About the Author: I dream a lot, and switch hobbies and interests faster than I can complete them. I know a little about almost everything, and know a lot about very little. Writing is just something I can come back to no matter how long of a break I take, which is why I have a lot of stories like these that never make it past the first chapter.


About Cheyla: Cheyla is a bit of an icon to me. Her youth taught her that everyone did the work, and that the difference between men and women was less than the difference between someone who boasted and someone who stuck to the background. She doesn't know what gender roles are, I doubt she'll ever even find out, but I think something that really strikes out about her to me is how she lets what's inside of her define her much more than the world around her.

She was also made for RP'ing, so if you want to join Cheyla and Hauch's adventures sometime, you can join her at The New Cornerclub, my TES RP site. The link is just thenewcornerclub dot com.


Synopsis: Cheyla's first step into life is an unwitting one. A band of men arrive for her, wearing the crest of Bruma on their mantles, following a man of wealth Cheyla has never seen the likes of. Swept along for the ride, she unknowingly sets her greatest adventures into motion...


I still had little clue about what was going on. First the man in his bright colors and on his large horse had rode to our home. Then he had started to choose between my brother and sister, and that just annoyed me. I was the leader, couldn't he see that? I was the tough one of us children, and I called the shots.

He gave me a good looking over with his sneering eyes, occasionally poking and prodding like he was figuring out if I had enough fat on me to cook. All the while my brother and sister gave me an awkward, pained look. I couldn't tell at all what my parents were thinking. Was it hope in their eyes? Or sadness?

Whatever it was, the man left me to talk to my father, and my mother rushed over to my side. She pulled us all back into the house and started to fuss over me, pulling at my hair in some attempt to tame the fiery monster on my head. All the while she was ranting and rant.

"It'll be good for 'ya," she was crooning. "Dun worry 'bout a t'ing, gal." I didn't understand. Was she worried that he didn't think I was good enough?

"Oi'm 'da best!" I shouted in response. It didn't occur to me that a majority of everything I had ever said was shouted. Or that some things weren't supposed to be boasted. "Oi ain't worried."

My words didn't calm her. The next hour was spent trying to manage my appearance, which was just a lot of hassle to me. The dirt had to be scrubbed off my face with a damp rag, and the little leather jerkin was replaced by my mom's best woven dress that had to be quickly folded at my gut and cut down past my legs, covering my breeches.

After she was done, I almost looked like a woman. At least I looked more like a girl, instead of the field mouse I had been. She led me back outside, bidding the others to stay behind. I didn't like that, and grumbled until she kicked my shin to quiet me.

"Gal, be on ya' best behavior." Came the stern warning, before I was handed off to my dad.

"Oi'm the best!" I bragged again. "Oi'm the best at behavin' too."

My father yanked me over and started to show me off again. It was like the market all over again, watching him pull and bend the chickens to show that they had enough on them to eat. Only, I wasn't watching this time, I was the chicken. I was barely smart enough to keep my mouth short of a grumble, and happy that he wasn't poking my skin and showing off how much meat my legs had on them.

In all, he only showed the man that I was a sturdy little girl who could keep to her feet. That, and my hair was a rarity that would brighten up a hall.

"Oi brigh'en up everything!" I shouted at the man. "Moi 'airs made of flippin' fi'a!"

At the very least, I could make visiting group laugh. They chortled at my words and the way I fluffed out my hair to show them. I could hear some of them talking to each other too, speaking with some kind of thick Norse drawl I couldn't quite understand. What they said must have made sense to the leader, who nodded and stroked the hair of his face as he looked down to me.

"Very well," he said after a while. "The girl can serve for the children. They'll need a new chambermaid."

My father was about to say something when I cut him off. "Oi ain't no chambermaid! Oi'm gonna be an-"

He cut me off after that, clasping my mouth with his hand. "'Dis gal will be the best maid you've ever seen, right?"

"Oi'm 'da best!" I shouted in response, partially muffled by the hand on my face.

"We'll see about that, girl," the fancy man said. He turned, returning to his steed, and mounted it in a single jump. "Claudius! She rides with you."

I was riding? My father had taken me to the market on occasion, which mean riding on the horse or in the back of the farm cart, but these horses were a lot bigger than ours were. Not that I knew enough about horses to be afraid. "Oi can ride by moiself!" I was far too prideful to admit being unsure.

"You and what horse?" One of the men asked, laughing. He approached me, riding on a particularly tall horse that looked near like a giant to me. Atop the horse, the man was as high as the trees, and hidden behind a dented iron helmet and chain armor, with what I thought of as a yellow apron overtop. It had the bird crest of Bruma on the front.

Without warning, he reached down and lifted me by my shoulder with one of his hands, pulling me up and then over. The cart was opposite where I was, and I landed on it with a thud, only to squirm to my feet.

"Watch y'rself or Oi'll put moi foot up yer arse!" I shouted.

Claudius, whom I assumed to be the cart's driver, hopped the horse into motion and I stumbled. A quick decision to land on my butt was the only thing that saved me from backflipping off the cart, or cracking my head open on the cart's edge.

"Be careful ye' sod!" I raged at him. "W'rn us 'fore you try 'n get us kilt!"

My anger quickly abated, and curiousness took ahold. In my short life, I had never ridden in a wagon so big and long. Amidst the laughter and teasing directed to Claudius, I was more interested in the fresh wood and the dark iron that made up the harness.

It occurs to me now that I never looked back as we started to ride. The look my mother gave me as she was fussing over my clothes was the last look I ever saw of her, same for my father and the scolding way he had told me to be calm.

I don't remember much of my brother and sister. My brother's name was Ros, and he was tall and skinny with pale skin and oaken hair. My sister's name started with an M. I remember her being pretty, when she was younger. Her hair was unlike ours, it was black and straight, and when it was clean I could run my fingers through it and it wouldn't curl or grasp at me. She cut it off not long before I left, and looked more like a young man than my brother did.

The men who surrounded me were all different than my family, and all the same to me. They were big and bulky, with too many beards and too little actual faces. Claudius had a face. He was a young man, with little more than grizzle covering a pointed chin. He had a flat nose and high brows that were quite unlike anyone I had ever seen, and his skin was kissed by the sun, until it had browned to the color of hard leather.

"Y' got a weird nose, mate." That was the first thing I ever told him, and I said it leaning over his shoulder as the cart rolled up the road. It was going up because Bruma was always a lot higher than my house had been, and all I knew about getting there was to go up and get tired along the way.

I also knew it was a long, long trek. It could take hours and hours to get there, and I chose to fill the time doing the only thing I really knew. I talked.

"Where we go'in?" I asked Claudius, having already climbed over into the front seat with him. The trees were rolling past now, and when I looked back I could no longer see the little corner that was closest to home, where we left the cart.

"Bruma," Claudius answered. His accent was even better than the others. He spoke low, like he was trying to hiss words, but had too much depth to his voice to reach a snake so instead he turned into smoke.

"Y' voice is weird," I helpfully informed him. He gave me little reply, and I turned my attentions to other things.

The procession didn't say much while they were riding. A few men would group up next to each other and chat like old ladies, or at least chat like my mother did when she was doing the dishes. The rest rode out like they all knew where they were going. Given that we were going to Bruma, I'm sure they did know where they were going.

But it was curious for my young mind to see. Two of them quickly took to the front and soon disappeared up the rising paths, of which I would only see one occasionally stopped in front of us motioning with his hands. Another two marched side-by-side with the fancy man and his hefty horse, and four stuck close around Claudius and I.

I tried to chat one of them up, to see if maybe he would be a better distraction than Claudius. "Oi bet Oi could jump up 'de cart horse in one try." Unfortunately for me, my best attempts at a dialogue didn't seem to charm him, and my attention had to go back to the scenery.

It was still spring in the Heartlands. Pretty early spring, since the snow was just starting to melt around the peaks and everything was a bright, fresh green. The mountains of country Bruma were still in the distance from us, and I could see them often as we rolled over hills and between trees and meadows. They stood tall, white peaks gracing the horizon like a set of guards protecting the far-north Nords.

Bruma, itself, was higher up on those peaks. I had been there once before, when my father had gone to speak in the big house about things that didn't concern me. Up there, the roads were less stone and more hundreds of tiny chunks of gravel. Horses had to fight and wheeze for breath. Everything was pristine and white, like it was winter all the time.

Down here, where our cart pulled to a stop, it was more dark greens of hearty trees and grass that beamed the moment that the sun fought off the clouds. I liked the nature here more than I liked the people.

The town of Adamas Pass was a little place, originally erected to serve as a trading foothold when the paths to Bruma snowed over and travel became fatal. It was made of huts, mostly, and the few buildings that rose more than a story from the ground were made of thick timbers that had been shaved down to a cherry color color and plastered with mortar in-between. There were none of the large, stone structures that made up most of Bruma.

But Adamas Pass was a far cry from Bruma in almost every aspect. The largest buildings were trade depots and storage silos. The only road went into a storage shed, then up from the foothills and onto the stone path that lead to Bruma. Tents and huts had been set into the valley, back before the homesteaders had realized that spring drew the water from the icy peaks of the mountains and turned the valley into a pit of mud and sludge on a good day. I'd heard that the water could sweep in without warning, pulling entire buildings with it on a bad day.

As we settled down, I sort of hoped it would. My home had been relatively clean. There was more than enough space for everyone, and a little outhouse out back kept that more so. The traders here left filth in the ground, and even if the morning was relatively fresh, the mud had an awful stench to it.

I scrunched my nose in disgust. The fancy man spoke a few words to Claudius, then rode on with his guards, through the town and out the other side. The men around me all idled off to one of the only large buildings around. It had doors that swung in and out, but only took half the frame, and wide windows that let me see inside at what looked like a dark, dreary place by any stretch of the imagination. There was even a patio, the only one I'd ever seen.

While they all lazily drifted off, Claudius dismounted the cart and started to haul thick burlap sacks from one of the storage sheds. He laid them down without ceremony, often rocking the seat under me.

"Make yourself useful and sort these," Claudius said when the third sack hit the wood. There was no rhyme or reason to how he threw them down, there was just a lot of them. Three had been loaded already, and another dozen or so remained, tucked into a dry spot in the shed.

"Why don't ye'?" I told him, hopping down into the mud with a splash. "Oi'll carry! Y'r so slow 'bout it 'dat moi dead gram' could do betta'!" It was a saying that my mom always got me with, back when I was little and slow.

But in my mind, now I was all tall and lank, with muscles hidden inside me that everyone overlooked. The sacks were heavy, full of grain or something similar, but I believed that was was strong enough to lift them without any doubt.

So I did. I hitched up my dress and hauled, throwing them one at a time onto the back of the cart while the bemused Claudius sat and relaxed. I slipped and fell once, splattering my breeches with mud, but my imagination took over and I saw myself as a burly worker carrying loads of iron or stone to the foreman's cart. Nothing could stop me.

The next ride was much more comfortable for me. Pride beamed through me and seeped through my tired limbs. Being young and invincible had its perks, and being foolhardy enough to wear myself down in a matter of minutes gave Claudius a brief respite. The respite only lasted until the cart was leaving the village walls, which were all pointed logs jutting out of the muddy earth.

I only noticed when I took a nice breath of air and it didn't smell of foul mud. Fresh cut pine and flowers were in the air, and the sun was growing steadily brighter. Everything glowed green and brown, and if I could have run through that forest in that second I would have gladly been.

But I couldn't run free. Or could I? I had been riding in the cart for hours now, from the early morning to midday, when my stomach started to grumble for lack of food. Never in that time had I asked why. Why was I here? My father expected me to go with them, but to what purpose?

"Oi, Claudi," I said, catching my driver's attention. He only spared me a single glance, and an unamused one at that. "This ain't flippin' Bruma."

"You've got a mouth on you, girl," was his response. It was the most I'd heard him say so far, and his intonation continued to be interesting to me. "We're not going to Bruma."

"Then where?" I asked. I felt like lying down, so I did, climbing back over the cart's seat to collapse atop the sacks of grain and whatever else blanketed the floor. The bumping wasn't so bad then, so I rested and stared at the sky as we passed. "If y'r plannin' on taken' me somewheres to off my head like, Oi'll be taken' y'r jewels an' hangin' 'em o'er the fi'aplace."

"I don't know what you're talking about, girl," he said. "But the Earl gave me orders for where to take you."

"Where?" I think Claudius was halfway through his thought when my next one came to me. "Why?"

He paused, and from the corner of my eye I could see him chewing his words. It was something he did often, chewing when he ate nothing. It always happened when he was staring away, looking at no one and nothing.

"The Earl fed your family when you had nothing," came after a while. I had been listening to the rocking of the car, and pushed myself up on my elbows when he spoke to see him. "Your father owed a debt of life and work. You're the payment."

It made sense, I supposed. Didn't it? My father and I had been to the outpost a few times before. We were simple people, and he was the only of us in tune with the ways of bartering and fair trade. Once or twice in my youth, we had stayed in the little town to do work for goods, and even then it was just a hen there or a bushel of wheat here.

"For how long?" I asked, my curiosity trying to piece together my worth. I had to be worth at least ten of my brother, and one or more of my sister.

"Not for me to say," he said. And that was it from him. His conversing time was over, and his attention went back to the road before us as the rickety cart continued along the valley.

The outpost, with its high wooden-post walls, was in the distance behind us. I could see it all clearly when I looked back. We'd been slowly rising with the scenery, and passed a small brook that gushed with clear frost-water when the town started to be too small to see. From there, the woods thickened, and the pines grew taller and taller. In parts, bits of snow and frost still clung to the trees.

I pulled my clothes, which were the best I'd ever worn at little more than muddy rags, tighter around me. My tiredness was forgotten, and instead I hunched over myself and watched as we navigated a smaller and smaller trail between the large trees.

Was it hours? I didn't think to count, but I grew hungry along the way and voiced my plight to Claudius more times than he could stand. The scenery changed all at once, from huge trees bigger than any house I'd ever seen, to nothing.

It was a clearing, a big clearing. You could fit Adamas Pass between the trees and mountains at least three or four times. Green grass, tall as me and half again, blew under a thick wind that rolled off the mountains. Little sprouts of wheat were just starting to pop up, and I could see a line of shrubs and small trees where I couldn't see a river running somewhere in the field. I couldn't help but think that, if my family had owned this land, we would never go hungry again.

But I didn't have a family now. And that still didn't really dawn on me.

Instead, what I had was the tall man-boy with the funny nose, a cart full of sacks that could get us through a winter, and a destination. My mouth fell open at the destination.

I had never seen anything so big! I thought the trees were large, but this was massive!

It was like a house, but three stories tall with enough left over to fit a fourth. Large windows lined the front, and the middle had an awning that stretched so far, two pillars as thick as horses had to hold it up. The path widened into a big road of gravel that lead up to the place, then looped around in front of it where the grass and weeds had been cut low enough to see over.

There was more, too. I could see stables, carts, a long, long building hardly taller than my old house, and even more structures out behind it. The more I looked around, the more little details I could see. Out in the field, there were a few little houses that barely pierced the green. There were also figures, too far out to really see besides how tall and rigid they stood. They worried me, because they did not move and they did not sway. The field started to worry me in general, and I was glad when the cart pulled away from the tall grass and towards the building.

"'Dis place could hold a flippin' mountain!" I shouted at Claudius, who didn't seem to share my excitement. "'Ews 'de blighta' 'dat owns it?"

Claudius gave me a look that bordered on contempt, to which I gave a mocking sneer back. "That's one of the Earl of Bruma's estates." He sounded tense. "But you'll know it as Sir Carvain's manor."

"Was' a prissy sod need so much land fo' anyway?" The cart slowed to a stop outside the stables, and I forgot my tired limbs and aching stomach to hop out. I could see a few people around, women wearing dresses and tending to lines of hanging clothing and hauling water to and fro. A few men were handling labor in the stables, and some more in half-gear were marching out behind the house, mostly out of sight from the fore road.

"Someone needs to train soldiers," Claudius said as he joined me on the ground. "And someone needs to take care of them."

I looked around, not taking an interest in what he said, or really understanding at all. Everything was so big and bright. Their horse house had a smoke-stack, which meant that they could survive the winter without needing to be bundled or taken down out of the mountains. They had a well, two of them, right next to their house! It was all so exciting.

Something Claudius said did stick with me, though. He spoke it with a tone of soberness, more somber than I had heard him yet, which was amazing given how dull he could be without his funny nose and funny voice.

"This is your home now, until your debt is paid, Cheyla."