alweard

“Cease your bids for murder, you wretch,” she hisses, letting loose a stone across the ground. The heavy thunk where it sinks into the dirt sends a cry of alarm into the air as one crow takes flight; following it are many others, joining in the cacophony of piercing screams as they take into the night sky. The absence of the crows milling around offers her little comfort where she sits, by a cold hearth, acting as the lone warden to a dead man.

The sun blazed high over the square outside Sedgebury's meadhall as Osythe, Óswine, and a growing crowd of witnesses gathered to see the duel. Only three paces from the meadhall's doors, a dueling-cloak had been spread over the stones of the path. It was worn from the feet of many disputing warriors; the color, once a rich scarlet, had faded over the generations. 

It was a familiar dream.

He was standing out in the barren fields. His only companions were the wintry winds that moaned with all that which he could never put to words. Those unspoken agonies usually gnawed at him like beasts at the roots of an apple tree—above the earth, all sweet scents and blossom-laden boughs and the promise of something more; below the earth, a ruin.

Tucked into a shadow behind the meadhall, Alweard was bending over a basin. He had surmised that, after the long journey across the Isen, his companions would neither think to find him there nor muster the energy to go searching in the first place. Now purple dusk was descending over Sedgebury; the air, once buzzing with river-town conversation, was still and silent. Yet the low light was a comfort now, for the surface of the water before him bore only the barest trace of his reflection.

This story takes place weeks before Dragon Slayers, while Alweard was missing from the ranks of the Oathsworn.

Gray dusk descended over the road as Alweard rode out once more, the Oathsworn’s camp long behind him.

Over fifteen years before the cousins met at Helm's Deep once more ... 

He had found her house for the first time on a summer night many years ago. He had been doubled over by the doorframe, white hands trembling; she hardly recognized him at first.

[ The events of this story take place months before the present, when the Oathsworn were stationed at Helm’s Deep in the autumn. ]