A/N: March 10, 2015: Minor edits (Sigrid and Alvor now speak with their in-game drawl).
Part I: A Quiet Life
the blacksmith's wife/riverwood
[arrival]
Alvor dropped his hammer with a sudden clang, and Sigrid knew something was wrong.
The sun was high in the sky. Sigrid had taken Alvor his midday meal an hour ago; they were both creatures of habit now, and she had expected hear the steady pounding of his hammer against the anvil until the sun began to dip behind the trees. Instead she heard a clatter and a sharp, sudden oath. She stopped sweeping. Alvor's tread was always heavy, but rarely hurried; the hard cadence of his steps sent her to the door, broom forgotten against the table.
The door swung inward. Alvor's ruddy face was grim, and over his shoulder was an effigy of mud and matted here. There was a reek, like blood and charred skeever meat, like sweat and mud and a town in ashes.
"Hot water. Clean linens. Where's Dorthe?" Sigrid gaped. Alvor craned his head to bellow over his shoulder. "Dorthe!" Behind him was another traveler, similarly filthy and stinking of a charnel house. She didn't recognize him until he spoke.
"Aunt Sigrid," he said, and with a start she recognized the brown doe-eyes of her nephew.
The next few minutes were a blur. Hadvar sat gingerly on a wooden bench, favouring his right leg. Sigrid dumped half a barrel's worth of water into the cauldron, and stoked the fire until it roared; Alvor set his burden down gently in their bed, and Sigrid could not stop the reflexive wince at the sight of her clean sheets mottling beneath the filthy, if pitiful, creature.
Sigrid tended to her nephew first – or tried to. Perhaps it was small of her, to leave their gravely injured guest for her nephew, but -
Sigrid was a family-woman. She knew where her loyalties lay.
And yet Hadvar had always been a soft-hearted boy – too soft for the Legion, she'd said, over and over – and he pleaded his case with heart, if not eloquence.
"She saved my life," he said, again, and this was the fifth time he'd said so. It was like a litany now, and Sigrid finally won the argument by slapping their last potion into his hands and forcefully curling his fingers around it.
"Clean tha' leg first." Sigrid put down a metal bowl – one of her largest, a fine gift from Alvor during the first year of their marriage – and placed strips of linen onto a tray. "By Kynareth, ye've got rocks in yer knee -" and it was true. There were pebbles embedded into his knee in a large swath that spoke its path plainly: a hard fall, then a skid on loose pebbles and rocks – and it was obvious that he could not clean the wound himself. Not properly, at any rate.
A shadow fell over them. Alvor knelt before his nephew, vegetable brush in hand. "I'll see to Hadvar." He turned to Dorthe, hovering in the doorway. "Get Camilla. We'll be needing some potions too." The girl left; Sigrid took a basin of hot water and stooped over the bed.
She would have never guessed that this was a woman. Not if Hadvar hadn't said so. She reeked of blood and ash, was covered in filth – her hair was a matted skeever's nest of black, straggly locks, and there was wound about half her face what appeared to be the remains of a filthy rag. Her clothes were threadbare and so ill-fitting that it was a wonder she was not swallowed whole. It was obvious, even to her inexpert eyes, that the fabric would have to be cut away. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, her skin hot with fever.
Sigrid did not think she would survive the night. She wondered if they ought to even bother with potions, but no – she knew her husband. Hadvar owed the girl his life – or so he had claimed – and so Alvor would repay her in kind. It would not matter to Alvor that Dorthe was outgrowing her clothes at a rate that rivaled the weeds (Hadvar's old clothes will fit her, he'd say, nevermind a girl needed skirts, not breeches), or that a sudden, wintry chill had sent their garden greens to shrivel back into the soil; Alvor's honour would have the final say.
Sigrid loved her husband. But sometimes, she wanted to hit him over the head with the broom.
She was in the middle of wetting the rag wound around the girl's head, coaxing the blood-soaked garment from her skin, when Camilla arrived with a small satchel of potions. Dorthe peeked at them from the doorway until Alvor took her by the hand and led her out; the door swung shut and Sigrid could hear voices on the porch, though she could not make out the words.
"Sigrid." Camilla nodded her greeting, eyes serious as she examined their patient.
The imperial girl had a steady hand, Sigrid had to give her that. The cloth fell away, and they both gagged at the putrid smell that rose from the naked wounds. Hadvar limped to them from his seat.
"Is it bad? Will she make it" Nay. Sigrid kept her peace. She wasn't cruel, though the likely outcome was obvious even to her. Camilla took a shallow breath through her mouth, face averted.
"She needs a priest."
"We don't have a priest." Hadvar's eyes glittered like a doe's in the lamplight. It gave him a mournful, pleading look; when he'd been younger, that look had put a sweetroll from every kitchen in Riverwood straight into his sticky little hands...But no, Hadvar was a young man now, a Legionnaire with a limp; Sigrid hoped the wound would not cripple him.
Camilla rolled up her sleeves. "I can try. But Hadvar -" She glanced at his pleading expression, face shuttered as she looked away - "We'll need to drain this first."
It was a long, hard night.
Later, Sigrid slept in a chair while her daughter and her husband lay on the floor. They did not have enough furs, so they used hay from Delphine's inn, stuffing the fistfuls of the thick, long grass beneath their cloaks to use as a make-shift bed. Dorthe had been delighted - "Camping indoors! Frodnar will beso jealous!" - because she was a small child who did not know any better, who did not understand that sickness sometimes led to death.
Hadvar slept backwards in Dorthe's bed, bad leg propped up on the headboard. In Sigrid's marriage bed lay the ruin of a woman whose life teetered on a knife's edge; Sigrid knew she lived by the occasional whimper, though she lay still as the ancient stones. Sigrid's vigil would last all night, though Alvor had protested, had tried to persuade her into shifts.
Sigrid had refused, of course. Smithing was dangerous in the best of times, and she would not abide the thought of him hammering away after a restless night with too much stress and too little sleep. She would watch over this sad, dying creature alone.
In the end, the potions had come cheaply enough. Considering. Lucan had come to fetch Camilla not long after dark, citing her his greatest treasure; Sigrid had scoffed inwardly, knowing full well that he had come to settle the price of this strangers life, bought with potions and spells. Alvor had an order of two sets of horseshoes from Lucan last week. That and a promise of a new axe and a replacement lock had secured three precious potions.
There had been an impasse on the spells.
"Restoration has a price," he'd said, and like all Imperials it was gold and barter that ran through his veins, "and my sister is exhausted." Behind him, the girl had crumpled her face into a frown.
"Well those were my spells," she'd said, with a discreet kick at his ankle, "and I'll charge what I like. One of your pies this Sundas would do nicely, I think." The girl had winked at her from behind her brother's back. She had been too tired to wink back.
The stranger whimpered in her sleep. Sigrid wetted her dry, cracked lips with a damp cloth, then back down. It was dark inside the house, and the single, guttering candle light did little to banish the shadows that creep along the edges of her vision; her eyelids slid shut as her head began to droop.
There was a soft, rustling sound. Sigrid felt a familiar pair of arms lift her from the chair as easily as though she were a child; she tried to speak but could only mumble out vague, nonsensical syllables, eyelids twitching as she tried to force herself awake.
"Shhhh. Sleep, Sigrid. I'll watch 'er fer a while." Alvor's voice was a soft rumble in his chest.
There is a feather-soft brush of warm, chapped lips across her brow; Sigrid slept.
