a/n: nobody really commented anything about what i asked so we're doing what i want instead and currently i'm stuck between just saying to hell with it and bringing in tormund in the next two or three chapters or because now i kind of know where i want the story to go, i'm considering just biting the bullet and making edlynn fall in love with meera reed solely because i think there is no feasible way to actually make edlynn love any man currently in this book series and i love gay people. also, at the moment, somehow with my really bad following of this timeline, we're somewhere in clash of kings and season 3 because i just threw jaime in jail for the fun of it, but tormund doesn't appear until the next book but in the same season, so at this point in time, this entire thing is the literary equivalent of a dumpster fire. so, enjoy!

After three weeks without a bath, Edlynn scarcely believed she looked nothing less than a true child of the forest, caked in dirt and frog blood from head to toe, as though she would ribbit rather than speak if one asked for her name. Fairmarket was, to her knowledge, only a day's walk away, and yet, from the blisters forming on her feet to the leaves permanently matted into her hair, she hardly thought she could manage to make it that far. Instead, halfway to the day's edge mark, she sat down with her things and began to make a bow and arrow from scratch the way her and Arya made practice swords from fallen trees when they were young; there were ash trees near the forest's edge and, for arrow shafts, a whole copse full of beautifully straight hazel saplings. Edlynn took off all her clothes sans her underwear and dunked herself carefully in the water of the creek nearby, enjoying the feeling before working quickly to scrub the dirt off her that had accumulated in the last few days. Much to her surprise, in a way that had never happened before in her life spent in the cold recesses of the north, her skin had grown tanned in the long journey she had undertaken, her shoulders and cheeks sunburnt and blushed. It was pretty, she thought, idly counting the freckles on her arms as she sunned herself on a large rock, her feet still skimming the water's surface.

She soon draped on her pants once again, getting to work felling a young ash, cutting out six feet of unbranched stem with her reliable knife, stripping it of its bark and, paring by paring, shaving away the white wood just like she taught Arya to do years ago, until she had a stave of her own height, and as the hours passed on, she built a small, slow fire of green wood, where she planned to dry and harden it, fashioning arrows out of the thin sticks of hazel, whittling and drying them in the same fashion, tipped with sharp nails and carefully nocked. If she could find a stupid enough bird, she could have dinner on top of plenty of feathers for the shafts; she already had an assortment of berries and wild herbs and vegetables she had found that she recognised in her bag– the seeds from the ash tree she had felled, an odd salad of chickweed, dandelion, and hawthorn leaves, wild onions, and a small pocket full of berries she was familiar with– so Edlynn safely assumed she could kill a bird with a stone of some kind instead of wasting an arrow, which is what she then proceeded to do. Shirtless, rolling the cuffs of her pants up further, sitting on the large rock, she picked a couple of flat stones out, put them on her lap, and began to chisel away at them to make arrowheads.

Of course, she had let her guard down, like a fool, but she hardly thought twice about it before coming to the conclusion that, if she did get kidnapped, it would be a lovely time to get a ride to Fairmarket instead of having to walk all the way there on her blisters. She almost started laughing at the thought before she thought better of it; there was really nothing particularly funny about it, being kidnapped, because the reality of it for her revolved around rape, assault, murder, or robbery, none of which she was prepared to handle in any way, nor did she think there was a way to actually prepare herself to begin with, even if she wasn't the most vigilant person in the world. But, still, she began humming to herself as she did the work she most enjoyed, that which required skill and patience in spades– a sweet little song she had played on the harp once, a love song called Oh, Lay My Sweet Lass Down in the Grass, one of the few she enjoyed playing that used to delight Sansa when she was young.

As she was sitting on the rock, sunshine sinking into her face, Edlynn realised she would miss what they called civilized life, if only for her family whose fate she did not know; though there was something about sunlight that made things feel less horrible, it was still a horrible thought to stumble across blindly, realising that there was a chance she would never see any of them ever again, not Arya or Sansa, no Jon or Robb, neither Bran nor Rickon… She could handle never seeing her father again, for he was the one who got her into this mess to begin with, and her mother had always been hurtful with her words towards her and Arya, so there was no concern for either of them in that aspect, but she would always miss her siblings, the people she learned from so intently and the people she taught in return. And it was scary, to have little to no knowledge of what was occurring in the outside world she was so far away from, in search of her home she sought out desperately. She was lost, in a way, alone and away from the war, and her soul felt like a lost star or a lost boat, adrift at sea, never-endingly floating on, waiting for itself to beach onto land.

She was tired. At her very core, despite her happiness at doing her activities she had always enjoyed, she was desperately tired. Above all, she missed her bed at the castle, the isolation she experienced that was, in itself, a form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings… Edlynn figured this was a side effect of being accustomed to things and kept beating away at the rocks, cutting a sizable arrowhead that she shoved into her pocket. Abruptly, she decided to pick her things up, smother the fire, slide on her dirty shirt again, and leave the area swiftly, heading towards the next curve in the Red Fork to look for a place to stay for the night.

Which, in itself, was a problem. She had only a little gold in her bag, so an inn was almost entirely out of the question, and stranger's kindness only can go so far, but she was tired and her feet hurt from almost ten days walking, so she kept walking, almost bursted into tears when she felt a blister pop, and finally, eventually, came upon a village of smallfolk.

A man was the only person she saw immediately outside who wasn't staring at her, so she approached him carefully in the same manner one does an animal, stepping gently down a hill to face the man holding a bundle of wheat over his shoulder.

"Are you a woods witch?" the peasant man asked almost immediately in a tone that suggested he was merely curious, and Edlynn shrugged, palming the arrowhead in her pocket, frowning up at him.

"I'm no witch," she said quietly, almost dreamily, biting her lip. "Just a girl… Nothing more."

"Nothing less," he intonated, smiling softly.

"Who are you?" she asked, looking around the man's shoulder. His modest house– more so a hut, really– sat plainly in the grass near the small creek cut from the river Green Fork, a field of wheat cut into the grasses, with a small pigpen behind it where a very small girl giggled, sat upon the pig that galloped gleefully around. It reminded her so vividly of an incident Arya had when she was a young girl when Robb had thrusted her onto his back and began howling and running around as Theon used them for target practice and caught Arya on a tree by the seat of her pants onto a tree by his arrow. Edlynn had laughed and laughed for hours afterwards until Robb did just the same and paraded his twin around the lawn as Theon made ugly cackling noises and shot an apple off Edlynn's head.

"My name's Olyver," he said, carefully observing her face. She was tall, but he somehow managed to make her feel small. "Who're you?"

She thought about it. She could lie, there was no hurt in doing that. She could tell him her name was Jeyne Poole and he wouldn't know anything, not who she really was, where she was from, where she had come from, but she couldn't muster up the courage to do it. He was a farmer with a young girl and no wife and he assumed that she was a woods witch of all things; she couldn't possibly lie to such an innocent person. The smallfolk were all innocent, when it came down to it; it was the noble people who were fighting over a throne that she worried about.

Finally, she whispered, "Edlynn… My name is Edlynn."

"That's a pretty name," he said, smiling dumbly again. He pointed to the girl who had, now, fallen off the pig, smearing her entire body with mud and dung. "That's Ginger."

"Is she your daughter?"

Olyver nodded sadly, biting his lip. "Aye. Her mother died giving birth to her. Bless her heart."

A silence lulled over them and Edlynn found herself intently watching Ginger in the pigpen, her heart aching. She hoped more than anything that the girl would stay feral and gangly and muddy for the rest of her life if she so chose to be. She didn't want anything in her to change at all, just so she could have a taste of what it was like to live in a man's world. Abruptly, Olyver rocked on the balls of his feet, staring off over her shoulder in the same way she was.

"Where are you going off to?"

That was a heavy question. Where indeed? She had little idea. So, vaguely, she shrugged.

"Kingsroad," she said calmly. From there, it was a straight shot through the Neck to Winterfell.

"And from there, where are you going?"

She shrugged again. Though Winterfell had been the first thing to pop into her mind, she didn't want to go there when there was nothing left of it but ghosts and her younger brothers, maybe her disapproving mother with her permanent scowl, maybe the godswood if it hadn't been burnt to the ground yet… So, very simply, she said, "North."

After another beat of silence, he asked, "Do you want to stay the night here?"

"If you'd let me. I can help around the house, if you would like," she offered meagerly, feeling as though she looked as pathetic as she felt.

"Oh, as long as you clean Ginny up and make dinner for us all, I don't see any need to," Olyver assured her. "As long as you promise me I'm not making a grave mistake here, you're free to stay with us. If Ginny likes you, I'd offer you to stay for a longer spell if you'd like."

She nodded, and went to the pigpen to retrieve Ginger from the back; she dragged the little girl inside and went outside to get water for a bath. After Edlynn scrubbed the mud off her, she introduced herself and began to bond with the little crazy girl whose favourite pass-times were fishing and digging holes in the grass to bury fun things for later, and together, she forced Ginger to help her make a dinner of a rudimentary soup and a hot loaf of bread with butter. Edlynn, by now, assumed her language to express love was through food; she made everything with care and kind instruction to the little girl as though she were her mother instead, and made her set the table neatly so her father, who seemed to work very, very hard for both of them, could have a nice dinner waiting for him. Idly, Edlynn thought, in a better world where Jaime wasn't a pig and she didn't resent him deeply, she could have had a happy domestic life in some ways if he let her be her own person in the way that Olyver, having only known Edlynn for the better half of three hours, did not care at all what she did as long as she didn't have ill intent.

They ate, she slept on a cot in Ginger's small bedroom, and in the morning, Olyver helped her dress her broken blisters, gave her the promise that she could always stay with them if she wanted in the future, and let her go on her way with the loaf of bread she had made the night before and a water skin. And every time Edlynn remembered this incident, she wanted to cry so desperately; she didn't know if either of them were still alive, but it made her weep at the thought of having a loving, gentle husband who let her do as she pleased and a rambunctious daughter who loved playing with pigs more than learning how to recite pleasantries to the court. But, as it seemed, she could never have that, not unless Jaime magically escaped the riverlands and now wanted to be kind to her and ask first if she wanted to have a baby before planting one anyways.

"Ginny," Edlynn murmured quietly, bending over at the waist to be at eye level. "There's a creek half a day's walk down from here westward, teeming with fish. I think you and your papa might have a delightful time there one day, you know?"

And she nodded like she did, and Edlynn smiled because she knew a lot more than she realised, and she left soon after. Once she got to Fairmarket, the thought wouldn't leave her mind. She slept there for a day at an inn she could afford that was dingy and dirty, but comfortable nonetheless, and that was the night her dreams began again. Before, they had been infrequent and somewhat prophetic to the point Edlynn thought they must be premonitions that arose only when something heinous could happen unless she made the conscious choice to change her unconscious visions; now, after this image of Ginny, fishing and running through the mud, something within her had shifted, and as nights passed with increasingly vague yet intense dreams, Edlynn left for the Kingsroad as promised, though she stayed away from the main track out of caution and kept to herself, quiet and doing nothing more but walking and sleeping in the hollows of trees or the branches.

Eventually, she kept north, towards the familiar bogs of the Neck. In her dreams, every night for the last week, an ephemeral nymph paints the sky with her slender fingers, reaching timidly towards Edlynn as she sent the dewdrops to slumber; then, the dew forms a mist, and they walked slowly, wrapped in a tender embrace, her head on Edlynn's chest, through the curtain of pearls framing a tranquil landscape, sunlight cutting through the brush of trees crowning them ahead, making everything around them shimmer and falter before her very eyes. Mouth to mouth, she kissed the nymph like she had done it a million times, soft and delicate and familiar, and she tastes of mint and blackberries, and eventually, she's devoured by insects, yet the ghost of her still haunts the swamp through the light, the glow, the heart borne of violence… And something very ancient within Edlynn, full of ghosts and history, welled up, and she knew that the place she saw in her dreams, a forest fenn, was where she needed to go, whether that was forever or only for a short time until the Gods decided she was unworthy of the nymph's touch.

So, she continued through the Neck, towards the swamps where she had once stumbled through the water and lathered mud on her sister's rashes on the way to King's Landing what felt like years ago. But now, Edlynn was alone, going by foot and licking her own wounds, kissing the image of the nymph's face in the pond, waving her nude arms at the little crannog villages going by, learning the last bright routes as the survivor of something inhospitable enough that the desolate swamps ruled by the crannogmen were seeming more and more appealing. According to legend, the crannogmen were tiny people who voraciously ate frogs and dipped their arrows and rudimentary blades in poison, known for being talented in hunting and fighting, whom Edlynn had read about a number of times throughout the years and thought, in her best interests, as they were still pledged to House Stark, they would allow her to build a home in the comfort of a harsh, unforgiving terrain as long as she kept her nose out of any other house's business. Though it would take six days at the very least to get to Moat Cailin, where House Reed sat, it was her best bet at the moment; maybe if she played it right, she could enlist the help of his men to help her build something lovely from scratch, look over any human oversights and leave without another word so she could learn to live on her own, without anyone, without the tempestuous goddess that continued to haunt her mind, her dreams, the forest fenns, the shadows in the corner of her eyes…

That night, when she slept, Edlynn listened to her voice for the first time. Why do you keep your tenderness to yourself? she asked quietly in a dreamy, yet strangely happy voice. It must be terribly lonely being misguided. It's horrible you have had to deal with the men who violently breed but it's no use making yourself suffer over it. Don't eat your words– tell them to me. I will always listen…