“Ah, so it's like conversing with the Norse,” Hera replied, no hesitation in her quick response. “I'm certain I've seen Frigg furtively twitching her tail, I just hadn't realized she was attempting to communicate in addition to her chirps and chitters.”
Now she was fully imagining Frigg as a squirrel and it amused her far more than it probably should have. But with all those furs, and the puffed up way she had of speaking that truly did sound like chattering, it was impossible to get out of her mind. Hera wondered if she could find an artist to carve her a Norse squirrel, something she could keep in one of the alcove shelves to cheer her up on dreary days. She'd have Iris look into it when they returned. While she herself would see if she could find a small potted tree to gift her messenger for that quip about dendrilogia. Clever girl.
Hera turned her feet in the direction that Iris had indicated, since smoke was a fairly good sigh that there was some sort of settlement there. She let her actions answer Iris' question, and they fell into a companionable silence as they walked. Having known each other this long, there was no need to fill every gap in conversation with meaningless noise. But as they crested a small knoll, Hera paused, then said, “Well.”
It was all she could think to say, really. She'd expected a bit more than... this. Perhaps she'd grown too used to the orderly nature of the Romans, relied too much on the organization of the Greeks. Even the Norse, much as she chided their barbarian ways, didn't have villages this... scattered. Honestly she wasn't sure it could even be called a village. It seemed to be one central hall surrounded by scattered mounds with leathers and furs on top of them that Hera only recognized as residences because of the holes in the top emitting the smoke they'd spotted earlier.
“Well,” she repeated, “I think the large 'building' is the place to start. Let us go see what adventures it may hold, shall we?”
With that, she began the short walk down the hill, completely expecting Iris to follow.