B is for Broken

Kathil slips into the village at sunset, Lorn at her heels. There's a wolf pack about, and she doesn't feel like staying up through the night to defend the two of them from it. There's a barn on a farm at the edge of town. Barns often have haylofts, and haylofts mean sleeping warm for once.

This one doesn't, but it does have an empty stall between a mule and a cow, and she scuttles for it. It'll do, it'll do. She wraps herself in her blanket, setting her back against a dusty barrel, as Lorn settles down beside her with a great canine sigh. "We'll eat tomorrow," she promises him. The mule hangs its head over the stall wall and blows suspicious bubbles from its nose at the two of them.

And it's fine.

Until it's not.

She wakes with a start as Lorn growls and there's a child with a lantern staring at them, eyes saucer-sized in his thin face. She stares back. She knows what the boy sees—tangled and filthy hair that might once have been white, a tattered blanket, a ribby dog with loose skin. Her face a mud-stained blade in the lamplight. Maybe the two of them stink, too.

The glorious Hero of Ferelden. An apostate, sleeping in barns, never asking permission.

The boy screams, and runs. Kathil shoves herself to her feet, Lorn doing likewise. They hitch themselves out of the barn before the boy's screaming wakes any adults. "Bad luck, old man," she mutters to Lorn as the two of them slip down the wheel-rutted road and away from the village. "Tomorrow will be better."

Except that it never is.