(Writing ambience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie2fxiTSreQ&t=6038s)
Conrob.
She had seen him. So vividly. All gentle brown eyes, leathery lined face, bald scalp, with his salt-and-pepper beard. He wasn’t suffering. He wasn’t crushed by rubble. His body was not broken and smashed, nor rotting with the passing of time. He was not a pile of battered bones as he should have been. He was alive. Smiling at her. That smile. Her smile. Only for her.
She reached for him. Take me with you. Don’t go. Don’t leave me behind. I want to be wherever you are.
“Ai! The witch is going to fall again!” A harsh, ugly voice breaks into the dream. It speaks a strange language, yet she somehow understands the words. The vision of her beloved melts away like a snowflake under the early spring sun. Fleeting, lovely…gone.
“Wake up, forgoil!” Something collides harshly with her left shoulder, knocking her upright. She hadn’t realized she was sagging and about to collapse. Beneath her is a horse, rocking gently side to side in a lazy walk.
She resists the necessity of opening her eyes. Perhaps she can slip back into the dream if she just keeps them closed. The owners of the harsh voices will strike her again for dozing in the saddle, but it is worth a moment of escape from this.
This.
She remembers nothing after spitting at the shoes of the lean, cruel man who’d lunged at Forlorian with the fiery stick, just outside the cave where they’d been hiding. She’d been glaring at him with venomous hatred, and then…nothing. Perhaps one of them had struck her unconscious. Or forced some kind of sleeping draught down her throat. Pricked her with a poisoned needle. She’d never know.
Her head is a mass of hurts. Whether these had occurred back at the fire near the cave, or sometime after, she couldn’t tell. There is a vague image in her memory of the lean man kicking her with his foot, just before darkness took her. Her hands squirm with the impulse to reach up and test her jaw, and she feels a particular terror that it might be broken. This impulse refreshes her awareness that her wrists are bound behind her. Her arms can do naught but twitch impotently.
Her eyes are suddenly open. She is mounted on another horse. A sizable cluster of dark-haired, dusky-skinned men move on all sides, but mostly in front, stretching away to the next curve in the path. Some are riding horses, and a few are walking. Their number has grown since she was first taken. Several faces have become familiar. And frightening.
It seems to be evening. The sun is low to the west. The air is yet warm, as it is early autumn. The men carry spears, bows, and axes. They do not look at the pale woman upon the horse, unless it is to glare, to make crass suggestions about what her captors should do with her, or to spit at her. To her right, a trail of tethered horses is being led, one behind the other. She sees Forlorian among them, and her heart crumbles. There is a flavor of something on her tongue. Gamey, salty. Someone had fed her flesh of some fashion, but she cannot remember eating it. Nor how she came to be here, open-eyed and awake. There is a terrible throbbing upon her right temple. It makes it painful to keep her eyes open. She wants to think, to put thoughts together, to figure out what is happening and why…
“Keep your mouth shut, or you’ll feel worse than this.” She knows this voice now. And the name it belongs to. Harant. The cruel, thin, tall man. Her eyes flutter open. She is sitting on the earth now. Outside. It is nighttime. Stars overhead, and the vague shapes of hills and scrubby trees beyond the camp’s firelight. He is tying her ankles together. Her hands are bound behind a post driven into the soil. Her feet are bare to discourage thoughts of escape. Her dress is still upon her body, and despite the mounting bruises on her face, arms, and shoulders, she feels no pain of violation beneath her clothing. Thank Béma. The thought passes drowsily through her.
More time has passed in a black void of loss. She remembers none of it. How many days and nights has it been since she was taken? Her moments of waking are sharper now, and more frequent. She is able to stay conscious and place thoughts in order, like pieces of an incomplete puzzle.
Jack. The stallion would be frantic by now. The first night she did not return home, he would notice and become agitated. The village folk in Bancross would note her absence within a day or two, and begin to worry. The sharp ache in her breast to think of this is as painful as any of the mottled bruises blossoming on her flesh. Such a terrible, awful helplessness, unable to reach out to them and tell them where she was. That she was yet alive, but in great peril.
“Quiet now,” Harant is saying, as he crab-walks up from her feet, bringing himself close to her face. The threat is pointless. She has not spoken a word, not made a single cry of pain or fear or pleading. But he seems to savor the power to make these threats against her. His mouth contorts in a leering grin. His muddy eyes are frightening. Wild. Bloodthirsty.
Nearby, a voice barks his name. He glowers and slinks away from her like an obedient, resentful hound.
It is raining. She is tied outside again. Soaked through to her skin. Blessedly, the rain is not especially cold, but it still saps the heat slowly from her body. Infrequent shivers rattle through her bones. Her stomach snarls with hunger. They have given her bits of meat and gruel and dry, hard biscuits, but only enough to keep her alive. She can feel herself shrinking beneath her dress. Shriveling inward. The fabric a little looser each day. With her head bowed to the weeping sky, she sees the long plait of her pale golden hair, laid over the curve of her breast, trailing down to her belly. It is a mess now. Knotted and frayed. She wishes she could undo it.
“Here,” says a voice. It is deep and male, but less grating than the others. She lifts her eyes. A young man. Younger than all the others. She knows this one’s name as well. Henan.
He is a son of the group’s leader, the thick-bodied brute who had been Harant’s companion when she was taken captive. Megrac the others call him, and she fears him most of all. His face is like a stone; flat, hard, utterly without mercy. Not even passion there in his dark eyes. They are empty. Cold. Soulless. She prays to stay outside of his notice until she is dead. She knows these people will not leave her alive. Certainly never let her go. She was an unexpected burden during the rounding up of the stolen horses. Forlorian would be prized for the coin he could fetch. But she? A vile, despised woman of their blood enemies. She could be used up in various ways by the men. Perhaps taken back to one of their villages and put to work as a slave for one of their wives. If she proved troublesome, she would be beaten into submission. If she rebelled still, she would die.
Henan is not kind, but his youth has spared him yet from the hardest and cruelest ways of his teachers. She catches him at times, looking at her, but not with lewdness or desire. Now, squatting in the rain, he is holding out a small strip of meat. Rain patters on it in the dim light, dripping from it. She cannot take it from him with her tied hands. Their eyes meet for a long moment. She grieves inwardly for the man he might have been, were he born in another place, another time. And she fears for the man he will become, and the savage acts he may yet carry out against her, against her people, against other unfortunate, weaker souls.
He holds the morsel near her mouth where she may lean down and take it. She hesitates, still holding his gaze, and he grows impatient. Frowning, he presses the bit of meat between her lips, shoving it through with the tip of his finger. She recoils at the rough touch, but is too famished to reject the food. Her stomach wants to churn and refuse it altogether, but she forces her teeth to chew and her tongue to swallow. The boy leaves without another word.
Exhaustion is a ruthless, unforgiving master. Even the strongest warrior cannot endure it forever. The woman tied to a post with her dirty, bare feet and bruise-mottled face is no warrior at all. Sturdy and hale, and inwardly courageous, but nothing could prepare her for such a time as this. She has not slept more than a few minutes at a time for days uncounted. She nods off while on the backs of the Dunlending horses as the group travels. Her head droops awkwardly to her shoulder or chest when she is tied and left alone, but her body is ever tense and quick to waken at the slightest sound, often with spasms of disoriented panic. Her face and body, once full and voluptuous with life and health, are growing drawn and sallow and pale. The constant slaps, kicks, and shoves, have left her drained and weary with never ending aches and pains.
They have stopped again. This camp feels more permanent, as if they mean to stay for a time. Tents are erected, a makeshift corral built for the stolen horses, fires lit. It is evening again, and the air is sharper and cooler in the uplands. She is taken down from the latest horse that carried her here, and walked into one of the larger tents. There is no surprise or shock to see a post driven into the soft earth. She is roughly pushed down, her hands are tied behind it, and her ankles bound.
Left alone, she can do little but listen to the goings-on outside the tent. She cannot understand all of the foreign speech, but enough to pick up the gist of things. Horses are being sold. Voices arrive, haggle for prices, and then hoofbeats fade away, one and two at a time. Her chest burns with hatred for whoever is laying hands upon the beasts of her homeland. She prays the animals throw them and break their necks. She wonders if the valiant, faithful Forlorian will be gone when she is untied and dragged outside again.
Many of the voices of men who had trickled into the group as it traveled, seem to be departing as the horses are sold off. The pack of thieves had served its purpose, and the men would return to their various homes with new, fine beasts to show off, or their coin pouches fat and swinging. She wonders if they will forget about her. Leave her there to slowly starve to death. It is only a fancy of her despairing mind. She knows her end will not be so peaceful. This thought is unhappily solidified when she hears two of the voices she dreads the most. Megrac and Harant speaking together.
The latter had been growing more bold in his leering. She would look up to find him boring into her with his eyes. There was nothing remotely passionate or romantic in that look. It was hard-edged and violent. She recalls hearing words that hinted he had taken a woman before. Perhaps more than one woman. That he was belittled for not producing strong sons.
The two voices beyond the tent-flap grow high spirited. She hears words about the horses, about coin. It seems Harant has done well in fetching high prices for the stolen animals. Heavy, purposeful footsteps approach the tent, and before she can brace her heart, the menacing figure of Megrac is brushing the flap aside. A wisp of night air follows him, cool and scented with wood-smoke from the fires outside. She will not look up at him. He has struck her before for daring to make eye contact. She stares in despondent anxiety at the soiled fabric of her dress where it covers her knees. Her heart hammers unpleasantly against her ribs. How very weak she feels. Weak and pathetic. The horses are sold. The men have dispersed, save for the small group that had set out from the hills near Aldburg. They have no reason now to cart her about like luggage, leaving her unmolested.
She senses a shift in the air about her. Some sort of drawing-down of a tale. A descent. An ending.
Megrac stands over her. In his rough tongue, he growls, “I will be giving you to your new husband early.”
