Once we were on the other side of the mountain, it was as if time rolled backwards several months, from deep winter back to early winter, and early winter back to autumn. The landscape smoothed out too, from rocky ridges and pine forests to rolling tundra, alive with rich oranges and yellows. It also got considerably warmer, to the point where I could take off the tent-cloak, (which was now due for an appointment with needle and thread after the troll attacked it) and roll it up.
To someone who for more than a year had seen little but Blighted lands, the Deep Roads, and the neglected holdings of Amaranthine, these plains teeming with life were a relief and an affirmation. The smallest bird chirping in a shrub was a reason to be glad, after the eerie silence of vast swathes of Blight-struck Fereldan.
This was Whiterun Hold, Eryka told me, and there in the distance was the city of Whiterun, our destination. We made much better time now on the road, and she pointed out features of the area, including the scorched and crumbling watchtower where she had killed her first dragon. But twilight was falling before we got to the far-flung farms surrounding the city, and it was full dark, not to mention getting cold, when we pulled up in front of the stables.
My first impression of Whiterun is, therefore, 'Big' and 'Dark'. Oh, and 'Running Water'. There were a lot of high walls around it. Leaving the carriage, we walked up the winding road over the drawbridge to the city proper.
Then we reached the gates. "Hold a moment," said a guard, lifting his torch to see our faces. "Ah. It's you, Dragonborn. Welcome back." He nodded at me, "Kinsman," and opened the gates so we could enter. She thanked him , and we went in. There were a few braziers of coals burning, a few torches, but other than those few pools of light, it was dark. We went past one dark building and stopped at the next, which Eryka unlocked.
"This is home," she said. It was pitch dark inside until she called up a mote of light. It was also cold, but here was a fire pit directly before us, the logs and kindling laid but not lit. "I've nothing to speak of for dinner in the house, but the Bannered Mare serves up whenever someone's hungry, so we'll go there. I want to stow my gear and change first, though." She put her sword away on a handy rack and swung her pack down from her back.
Eryka knelt to start the fire, but I stopped her. "I can do that. I can't change your clothes for you, though." I joked. "That is—that was rather inappropriate. I'm sorry."
She smiled, "It's all right. Make yourself at home. Don't light too many candles, though. I'm nearly out and I can't get more tonight."
"Right. Easy on the candles." She went up the stairs, and I called up fire, bathed the logs until they caught. Taking a long splinter of wood, I lit a candle I found by the door, and picked it up to have a look around the place. Upstairs, the clanks and thuds said Eryka was changing.
Her house was modest but comfortable, I decided. One room served as living room, dining room and kitchen; I could only speculate about the upstairs, but I had heard a door. Speaking of which, there was one in the space behind the stairs, but it was closed and I didn't want to pry. There was a dining table pushed against the wall with a single bench, before it, and a couple of chairs drawn up by the fire. One of them had dust on the seat; Eryka lived alone, then, and had few guests. Odd. Given how friendly she was with Rustleif and his wife, and her other appealing personal qualities, I would have thought people would be in and out of her house all the time.
Half the furniture was simple, unfinished wood, while the rest was carved, smoothed and polished. The metal pitcher and bowl on a shelf were handsome, but they were pewter rather than silver. Here and there she had baskets woven in two or three colors hanging on the wall. They served no useful purpose—they were just there to look nice. It was a cheerful house, but the fire pit struck me as a hazard. What did people do to keep very small children from falling in and being badly burned?
Ah, a bookshelf. I scanned the titles. The Book of The Dragonborn, On Oblivion, Aedra and Daedra. She had at least thirty books in this bookcase alone. Intriguing, but if we were going to eat soon, it might be best not to start now.
"So—this is where you grew up?" I called up the stairs.
"No," she replied. "I was born and raised in Markarth. The last few years I spent in High Rock, though." I heard a drawer sliding open and closed again. "I've only lived here a couple of months."
"So you bought this house on your own?" I asked.
"Yes."
I felt a new respect for my companion, and also a greater sense of what was possible here. A magic worker could buy a decent house and live in a city and if anyone complained, obviously they didn't complain all that hard.
"You know, for all the talking we did today, we never really talked about ourselves. What did you do before you took up adventuring? Do you have brothers and sisters? Is there someone waiting for you back in Markarth or High Rock?"
"If you want to know that sort of thing, you'll have to give as much as you get," she called back. "Come to the foot of the stairs."
"What for?" I said, going over there.
"Catch!" she chortled.
"—Ufffh." She had dropped something dark and furred down on me, and on inspection, it turned out to be a cloak.
"I think my tent does better as a tent than it does as a cloak," she said. "Here's one of my spares. They're always getting wrecked one way or another, so I keep a few on hand. I like to put cold-blocking enchantments on them like I do on the tent, but then I face a fire-breather and the cloak is ashes. See how you like that one!"
I swung it around my shoulders, realized I had it inside out, and turned it around. Made of dark grey fur, it had a lighter grey, black-flecked shoulder cape overlaying it, not unlike my feathered pauldrons. It had three closures down the front to the mid-chest, instead of just one at the neck. The hood was edged with the lighter grey fur, and the whole cloak was lined with it.
"I like it very much!" I called back to her.
"It's not too short? Or too narrow in the shoulders?" she asked.
"No. It's perfect." She was a tall woman, and if this cloak was a few inches shorter on me, it would hardly matter. As far as narrowness went—well, she was a woman but she wore heavy armor and I didn't, so the shoulders fit. It wasn't possible to say what her figure was like under all that bulky armor, but it was safe to assume she wasn't going to fit the Orlesian ideal, which says that a woman should be 'the most delicate flower on the slenderest stem'.
No woman who can sprint in heavy armor, do her own blacksmithing, and hack up frost trolls, not to mention dragons, could ever meet such standards. I was expecting her to be rather a big girl under all the metal…
She came down the stairs.
Um. Not that big a girl, but definitely not small either. A fine, well proportioned girl. In a dark red dress with a brown corset of tooled leather which wasn't cut low, but it didn't have to be because there was enough of her to fill it up and eyes on her face. When did the Maker give the Orlesians the right to dictate what is and isn't attractive, anyhow? Besides, Fereldan women weren't having any trouble meeting the Orlesian idea these days, not with the famine attendant upon the blight, and gaunt is not attractive. Starving is not a good look on anyone.
"So—where is Markarth, anyhow? And what is it, a hold or a city? I'm sorry if you told me before and I don't remember, but there's so much I've had to take in today. It's all starting to blur on me." I managed to ask.
"It's to the west, and it's the capitol of the Reach. It's the most fantastic city, with mad staircases going everywhere and waterfalls—at least I thought it was when I was a child. I haven't been back for—it's nearly seven years now. My mother still lives there. Oh, and I'm an only child. At least I'm her only child." She put her tawny cloak on again and fastened it.
"Seven years away from home? What happened, did you break the law?" I joked.
"In a way, yes. An unwritten one."
I winced sympathetically. "Those are the worse."
"Oh, aren't they just? Let's go eat, shall we?" Eryka suggested.
"By all means." I blew out the candle, checked that the fire would neither go out nor burn the house down, and followed her out the door.
"It wasn't actually me who broke it," she chatted as we went up the narrow street. "I'm the result of it being broken, so to speak. I can guess what you're thinking, and no, I'm not a child born of rape. Your turn."
"-That's good. I wouldn't wish that on anyone." I said. We passed a house set back from the street, and kept on walking. "I myself—well, I had two very normal parents, a couple of brothers, a little sister…When I was twelve I started doing magic, set the barn on fire, and was promptly hauled off to The Circle in handcuffs. That was…fourteen years ago. I have never seen any of them since then. In those fourteen years, I escaped from the Circle more times than I can recall, I was nearly executed several times, and finally wound up in…even more trouble. That is, until I boarded a ship for Kirkwall and arrived in a strange and wonderful place called Skyrim instead."
"I was nearly executed once," Eryka reminisced, "and when I say nearly, I mean very nearly. My head was on the block—I can still feel the wetness of the last man's blood, when I think about it." Her hand stole up to touch her neck.
"I've never been quite that close, but I came very near to it a few times. So what happened?" I asked.
"A dragon happened. I can tell you that there is nothing that will disrupt an execution quite so much as a dragon swooping down on it." she reported. "This is the market district. The city well's right there in the center. I know there's a stream running all through the town, but it's not that good as far as drinking and cooking are concerned. It's fine for washing and watering the garden, though."
"Good to know. I'll keep that in mind." Again, except for the occasional brazier or torch, it was too dark to make much out.
"And here's the Bannered Mare," Eryka led me up a few stairs and into warmth, light, and music.
"Ah, Eryka! Welcome back!" a pretty waitress greeted us. Her dress was cut almost perilously low. "Who's this handsome fellow?" She looked up at me with curiosity.
"This is Anders," Eryka performed the introductions. "Anders, this is Olfina Grey-Mane. Olfina, a table if you would."
"Right this way," Olfina led us through the tavern. There were fifteen or twenty people there, a couple of families with children, several warriors in armor, a few off-duty guards, and a bard tootling on a flute. As we passed, not a few greeted Eryka with a wave, a word or two, or "Dragonborn!" called across the room, accompanied with banging their tankards on the table.
"Here you are," Olfina stopped at a table in a niche. "What'll you have?"
"Will you be guided by me?" Eryka asked.
"In everything," I replied with my most charming smile.
"Ooh, handsome and smart!" Olfina marveled. "I don't suppose you have a brother, do you?"
"Nowhere near here, I'm afraid," I shook my head.
"Oh, well."
"As if you needed one!" Eryka teased her with a knowing arch of her eyebrows. "Two platters of whatever Saadia sends, not cabbage stew by preference, and two of the autumn ale."
"Coming right away," Olfina swayed away, dodging pinching fingers.
"So," Eryka turned to me. "That barn fire when you were twelve. Was anyone killed?"
"No, not even a cow. We did lose a few bales of hay. I'm pretty sure it was because I was angry with one of my brothers—but it was half a lifetime ago. My mother wept when they took me away. My father was—I won't say pleased. Relieved is more like it."
"That shouldn't have happened," Eryka said. "It wouldn't have, here, but you know that already. Now, before I go making my decision, why don't you tell me about why you sometimes go all blue and crackly?"
"Ah. That." I started. "I—need an ale in me before I delve into that."
"Two ales right here!" Olfina delivered a couple of foamy tankards before disappearing again.
"Don't let me stop you," Eryka nodded at the drinks.
"Here goes…"I picked up mine and started in on it before Justice could interfere. He and I did not see eye to eye in matters such as drinking. In fact, I drank it all down in one long draught, inspiring calls of 'Now that's a man with a thirst!' from surrounding tables, and 'There's a Nord who knows what to do with an ale!' 'Olfina, get him another!'
I set the tankard down. "It began when I met the Warden Commander…"
TBC…
A/N: Ceg, thanks so much…and you got what nobody else did. Yes, Anders is serious…Sort of. *Huggles Lisa* Missed you! I was afraid you had gotten tired of my tale. Thanks!