Summary: A horselass, out for a run in the Chetwood, stumbles upon a ruined, mysterious stranger, and asks for a tale. The first meeting of Freyga and Arra.
The sun hit the cliffside at a hard angle. Late in the day, the woods were empty of loggers gone home to beer and barley soup. The wolves had not yet risen. Besides the hares, the birds, and a single garden snake that had lost its way, the Chet was empty—except for one figure, sprinting through the undergrowth.
She was young, ablaze with energy, her body tight with muscle. Her white hair flapped like a flag in a storm. She ran but nothing chased her, and she had no gear for hunting. She was alone, unarmored, and unarmed except for a broken back seax in a red sheath. The blade was small, from tip to pommel the length of a forearm, bouncing against her hipbones by her pumping thighs.
Another seax of a similar make had been drawn in the Chetwood, this one glinting in the light of a fire— the smoke from which could be seen billowing through the branches on an escape path to the afternoon sky.
A rusty-haired woman sat holding the blade, as if someone might come barging through the trees at any moment, even as the lion's share of her attention went to the steaming hot rib in her other hand. She gnawed at it like a dog on its bone, its juices dripping down her chin and staining her already-dirty shirt.
The camp was small, consisting only of the little fire and a bedroll— a boar roasted over the flames. The Chet was now, as it was years ago when last she had been in these lands, a good place to camp out for the law-averse.
Freyga smelt the fire before she saw the smoke. Yesterday’s rain dampened enough of the loyal forest smells that the scent of heat was crisp. She slowed her run and tuned her nose to the wind. She followed it, not far. Her tunic and trousers patched with sweat, she appeared in a spare space between the leaves, and smiled.
A shock of white appeared in the leafy outline of her camp, and she stood to meet it. The mostly-eaten boar rib was cast aside, and the seax came up, ready to strike, all before she'd even gotten a good look at the intruder.
Once, she might have attacked on sight. Now, she sized the girl up. She was young- pretty, like she herself might have become had she not lost half her face. And her weapon was sheathed. She lowered her blade, but still kept it in hand. "It's a bit late for a walk in the woods."
“Why?” She mused, her hands going to her hips. She breathed heavily and with enthusiasm. “In summer the sun takes an hour to set.” She took in the whole of Arra—from the boar on the ground to her shock of red hair. Her gaze didn’t linger on the ruin of the woman’s face as did the linenwashers and logmen of Combe. Her smile seemed heartier to see another female with a blade and a record of violent deeds. “Phoo—“ She whistled as she caught her breath. “I bet you’ve got a story.”
"It takes half a day to set," Arra said, green eyes looking the girl over still, in a way that seemed justified given the intrusion on her camp. She grimaced at the remark, though maybe that was just her face's natural reaction to everything, and sheathed her sword. The girl seemed harmless enough that she could afford a second to bare the blade again if the need arose— and playing nice might be to her advantage, anyway.
Thus some choice words that might otherwise have been aimed at the girl danced instead on slightly-moving yet closed lips, her tongue working instead to dislodge a piece of meat which had gotten stuck between her teeth. She sat down on a log by the fire, and offered a rib. "What's your name, girl?"
The girl’s smile stretched. She bounded up the stump of earth into the arbitrary territory of the woman’s camp. She settled on a rock, her feet planted in the grass firmly apart, and accepted the sticky rib. “Freyga,” she said and bit into the meat.
It was clear she carried nothing but the seax—no purse to pinch or jewels to steal. Her linen clothing clung to her shoulders and between her breasts where the sweat had pooled. Her gaze never left Arra’s face, her green eyes bright like a girl who couldn’t put down a book.
Arra didn't offer her own name, but gave what looked like as sincere a smile as one could give with half a face. "Freyga," she said, grabbing a piece of meat for herself and taking a bite. She was not much neater at it now than when no one was watching.
She met the girl's gaze evenly— she had not been a cheery youth since she was several years younger than Freyga, and had run away from home to Bree-town. Then, as she sat in the Prancing Pony slicing at the ends of her tawny mop, a lady of outlawry had come to invite her into their ranks.
"Is it a hobby of yours, running into random people's campsites?" Her tone was within the bounds of politeness, if at the edges of it, and teasing. It was difficult to tell her sincerity from the look on her face. That was perhaps the only benefit of the scars.
The threads of the past were connecting. Freyga didn’t know the woman before her, who had lost half her face, or before that the lady of outlawry who lost an eye, or the woman who had first handed that lady a sword and aimed it at the law, the same red-haired brigand that would have raised Freyga herself had she not met her death before the girl could remember her. She looked at Arra’s hair and imagined her mother’s colored the same way.
“You have assumed that this was random,” she answered without any thought for tone, her voice as bright as if the forest were a feast-hall. She grinned with a secret that she didn’t even know. “Do you have a name, or can I give you one?”
The question, 'Was that a threat?' flashed across her features at what was likely a joke, after which she settled into a more reasonable raised brow. A pause, then, "Arra." She wasn't in Bree-town, so what did her name matter? She took another bite of her meat and chewed on it for a moment. "Dangerous hobby."
Freyga didn’t know the name. She didn’t yet know the stories. But she would learn.
“Great risk,” she said, chewing on the bone, “yields great reward.” It was clean in seconds.
Arra watched the girl with some mild curiosity. She was interesting, to say the least— most would not run into a random stranger's camp, for instance. And interesting could mean profit, for those patient enough to draw it out. That much she had learned in Gondor. "And what reward, exactly, are you hoping for," she said, leaning back, folding her arms across her chest. They were not the scrawny sticks of her youth; they had seen use in the south, and would soon in the north as well. "In the middle of the Chetwood?"
Freyga drew up and hurtled the bone far into the woods for the wolves to find. She was trim, but taut, with a good arm that would only get stronger with each axe she threw. She wiped her chin with her clean sleeve.
She leaned forward and tapped her temple. It simply happened to be the mirror-side of Arra’s trampled cheek. “Stories,” she said with a hunger for the word. “And you look to be rich with them.”
"This?" Arra said, touching a finger to her own broken cheek, "A cane broke it. Like mashing potatoes." She never was a good cook. She bent down to pick up a skin, and took a swig of the foul liquor within. Lowering it: "There, you got your story. Your turn."
Freyga shook her head. "That is not a story," she said with conviction. "That is only what happened." She pushed herself off her stone and lifted her voice. The wolves would soon be waking.
"Athelstan the King," she began, her voice clean as the wail of a ramhorn, "captain of men, ring-giver of warriors—and with him his brother Edmund the Atheling—unending glory won in that strife by their swords' edges that there was about Brunanburh. The board-wall they cut through, cleft the lindens with the leavings of hammers, Edward's offspring, answering the blood they had from their forbears: that in the field they should often against every foe defend the land, hoard and homes..." Her voice was the gold ink that penned the poem, made it rich for kingly ears. She offered up her only treasure—the story—which from anyone else she would demand real coin. But she was asking something else of Arra—a payment she had never made.
Her hand again settled on her hip. "...like mashing potatoes," she ended with a look that teased.
Arra did not look impressed by the display. She did, however, watch on thoughtfully, her thoughts going to the uses of a bard in her line of work. Certainly good press was never a bad thing. "You sound like a horse-maiden," she said, as though she had never visited Rohan or lived with exiled Rohirrim for years, but had only heard the rumors in Bree. The seax at her hip was enough to dispel that notion. But she continued, "There's none of that glory in my story. And I'm glad to keep it that way."
“Not yet.” Freyga claimed her post on the moss-grown stone. She leaned her elbow on one knee, watching Arra. “Not until you let someone tell it.”
Arra shook her head and picked up a piece of wood she'd left nearby, and added it to the fire. "In my line of work, the less people talk about you, the better." She jabbed at the logs a bit with a poker she'd left nearby, getting her new log situated.
The horselass leaned closer, her tone fading with the sunlight. “Even in death?”
Arra grinned at that. She was one of them, all right. "Why would I care what happens after I'm dead? I'll be dead and whether or not anyone sings about me, that won't change one bit." She set down the poker and added before the girl could reply, "Oh, sure, my name might live forever. But that doesn't do shit for me."
Freya looked around the Chetwood, the gold seeping out of its leaves. Her smile lost some color, then set. She stared at the gaps in the northern trees.
“And others?” she tried one more time. “Do you care what happens to theirs?”
"Far as I know," she said, sitting back now to watch her fire given new life, "We only have the one life, then we die. I'm more concerned with that life than with the life of some dumb name which happens to belong to someone. Sure, you can learn from stories- and you can make people think exactly what you want them to think." She looked across at the girl, "That's the real power of stories, not some ghost-life."
A sunbeam sliver of a grin broke across Freyga’s chin. She leaned over and plucked the stranger’s aleskin from the dirt. “Without stories, you’ll die before your body does.”
Arra smirked, and didn't stop the girl from taking her skin as she usually might have. For all the words she spent insulting the Rohirrim, her mind went to the years she'd spent in Rambroke and to a young horselord she'd once known. "You might."
Freyga unstopped the cork, put a thumb under the neck and tipped it back. Before she had a mouthful she had doubled over between her knees and sputtered a spray of ale that scalded the coals. “By Hunter’s Hammer, what is that?”
The brigand's smirk grew less subtle. "Can't hold your liquor? Something I drank in the east. Cheap and effective." She held out a hand for the skin. "Is that story enough for you?"
“East? How far east did you go? Round to the West again?” She swallowed down and smoothed the wrinkles in her face. She brought the skin back under her nose, sniffed again, then took a braver sip. This one, at least, she swallowed. “Nope,” she sputtered as her visage convulsed. She thrust the skin back at the randir. “No thank you.”
Arra chuckled as she took back her skin, and took a swig before recorking it. The only grimace she made was the one that rested on half her face, and which seemed almost sinister in the flickering gloom. "I went east, then north, to Dale. They know how to make a stiff drink, the lake-men."
Freyga coughed, then held her breath. “They better,” she croaked with tears in her eyes. “Only a fool trusts the water there. You know they shit in the lake just under their houses? Never row under a Daleman’s outhouse.”
"Funny," the brigand said, setting her foul drink down by her feet for later, "They have similar advice about visiting Rohan."
“If Dalemen can manage to row under a Rohir’s outhouse…” Freyga grinned, swallowing with closed lips the last of her choked grunts. “Then they’ve earned the adage.” She pressed her palms on her hips and opened her chest for a long breath in, one long out.
Arra watched the girl's recovery with some amusement. "Wherever you go, people are obsessed with how and where people in other lands shit." She looked up at the twilit sky. "Wonder what that says about Men."
Freyga chuckled. "That we're realists?" She breathed deep, the liquor souring the old taste of poetry on her tongue. "We have to be. We know exactly where our wierd leads. And I..." She pushed herself off the rock and slapped her hands to brush them of the dirt and mossy dust. "Am in no hurry to get there." Her foot pointed back the way she had came, and she paused, taking in the last dregs of gold that leaked from the greening leaves.
The brigand watched the white-haired girl as she went to leave. She was a sharp rock which could be made into a spear-tip; or perhaps hide to craft a boot. Arra picked up her poker and nudged a log further into the heart of the flame. "Westu hal, Freyga." Her lips tugged to her good side, the other turned to the girl.
Freyga smiled. “Westu hal, Arra,” she said. The words were right, but with a bit of a Breeish accent—like a tapestry copied with the same shapes in different colors. “And gōd wyrd.” She took a breath, swallowing the last fumes of hard drink, and took off into the woods to race against the sunset
