Away, Fine Lad
By PippinRohan, West Emnet
Year 3018, February ("Astron") 25 (Appendix B: "The Company pass the Argonath and camp at Parth Galen. First Battle of the Fords of Isen; Theodred son of Theoden slain")
Chapter One: Messenger
The wind was bitter cold as it whipped through the grass to where the youth sat, but he did not notice as he concentrated on the scrap of paper that he held carefully in one hand. In the other hand he held the piece of charcoal and let it move across the paper. His hunched shoulders provided enough shelter for the paper against the wind, but even so, it crinkled and its corners waved every few moments. Oh, if only he could go inside where surely there was a fire burning in the hearth. But once inside, he knew he would not be able to do this right.
The slight tremor of the earth near where his elbow leaned into the ground caused him to turn his head upwards. The mare before him was beginning to dance in a tight circle, practically begging him to hurry up. He hoped the mare would be still for a little while longer. Then he would at least be able to finish drawing her flank. After that, if she moved, it would not be such a bother. As if the mare had read his mind, she snorted air that turned to white steam in the crisp twilight, but did not move, other than flicking her tail several times.
As his charcoal scratched across the last part of his preliminary drawing, he rubbed at it with his thumb to begin showing the rough pattern of her shaggy winter coat. Yes, she was a good creature, not the prettiest by breeding standards, but nice in her own way, and she did her work as well as any other horse. Stomping her foot, she seemed to insist that he finish soon, and he nodded amiably as if to tell her that he was almost done, and that as long as she stayed within his sight, she was free to move about now. There, her charcoal coat was beginning to resemble her, and with that he moved on to define a small swirling of the hairs. He bent his head down and tightened his grip on the charcoal, not minding the black smudges that were beginning to travel all the way above his wrist.
A face peered up at him above his page as if it had been born out of magic. For a split second, he was startled, and then his surprise switched to just being cross at himself for being surprised in the first place. He believed his younger sister took a secret delight in appearing that way when he wasn't paying attention to his surroundings, and lately it had become increasingly vexing. Why couldn't she just walk up behind him and make herself known instead of walking on her toes without making a sound. It was almost as if she were trying to be as quiet as those elves they knew existed somewhere beyond the boundaries of Rohan. It just wasn't fair that she could sneak around him all the time and get so much fun out of it.
She grinned, her blonde hair flying in nearly four directions at once in the gusts of wind that tugged at it. One front tooth was missing, and he knew from all the time she spent wiggling the other that the second was due to fall out soon as well. She pointed to the drawing, her small hand grabbing for it so quickly that he barely had time to hold it away from her. No, she couldn't have it, she'd smear it up! He shook his head wildly.
She danced around his back and again reached for the paper, but again he saved it from her grasp. Exasperated, she finally flopped down beside him in the grass and pointed to the mare who had moved several feet further away when the girl had started jumping about like a grasshopper.
When he affirmed that it was of the horse, she smiled again. While carefully keeping her fingers away from the drawing and making it extra clear that she wasn't going to touch it, she leaned over his shoulder to where he had started to work on it again. It really did look like Hwesta, right down to the way the horse would position her ears when she was deigning to allow someone to sketch her. If she didn't know better, Brytta would say the horse carried noble blood somewhere in her line that made her act regal whenever someone was paying special attention to her. But the mare's appearance was enough to dissuade any Rohirrim from even suggesting aloud that the mare came from high bloodlines. She was a farm horse, and while she was a good one, that was certainly all she would ever be. A war horse she certainly was not!
"Brytta!" the call sounded over the grass, and the girl reluctantly stopped watching her brother stroke the charcoal down Hwesta's smudgy foreleg. "Did you find Fastred?" her mother added, and instantly the girl remembered with chagrin the reason she had gone across the field in the first place. She tugged at Fastred's sleeve, and when he turned his face towards her, she pointed towards the house.
"Modor," she explained when she caught his eye, and she could see the disappointment there. She could tell he had been engulfed in the drawing, and she knew he'd have to wait until another day to finish it properly, since the sky was already turning a the same color as his charcoal, except for the few stars that showed through the darkness. 'Sort of like where the paper shows through real pale where he hasn't smudged the charcoal all the way over it,' Brytta thought to herself as she walked ahead of her brother towards the house. While the wind still played with her hair and skirt, she almost laughed at the idea that maybe the sky was one big piece of paper that went all over everything at night, and someone had just scribbled all over it with charcoal, and the stars were the parts of the paper that hadn't gotten completely covered with black. She made a note to herself to try to explain this theory to Fastred, although exactly how she would was going to would take a bit more thought. It was a silly idea after all, one he probably wouldn't appreciate anyway. Besides, it was much nicer keeping the silly ideas to oneself to think about while knowing no one else would ever be thinking about the same thought. 'Much nicer indeed,' she thought, and decided not to try to explain to Fastred about her nonsense after all.
When the two reached the front door, Brynne was waiting for them. She turned first to the girl who shifted on both feet and looked past her mother through the open doorway to the warm hearth inside and the kettle of something – a sort of soup, surely – that sat near it. Brytta could practically feel the flames melting away the cold that was eating her ears. And the soup, oh, she could almost taste it already.
"I asked you a question," came her mother's voice in her direction, and she turned her eyes up. She knew she had been preoccupied and hadn't been listening, and could only hope it wouldn't delay the soup any longer than was necessary. Fastred, now finished lamenting that he could not finish his sketch that evening, glared at her. He was shivering too.
"What, modor?" she asked.
"How long did it take you to forget that I asked you to fetch your brother for me?"
Brytta dropped her gaze to inspect her feet and the wood boards of the floor that made up the small covered porch of their home. Even by averting her eyes, however, she knew her mother was raising one eyebrow and waiting for her answer. She didn't need to turn around to know Fastred was becoming more and more impatient with her as well.
"A long time," she said, but the wind was too loud, and so she was forced to repeat herself. "Very long. I mean, I'm sorry, I forgot, and he was drawing and I wanted to see because it was so good!" Her words bubbled out before she could stop them. "He was drawing Hwesta. She looks really pretty," she explained.
At this, Brynne gave a short bark of laughter despite herself. "Hwesta looked pretty? Fastred must have been imagining more than actually drawing her then."
"No, it looked like her, really! Look at it! Hwesta's not that ugly." Brytta smiled, hoping that by leading her mother away from the subject of why she had forgotten to fetch her brother so he could do his chores, that they could go inside and be warm. The fire looked so good. She closed her eyes and tried to feel the fire even though she wasn't near it, hoping that if Fastred could imagine Hwesta being that pretty looking that she could imagine fire and be warm because of thinking about it hard enough.
It didn't work.
Brynne reached a hand towards Fastred as a request to see his sketch. Pulling the wrinkled paper from his trouser pocket, he relinquished it. His mother squinted at the drawing in the twilight, but finally stepped backwards over the thresh-hold so the firelight could aid her in seeing it. After staring at it for several seconds and taking in the detail her son had applied to his artwork, she turned her eyes back to Fastred and Brytta, a smile playing on her lips.
"There's soup in the kettle, so get the dirt and charcoal off your hands – Fastred!" she took his wrist and pulled him to a stop as he followed his sister into the room towards the bucket of water that sat near the hearth as well. "You coat, you've gotten charcoal over the sleeves of it. And you didn't wear your hat outside!" she pointed to the sleeves of his coat and to his glowing red ears as she spoke, then tousled his hair where his hat should have been. "Wash," she said, pointedly tugging the edge of his sleeves, then rubbed at his head again and exclaimed half-heartedly, "and hat".
Fastred looked back up at her, then to the peg by the door where his hat hung, then back to his mother, and nodded. Next time he would remember.
When both children had sufficiently scrubbed as much of the dirt from their fingernails that she could manager to convince them to get off and when they had insisted that the rest was just skin, they both dug into the bowls of soup. Fastred rubbed at one ear that was still pink from the cold, and Brytta giggled when he sneezed at the same time he had a mouth full of soup, causing him to clamp a hand over his mouth while his face turned a darker shade of crimson. However, her giggling stopped when she did the same halfway through her own bowl of soup. Turning her head, she saw her brother had not even noticed. For a moment, she wished he had giggled like she had when he had sneezed – it was sort of funny, after all. But then, she thought, it really was nice when she didn't get picked on for the same things she did to him. But no, he was absorbed in his soup and, as she thought was highly likely, thinking about how to draw Hwesta's other foreleg just right. To herself, Brytta would have liked to see him draw some flowers for the horse to wear around her neck, but he might not like that as it was a little bit too much like something a girl would draw. Still, he could draw very enchanting little flowers when he felt like it, and he hadn't drawn any since Thri-milce, and she wanted to see flowers again. It had been so long since she had seen flowers.
On an impulse, she reached for a sheet of paper from the small stack that lay by the bottle of soot ink on the shelf. With the tip of the paper, she reached and let it tickle the part of Fastred's neck that was not covered by his shirt collar. He jumped, and Brytta could not keep her giggle entirely muffled. Fastred scowled when he saw her face, and instantly she stopped, and before she lost his attention again she pushed the paper towards him. When he looked at her with a blank question in his eyes, she pulled the paper back and opened her palm for the charcoal. After he obliged and handed over his instrument, she carefully drew her best imitation of a flower; a small dot with three oval petals and a leafy stem that tilted slightly on the page. She pushed her work back to him, he understood, and smiled. Despite the fact that he had not appreciated being laughed at because of his sneezing – it was so cold out, and he really should have remembered his hat, his ears were still all numb - he did like it that he could do something better than his little sister could. It was even better that she openly acknowledged it and was always asking him to draw her something.
Brynne watched as Fastred bent his head over the paper, and silently hoped that they would use the pieces they had to their fullest potential. While it was inexpensive enough and could be easily bartered for, no one wanted to go out in this weather. No one, that is, except her son, who had gone and sat outside in it for thirty minutes to draw a horse. And it wasn't even a well-bred horse, not one of the horses famous to Rohan, and certainly not one of the mearas. She chuckled at the thought, then sobered. The horse was ugly, and stubborn on top of it, but somehow Fastred had managed to even convince her for several seconds that the horse was beautiful. She didn't know what it was about the sketch, was it the eyes he had given the mare? She wished she could look at it again, for when she had first seen the sketch, it was almost as if Hwesta was speaking to her from the page, or at least whickering. She wondered briefly if a little magic were involved, but dismissed the thought and replaced it with the decision that it was simply talent combined with imagination.
"Look at the flowers he drew for me!" Brytta said as she skidded to a stop before her mother, the paper carefully grasped in her fist. From where he sat as the table, Fastred smiled and returned to his soup after placing the charcoal back in his pocket, despite the disapproving look Brynne sent him. Ah well, he would be the one to clean it then, she decided. She focused her attention to the paper that her daughter held out to her. On it, small flowers dotted a field, and at a first glance it was a simple view of spring from a boy who knew his sister longed for flowers to look at. But as she peered closer, Brynne trained her gaze to the mounds of earth that the flowers grew upon, and knew that he had drawn not the flowers of spring, but instead simbelmyne, which grew upon the mounds of the kings after they were buried. She looked closer still, and the sound of her daughter wiggling impatiently for her mother to give the drawing the praise it deserved faded as she became aware of the tips of swords he had drawn barely poking out from the tips of grass. Above one flower she looked to see a hoof of something – a dead horse, surely – and near it a ripped banner of Rohan, with the white horse still barely visible underneath the grass he had cleverly drawn over it.
"Did you watch him draw all of this?" she asked Brytta, and the little girl shook her head.
"No, I just asked him to draw me flowers and I finished my soup while he did. Even the carrots." She scrunched her nose, but then her eyes brightened again. "Aren't they pretty?" she asked, pointing to the charcoal flowers.
"Yes, yes they are," Brynne replied, although she no longer looked at Brytta. Instead she watched as her son finished the last bits of his soup and ladled himself another smaller serving. Yes, she decided, he was growing older, and would soon be twelve. It was little wonder he was drawing battle scenes when he was asked to draw flowers. Yet he had not struck her as the type of lad to do so, being as withdrawn as he was. But she also knew from what the other women of the hold said that boys this age were all following the news of the darkness that was sweeping over the land with baited breath, almost, as Brynne had said the other day, as if they were hoping for war.
No, she would not dwell on such thoughts. He was a boy going on twelve who simply thought about war as much as any other lad– he would not fight in it. She vowed not to think of the subject again. Besides, she consoled herself, he would not help many, would probably even be a hindrance to those around him.
"Modor?" Brytta's voice interrupted her thoughts. "There's someone at the door," she explained, and Brynne quickly let the drawing fall back into the girl's eager hands. As Brytta trotted off to gaze at her newest possession, her mother lifted the latch and found herself greeted by Leofwine, a messenger whose home was beyond several holds to the south of theirs. He owned a great many horses, and while none were the sort that were bought for breeding purposes, nearly everyone knew him as the man to go to when one needed a horse for farming.
"Leofwine," Brynne exclaimed, ushering the red-faced man inside at once. "We have soup here, if you'd like some, Brytta!" The girl appeared from the bedroom adjacent to the main room, the drawing still clutched in her hand. "Fetch a fresh bowl for Master Leofwine."
She began to direct the man to sit, but he declined and already motioned a decline to Brytta with the bowl of soup she had made ready for him.
"I'm afraid I come bearing ill news," he said, and instantly Brynne and Brytta fell silent. Fastred looked up and watched in grave attention, switching his gaze from his mother to his sister to the man who had entered and then back to his mother again, examining each reaction that the individuals made.
