A/N: I keep intending to take this story slow, and then I just cannot stop bloody well writing it. Thank you for the lovely comments! They make taking on this fandom just a touch less intimidating. Considering how long it's taking me just to get them to Rivendell, I hope we're all ready to be here for the long haul!
If someone had told her only one week prior that at this point in time, Sybil would be face-down on a strange man's bedroll while said strange man gently prodded at the back of her thigh, she'd have laughed herself sick. She wasn't in much of a laughing mood now.
"I shan't play coy and ask why you didn't tell me of the extent of your injuries," he murmured, a grim note in his voice. "Although I confess I wish you had."
"Are…are you proficient in treating burns?"
She regretted the pointed question the moment she asked it, but he breathed a tired laugh behind her and didn't rile.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You've a point."
A little ways off to the side, a tea was brewing above a tiny fire they'd assembled – for he had indeed found feverfew mere minutes into his hunt.
"How does it look?" she asked quietly. "I couldn't…with the angle, I couldn't get a good look at it. Not really."
A pause followed her question. "I'm sure all will be well – after you've had your tea, and the Elves have tended to it."
His words were too cheerful to be genuine, and she knew then that it really was looking bad. Especially given how he'd avoided describing what he saw at all.
"How do I apply this salve?" he asked before she could continue to seek his assessment.
Salve was a generous word for it. Not only had Boromir found the very plant she'd needed – for when he first made mention of it, she feared he'd mistaken common daisies for feverfew instead, which would have been an easy mistake to make – but he'd found much of it. More than enough for a tea and a topical application. Now the difficulty she faced was a lack of equipment. It mattered little for the tea, although a little honey might make it go down easier, she couldn't afford to be picky. But with the salve, she was left with little to do other than mash up the flowers, apply it to the burn (or rather, ask Boromir to do so) and hope it would be better than nothing.
"Gently," she said – and earned a snort for her troubles, because okay, it was pretty obvious. "Just…dab it on, rather than rubbing it in."
She wasn't sure the skin would hold up to anything more than a gentle dab.
"Build up- gah- build up as thick a layer as you can while keeping all of it covered."
Hopefully it would soothe and clean the wound, and the tea would ease the headache and the nausea threatening to build. She didn't need it to cure her, she just needed it to give her the time she needed to get to Rivendell.
Her skirts had been hitched up to sit just under the curve of her backside, one side pulled down haphazardly over her good leg so allow some semblance of dignity. It didn't feel very dignified – but she was in too much pain to be overly embarrassed, as the water had awoken the wound more than it had soothed it.
"I've no bandages, but I'm sure we might improvise something."
"I don't know if I could stand the pressure of bandages, to be honest," she breathed. "This will have to be good enough."
The plant would probably flake off as she walked, but if her skirt brushing the burn was bad, the constant feeling of a bandage packed against it would be unbearable. It was a matter of choosing which evil she wished to face. Boromir dabbed the first of the paste onto her leg, and she was back to wedging her arm into her mouth.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
The second dab was worse, the sting streaking up and down her leg to patches of skin that weren't even injured, and she kicked involuntarily in response. Unfazed by her hearty impression of an anxious horse, he pressed his free hand down against her calve to keep her still. Sucking in a deep breath through her teeth, she stilled herself through sheer force of will alone. Although a few twitches still snuck through.
"My mind has strayed to our route, as of late."
"Oh?"
"The footing here slows us down – and now seeing…seeing this, I believe the ease of the Road may be our best option. Trolls cannot travel by daylight, after all, so as long as we veer south again by nightfall, we should be fine."
Sybil listened, but she wasn't sure she agreed.
"Should we not?" he prompted, and she stilled.
Daft as it sounded, she hadn't realised he was seeking her input. After years of doing as Bera asked, when she asked it, and of customers who more often than not referred to her merely as "girl", suddenly having an input at all would take some getting used to. Voicing it would take more still. But she wouldn't shy away from it.
"I think we would lose almost the same amount of time veering far enough to and from the Road every morning and night. And- mmf- the…the trolls aren't the only danger on it these days. Not with…not with times being as they are. Daylight does not guarantee safety."
There was also the fact that she doubted they'd find more feverfew closer to the Road where it was more easily happened across, but guilt stayed her voice in pointing that out. Had she not been enough of a hindrance? How might she ever repay him for all of this?
"I worry that the terrain will only pain you more," he admitted.
"Pain or no, if can move, I will move," she said resolutely.
There was a pause, then, in Boromir's attentions, and then he breathed a soft chuckle – and a warm one, at that, without a hint of scorn or derision.
"I admire your determination," he said finally. "But you must allow me to aid you where I can. As I said, I understand why you kept silent, but I give you my word that I will not breathe a word of this to any soul. Ever."
It took her a moment to reply – because the more he worked, the more the pain radiated across her leg. She couldn't even feel precisely where his fingertips were thanks to how every dab sent stinging prickles all across the entirety of the burn. A cold sweat already trickled across her brow. It was only once she gathered herself that she spoke.
"I didn't think you would…speak of it, I mean."
"Good," he said, sounding relieved for it, before repeating himself quietly. "Good."
They were quiet from thereon, Boromir absorbed in his task and Sybil trying to remain both quiet and still. When he was finally finished, he stood and made his way towards the small fire, depositing the tea that had been brewing into a small metal cup from his pack. Having to remain where she was while the salve dried, Sybil awkwardly shifted up onto her elbows and accepted the tea from him with quiet thanks. Hopefully it would ease the headache settling into her temples.
It was with some good-humoured relief that she noted the hint of a flush around his cheeks, too, for she could then stop feeling quite so ridiculous for being as embarrassed as she was about the task that had just been forced upon him. She wasn't used to being on the wrong end of a healing mixture. And Bera had always been the one to take care of it whenever a man needed something tended to from the chest downwards, so Sybil could hardly play at being above it all in the way plenty of healers were. At least they could find camaraderie in their mutual mortification.
He came to sit before her, clearing his throat and carefully looking anywhere but at her exposed leg. Only when he began to busy himself with putting his gloves back on did Sybil broach the topic that she knew would be a good enough distraction.
"The fire," she said. "The one at my cabin. It wasn't an accident."
Even she wasn't totally sure why she felt like now would be the best time to explain that to him. A newfound level of trust, maybe, that one could only find with a recent acquaintance who had just become unduly familiar with one's thigh. A hope of a gesture, too – to show him that distrust really wasn't the reason she'd kept the extent of her injury from him. Or it could have been that she just needed to speak of it, and his had fast become a friendly face.
"A man came to us…he was terrible. A real piece of work. He…well, he was not a gentleman," not if how he'd pinched her backside was anything to go by. "His wife was ailing, he said. Joint pains, an inability to sleep, muscle cramps, a bad cough, and terrible nerves. Symptoms not often all found together in one mysterious, sudden illness – and all that may be treated by one specific plant."
"Which plant?"
"Hemlock."
Boromir's lips set into a grim, thin line. "A poison?"
"Mm. But plenty of medicines become poisons in large enough doses, or when mixed with the wrong thing. That in itself isn't an ill omen – and it's why we must be diligent when we work. I suspect my aptitude for memorising it all is the only reason Bera kept me around."
"A harsh mother," he mused – although he didn't sound stunned by the prospect.
Was it personal experience that injected a slither of knowing into his tone? Still, his response was enough to remind her that she should mind her words. She might've been telling him the truth here, but she was not yet so comfortable as to tell him the whole truth.
"I suppose. This was no more than a month ago – she was already very sickly by then, and so the work all fell to me. And I did not trust this man, nor his word. My instincts told me something was wrong, and so did reason. If his wife was so sick, why would he leave her alone to travel so far? Other healers could help with this. I was willing to accept that her strange list of symptoms all made up an illness I simply had not heard of, but to my instinct it sounded as though he'd simply memorised a list of symptoms that hemlock would treat to try and improve his chances of getting it without asking for it directly."
Speaking like this – lying on her stomach – was difficult, and she took a moment to pause and take a few gulps of tea before she continued.
"I offered him other remedies. Countless other remedies. Expensive, rare concoctions at steep discounts, no less. He would not hear of it. He wanted hemlock, and only hemlock. I expect he came to us because we were so far that word might not spread…and so he could guarantee that we wouldn't know his wife, and that there was little wrong with her."
"So, when you refused to serve him, he burned your home down?"
"I served him," she said – and when she saw his alarmed look, she added. "I didn't give him anything with hemlock. I gave him a mild sedative, and I told him it was hemlock extract."
"Sedative?" he frowned.
Ah. Bera hadn't known that word, either – and Sybil had little idea of how she knew it herself.
"A soothing agent. The worst it would cause is drowsiness, even if she downed the whole phial in one. I…I lied, and I took his money, and I sent him on his way. Bera…ha…Bera called me a fool. But I thought that was that. Until he returned, the night before last…with friends."
"He realised he'd been deceived, then?"
"Maybe. Not quite. He…he was shrieking of how I'd given him some foul poison and masked it as medicine. That I'd killed his wife. That we were witches."
Her hands threatened to tremble – and her voice already did – so she drained the last of the tea and set the mug down, clasping her hands before her as she continued to rest her weight on her elbows. As she did so, she found herself with her eyes downcast, staring at the ground rather than at Boromir, worried that if she inspected his reactions too closely, she would lose whatever stomach she had to tell the tale in the first place.
"I know not if that was his plan all along – if he found some other manner of murder and blamed me all the same, or if some suspected him of doing ill and I was a convenient scapegoat, or if he realised my trick and this was his revenge. I suppose it matters little now. They shot flaming arrows into the roof, and the thatching caught quickly. The consolation was that his friends believed his lies so ardently that they wished to exact their revenge only from a distance…lest we cast all sorts of evil spells, I suppose."
"They believed it all without so much as seeing or speaking to you first?"
Sybil would've been tempted to laugh at that, if not for how earnestly he spoke. She was highly doubtful that it would have improved matters if they'd chosen to see or speak to her before they made their minds up. First impressions were not her forte – and if it was a skill that might be learned, she'd yet to manage it. Save for here, perhaps. But the credit for that likely lay at Boromir's feet, or even that of the fire. She'd been in little state to blush and stammer in the aftermath, when he first stumbled upon her.
Was that the secret? Meeting new people in life-or-death situations?
"I'm not sure meeting me first would have made much difference," she said softly.
Especially if they'd heard the whispers and theories of her origins in Bree. They'd come from the west, generally speaking, but she didn't know how far west. The furrow of his brow looked endearingly sincere then, and he seemed tempted to question her words, but she pushed on before they could delve into a debate on whether she did or did not have the appearance of a fiend – albeit a touch more flustered than before.
"Bera had passed that morning. A relief, really, after her illness…so long wheezing in a bed…I think she was glad to…well. No matter. I am grateful for that, at least. I cannot imagine what might have happened if…she was barely up to walking, you see, much less…and this? Travelling like…with everything…this would have…"
It would be a good thing, she suspected, if she paused to decide how her sentences were supposed to end before she began speaking them. She took a moment to do just that, and Boromir waited with no sign of impatience until she finally found the words she was looking for.
"If it was all fated to happen, it at least did so in the best way it possibly could have," she said finally. "I can be relieved at that, if nothing else."
Had Bera been here now, she'd have laughed at what she was saying. Lofty words of fate and destiny and fortune – and from whom? A foundling? One who still reeked of smoke and whose skirts were rucked up well past the point of decency, no less. She was tempted to laugh at herself. But Boromir didn't laugh. Instead, he regarded her solemnly with a look far softer than she expected. And then, finally, he replied.
"You've strength of spirit, Sybil. Admirable strength of spirit."
Having no idea how to respond to that, she simply said nothing at all.
But she was relieved for having shared her tale. In hindsight, she would come to realise it could've been her final opportunity to do so – for the next day she worsened still.
A/N: Find me elsewhere—
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IG: miotasach (more geared towards original writing talk…and general shitposting)