Summer was passing with an alarming swiftness. Already, the light felt different in the afternoons. She found herself gazing at the sky in pensive wonder, stuck in place like a carved statue of old, with increasing frequency. The heat would not relent for some weeks yet, and her temples were sticky-damp well before noon each day, as she went about her errands. But she could feel autumn heralding its own approach when the sun kissed the western horizon a little sooner each evening, and the crickets took up their song in the afternoon, and did not wait anymore until the cool of nightfall.
The worry was like an illness. It was always with her. No matter how bright the day, how quiet the village, how safe and well she was...it would not relent.
Equally troubling were the inevitable thoughts and impulses that followed the anxiety. A dreadful, tense rage. Tightened muscles and a clenched jaw. The ferocity of the woman who had charged headfirst at a warg with a fiery pike in her hands. Only this terrible fury had nowhere to go. No way to be released. She would tremble and pant and wait for the feeling to pass, and despised every second of it.
Then would come despair. Deep-seated convictions of futility, helplessness. At times, she would weep.
As the weeks plodded by, she came to understand that she needed to let go of it all. At least, in some measure. She could not cling with both hands and all her might to the frenzied worry over his fate. It would kill her in the end. She was already too acquainted with grief, sorrow, and despondence. He was part of her - part of her story, her life, her fate - and always would be. But she needed to let go. The Fate that she believed in would either see his path entwine with hers again, or it would not. She could not force him to appear and be safe and well simply by the force of her own worrying and yearning. Let him go.
The feeling of being alien, being displaced, not belonging...grew steadily. She wasn't Breeish, and never had been. Bree had become home when she had people there to love, for it was love that made any place "home". Now, once again, she was without it. Floating through the world, unrooted and solitary. The reserved, quiet foreigner, passing along the streets like a golden-haired shade. Her head bowed with the weight of loneliness and worry.
Bree had become intolerable to her. Summer seemed to have called away every soul she deemed a friend. Even the ubiquitous Cesistya had traveled away with friends of her own. Brynleigh had given her notice to Butterbur and left strict instructions that he should remember their conversation in case anyone came from the man’s company to inquire after her whereabouts.
She spoke to the colt, though she did not know how much he might interpret from her words, her tone, her touches. She could not drag him down long, uncertain roads behind Jack. The thought that, if trouble befell her, he might be harmed, or lost, or worst of all…taken and used to find or harm his master, had set her decision in stone. She paid Butterbur a high price to give the colt the best care any hostler of Bree could provide to him, for as long as possible. When she took Jack from his stall, she picked up the old white hen, who clucked sleepily and irritably, and set her in the colt’s enclosure.
Whether the rugged-faced and grimly kind wanderer would find her again, and accompany her journey, was unknown. She would leave that to Fate, too. The messenger said that dangerous men were looking for her, and there was no sense nor reason in lingering further. It was time to seek the next portion of her destiny, whatever it might entail. Ryheric would remain, as he always did, a shadow at the edge of her vision. Always there, even as she tried to turn her eyes to a new path.
