The marching boots

Boots for people who intend to walk further in a day than a body will comfortably carry them. Push a march past that point and the road takes its toll twice over, in the battering the legs take and in the exhaustion that follows, and these forgive both. Once. The second time the road asks, it asks in full.

They are heavy and they are stiff, and a man wearing them is a fraction less nimble than he would be in his own. That is the whole of the trade.

They went a long while in the party’s baggage with nobody willing to make it. Koa took them in the end, because exhaustion is the one thing that costs him his rage, and his rage is what he fights with.