Chapter 3: The Long Road Home
Having escaped the clutches of Grelod the Kind and the horrors of Honorhall Orphanage, I found myself traveling north in the early parts of summer. As dawn crested the eastern mountains and cast its warmth across the Rift, I felt my spirit buoyed up. For the first time in half a year, I felt real hope and enthusiasm instead of desperation and bitterness. I knew the trip back to Windhelm would be a long one but in my newfound optimism I thought that the worst was behind me.
In some ways, I was right. Never again would I feel as helpless and lost as I did at Honorhall—but looking back now, my bubbling optimism was actually hopeless naivety. Escaping from the worst time of my life left me with a giddiness that was probably inappropriate and a confidence that was definitely unfounded. Taken as a whole, my return trip to Windhelm was a good example of what I still consider to be my worst flaw: I don't think ahead.
Don't misunderstand; I'm quite good at setting goals for myself and then achieving them. I just don't think further ahead than the next step, which can be a serious problem. My desperate struggle to get away from Grelod got me out of the city and onto the road, but I had no real understanding of how far apart Riften and Windhelm were. My journey by wagon had taken several weeks, so I thought it might take perhaps twice that long to get back. The sum total of my possessions included a change of clothes, a few days' worth of food, and a crude knife, all toted up in a makeshift pack. I had a vague notion that I would use what Fanar had taught me to snare rabbits for food, walk most of every day, and hide in the roadside bushes whenever guards came by. It would be easy!
As I said: poor planning all around.
My first problem came my very first day on the road. I had escaped Riften at night and decided that I would hike until sunset. I was soaked from wading through the canal but figured that the sun would dry me off quickly enough. By noon, my feet had started to hurt and my clothes were stiff. When I stopped to eat some of my packed food, I found that the soles of my cloth shoes had already started to wear through and that I had blisters on both feet. I moved off the road, changed into my single spare set of clothes, and pinched the blisters until they popped. The new clothes felt much better; while popping the blisters stung a bit, I had gotten used to working through pain.
By the time the sun started falling to the horizon, it felt like my feet were going to fall off, leaving me to finish my journey to Windhelm on stumps. I staggered off the road a few dozen yards to a small stream with a sheltered overhang to soak my feet. When I pulled the shredded remains of my shoes off, skin came with them and I was shocked to see that the wrappings were soaked through with blood. I dipped my ruined feet into the fresh water, still cool despite the warming days, and shook all over until dark fell. For the first time I realized that escaping Grelod might not make everything okay. In fact, I might not survive the trip back to Windhelm.
That night, I found out how cold Skyrim could be, even in the summer months, and used my dirty spare clothes for a makeshift pillow and blanket. The next day, I examined the extent of my injuries and found that my feet were in a terrible mess. I didn't know any sort of healing, so the only thing I could think to do was to stay off of them and wash them a lot. It was another three days before they were healed up enough that I could even think of leaving my little hiding hole, and by then I had exhausted my food. So far, I hadn't seen any soldiers but I could hear the noise of horses and wagons on the road from my sleeping place. Every time I heard hoof beats I was certain that it was Rift guards come to haul me back to Honorhall. Between the pain and the fear and the cold, I wasn't sleeping very well.
Still, I considered myself fortunate that I was in good enough shape to hunt when my food ran out, but I was getting impatient. I had already lost too many days to poor planning, and I was anxious to be on the move again. I hobbled as best as I could down the road until noon, then spent the next several hours off the road looking for another stream. I wound up wandering further from the road than I really felt comfortable with, but I hadn't realized how hard it was to find fresh water. Once I managed to find a small stream, I took Fanar's lessons and wove twine from vines and bark then went hunting for a rabbit.
Catching a rabbit and killing it was the easiest part of that whole week. Once a rabbit was in the snare, I ended its life and stripped it of its fur easily. I set aside the bloody fur so I could craft myself new foot wrapping later. Fanar's lessons had thankfully included a quick primer on turning hides into useful cloth and leather. As I washed the blood off of my hands in my little stream and congratulated myself on my cunning, I suddenly came to an awful realization: I didn't know how to make a fire.
Naturally, I had built the fire at home plenty of times. With flint and steel, or a striker and tinder. But when I had been traveling south before with Fanar, he had always built the fire while I was brushing the horses or doing other chores—and I'm pretty sure that he'd had flint and steel anyway. When it came to building a fire in the wilderness with no tools, I was clueless. I didn't even know where to start. I must have sat and stared angrily at my poor dead rabbit for almost an hour before practicality won out over bitterness. I can't say that I enjoyed the taste of raw rabbit, but it kept me alive.
Without a mirror handy I couldn't have said for certain, but by the end of that first week I must have looked like one of the Forsworn—covered in furs and makeshift leathers, bloody and bedraggled, and getting increasingly thinner and more desperate. Some days I went without fresh water, since I had no way to carry it if I went away from a stream. Some days I went with no food because I couldn't catch any rabbits and had no way of storing leftover meat more than a day or so before it got too foul to eat. There were moments when I seriously thought about turning myself in to the Rift guards and getting hauled back to Honorhall, when I tried my best to convince myself that Grelod beating me to death couldn't possibly be worse than this slow starvation. Only sheer bloody single-mindedness kept me going.
The worst part of it is that even if I had decided to turn myself in, it wouldn't have been to the Rift guards in all likelihood. I didn't know it at the time, but most of the guards had been moved over to the Stormcloak army that was gathering to push the Imperial forces out of the east. It was much more likely that if I had offered myself up to the first heavily armed men I saw, I would have wound up surrendering to bandits. All of my worry about getting caught and all of my indecision over turning myself in were for nothing. At the time, though, it felt real enough. Ultimately, I believed, I could only trust myself.
The days and nights blended together. Sometimes I ate and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes the road was paved with stones and sometimes it was just a dirt track. As I pushed further north, the stones became less common and the wagon-rutted dirt became more frequent. It struck me repeatedly how none of it looked familiar; between the different weather and seeing it from foot instead of from the back of a wagon, the terrain looked completely different.
Finally, I came across something that gave me hope. The road split and went up a small rise to a collection of huts, shacks, and rough buildings that Fanar had pointed out to me on the way to Riften as Shor's Stone, a mining town. They would undoubtedly have food and clothes—which they would naturally refuse to sell me once they saw me. I was on the verge of tears, sitting in a bramble by the side of the road and thinking about how close I was to everything I needed but with no way to get to it.
As nightfall came and the miners left Redbelly Mine, I made my decision. Once they had all finished drinking and doused their fires—which was late enough that I was starting to nod off in my hiding place—I crept out of the bushes and up the rampart road into the town. I quickly found the mine's storehouse, which was naturally locked, but the clothing bin behind it for the miners' washing wasn't. I remembered hearing that miners weren't expected to do their own washing or cooking, like soldiers, so I had figured on there being a washhouse somewhere in the town.
I managed to find a set of clothes that weren't too horribly stained with grime and sweat as well as a washbasin and some lye soap. I stripped naked under the moon, shivering at the cold, and quickly washed all of my clothes, including the newly purloined set. This was the most delicate part of my plan; if someone had come out at that point, I would have been hard pressed to explain exactly why I was stealing soap to wash my clothes, let alone why I was doing it naked in the middle of the night. Fortunately, I managed to get everything cleaned up without being caught and then used the leftover wash-water to scrub myself clean. I dried myself on another set of miner's clothes and put on one of my outfits after wringing out as much of the water as I could. I hung the rest of the clothes on the cooking spit over a bank of embers; the remaining heat would dry them faster.
Once they were dry enough to feel damp instead of dripping, I switched into the dry clothes and slinked out of town to a sheltered rock overhang I had seen the day before. There was no clean water nearby, but if my plan worked out, I wouldn't need it. And if my plan failed… Well, I'd be back in Honorhall, and I still wouldn't need it. I quickly grabbed some loose branches and jammed them into cracks in the rock to make a clothesline. My spare set of wet clothes went over the branch while I used my trusty knife to cut the shirt I had stolen into a makeshift blanket. I stuffed the pants with leaves and folded up the waist and legs to keep them in for a pillow. For the first night in weeks, I slept well.
The next day, I changed into the set of clothes I hadn't slept in, smoothed down my hair as best as I could, and walked into Shor's Stone. This was the most dangerous thing I had done since leaving Honorhall, but I was calm and collected. Part of me felt like I was floating above my own skull, watching the world dispassionately while the rest of me worked on instinct. It was an empowering feeling, the same feeling I had gotten when I snuck out of the orphanage. It felt like I was finally in control of my own life. It buoyed me right up until I actually walked into the general goods store, when I suddenly realized once again that I was a child out on my own—a child they would send back to Honorhall if they knew I was on my own.
I must have stood there in the doorway just a little too long because the Nord woman behind the counter coughed loudly while looking at me. I started and walked up to her. She virtually towered over me, but her face gave me an impression of amusement. I don't think they saw many children in Shor's Stone; a mining town was no place for them. I stuttered for a moment as I fumbled in my pockets for a nonexistent object.
"What's wrong, sweety?" the woman asked.
"I lost my list," I said in my most plaintive voice. I looked up at her and tried to meet her eyes, pushing tears up into mine. "I'm supposed to get supplies, but I lost my list."
"That's okay, hon," she replied. "Which of the traders are you with?"
"Fanar," I blurted out, suddenly realizing that it was going much more easily than I expected. "I'm here with Fanar."
"Fanar…" she trailed off. "Don't think I know him. Does he usually stop in here?"
"No, ma'am," I responded. Adults loved being called "sir" and "ma'am" as far as I could tell. "Normally we keep on the road all the way to Riften, but..." I shrugged amiably, trying to convey the vagaries of life on the road. Honestly, I wasn't sure why someone like Fanar would break his routine—merchants lived for routine, after all—but I didn't need to come up with reasons. I just had to sound sincere and the woman would come up with her own explanation.
She nodded sympathetically. "Well, since he's not one of our regulars I can't put it on a tab." I hoped that she didn't notice my gaping jaw as she continued. "If you can remember what you need, you can go ahead and pick it out. Will you need help getting it back to your wagon?"
"No!" I said, a little too enthusiastically before continuing more calmly. "No, ma'am. It's not a lot. Some dried food, a new tinderbox, a waterskin… and I'm getting a few things for myself too."
"Well, nothing too bad," she scolded, but with a smile. I smiled back my agreement and then set about collecting my necessities while she looked on bemused.
After I had brought back a neat little pile of goods to the counter—a backpack, a waterskin, a small pile of dried meat and hardtack, a tinderbox, the smallest pair of boots I could find, and a heavy cloak—I paused for a moment to look at some other things I thought I might need. After deciding that they were all too heavy (a cooking pot) or too expensive (potions) or too likely to have the owner ask questions (a real weapon), I finally added a spool of heavy twine and some metal fishhooks to the pile. I had gone fishing down at the docks a few times back in Windhelm; I didn't know how useful it would be on the trip home, but twine and hooks weighed almost nothing so it would be a useful fallback if I found open water.
The owner didn't even ask me any questions as she looked it all over. She gave me a price that sounded a little high but I was in no position to haggle. I quickly counted out from my precious pile of septims and pushed them across the counter before beginning to pack everything I could into the pack. As I was getting ready to leave, the owner called to me.
"Boy!" she said, and I turned slowly, thinking that she was finally going to call me out on my deception. Instead, she came around the counter with a small wrapped bundle and pressed it into my arms. I looked up at her with a confused expression. She opened one corner, showing a pile of small cheese wedges and sausages. "You're too damn skinny, even for an Imperial. You tell your master to feed you better from now on, or the next time he comes through Shor's Stone that Sylgja will have his ears." I nodded very seriously before she smiled again and patted me on the head.
I was shaking all the way back to my makeshift camp, not just from the aftereffects of a successful plan or the fear of getting caught. I was also shaking with gratitude for unexpected kindness. It helped more than I can ever say to have run into someone who was nice to me for no return; it helped remind me that there were people in the world who weren't as bad as Grelod or as beaten as Constance. I spent the rest of the day trekking down the road away from Shor's Stone with a sense of distant regret. While Sylgja had helped me, I still had no doubt that she would turn me in if she knew the truth—"for my own good," of course.
The majority of the trip after that was just monotonous rather than terrifying. I walked, I nursed my sore feet, and I hid whenever I heard or saw other travelers. I started getting calluses on my feet and recovering the weight I had lost from the orphanage and the first part of my trip. I saved my dried food for emergencies and hunted most of the time. I made small, controllable fires—a lesson I learned after almost setting my chosen sleeping space ablaze the first night I used the tinderbox. When it rained, I looked for shelter or got wet. It wasn't an adventure or particularly awful; it was just slow.
Don't get me wrong; I saw some amazing things on that trip too. I remember beautiful sunrises and sunsets, sudden rainstorms that came out of nowhere in the middle of sunny days, sudden flights of birds and rushing deer crossing the road heedless of my presence. I remember creeping past a sleeping bear just in time to hear it wake up and turn to face a pack of orc hunters that I never even saw until they burst out of the underbrush. I remember passing a giant camp close enough to see their bonfire casting mammoths into silhouettes. I even once saw a dragon flying past a bone-strewn crag, and I remember feeling both awe and terror at the distant sight. Those sights were intermittent at best, though. The days and nights blurred together, occasionally spiced up by brief moments of panic or wonder.
After leaving Shor's Stone I returned to my previous policy of avoiding human contact for fear of being caught and sent back to Honorhall. For the better part of three months, I didn't speak to another human being. The loneliness was bad, but I had been lonely before. My mother's illness and death had left me alone in our small home for quite some time, and even at Honorhall I had been a loner. Some nights I would talk out loud to myself for fear that I would forget how to speak at all.
My great comfort during this time of total isolation was fishing. As it turned out, open pools and rivers became more common as I traveled north. Fishing became my primary source of food through that summer on the road, not just because it was a little easier than hunting but because of the peace it brought me. I didn't hesitate when I had to kill a rabbit—it was a matter of survival, after all—but I felt less bad about killing a fish for some reason. Also, fish could be smoked over a low fire to keep them edible for several days; rabbit usually spoiled much more quickly. Beyond all of that was just a gentle calm that came over me while I had my line in the water, waiting for a bite.
The nights were starting to get colder again as I traveled north, and one day I noticed that the leaves were beginning to change color as well. The worry about how to keep warm and sheltered if the trip took any longer came back. I had a day or two to worry about it and come up with contingencies before the unthinkable happened: I rounded a corner, and there was Windhelm. The city was still miles away, across the rocky shores of the White River and settled into a rocky hillside. Its ice-covered stone walls were grey and imposing, but somehow welcoming nonetheless. My first sight of my home actually made me sag to my knees from relief.
That's when I heard the howling of wolves.
For most of my trip I had managed to avoid crossing any of the wildlife that populates Skyrim. I had seen plenty of birds and deer, of course, and there was one close call with a bear. But wolves were a new problem to me. As soon as my ears picked up their howling, I pulled myself back to my feet and took off down the road at a dead run. All thoughts of being found or caught were out of my head now; there was only staying ahead of the pack and surviving.
Foolishly, I took a moment to look back over my shoulder to see if I was actually being followed. Sure enough, there were three black wolves on the road behind me, snarling and snapping as they gained distance. There was no way I could outrun them on a straight stretch. Fury flooded me at the thought of getting so close to home, only to be dragged down and eaten by mangy wild dogs! Anger gave my legs new strength and I angled off the road toward a nearby tree. I hit a rock at the edge of the road at a dead run, leaping from the top of the stone to the lowest branch on the tree before dragging my legs up over the edge.
The wolves leapt after me, only to fall short and snarl in frustration. The three of them circled the tree, baying and howling. I climbed up higher into the branches just to be sure that a lucky jump didn't put me into their jaws, then secured myself in place with my fishing twine to avoid falling out from shifting. I pulled my clothes tight around me and settled in to wait for the wolves to get tired and move on. They finally left after sundown, chasing after prey that would give them less trouble. I slept fitfully in the tree, tied in place.
The next morning, after carefully scanning the countryside for more wolves, I shakily lowered myself out of my hiding place and returned to the road. I spent the whole morning trudging through drizzle and mud, wondering how I was actually going to get into the city now that I had reached it. Finally, I decided that the best choice was simply to walk through the front gates. Guards or workers might notice if I swam across the river and came up through the docks, but the front gates were left open during the day to accommodate travel and trade. No one would notice a young boy on his own; apprentices and messengers would be coming in and out of the city alone all day. That was my hope anyway.
As I walked down the majestic bridge that crossed the White River to the main gates of Windhelm, I saw that I was in luck. A group of wagons and horses were crossing the bridge as well, possibly farmers bringing in their crop for market. I calmly walked up behind the rearmost wagon and just took a place behind it, pacing back and forth as though I were checking the ground to make sure that nothing had fallen off. The guards didn't spare me a second glance as "my" wagon rolled through the gates and into the Stone Quarter.
Once I was inside the front gates I did my best to keep my jubilation inside but it was difficult. After half a year trapped in a living hell, and three months on the road, surviving by my wits, I was finally home. It had been the tail end of winter when I left Windhelm and the city didn't look that different at the beginning of autumn, but it felt like a new world to me. My house was only a few blocks away from the main gates, at the border of the Stone Quarter and the Gray Quarter. It was only a few minutes until I found myself before the front door of my small home, my eyes burning with happy tears.
It was only after the doorknob refused to budge that I remembered that I didn't have a key to the house anymore. The jarl's men had taken it when they had me taken away to Honorhall. As I looked at the door in a fog of confusion, my elation turned to despair. How could I have come all this way just to be stopped by a locked door?
As I said before: poor planning all around.
…to be continued…