Cowcorn given the lower passage fees for adventurers, plus enough to stay at an inn a few days while she talks to Haroun's professors.

...Or possibly Bella would consider signing up to learn at Cowcorn for a while?  Magister Sting could probably manage that, if Bella exhibited her strange knowledge of 『Language』or demonstrated rate-of-change-math.  Magister Sting would certainly manage it if she found out who Bella really was and wasn't otherwise a demonic spy.  Magister Sting might deduce it anyways if Bella shows sufficiently foreign knowledge; she's sharp like that.

After an hour or two, the conversation winds down.  Bella hasn't learned everything she wants to know from Haroun, and the converse is no more true; but Haroun is mentally exhausted and needs a break, and Bella feels the need to write in her notebook.

The carriage reaches the gates of Relis, the sun setting behind them as they do.

More carriage-trundling!  'Trundle' is such a lovely verb, especially when you add the present participle to it.  In Lictic the verb for the thing a moving carriage does is 'kabbabunk' which onomatopoeias the same concept, but lacks some ineffable grace of the English.

Haroun tries to explain why it takes money to move Bella between their next destination of Relis and the academy of Cowcorn, or alternatively his family's home in Pigbridge.  The kingdom is broken up into duchies, counties, and baronies, and each of those has very little incentive not to tax the traffic that crosses their territory for everything it will bear.  If one territory tried to extract less, that would just give their neighbors a chance to extract more.  The Adventurer's Guild, Merchant's Guild, and magical academies like Cowcorn have enough pull to protect adventurers, merchants, and students from the worst of it.  If you're not affiliated with any major power structure, you're the equivalent of an uninsured patient in the American healthcare system; people will gouge you harder just to establish a higher base point for negotiating with the bigger players.

Bella says she was expecting the money to be more for inns and stabling the horses and eating on the road.  Haroun replies that bread isn't that hard to make.  Bella resigns herself to eating a lot of bread.  Haroun replies that stew isn't that much harder to make, if you have a permit to make it and a permit to sell it.

If you do sign up with the Adventurer's Guild, of course, they will soak you for everything they think you have, at least until you get up to A-rank or S-rank and are a power in your own right.  But the graduated fees and structures would allow somebody who already has high combat potential - like Bella, whether she's comfortable with that or not - to sign up for the Adventurer's Guild, pay a minor fee to go on a first-floor dungeon run where she'll be observed to make sure she can handle herself before she gets her E-rank guild tinplate, and then Bella can turn in a few minor bounties on first-floor monsters, without having to rank up past E to the higher fee schedule.  Even after taking into account the city's cut, the baron's cut, the count's cut, the duke's cut, the king's cut, and the fee for all the paperwork somebody needs to fill out before and after the dungeon run, that should get her enough money to make it to Cowcorn given the lower passage fees for adventurers, plus enough to stay at an inn a few days while she talks to Haroun's professors.

...Or possibly Bella would consider signing up to learn at Cowcorn for a while?  Magister Sting could probably manage that, if Bella exhibited her strange knowledge of 『Language』or demonstrated rate-of-change-math.  Magister Sting would certainly manage it if she found out who Bella really was and wasn't otherwise a demonic spy.  Magister Sting might deduce it anyways if Bella shows sufficiently foreign knowledge; she's sharp like that.

After an hour or two, the conversation winds down.  Bella hasn't learned everything she wants to know from Haroun, and the converse is no more true; but Haroun is mentally exhausted and needs a break, and Bella feels the need to write in her notebook.

The carriage reaches the gates of Relis, the sun setting behind them as they do.