Her mouth tasted like a barrel of rotten blackberries.
The throbbing ache behind her eyes didn’t help.
The slender, curved outline of her shape rolled over beneath the coverlet with a disgruntled moan. A hand snaked out and patted around the bed as if searching for something. The pale fingers collided with an empty, dark-glass bottle that lay near her head. It rolled to the edge of the mattress and fell to the floor. Thankfully, a thick carpet cushioned the impact, and there was a ringing clunk! instead of a shatter. The bottled rolled on, over the age-sagged timbers of the floor.
“Shut up!” moaned the figure under the blanket.
The bottle did not comply, but continued its lazy path until it went under the dresser and smacked into the wall.
A head poked out from its cocoon. Burnished locks that were normally somewhat unruly, were now bordering on frenzied, sticking up from her skull in all directions. The eyes that often shone like clear, aquamarine gems, were streaked with blurry redness. She smacked her sour-tasting lips and sat up stiffly, with much huffing and groaning.
A wary glance was placed upon the closed door of the small room. An irrational thought arose, that if she kept it shut, she would be safe from any chance of the previous evening having been real.
Not the entire evening, of course. Just that...that accursed phantom who had shown up just before bedtime.
Certainly, it had been a dream. A brandy-flavored memory that arose at an inconvenient moment, just when Lothaer had apologized for his outburst and offered a conciliatory drink before retiring.
There was only one problem. The huntress didn’t drink brandy as a matter of habit. She would have had no reason to taste it unless something had nudged her away from her usual mug of bitter-cold ale.
And there was a second ghost that was swaggering about in her muddied thoughts. A woman in a silver-white dress. Kissing the phantom while the huntress looked on. Flitting from one man to another, over to the side of Loth next. Then storming from the room entirely, while Loth murmured words to the phantom that would have pricked and stung the huntress’ heart. If they had been real.
But they weren’t. They couldn’t be.
How had the evening started? Perhaps it would help to go back to a clearer memory. After a glance at the bedroom window and its weak, pale hints of a winter dawn, her hands raked through her mussed hair and then scrubbed over her face. She curled her knees up to her chin.
Rain. Darkness. Muddied hills and naked trees. She’d been tracking a buck, hoping to bring it down and provide enough meat to fulfill her promise to Egfor, with more than enough left over for a silver or two from the butcher. Storms didn’t often move swiftly in winter. They tended to linger and hover, pouting heavily over Bree-land for days on end before blustering away to the west. The sky had been clear when she set out from the west-gate, but not long after nightfall, a broody tumble of clouds snuck in, and before she could find shelter, the rain was pummeling her like pellets of ice.
The glow of a campfire drew her reluctantly. There had been talk of bandits in the eastern Bree-fields, and her sight was obscured by shadow and rainfall. After a tense approach, the solitary man at the fire allowed her to seek shelter under his canopy. They exchanged a few words, revealing little about themselves, as was the way for strangers meeting in the wild. But he was civil and gracious, sharing a bit of stew from a pot over the flames. It was difficult to untangle whether he would have liked more of her company or not, but it was always more comfortable to melt into the night and become invisible to all but the sharpest eyes of nature. He hadn’t offered his name, and she didn’t ask for it. It didn’t seem important, somehow. She couldn’t explain why, only that it hadn’t mattered to her at the time, to press for a name.
A sharp rapping came from the bedroom door, startling her out of her rumination and sending a hammer of pain into her overhung brain. “Aye?!” she barked loudly. More loudly that she meant to.
“Change the linens, miss?” came the high-pitched voice of a hobbit.
“Nay,” she answered, and prayed that would be the end of the polite, dutiful interest. She exhaled in relief as tiny footsteps pattered away down the corridor. Cradling her flushed cheeks in her palms, she strove to return to her recollections of the previous evening.
Back to town she had walked, once the rain had wept itself out. She’d hardly made it past the door of the inn when Lothaer honed in and approached her, asking to speak alone. And that was when she’d first seen the apparition. Or thought she had. Lurking by the bar, in that corner he used to occupy so often. But she was following Loth outside to talk, patrons were jostling past, and there was no chance to look more closely. She didn’t want to look more closely.
The apology was made. The explanation given. She accepted it as best she could. He seemed sincere, after all, and if his tale was true, then he was deserving of some measure of compassion. But she was not one who allowed wounds to be repeated, not by the same perpetrator. She would grant a chance for their interactions to become affable, and Fate would determine the rest. They shook hands, he asked for a portion of her evening to be spent with him, she declined as gently as was manageable for a woman of rough and candid manners. An agreement was struck to share one last drink before bedtime.
Sitting on the bed, her head curled further into her hands, sending her fingers into her hair like a plough cutting furrows into soil.
She would never have asked for brandy.
A low, miserable sound rumbled in her chest.
The memories became fractured now. Her feet glued to the floor. How foolish she must have looked, standing there, gaping, slack-jawed! The pale-haired woman flitting from one end of her vision to the other, before huffing away up the stairs. Then he was in front of her. Not a ghost. If he’d been a ghost, he would have been several years younger, with fewer cares etched onto his brow and at the corners of his eyes. He would have been cocky, smirking. But he looked as befuddled as she. He spoke her name, and some other words she couldn’t remember now. She couldn’t answer at all, her tongue was frozen to the roof of her mouth, and her throat closed up. At some point, she whispered one syllable, “Dag…” Nothing more would come.
Lothaer had broken the spell with a joke. She remembered a sudden fire of indignation. Then she was at the bar and there didn’t seem to be enough air in the room. Her hands trembled as she picked up the glass of brandy Loth had gotten, sensing that she needed something much stronger than ale. Panic threatened. She thought unaccountably of Ivandar and wished with ardent fervor that he had been there.
“Nay,” she heard herself whimpering now, and her voice sounded tiny and insignificant to the cold, dim walls of the bedroom. “Nay, nay, nay…”
