Northgyth

The white wolf watched with sad eyes, She had known the girl and boy should have been as one. But life did not always hold what one wished for, or expected. When Yllfa lost Wolfhere she had lost her mate too.

From that time forward she had followed the girl, who grew into a woman, and into one with a rare power for healing. Something that should be nurtured. And the wolf had grown too, though at a different rate than one in the physical world. A different passing of seasons and years. 

I am a woman of peace, of good order, of enough for all. So I was raised, so do I still live. I see no benefit in chaos, and poverty of goods or of spirit. We are the Rohirrim, the Horse-Lords, and by that title should be honourable and trustworthy, else what is a ‘Lord’ but a baying dog not wanting his bone while depriving it from others? 

Swords. What strange things they can be. I mean not the way they can deal death, rather, that some seem to have a life of their own.

I envied Waelden for his ability to sleep. My mind was still more active than I wished as the small hours approached, but he slept as if he hadn’t a care. That was not true. After speaking with him of Isa, he had much to ponder.

I am tired. I grow frailer by the day.

Not devastatingly so. Nay, the weakening moves in small steps. But something I find normal one day, may be more exhausting the next; may be undoable the following week. 

.

I saw two red eyes, with very narrowed pupils. The air was misted by rage fueled breath. Then the head went down. Horns to the fore.
 

“There is no rule that troubles only come to us one at a time,” I heard Northgyth say. “Indeed, we have troubles aplenty now. But Yllfa, ah, I must try and unravel the threads that seek to bind her if she is to emerge as the woman she needs to be.”

Related to A Midwinter Lullaby, by Yllfa

My eyes fluttered open to a comforting darkness, broken only by the light of one candle some distance from the bed upon which I lay. Someone sat there, watching me. 

“Waelden?” I whispered gruffly, the words tearing at my throat like the raking of claws.

I brush away the heavy lock of hair that has fallen across the sleeping boy’s face. He blows against my touch, but does not wake. Thick, straw blonde hair it is, so typical of many of our folk. His eyes are greenish, and his nose seems overly large. He is young, no more than a year or so older than Ethel, I suspect. But then often girls take on the appearance of women at a younger age than boys take on the look of men?