She knew nothing of suffering. She was excessively rich, for a woman of Bree. She dressed too lavishly. She relied too much on her moods and was bad at hiding them. She should live on the streets with the working women, selling herself for coin.
All of these thoughts came to her in the days following the events of the previous days. They were not originally her own thoughts, but rather, things that had been said to and of her over the past week, and even before that. Flashes of what had happened over those days came to her, and she clenched the fist of her uninjured hand.
When she had arrived from Dol Amroth to Minas Tirith, she had lived on the streets of the White City for a time. A month she had spent there, wearing vibrant but frayed garments from her brighter times in Dol Amroth.
The memory was vivid, packing up a single trunk in her luxurious apartments near Court of the Fountain. Servants had been perturbed. One had even wept. The woman then wandered off with a caravan and spent a good amount of time on the road.
And there she was, in Minas Tirith, the City grand and imposing. Even more so than Dol Amroth. She remembered the Shadow on the horizon, and how she had slept on some of the porches, how she had learned to avoid the Cisterns, to not go near some of the inns after a certain hour. She began by renting a sleeping space in one of the inns, but soon she ran out of money.
She had arrived at the Hospital after having silently walked from the Prancing Pony with the physician. She hated the way he began expecting her to talk of something of import or nothing at all. Matters of business had become more to his liking than other things. She missed the interesting conversations she had with the man, she missed seeing him and remembering home.
They had spoken of the woman, and how she had dealt Isulril yet another blow, to the gut. She finally told the truth: the aggressive woman had been the source of her ruined stitches, and the source of much of her grief.
She did not understand the man, as much as she tried. He was, she thought, perverse, in that he would offer her hospitality, but then summarily dismiss her if he thought that she did not have anything of import to say. Their rapport, she felt--nay, she knew--was becoming strained. It did not help matters that her moods had worsened over the past week. She was more likely to snap at him or be argumentative. But she had tried. There were only so many olive branches she could extend.
Those weeks in Minas Tirith were difficult. She begged for food, sometimes took from the refuse piles behind The Thirsty Seer. She kept away from certain places, slept in others. It was during this time that a certain scholar, a rather wizened old man, found her, sleeping near the tavern of The Thirsty Seer. He was kindly, was a scholar of the Houses of Lore. She had been a splotch of turquoise on an otherwise white parapet, and the man had hoped to restore her to, if not her former glory, then to something resembling a woman, rather than a huddled mass.
He had offered her a job as a housekeeper. There could not, he had said, be as much dust as it looked there. And he was right. She combated the dust daily, having been assigned to one room. She admired the ancient texts, the arcane texts and the otherwise useless texts. And yet there was no one there to observe and approve, as few people went into this room, looked at these texts. This did not stop her from working hard, however.
After Isulril had let the door slam, leaving the physician with a rather moody exit, she returned to the Prancing Pony, in hopes of the wine that the nearly white-haired woman had said she might make use. And so she procured a bottle of fine Elven wine, and retreated to the back halls, finding the kindly man there. But he was not as patient as he had been in the past.
The two bickered, and went from bickering to arguing. Isulril hated it, hated that she could not help but argue with this man, who had once been a beacon of kindness to her. It had ended with his calling her weak, her having drank two-thirds of a bottle of wine, and smashed the bottle against the wall near his head. She had offered Nob all of her purse in a gesture of instant contrition, but she had left the man where he was.
The implications of his words were jarring to her. She had never before in her life been so offended and put off by anyone's words--not even in her quarrels with the physician. And yet, she wondered, were they true? He did not know her, but were they true? If she was not weak, she was at least weak-willed. She should have had better control over her tongue, she should not have provoked him, should not have provoked the physician. But then, had she really provoked either? Or was it merely her presence?
She had ended up crying in the arms of another local person, who had also been slightly inebriated, but sympathetic. Why was it that strangers were more sympathetic to her than people who knew her better? But then, she reasoned, everyone was a stranger to her.
She thought back to the man who had been her particular friend, all those months ago. She hoped that he wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere. She thought also of the wizened man from Minas Tirith. Did he live still?
And finally, her talk with the aggressive woman, her attempt to walk away from it as she walked away from everything, and the woman's attempts to keep her there. She had to admire it, really, that there was someone who bothered enough to not let her go, when all she wanted to do was run.
Her life until now had been about running. She had run away from her father's vineyard, had run away from Dol Amroth and Lord Handrynhad. She had run away from the life she had made in Minas Tirith, to come to Bree. And yet, here she was, running away from every conflict that passed her way. Perhaps the kindly man was right. Perhaps she was weak.
She was disturbed by what the woman had told her, though she would not let it show. She had to keep a calm, placid demeanor. She had to, for fear that the woman might strike her again, or worse. She did not pity the aggressive woman, no. But she felt a sympathy for her. But at the same time, she had grown wiser about the situation with the woman, and knew that there would probably be a time when she could not stop her from trying to hurt her. So she tried to run away.
The thought occurred to her again, the thought of returning to Gondor. It would matter not where, but perhaps that would be best. A place where people better understood her, even if she was running away from things. She would suffer poverty in Gondor for riches in Bree.
A simple town, was Bree, and yet its cast of characters were so complex. Isulril thought to herself, I can't run away from this.
