Érad stirred, his shoulder being jostled.

“Wake up, loghead,” someone whispered near his ear.

Érad tenderly opened his eyes and regretted it immediately, a painful blinding white screaming around the edge of his dizzying vision. He snapped them shut from the sting.

“Marn, it hurts,” he whimpered.

His cheek suddenly stung with the rawness of a fresh slap.

“I said wake up,” Delryd hissed, giving his shoulder a cruel pinch with her nails.

Érad let out a quiet cry of pain, quickly stifled by Delryd’s hand clamping over his mouth. He breathed laboriously through the spaces between her fingers and carefully opened his eyes again - the sensation of disorientation and the white fuzziness around the periphery of his vision slowly receded as he became aware of his surroundings.

The first thing he became aware of was a distinctive fruity smell. Apples.

Apples gently rotting in the heat.

It reminded him of home.

Érad was lying on his back on what felt like his own bedroll, wet with his sleep-sweat. Above him he saw Delryd’s face hovering a few breadths of a hand from his own past wild strands of her straw-colored hair; she was kneeling by his side looking down at him, an uncharacteristic worry plain on her face.

“Can you think?” Delryd asked.

Érad could almost feel the weight of her inspecting gaze roam over the features of his face, as if she was looking for something out of place across its surface.

“Clearly, I mean,” she added in a somewhat uncertain tone, pulling back her hand from his mouth.

“I.. I think so,” Érad said groggily. He scrunched his eyes together to further dim the glaring white at the edge of his vision.

“I don’t feel too good. My head hurts.”

“Makes sense,” Delryd replied in a somewhat strained tone. She sat herself up on her haunches, continuing to talk down to him. Érad noticed that she had thick bags under her red-rimmed eyes, like she hadn’t slept in a while.

“You’ve been leaking mad from the mouth in your sleep.”

“Leaking mad?”

She nodded slowly. Discomfort read plain on her face. “Yes. Mad.”

“Like what?”

Delryd pulled back some of her hair behind one ear, looking away.

“Just… things. It doesn’t matter. You were ailing.”

Érad thought on what to say and, noticing her unease, decided not to press her further, looking around him instead.

The rising sun implied that it was somewhere early in the morning and they appeared to be in a small glade somewhere, where the air smelled of a fruity rot and was filled with the sound of busy insects buzzing nearby.

“What happened?”

“The bastard gave you a good whomp on the back of your skull.”

“Who did?”

“The bard from earlier. Haran.”

“The one from the tavern?”

“The very same,” said a different voice some distance away.

Both their heads turned to look towards a small copse of fig trees near the edge of the clearing. Érad realized that this glade was different from the one he remembered - he saw no horses grazing on a hill, nor did he hear a river running nearby. They seemed to have traveled elsewhere in the time that he was out.

Haran, dressed in motley traveling garb and a brightly colored blue cloak, was walking over towards them from the nearby treeline with a bundle of freshly gathered firewood in his arms. He was a normal length’s tall, narrow in the waist and long-limbed, with shoulder-length brown hair gracefully graying and a wild, whitening beard that reached the top of an unnecessarily wide collar. His physical appearance implied him to be almost the age of an elder, but he seemed both spry and still surprisingly strong considering the amount of wood he was carrying.

Érad noticed that the bard had a pair of sheathed longknives hanging from either side of his belt and recognized the distinct floral decorations on their scabbards as Delryd’s and his own, but saw no sign of any other weapon.

Had the bard managed to disarm the both of them while being unarmed himself?

Érad squinted back up painfully at his friend, whose own eyes were pulled tight in a glare fixated on the approaching bard. He saw no sign or mark on her, or on himself for that matter, of rope or chains that would indicate that they had been forcefully captured.

“Now, now,” Haran said as he walked over to the center of what looked to be a recently set up shared camp, “there is no need for a girl like you to look so sour.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Haran knelt down and started placing the gathered firewood down in the center of their gathering, taking his time to create the skeleton of a proper campfire.

“You know,” Haran continued in a musing tone under the gaze of Delryd’s silent scowl, “there is a commonly held belief in these parts that if a girl grows up to be ugly that it was likely her own fault. She will have pulled too many sour faces while ripening, the Sureli say. A grape can only take so much prodding before it bruises.”

“I’ve seen a great deal of ugly men in these lands. Do they say the same thing about them?” Delryd shot back, her tone biting.

“Amusingly, no,” Haran said, taking out his flint and tinder, “they do not really have a similar saying for the boys that grow up to be trolls. Just if they grow up to be weak.”

Érad slowly tried to pull himself up by his elbows, but he felt Delryd’s hands slyly move to stop him; her hands pressed down, but not too sternly as if she was merely trying to be protective of him. Long years of dangerous life together in the wilds had given the two of them a mutual understanding of one another that required no words to express intent.

Érad understood.

Wait.

“Weak men,” Haran continued, working on lighting the fire,”they instead say make for sour wine. Something to do with their local tradition. Some days before the first grape harvest they-”

“I don’t care,” Delryd growled, springing swiftly up to her feet.

Like Érad, Delryd had pure Comedhi blood coursing through her veins and it showed not just in her appearance but also in the manner of her bearing. She was surely the length of a man while Érad was almost a length and a half, and on average she seemed to be about a head-and-a-half taller than most local women they had encountered so far south of the Crown. Her hair was a wild flaxen that reached just below her shoulders and appeared to be perpetually dirtied by the road, decorated solely with a few strands of dark ribbons haphazardly woven through it to denote still being one of Dahn’s children; her eyes were deep-set and a clouded blue - the color of an overcast sky - with her narrow nose having a naturally sharp incline that tilted somewhat jaggedly to the left at its tip on account of a youthful mistake that caused a break to heal poorly. Her jaw was square to the point of a harshness, its strong lines coming together in a proud chin held high in rebellion as she stood in front of her friend. All of it came to show a defiant stance that in the Southlands would be said to more befit a powerful lord on the cusp of victory rather than a young shepherd girl come down from the mountains.

“Stop toying with us! Either see fit to kill us, turn us in, or let us go our way,” continued Delryd in a harsh tone.

Hidden behind Delryd’s long legs, Érad kept himself flat on his back with his elbows tense and tight to his sides to spring himself upward quickly should the chance arise. He blinked away the tears caused by the dull ache coming from the back of his head; he didn’t need to touch the back of his skull to know that it was tender.

Haran looked up from his work on the campfire, a thin tendril of smoke already making itself visible from somewhere beneath his hands. The creases in his old face were one of amusement, and not at all of worry, at the outburst.

“Kill you? Why would I want to do such a thing? You should know of me that at best I am a vagrant with a tale or two and at worst I am a mean drunk with a loud mouth.”

“You’re both Comedhi, aren’t you?” asked Haran as he bent over to blow on the nascent flame.

Neither replied. In and of itself an admission of fact, Haran thought to himself.

“Handing you over to the Sacrelians would be just as sure of a death sentence as me putting a knife in your guts. And I refuse to do either - I am no killer.”

He then paused, considering.

“Although I suppose that if I was, I would probably say the same thing. So I suppose you shall have to trust me that I am not.”

“I don’t trust you at all,” Delryd spat.

“Then I am glad to know there are at least some fruits of reason loosely rolling around in that head of yours,” Haran quipped as he rose to a stand and dusted off his many-patched traveling trousers. “Despite your presence in these lands implying very much otherwise.”

“Why won’t you let us go?” Delryd demanded.

“Let you go?” Haran rubbed his grizzled beard musingly.

“Well, I suppose if I were a loyal servant of the crown I would say that I captured you because you are, in essence, my enemy in war and that I am doing little more than my duty demands me to. But I have never seen eye to eye with my king and I have no interest in wars ongoing, only ones already waged. So I shall keep my answer pure to heart and simply refute: I have put no chain on you to keep you fettered. You are free to leave, should you wish to.”

“Free to leave?” replied Delryd incredulously.

“You’ve stolen from us our weapons and our coin. Leaving us on the road without either is just another death sentence, except the noose’ll take more of its time to tighten.”

Haran pursed his lips. “I did not steal anything away from you. Stealing implies I wanted your knives and your coin for personal gain, but that is not why,” he patted the sheathed knives hanging from his belt, “I took these. I did so because I did not want you to have them - that is taking, not stealing. There is a difference.”

“You have an annoying way with words, bard. Fine then, I’ll be as clear as the Dame. You’ve taken our things and wounded my companion, meaning that for the better part of the day I’ve had no choice but to travel with you. Why attack us only to force us into your company?”

Better part of the day? Érad repeated in his thoughts. He looked at the stance of the sun past the treetops and realized that it was on the wrong side of morning: it wasn’t rising, it was setting. Had he really been out for that long?

“As I have told you before,” Harad said as he looked to Érad lying behind her feet, “I felt guilty for knocking the boy a tad too hard on the head. It didn’t feel right to crack the egg and leave you with the yolk to leak.”

“Then why did you?” Érad croaked, his voice raspy. “Crack my egg?”

As the last words left his lips, so did the strength seem to leave Érad’s arms. His elbows collapsed and he fell back with a quiet thud, the dullness at the back of his head having turned into a sudden searing pain. Delryd glanced back down at her friend and they shared a look that spoke volumes on its own.

Can you fight?

No.

Can you stand?

No.

Érad could see what Delryd was thinking from the way her shoulders slackened. She looked to have realized that any potential confrontation wouldn’t mean a two on one and the fact that Haran had managed to take Érad out by striking him from the back didn’t necessarily imply the bard had a reason to avoid such a fight in the first place; a mountain lion also preferred to attack its prey from behind and no sane man would ever think to underestimate such an animal even if they had a superior number. As his father would have said on the matter: meat is meat. It’s the kill that counts, not the method.

By the way the fight seemed to leave her, Érad couldn’t help but wonder how the bard had managed to overpower Delryd on his own the first time around. Érad was the stronger between the two of them, yes, but she was faster. A lot faster. It made him question if the bard, despite his advanced age, wasn’t somehow even quicker.