Faron

After the moot, and after her little bit of extra chat with Ljota that followed, Hildegund made her way back to her hut. She mulled over some things as she limped along, not hiding it so much now that there was no one to see.

She wished that Home-Wright's joke about bride-price hadn't happened, or that it hadn't hit her so hard. It was still hard for her to think around the memories it had brought up. But nobody knew, and it wasn't anything but a jest. It had kept her from being able to say or ask some things with Snow-Hair and Ljota, but there would likely be other opportunities for those. And perhaps her thoughts hadn't really mattered, anyway. That seemed likely.

Surely the bottom is going to drop out from under me, Heriwulf kept thinking. There would be some moment where the enormity of recent events, of what had happened at the clan moot, would leave him shaking with realizations and perhaps horror at the consequences. The responsibility that was his now. The impossibility of how it had come to pass. The collision between regret for his mistakes and expectations for his future actions.

Once her visitor left, Hildegund got out of her clothes and checked on her leg. It was, as she'd just told Faron, sore from all the walking, but it was only sore. There was no new bleeding, and no new redness. It just hurt.

After so much struggle, so much passion, so many revelations, so much disaster, and still in the midst of so much uncertainty, the last thing Heriwulf should have been thinking about was the only thing on his mind: the question of a chieftain for the clan. (He'd given up trying to find smaller names for 'clan', or even 'chieftain'. There simply weren't any.)

It wasn't just the mead that had Heriwulf's head feeling a little too heavy, like his neck couldn't quite keep it up.

Even before Radagast's question had been read out, slowly and carefully by Hildegund at the clan moot a few days earlier, Heriwulf had spent a lot of his time thinking about what he could contribute to the small clan. (What should he even call it? It wasn't a clan, but it wasn't like anything but a very small clan. Without a chieftain.

A glance to her side as she thought she heard the start of a complaint from her hound, and the walker saw that, indeed, his hackles were raising. Then, she also started to hear the padding of the paws behind them. Why are the wolves…? Oh no! I forgot about the birds! Fresh-kill scent, and moving! Not that her thoughts were quite that ordered and verbal, but such was their meaning. She whirled as she heard one settle in to spring, and met it with her spear, cursing herself inwardly for her carelessness.

Fang would be fine in a sennight or perhaps a fortnight; this much Heriwulf was sure of. He'd removed the clumsy but effective field sutures, cleaned the wound thoroughly, put in cleaner sutures, and inspected the hound for lasting muscle damage, finding none. Hounds are smart and sturdy and they know how to take care of their own hurts better than men. And their injuries were less likely, at least while the hound was young, to fill with angry heat, the sure sign of danger.

The folk of Bree-land rarely visit the Chetwood that much, and most of those who do, like the hunters and trappers that Hildegund meets during her wanderings and scouting journeys, don't pay much attention to the small lodge that the Woodmen had built. It was easy for Heriwulf to think that it was somehow hidden, but of course, it was in plain sight to anyone who happened to cross the woods from the west, or the marshes from the south, or the hills from the northeast.