Entanglements of the Past - Epilog

Rastellion pauses as he reaches the Greenway to look back at Bree. The town’s stone towers, rising over the encircling hedge-wall, flush in the light of a westering sun, as if in anger or shame.

It’s foolish to be starting out on the road so late: it’ll be full dark long before he reaches Trestlebridge, dark even before he reaches the first wayside inn or encampment. But that doesn’t matter. So it’ll be dark. So what? And if bandits or orcs find him, well, then they do. It would take too much energy to care. He clucks at Whitey and turns the mare’s head, and his own, back north as they resume their journey.

The last few hours, since staggering away from Zandrianna’s home and from the news that Immalaine had run off with another man, are but a haze in his seething mind. He knows it would have made more sense to have stayed the night – to leave, if he still decided to, in the morning. But Zandrianna might be up by now, and she’d hear what happened and insist on coming by with sympathetic words and glances. Sympathy with a damned undercurrent of ‘what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘what did you do to her?’ Might even bring with her widow Rossiath and her unvoiced whispering: ‘I told you so.’

So, instead, as soon as he returned to his lodgings, he scrawled a hasty note to Zandrianna, saying he was heading north to discuss Rossi’s mill with his father; paid the next two weeks’ rent in advance; threw a few possessions, more or less at random, into his saddlebags; and set off north, toward home.

Home? Hardly. His uncle’s cabin is still unfamiliar, a place rarely visited until recently. Home was the old farm, but sold now, gone. And his new life in Bree? Well, in the space of this one afternoon that’s become nothing but a mockery and the shattered shell of a dream.

He has no home.

Why even return to Bree? Oh that mill would be a good investment, and it’d be a kindness to Rossiath, a way for her to keep living in her familiar house. But the real attraction, for Rastellion, was that it’d take care of his father: give his father something to do, something near Bree, which would free Rastellion to continue on with the new life he is making for himself.

Was making for himself.

But now? Now… maybe farming in the downs wouldn’t be that bad – far away from Bree, and from the looks he’d get as people discovered how he’d been rejected by yet another woman. Or maybe he could just move in with uncle Ceolfred and learn to be a hunter and trapper. That could be a comfortable life: days out in the wilds, with no one else to see or try to understand.

And the Association? Well, it would get along fine without him. Or not. Of late it has been getting most of its income from Rastellion’s trading deals, not from sales of the goods returned by the sporadic adventures of its members. But why should Rast care about that? After all, he was only appointed the group’s factor as a temporary position – only until he figured out what new land to buy, and where, after selling the family farm. So if he just quit and moved back north, well, that’d not be breaking any promises, right?

Hoofbeats ahead draw Rastellion’s attention from his dark thoughts, and he urges Whitey to the road’s verge as a messenger, in the Watch’s livery, comes galloping down the Greenway. The man glances and nods to Rastellion as he hurries by, and Rast imagines he can see an accusation in the stranger’s eyes: “What did you do to her?”

What had he done to her? Offered affection, support, consideration. Where was the fault in that? Okay, so he hadn’t made any long-term promises – yet – but he hadn’t known, still didn’t know, whether he’d stay in Bree. Was that so wrong? Couldn’t she tell how much he cared by how hard he’d worked to help get her land back?

Something niggles at him with this thought, a single puzzle-piece out of place. Even though she planned on leaving him, why had she seemed unwilling to get her farm back? But that train of thought leads to images of a dark figure in the fog, and ink poured like blood across a page, and, longer ago, the contemptuous laugh of a blonde-haired girl breaking off their engagement….

He winces and pulls his mind away from those images. Shadows are lengthening as the sun touches the western hills, and he urges Whitey onward. There’s a farmhouse to the north, not quite halfway to Trestlebridge, where his name might be recognized. Perhaps he can pause there for the night, maybe even sleep in their stables, if they prefer not to invite him in. …I worked in kitchens and stables and anywhere I could…

Rastellion winces again at the memory’s lash and forces his thoughts back to the present, to the rhythm of Whitey’s hooves on the hard-packed earth, to the play of light and shadows across the surrounding fields … and soon, blessedly, his thoughts fall into the numb monotony of travel, as he hastens down the darkening road, away from Bree.

(c) 2015 by Rastellion