Dytha, awake long after Adriwyn had gone to bed, find's comfort in Will's company by the fire, as he tries to keep his feelings secret.
Dytha |The somber evening turned into somber midnight. Most of the outpost had retreated to their tents to sleep off the day's troubles. It was the first night in seven that there had been no music at the campfire, and the spit was barren of any roasting flesh. Dytha sat alone, a skin flask dropped in the dust as she leaned forward heavily, elbows on knees, staring into the fire with a cup that smelt stronger than mead in her hands.
Willelmh |Will had been very cautious as they ventured out from the safety of the town's walls toward the outpost that was in sight of them. He felt exposed, and vulnerable there, and the bow strapped to his back feeling heavy despite him being quite used to its size. It was the first time he had ventured out to the place, and the long stay had made him anxious. He /had/ gotten more practice with his bow, the sort of thing he picked up again after the repetition had triggered his muscle memory. On that seventh night, unable to sleep yet again, he climbed out of his tent and looked up at the sky, then reached for his cloak as he stumbled toward the warmth of the fire. It was only when he got closer that he noticed he would not be alone, and the way the familiar face glowed in the light halted him in his steps. Her posture suggested an unseen weight, but he would make no mention of it as he approached, with a faint smile. "Could you also not sleep, Miss Dytha? Was thinkin' I'd be the only one."
Dytha started on hearing him. She'd fallen into her own thoughts, doubting she'd be disturbed. She righted herself and the liquor that'd been misting in her mind rose to its surface. She reached for a skin of something sweeter, but she'd not had the foresight to bring one. "No," she muttered, pouring herself another quarter-cup. "No, I haven't even tried."
Willelmh |His step halted for just a moment when he saw that he'd startled her, but he continued on to squat near the fire a few feet from her, feeing it a log from nearby. "I can leave you to it, if you like." He glanced at her sidelong, "Don't wanna disturb you if you want some time for yourself." He looked back to the fire, which accentuated the circles beneath his eyes. He extended a hand as the flames licked the new log and tried to absorb the heat from it.
Dytha shook his head, and after a moment's search of the ground found the cup Adri'd abandoned when she went to bed. It was still half-full. Dytha traded it for her own and offered Will the cup that'd not sat idle catching ash. "It sounds like I'm the one intruding on your alone time."
Willelmh hesitated at being offered the cup, but eventually took it with a nod of thanks and brought it up to drink. "No offense, Miss Dytha, but I don't think you could intrude on mine." He smirked. "Not the way it works." He was aware his station was not the same as hers and was respectful of it even when he didn't need to be. "I just don't sleep too well, and bein' out here....guess it kinda makes me nervous."
Dytha nodded to the empty log half-buried in the dirt. At least the snow around the campfire had melted or been cleared away. "Sure it is," she protested, but without the fire in her gut she usually bore. She sipped the precious grain-potion and spit out the ash when it hit her tongue.
Willelmh smiled slightly at her words, but there was something in them that was lacking, without the usual banter they could pass back and forth. He furrowed his brow and had a deep drink from the cup. "You alright, Miss Dytha?" His breath clouded in front of him, stagnant in the still cold night.
Dytha gripped the cup she'd held idly in both hands, nearly squeezing til the wood popped. "Don't...call me that, Will." She looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes watery and bright. "How many times must I ask you?"
Willelmh squinted his eyes, almost replying with a quip until he noticed her expression. He looked at her for a long moment and broke the gaze by taking a drink. "It's a habit that's hard to break, I guess." He rubbed at the back of his head and pulled one of the stools over to sit next to her so that he wouldn't have to sit on the cold ground. "Dytha," he practiced with a nod, and had another sip. "Doesn't really tell me what's eatin' at you."
Dytha looked back down at the fire. Her name without a title gave her a chance to breathe. She still took a sip from her cup. "I buried two bodies today," she said, leaning again so her elbows cusped her knees. "Adriwyn helped, though the effort took its toll on her."
Willelmh huddled with her in the same way she had been bent with knees on elbows, keeping their conversation much closer to them as his voice lowered. "It'd take its toll on the strongest of men. Who?" His brow furrowed slightly as he tried to think of who might be missing from their company. He had stayed back to tend to a lame horse, and had missed some of the happenings.
Dytha stared into the fire. "A husband and wife. Homestead north of here. The oupost..." she looked about them at the soldiers sleeping under tents and in bedrolls. "They've known his wagon to deliver basics...food, wool...weekly and in the worst of weather for years. Until they didn't. So we found them."
Willelmh got very still and quiet then, and the memory of how he came to be sitting in that spot next to her in front of that fire, surrounded by her soldiers became uncomfortable for him to remember. As if he ever let himself do that. How many had lost their lives at the hand of the men he had fallen in with? He had nothing to say and gripped the cup in his hands idly. At length, and after draining the cup, he asked hoarsely, "Orc?" There was an odd hopefulness in his expression, not wanting it to be the hand of evil men who had taken the couple but the unbridled hatred of the Enemy.
Dytha seemed to consider the question. She rolled the cup back and forth between her palms. After hours of this it was a wonder she'd not worn her own mark into its skin. "Why?" She poured out the dregs and ash and filled the cup freshly of the hard grain. "Orcs...when they capture, it's either deliberately, or randomly. There's no in-between. There's no strategy." She sat up, but her gaze was still lassoed to the fire. "They had three children of working age, all missing. What orcs would...butcher a family so precisely?"
Willelmh ducked his head at that as his dour thoughts were confirmed. "None," he answered quietly. "Likely wouldn't be much left," he admitted with his eyes toward the fire. He let a few moments pass and the silence between them was broken only by the crackle of the fire and the occasional soft snorts of the horses hitched up nearby. He knew why the men he had been with had made an attack on the caravan, and only assumed there was a link. ""D'you think someone's tryin' to keep supplies from reachin' us?"
Dytha glanced up at him, but not so sharply her chin rose above her shoulder. "Always. We're the linchpin of the Isen. Someone is always after us. Are those the same as would steal homesteaders from both sides of the Isen?" She shook her head.
Willelmh furrowed his brow and nodded. There was little he could say that would lighten the burden of it. "Were there any clues as to who was behind it?"
Dytha 's fist closed around her cup. "I know who is behind it..." She drained the vessel and filled it again.
Willelmh looked over to her, and put his own cup out for a helping of the strong drink. "Who? And what do we need to make sure they cannot do it again?"
Dytha reached for the skin and shook it, relieved to find she'd not drained it. She helped Will to a generous portion. "Harad," she said, not without weight or pause.
Willelmh squinted at her as he took a long drink from his cup. It stung his nose and made him wince, but he kept his gaze to her. "How can you be sure of it? What interest does a far Southron have in Rohan?"
Dytha seemed to have drunk enough that it numbed her tongue. The drink went down smoothly as water. “My grandfather is the Reeve of the West-march. It’s so separate from Rohan it could be its own country, if not for the loyalty to Edoras of my family’s line.” She sat a bit more upright, talk of her and her family’s place in the world clearing her eyes a little. “He is charged with guarding the Isen from here, to halfway to sea. Corsairs have sailed up these wide waters before in search of people and plunder…” The candle-flame fire faded from her eyes as soon as it was lit. She leaned again, elbows on knees. “The pattern is different, now, and we have no leads.”
Willelmh sat quietly and listened, watching the profile of her face as she spoke. His eyes were glassy, but he did not have the sway of a man in his cups. He drank and winced as the smoke from the fire stung his eyes. When she finished, he offered, "If not the Enemy, if not Corsairs, then who's left?" He shifted to lean in a bit. He knew who a likely culprit was, but wouldn't suggest it then. "And how are we gonna fight it back?"
Dytha |"I don't know," she managed to groan. "I...this isn't the kind of war I was raised on."
Willelmh turned his head more toward her and furrowed his brow over his pale eyes. "What sort of war was that? Your father led a war-band, fought off brigands and protected folk who needed it. Is that not what you will do here?"
Dytha glanced at him and was struck by how seriously he watched her, glass over his eyes or no. "Open war. War where the enemy is right there..." she turned her gaze across the fire out into the open field as if a line of shields and spears faced them. Her own eyes glazed over. "Where they have sewn their standards to be the opposite of the ones you've sewn to be the opposite of theirs. Where people have to choose a side or die, or choose the wrong side and die anyway. Out there..." Her tone faded, and she was left staring at a barren, snow-crusted field.
Willelmh kept his eyes to her even as her gaze broke to survey the battlefield in her mind's eye. He knew which side he would choose, live or die, but doubts swirled at the edge of his mind, should their enemy be revealed to be what he suspected. "You have good men and women at your back. Right or wrong, they die fighting for what they love." His eyes had fallen to the flames that flickered before them.
Dytha pressed her cup between her hands. “That isn’t enough.” Her shoulders rolled forward, protecting her neck, strain wriggling its way down her veins and tendons. “Dying isn’t enough if it’s not for something. I don’t mean a meaning, or a banner, or a legend…”
Willelmh |"Dying for honor? For love? For that which we hold dear? What other manner of thing could there be to be deserving of it?" He shook his head. "When I thought my life forfeit, I did not care who took it, or how it was taken." He continued after a moment and looked across to her. "But that has changed. I am only one of the many who stand beside you, Dytha." He used her name now, and let it roll off his tongue in their shared Rohirric accent. "I daresay every one would have their own reason, their own meaning, for choosing the right side, live or die."
Dytha looked at him, her gaze steady though she swayed slightly, trying to correct the angle the drink shifted in her vision. Despite their glaze, her eyes seemed to see him clearly for the first time. “What is your reason, Will?”
Willelmh looked at her for a long moment and the longer he looked, the more his brow furrowed. She didn't know, didn't realize the reason that, for him, was worn plainly on his sleeve. The fact that she, the one he had built up as his savior, was his reason seemed small, insignificant, yet everything all at once. To him, a vast chasm stood between the two of them, and so he gave a half-truth. "Freedom," he said, unwavering, "And the ones who delivered it." His dark eyes stayed on her a breath longer, but then averted as he drank deeply from his cup.
Dytha knew something was there, but she couldn’t yet name it, and her mind was muddled from more than just her fears. “I am glad you joined us,” she said with intentionality. “I am glad we found you.”
Willelmh |A slow nod dipped his head, and though it hurt his tongue to bite it so hard and keep it still, he was relieved to have not set a fate into motion which would force him to flee, lest he face a certain, likely gruesome, end. He tipped his cup back to empty it and rubbed at his glassy eyes. "I had no hand in it." He looked back to her sidelong. "And no one is more glad than me."
Dytha gave up searching for what she couldn't find. It was too late, and the drink would likely wipe the memory of having even caught glimpse of it by the morning. She smiled and reached out to put her hand on his shoulder, then slide it across his back to the other as she offered him a clumsy, tilted hug.
Willelmh initially stilled at the touch, but when her hand slid across his back, his shoulders rolled and he leaned into the hug, however clumsy it was, not daring to move, lest she pull away from it. Eventually, perhaps to keep it from happening, his opposite hand rose to take hers at his opposite shoulder, silently.
Dytha lay there, her head on his shoulder, grateful for the first comfort she had felt that day. She was too numbed by the drink, the cold, and the ordeal of the day to notice anything but his presence and warmth.
Willelmh turned his head only slightly, enough to catch the scent of her hair. After several minutes of silence, with only the sound of the fire to break it, he muttered quietly to her. "Dytha, I-..." Something caught, stopped him, wiped his mind of the idea of the words that he wanted to spill next, and changed them. "I hope only the best for you. You deserve it." There was a hidden hope within him that she really would /not/ remember the conversation, the fire, the warmth, and they could both carry on as usual. It was safe, for the both of them.
Dytha answered with a sleepy nod, which turned into a sleepy nuzzle, her cloud of coarse, silver-gold hair rustling against his neck. Her eyes were simply closed.
Willelmh felt his resolve loosening by the second. He allowed his nose to sink against her scalp as she nuzzled, and took a breath before he murmured to her. "Should get to bed, before you...before you fall asleep where you sit." There was a faint smile in his voice and he very carefully slid his hand from where it grasped hers and slid it just as carefully around her waist, more to steady her than to hold her close. "Wouldn't do to have your head be muddled, come morning."
Dytha |"No..." she mumbled, drained of the fire that had carried her throughout the day. It wasn't clear if she agreed with his assessment or protested the move, but she yielded to him. She was unsteady on her feet, holding onto him lest she roll her ankle and pitch herself into the firepit.
Willelmh |Whatever the protest, either against the move or the assessment, he slowly stood up, held her steadily with a firm grasp, and guided her when she stumbled. He may not have taken the swiftest path or step toward her tent, but he got her there and nodded, pulling away just enough to keep her upright without outright taking her in his arms, however much he wanted to in that moment. "There. Safe and sound," he said quietly.
Dytha reached for the post that kept her tent upright and managed to hold on. "Thank you," she muttered, her blue eyes barely visible under their heavy lids. She kissed his cheek. Her breath smelt sharp, like a winter gale through a juniper wood.
Willelmh smelled of leather, frost, the hinting of the drink she had imbibed him with, and the smoke from the fire. He kept his eyes forward as she leaned to kiss his cheek and only turned his head toward it without offering or accepting more. It would be wrong of him to take advantage of the situation, and even though it struck him cold, he felt glad in that, at least. There was no otherwise. "Goodnight, Dytha," he muttered quietly, and after making sure she would not topple, let his hand slip from around her waist and stepped back, only to draw his cloak around him, shiver, and retire to his own tent.
Dytha managed to fumble her way into her tent, only knocking over a few sundries as she crawled to her bedroll and collapsed. Luckily, that night she was too drunk for dreams.
Willelmh |Unlike Dytha, the exchange left Will bothered in a way that made his blood seem too warm and the soft bedding beside him too cold. In the wee hours before dawn, when exhaustion finally set in, his dreams were of silver-gold clouds, clear, blue eyes, and the soft brush of juniper breeze against his face.
