Reflecting on the Injury
Fifty paces away from Cwenawynn's camp, for decency, Ryheric slid in to his bed roll by the fire. Son of Mouse grazed nearby.
They were within sound of the Brandywine river. The song of its waters echoed through forest trees in the night air.
His old shoulder wound, newly re-opened during the fight with the bandits, throbbed.
The warrior was not immune to pain. But, he did not see pain as his enemy. Rather, it was like a natural state. A storm. A fire. Destructive at times, and not a state to enter deliberately. When it presented itself in life, it was important to give pain its space and marvel.
Being allergic to it, or avoiding it completely in life, as some of the Breelanders seemed to do, was a battle where there could be no victory. Only self-important, outraged, petty disappointment. A cycle the Bree locals seemed to have on wearisome repeat.
And so, his shoulder ached. He lay there, silent, experiencing and accepting the familiar sensation. His muscles knotted from obsessive digging, earth moving, dragging and burying... what was left behind at the farm.
The man had lost most of the feeling in the fingers of his right hand, since the shoulder injury had occurred. He didn't usually think about it. Tonight, he indulged. To a Breelander, such a loss of sensation might be devastating. Life altering. A source of melancholy, anguish. Chronic moping and self pity.
Ryheric had instead felt relief that he had survived with his sword arm still whole. He was lucky.
He had downplayed the injury. Putting his arm out of use for two months. He'd thanked his lucky stars that Breeland was a peaceful place, and he had not needed to draw his sword during that time.
He hadn't lifted his right hand above waist height. He hadn't lifted heavy objects or even played his lute. Strangers never noticed at a glance, for the man had gritted through, and stubbornly hid weakness in posture and bearing.
Winnie had later, in horror, witnessed the extent of the injury. Just before the siege at Echad Candelleth.
Ryheric had sought her, only when the pain had grown beyond tolerable. Herbs, alcohol to numb his senses, braces, medicines, re-stitching. He implored her for anything to keep him up and fighting. It did not matter to him what happened to him after the fight, nor if the wound scarred deeper or re-opened.
It broke Winnie's heart, but the situation was dire, Ryheric one of the front warriors they all depended on, and she had little choice but to oblige him. He needed to fight, and they needed him fighting.
The wound was aggravated over and over, every fight after Candelleth. Weeks passed, then months after it with more fights as the company endured their most trying length of their journey. The others depended on his sword, more and more as the trouble and violence grew more prevalent, more vicious. More and more as Tarsorel started to go downhill into his vices. The shield lost, the sword having to double down in aggression to keep enemies at bay. He held nothing back.
Cwennie noticed the way he held his right shoulder, just before he had fought and slain Thebold in Rohan. But his sword was a necessity, not an option. The archeress could do nothing but double down her efforts to cover him with her bow. Cwennie slew more enemies than the rest of the company combined, in this time. But the girl was gentle, and she carried the pain of that killing with her.
As time passed, the wound did heal. Though slowly, and in part. Thick scar tissue forming, re-forming. Being torn only to start again atop itself.
He had gradually lost most feeling in the fingers of his right hand as nerves re-knit through his arm with some deficit from the shoulder.
Fortunately, his right was his strumming hand for his lute. Not the fingers used to shape notes on the fingerboard. His playing would have been crippled, if it had been his left hand. He was able to finger-pluck by muscle memory and rote. The resistance of the strings enough to compensate for the lack of being able to feel the texture of them.
It was in his bed roll, in these quiet hours for the first time, he allowed himself to miss it. That simple luxury, the texture of lute strings on the fingertips of his irreversibly numbed right hand. The feeling of Boltin's reins. The hilt of the southern blade, or his kukri. The warmth of a woman's skin.
As his shoulder continued to throb, and his eyelids grew heavy, he fell asleep with the final, stubborn resolve.
Well... At least his left hand is sound. He is lucky.
...
When he fell asleep
His dreams sunk him into the memory of Silver's blade tearing through the tendons of his left hand as she had twisted it through him. The pain like a wrenching inferno. Both through his hand and his heart.
Maybe not so sound, after all. As though his dreams were bringing forth grim memories, trying to prove him a dark point.
But in the dreams, his memories warped. Image after unrelenting image. Altered and tainted with red and black.
He didn't accept Silver's strike, in the dream. He lost control instead. He brought the woman he loved to violent ruin, just as he had done to the bandit in the farmyard.
A pile of severed limbs in a lake of blood. He tried to divert someone's eyes away from it, but he couldn't think. There was too much black.
...
A candle on the inside of a window gleamed modestly in the cosy dark of a mild Bree evening.
He felt an aching relief. Perhaps the dreams would turn to that space, never owed to him but created. Home. Hearth. Devotion to wait for him. Subtle needs filled both ways, yet no pressures of love or social claim. A beautiful pretense.
Ryheric had never minded lies. It was how things felt that mattered most.
But he knocked on the door and no one answered. He realised he had been gone too long. The candle burned and melted down...
down...
down.
Dawn turned to day, then to dusk. Then to darkness.
All he could do was keep knocking. He would have broken down the door to make sure she was alive. Dreading above all else that she wasn't, even while his heart wrestled with the knowledge he should not be keeping her.
But he couldn't break the door, because society had rules. Manners. The dream disallowed a breach.
The candle burned out. There was only silence and the unknown. Her abyss, one of purposeless waiting. Now his, in his dream. The prolongued agony of a drowning soul.
...
His kukri was placed into a trembling woman's hands as he bade her by touch to explore the texture of the steel. Words were spoken into her ear in Haradraic. Rugged, airy vowels, rolled Rs and vining consonants like a spell being woven:
"Remember this blade. None can touch the one who holds it."
He would plant this weapon into the girl's dreams, to combat the nightmares she'd been having. Ry wouldn't nurture her. He'd instead give her the tools to fight back. Reclaim her space from what monsters would steal it in her sleep. Assurance, pure trust. He might have released the kukri completely into the girl's hands, for he found he trusted her, too.
But in the dream, the memory was tainted. He struck instead. While she was weak, and at her most vulnerable. What was another person's life on his hands?
...
"Rabid dogs like you need to be put down..."
...
He woke drenched in sweat again. Without skipping a beat, he grunted harshly at the pain of his shoulder assailing him again, and rolled over.
Son of Mouse had his head raised and ears pricked, watching his master. It was not yet dawn by the Brandywine.
Ryheric groped through his effects to one side, for the flask of rough, paint-stripping whisky. He then drowsily drank the entire lot of it to knock himself out.
