Aeshaeidr

{the sequel to "Of Confessions"}

Aeshaeidr followed the Oathlord into the mead-hall that had become his seat of power in recent weeks. With the high ceilings and openness of the main hall, the echo of their footsteps across the wooden floors only echoed back louder to her ears.

I should see my honor spent, as readily and as redly as blood. 

“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.

She turns the spearhead thrice over in her hand as though it is a ritual, the sleek metal cold on her fingertips. Her hands are warm and slick with sweat, heated by the ire that still burns warm in her breast. Her shoulders heave in sharp exhale as her thoughts mire and simmer on the outcome of the trial - or the excuse of a trial that it was. Aeshaeidr gently rubs her thumb along the slight curvature of the iron.

He who sleeps with a spear by his bed is a fool every night but one. 

Two children stand shoulder to shoulder, seemingly small in the towering heights of the halls of the home in which they abide, and made even more so by the pacing of the man before them. Dark skies are revealed through windows cracked shut, and the long hall is lit by many hearths and candles for some warmth and light.

Aeshaeidr stirs from her sleep with a gasp and a shiver, the winter cold of Dunland seeping in through her tent and forcing her to rouse. She ushers herself out of the tent with a grunt, pulling her fur cloak tighter over her shoulders. The cold is unnatural; it is unlike the cold of home, the cold of Wildermore. This is frigid with fear, of the uncertainty in where she is and what she is doing.