Isendel
Y213 – 214
She would spend days, sometimes up to a week or two in one place or another, working for bread and board or simply recovering from traveling all day. She never stayed long, though; the sight of a Swan standard, or the rumor of soldiers traveling through, impelled her flight to continue.
It wasn’t all unpleasant. The road was a wild, unfamiliar place to her, and by choice she went from settlement to settlement rather than attempt to spend much time in the forests and plains she crossed, but kindness sometimes existed in the hands of a farmwife who gave her a liniment to rub into her sore feet or the advice of an itinerant peddler whom she traveled with for a few weeks.
It all blended together after a time, though. She recalled some events with clarity—a golden evening of laughter in an isolated farmstead. A rainy two hours sheltering in a stable with the horses, passing a bottle back and forth with the friendly stableboy. Hiding, terrified, as The Guard Commander and a troupe of soldiers passed literally feet before her as she huddled silently in the ditch. Her first sight of the sun setting over the mountains, white and craggy against a blazing orange-pink-purple sky, a beauty so razor-edged her heart bled. A desperate fight against a sickly wildcat that thought her prey, and the stink of its hide after she clumsily attempted to make it into boots for herself, with no knowledge of the steps necessary to tan it and keep it from rotting. Moments lodged themselves into her mind, against the blurred days of walking, bartering, walking, working, walking. Just walking. Away from the Swans, away from Isendel, away from anywhere she might be recognized.
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