[Content Note: Mention of blood, animal-related injury.]
“Can I borrow a bale of straw?”
Nauraa’s request at the Orennsons’ family breakfast, a noisy affair that she found she increasingly enjoyed in spite of herself, is only barely strange enough to warrant a raised eyebrow.
“I mean, yeah, ‘course you can, but what’re ya gonna do with’t?”
“I am going to stab it.”
In retrospect, there was probably a better way she could have put that to a family of respectable people and small children, but the point, however blunt, stands.
“Well’n that case, better it than me!” Orenn begins with a snort. He looks as though he is going to ask something else, but one of the younger boys begins trying to get the baby to throw food at the ceiling and the chaos resumes uninterrupted.
She supposes she could ask Orenn for help in putting it all together, but she does not want to. It is safe to talk to strangers at the inn, people who have busy lives and already care for others and for whom she is just an odd passer-by who has no lasting impression to leave. She enjoys the conversations, but there is no danger of anything else, and the other half of the people are so very uncouth she does not think anything could possibly make her like them. Orenn, though…if she lets him help he will sit there and be kind and strong and a good singer, and she will like him far too much to leave when the time comes.
No, better not to risk that.
And so Nauraa finds herself wielding a hammer against some scrap wood to make the frame of a roughly man-sized dummy, the rest of its body composed of a feed sack and a rather garish outfit made of extra fabric. It leans a bit to one side when she finally manages to get it upright, but without pulling the whole thing to pieces again it will have to do, and it does not have to be symmetrical for her to stab it.
That she does, practicing with different ways of holding her brother’s knife, until she is interrupted by a dog barking. She does not have a dog, and there are no neighbors in sight, and so she grabs the largest stick she can find from the yard, sheathes the knife, and sets off through the trees in the direction of the sound.
The dog has no collar, but it is a great big wolf-like thing with a rabbit struggling in its mouth – some farmer’s mutt that had gotten out, maybe, but where it came from matters less than the fact that it is not particularly friendly. The beast pauses as it senses her, and its prey gives a heroic effort to throw itself to the ground.
“Shoo! Get!”
That does not work.
The dog lunges, its jaw snapping around the girl’s calf and knocking her flat to the ground, and she jerks her leg as though that would do any good to get away from the sudden pain. She may as well have been the rabbit wiggling around in its mouth.
‘I think my first instinct is to run away.’
The look on that woman’s face had been very strange as they spoke about harming in self-defense, as though she had simply gotten used to the same things that Nauraa could barely think about without being queasy.
‘Perhaps the second instinct, then.’
She reaches for the curved knife at her belt and stabs upward once, twice, blindly, and feels the dog’s jaw release in a whimper of pain. The girl staggers to her feet, knife clutched in one shaking hand as the beast tucks its tail between its legs and runs off into the forest.
The poor rabbit is, to her amazement, still alive, though one leg drags useless and broken where it had struggled to wrench itself from the dog’s mouth. It might only be adrenaline keeping it alive, since the little things can die of any great shock, but its ears swivel as she talks to it in a low voice.
She limps back to the house, first settling her charge in a makeshift nest of blankets so she can look at its leg. It is pure white, she realizes, with the pinkish eyes that point to this being unnatural for a creature in a land of green and brown. When she was only very young herself, there had been a girl born in another village some way north with the same condition, unnaturally pale with hair as white as bleached bone or new snow. Frost-touched, the superstitious old women had called her, and they had said that though she was half-blind, she could see omens and spirits, and brought good luck to her tribe.
As it was, no good-luck charm or positive omen could change the row of dog-bite holes in the muscled part of Nauraa’s calf. The sheer panic of before has now given way to the fact that the wound hurts, and there is quite a lot of blood when she tries to clean it off – a good deal of it hers, and some of it not. She cannot remember whether her mother had stitched such wounds or not – surely not, since they are deeper than they are wide. She will keep it clean, and go to the city in the morning and try to find a healer, if she could get there without Orenn noticing and throwing a fit that she was hurt.
“But what do you mean?” she asks of the rabbit later that night, laying on her stomach on the bed to make sure it is eating while it regards her with those odd pink eyes. What was it the man with the hat had said?
‘If it is something you feel like you need to do…’
But what does needing to do something feel like? And what if you needed to do something that was not possible? The signet-ring feels like a weight around her neck now, a thread that is close to unraveling if she tugs at it too hard.
“Am I supposed to ask you a question? Make a wish? I wish you would send me someone who will either help me go to Gondor or take me home. One or the other.”
She rolls over to stare at the ceiling.
The rabbit, since it is a rabbit, does not answer.
