The next morning we all got up with the sound of bells ringing, and once we awoke, we went to breakfast and enjoyed a tasty repast to the sound of birds chirping in the trees around us. After eating, we assembled in a platform that was built next to the apartment area in the trees, with the prince, his chief of staff, and I, along with the half-Forester girl, standing on the platform and the rest of the party standing behind him. Before too long there stood an elegantly dressed man in a silk robe not unlike our own, with a couple of other people behind him on the platform and a mixture of men and women behind him. When the group saw the little girl standing on the platform there was a great deal of motioning, as it appears that someone recognized her and knew to whom she belonged.

The chief, at least as I understood him to be, and the prince spoke to each other in the Forester language, which I did not understand. One of the people standing behind me touched my arm and told me that he would translate quietly for me if I wanted, and I agreed. He explained that the two of them were beginning with pleasantries, saying that they hoped the other was richly blessed with food and growth. The chief then asked the priest what had brought him here to talk, as this was not the usually scheduled time for meetings. The prince replied that his brother, the governor of a province to the East, had met a tribe of people in a large forest like this one who spoke a very close language to that of the people of the forest and had been able to talk to them. The prince then wondered if the people of this forest were in contact with people from the other forest.

At this there was more excitement among the group of people near the platform. The chief explained that there were traditions and stories of the two forest peoples originally being one people, but generations ago there was a massive earthquake that opened up the land and destroyed the connection between the two halves of the forest, and the people separated on each side were unable to build a tree bridge between each other before the rift grew between them and a river (the Eastern River, as it happens) flowed through the rift, thus cutting off the two peoples from each other. The chief was very pleased to know that their brethren in the East were doing well, and would be happy to accept the help of the Bravians in building a connection between them. The prince explained that since the Bravians were now on both sides of the river, that they would be able to send ships upstream to scout for locations where a rope bridge could be made to connect the two tribes together and allow them to communicate with each other across the rift, and if support was necessary across the rift valley, the Bravians would be able to help set that up from below as long as both sides were willing.

The chief was very pleased to hear this and wondered what motive the Bravians would have in reconnecting the two people and bringing them into a friendly relationship once again. The prince here was honest and straightforward as Bravians tend to be and said that the Bravians wished to have warm relationships with both of the peoples of the forest and hoped that by being able to rebuild contact between the two that such good relations between both and Bravia would be helped. The chief said that this would certainly be acceptable, but that there must be a great deal of communication between the two peoples to see if both of them still practiced the same ways and were able to walk in peace, and if the people of the Eastern forest region had the willingness to accept the same friends that their kindred folk did on the other side of the rift. The prince said that if it pleased the people of the forest, that he could help set up efforts to bridge the rift immediately, and the chief agreed that his efforts could proceed while the entire tribe voted on it, as it would be of special interest to those members of the tribe who lived closest to the rift, who would be the most immediately affected by any new connections with their cousins across the rift.

At this the chief asked what the prince had done by bringing a girl onto the platform with him, and the prince explained that this young woman had recently been adopted into the royal family as a ward and thus was being given the chance to share in connections with her people here. At this a woman came from behind the platform to introduce herself, explaining that she was the girl’s aunt and wondering how it was that her niece had found herself in the royal party. The prince explained, as delicately but as honestly as possible, that the father of the girl had faced some problems raising her and had wished to divest himself of that responsibility, and the prince had gladly taken it up to ensure that the girl would be raised to know about both the culture of her mother and her father and be able to choose as best as possible how she wanted to live her life with regards to her complex inheritance from both peoples. The aunt explained that she was glad that the prince was willing to undertake such a charge but was disappointed that the father of the girl was so quick to forget his ties to the people of the forest. The prince explained that some people did not take their ties to others as seriously as they ought to do, and that the area of North Bravia that was close to the forest was so poorly connected to the forest that it was hard for such connections to endure and hard for most of the people of North Bravia to have any understanding of the way of life that the people of the forest had. This he regretted, though he understood that the people of the forest did not want to be overwhelmed by strangers seeking to expand their farms and lumber operations at the cost of the forest.

At this time one of the other men on the platform, whom I took to be the war chief, asked what the Bravians would do if they were able to build up their roads to and under the forest as they had proposed. The prince explained that they wished for a way to get through the forest without doing harm to it and being able to settle what were apparently rich plains to the north of the forests that they had heard about. The war chief asked how this sort of thing could benefit the people of the forest. The prince then replied that they were searching for other forests that would be fitting places for the people of the forest to live and allow their people to grow and also ways that people could be transported from one forest to another in such a way that would not require them to become ceremonially unclean, and thought that it might be possible to build wooden airships with silk canvas that covered the lighter than air space that would allow people from the forest to travel to other forest regions and have docks set up to allow for transportation and communication that would not require them to step outside of the wooden high forests where they lived when traveling to new areas. The war and peace chief agreed that this too would be something that the people of the forest would discuss among themselves.

With this the conference broke up, both sides being content with what had been discussed as well as progress in some important areas that would allow the people of the forest to expand. I gathered that the forest itself was somewhat heavily populated for a hunting and gathering people and that the lure of having forests to expand into would ease some of the tensions that could be found in their society. They did not seem to be willing to engage the Bravians in an open discussion of these problems, but their willingness to consider such efforts to allow their people to expand was such that I felt it could not come without some kind of reason, and a static land along with developing and growing populations would be a major pressure on a land such as their own with such heavy restrictions on how they lived. Most people, aside from the Bravians, would have exploited their relationship and the forest far more, but the Bravians saw reason to restrain themselves and that struck me as a wise choice given the likely military prowess of the people of the forest in ambush warfare.

At this point the party broke up, and the prince decided that he would first travel to his brother and then get a party from both North Bravia and Across-The-Eastern-River to work together to connect the people of the Eastern and Western forest regions together, in the hope that their combined efforts would encourage good relations with both of the forest peoples. Those of us who were not needed in this effort were then placed in different vehicles and were sent back to the capital to return to our normal business while the prince continued his own efforts at diplomacy with and between the different forest peoples. Royal service did not tolerate a break, and it seems as if the young girl who had been adopted would stay with him to see how it was that Bravians served and encouraged the well-being of her people, as a means of letting her know that Bravians were not her enemies. I hoped that this effort would succeed.

With this news, the vehicle I was in along with most of the other vehicles, except for a couple of them that carried the prince and others of his party, retraced the path we had taken from the forest back to the same dull towns that we had seen before. We ate lunch at the hunting village, where we changed back into our normal clothes, keeping the silk clothes and wooden shoes as souvenirs of our travels to the strange land of the forest people. That night we returned to the same dull Amphoe and ate the same kind of indifferent and mediocre food that we had before, without the prince to liven things up or to charm and appeal to the local population. We explained his absence to the locals, and they were pleased that he was working to develop connections between the people of the forest as well as in ways that would make their own towns less isolated, which they seemed to view as an opportunity for profit. About the rest of the trip, and the awfulness of the roads, I have nothing to add as I do not wish to complain and do not think it adds any useful information to you, dread sovereign.

I had thought that with the departure of the prince and with my departure from the people of the forest that I would have nothing to do with either, but that thought was only partly right. As it happens, I was called to a task that would allow me to see more of the areas of Bravia that I had hitherto not seen, and it is that story I wish to share with you next, which is really two different stories that happen to involve the same place, the Across-The-Eastern-River province that I had heard so much from in one way or another, an area that struck me as perfectly savage, perhaps even more savage than the people of the forest I had just meant. In seeing Bravian colonists in action, I hoped to gauge whether such efforts would be a benefit to us in distracting Bravia from settlements in other continents like our own, or would demonstrate that their strength was a potential threat to us.