Merry looks at the woods, frowning slightly.  "The last time we took a shortcut through some woods, they ended up almost eating us.  Promise me this's nothing like the Old Forest?"

"Thankfully, few forests are like that.  But if you're ever in Fangorn Forest, do beware."

(Aragorn translates for Gord, and adds a quick mention of how the Hobbits weren't the first wanderers to be almost eaten by trees there.)

That is completely unsurprising! Gord would absolutely not go into any woods let alone a forest without a local ranger guide and a good reason. Shaking mounted pursuit qualifies - barely.

('We'll go through these woods,' the ranger said, 'horses won't enter them and neither does the king's road, it's a great shortcut -')

But, yes, woods are hard on horses even if the trees aren't trying to eat them, it's sound tactics, Gord's just been spooked for the past hour. He hopes he can sleep it off.

...speaking of which. "Did the halflings sleep today, can they stand watch? And notice anything that might be in the woods besides wraiths?"

"Frodo of course, but - what would you expect after your spell?  I think the others slept a little -"  He drops into Westron.  "Merry, Pippin, Sam - did you sleep enough to stand watch tonight?"

"Oh yes!" Sam exclaims, with a very optimistic mental standard for "enough."

"I think I actually did."

Merry glances up and down the Road as they approach it.  No one's in sight, not even the horse.  "I hope this's the last we'll see of them..."

"Are they good at it? Apart from not being tired, I mean." Gord will take Strider's word for it; Merry didn't strike him as competent in a fight, but that's not the skillset you need to notice things and alert others.

"I have a wand... a way to cast a spell that's not my own, a wizard made it. It lets me - or anyone - stay up all night without moving, keeping watch, but still resting as if I'd slept. But it has only seven charges left, and I sometimes fumble using it because I'm not a wizard so I lose a charge. Especially if I'm already short on sleep. I'd like to keep it for emergencies and I don't know that this qualifies." Gord used up a lot of charges crossing the Wound and expected to buy a new one... Maybe this Gandalf will turn out to be a crafter on top of everything.

Aragorn leads them quickly across the Road and into the edge of the forest.

"They're... not the best," he says with a frown, "but Merry and Sam are good for beginners.

"I'd save your wand.  I can feel the wraiths coming and wake up for them.  And I don't expect to meet anything else by surprise in these woods."

That's an impressive boast, that anything they encounter here won't be a surprise to Strider, but rangers can definitely be like that!

Gord is going to trust him. He would like this day to be over now, please. His tent with the tripwires is in the bag of holding, it was too unwieldy to carry by hand, but there's enough of them to keep watch and hopefully they can find an a defensible place to sleep.

The forest barely seems to react to them during the day.  The trees don't lean in on them.  They don't see any animals larger than squirrels and birds, though there're some rustles in the distance that might indicate something else.

Frodo and Pippin are both starting to lag a little toward evening, but nothing worse.

When they finally set up camp, the hobbits flop down.  It's Sam who asks first, "You said you had some magic food, Mr. Gord?"

(Strider translates, with a wry grin.)

"Yes, but I can't prepare it until tomorrow, I filled all my slots today."

"Oh."

With a small disappointed sigh, Sam gets out a bit of the trail-bread and cheese he does have.  "What sort of food does it give you?"

"Bread, meat, cheese. Apples. Nothing complicated, or that requires much preparation, but it's fresh."

Gord has some conjured-and-preserved food in his bag, but luckily he ate some of it while they were walking to rejoin the party. He'd much rather spend a night a little hungry than open the bag again right now.

"Oh, apples!  I could enjoy a nice apple right now from the cellars at Tuckborough.  Or that stew at the Prancing Pony was good too..."

They talk about food for the rest of the evening.

Meanwhile, Aragorn murmurs to Gord, "Did you feel anything from your bag today?  I didn't, as far as I noticed.

"I didn't either." He hadn't really been watching the bag, he was focusing on external threats because - he assumed the bag was categorically safe so long as they didn't open it? 

Well, maybe it's not, but there's there's a fine line between reasonable paranoia and insanity. Strider is right, though, they should check in with each other regularly.

"You've traveled with the ring, unprotected. Did you feel any change since we put it in the bag? And how is Frodo doing?"

Aragorn pauses, thinking back over the day.  He hadn't noticed... well, he had been looking at Frodo differently...  His eyes narrow.  "Previously, I'd been... watching Frodo out of the edge of my eye, more than the other hobbits, conscious he was the Ringbearer.  Today... I haven't.  That could just be because he doesn't have it anymore; I hadn't ever thought the urge to watch him came from the Ring.  But... it could have?"

He shrugs.

"Frodo's more tired than he was before, but he hasn't said anything else."

"I hope he'll feel well after a night's rest. If he needs more healing tomorrow" - has he explained how morning prayers work, he doesn't think he has -

"I have to pray for an hour at dawn, and also prepare most of my spells for the day then. Once I start you mustn't distract or interrupt me; I can recover from stopping for a minute but too much more and I won't get any spells at all that day. If something happens and we need different spells, like another full Restoration for Frodo, wake me up a little before sunrise and tell me. Otherwise I'll wake up at sunrise, it's a cleric thing, works even if we want to sleep some more. And the spells from today will be free to use just before I pray because I'll be replacing them anyway, but none of them are useful if we're not attacked." Well, he can cast the Comprehend Languages before he prays, but that's not really important.

Aragorn's surprised, but nods.  "All right.  I'll tell the hobbits.  At least at sunrise, we can be pretty sure the wraiths won't be attacking us.  But, why sunrise?  Is your god related to the sun?"

"No, all the gods are like that, even the Evil ones. Maybe I should say all clerics are like that; I don't know how paladins or inquisitors work. Pray for an hour at dawn to get new spells, and any you didn't use yesterday are wasted."

"I don't know why it works that way. It's probably related to the reason all the gods' clerics get similar spells and powers, instead of every god doing their own thing. Some people say it's because all the gods agreed to do it like that, because even if they oppose each other they want the contest to - have some rules, be predictable - I don't think that's why, because some gods wouldn't want those rules or probably any rules at all, but I don't have a better guess."

Some people think it's because the gods want the contest to be balanced and fair but that's so ridiculous on the face of it that Gord won't even repeat it.

"Strange."  Aragorn rotates the idea in his mind, trying to see how it might fit... ah.  "I'm told that when our gods agree on something in council together, They will all abide by it out of a sense of duty, even when some might oppose it?  But... not the evil ones, Morgoth or Sauron.  But I haven't heard of any councils including Them."

"I don't believe that story either! But I definitely don't understand gods." How to put this... "Not what they want or why - they're all different and most of them want things unlike any mortals I've met, and they often seem - very single-minded?" Even counting demons, who aren't mortals per se. "But at least some of them want reasonable things. What I don't understand is - what constraints they have. What makes them, or lets them, do some things but not others. Make one cleric but not a hundred, grant this miracle but not that one... There must be something, I just don't know what it is."

"Most gods' worshippers - and churches, many gods have organized churches - have stories about it. Holy books, dogma, official answers - to be clear, most of them also admit we don't really understand the gods, but they think they have some answers. But I'm not sure how they can have them, or believe them, and they often disagree anyway. No-one can really talk to the gods, or even to a god. Even the greatest clerics can only ask yes/no questions of their god, and that spell's expensive. We can call outsiders, who live with the gods, or we can travel to the gods' domains where they live and where the afterlives are, but the outsiders and dead souls don't know either, or maybe the strongest or oldest ones do know but they can't or won't say for some reason. Maybe the same reason the gods themselves don't really explain things. It should be easy for a god to explain things if They really wanted to, right?"

Theology is one of the few topics of discussion that can make Gord briefly forget his need for sleep, but then he yawns anyway.

"I can repeat some of the things people say that I think are definitely wrong," he says, "but I might be misunderstanding them, since they look so obviously wrong to me... Anyway, I would love to continue this talk," yawn, "tomorrow."

(*) Hallit naturally has a word for people gone to the afterlives, but it doesn't quite correspond to the technical term wizards use ('petitioners'). This may be because until recently no wizard would be caught dead(**) speaking Hallit. If forced to speak in the vernacular about matters arcane, a wizard will use approximately 100% Taldane loanwords for nouns. Without wizards to keep it straight, the Hallit term for dead people in afterlives includes those who have long since turned into outsiders.

(**) That is, a wizard caught speaking Hallit used to quickly become a dead wizard.

Aragorn sighs.  "When I was a boy, I hoped to understand the gods... but it's been long since I seriously hoped for that.  And yes, let us talk more in the morning."

He turns to the hobbits and says in Westron, "Merry, you look most awake - can you take first watch?"

Sam volunteers for second, and they all gladly unroll their blankets (except for Frodo, who already has) and (except Merry) fall asleep.