skyrimkinkmeme | Meme Announcements!

Meme Announcements!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: UPDATED 12/16/2017

Happy Holidays, fellow Kinkmemers! I have returned and have no reasonable excuse for my absence except LIFE. I will be working on updating the archives. If anyone sees anything amiss, please let me know.

I am also hoping to find another Mod and an Archivist.

The more dedicated people we have in this Meme the less chance of it dying. I admit that being the sole keeper of the Meme is not great for the fandom. If something were to happen to me, for good, this place would go the way of the Fallout Kink Meme. Let's not let that happen! If anyone would be interested in Modding/Archiving, please drop me a line. Thanks! <3

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There’s no time to dwell on grief or anger. There’s no time to dwell on anything; they travel through the night, slipping between the pines like shades, with their cloaks drawn up and their heads bent grimly against the wind. Hand in hand, dragging each other along like frightened children. The snow muffles their steps, but the rush of the sea is a constant murmur to their left, just out of sight in the darkness to the north. It leaves Freyja straining her ears for the sounds of pursuit.

Morning dawns pale and cold. Thorald is flagging badly, so they press themselves against the cliff face and curl inside their cloaks. Eitri offers to take the watch, and when he wakes them two hours later his face is set and his eyes are red, though it may only be from squinting into the wind. They press on.

By the time night starts to close around them they are staggering through the drifts; Thorald slips on a slick root beneath the snow, goes to his knees, and does not get up again. Eitri moves forward as if to help, but he does not seem able to work out what to do with his hands. “Enough,” Freyja breathes. “We camp.” Between the two of them they haul Thorald to his feet. “In the trees,” she says. “Set up the tent. I’ll get the water.” Her head is spinning.

They passed water shortly before: just a rivulet tumbling off the edge of a little ravine, but it will do. Freyja drinks directly from the stream. Sits back, hunched over her knees and wiping her mouth; the world rocks gently. Freyja curses herself for a fool. She should know better than to push to exhaustion that way. At the best of times it’s counterproductive. On Skyrim’s north coast, in the falling dark of the year, it can be deadly. And yet the urge to press on is still jittering under her skin. Freyja does not consider herself easily unnerved – she’s seen far too much of the world for that – but there is an unsteady tilt in her guts when she examines last night’s memories. In a puddle filmed with ice she catches a glimpse of herself: freckles stark against the pallor of her face, a dark smear of blood near her hairline. Freyja wonders if it belongs to her or to one of the Thalmor. To the prisoner she killed. She scrubs it quickly away.

By the time she returns with full waterskins Thorald is asleep in the tent, slumped awkwardly sideways over his own lap like a tree brought down by a storm. It looks as though he passed out the moment he sat down. Eitri crouches just inside the door, trying to cover him with a fur cloak. He is fumbling, clumsy, his eyes drifting shut, and Freyja remembers that he hasn’t slept at all.

“Wake him up – get some water in him,” she says to Eitri. “And then get some rest. I’ll take the watch.”

“The man needs to sleep.”

“He needs to drink. He’s weak enough as it is – trust me, nothing makes a man drop faster than thirst. I don’t want him collapsing in the middle of a march.”

“Would you leave him if he did?”

“What?”

“Would you leave him behind? If he collapsed?”

Freyja turns away, biting furiously at the inside of her cheek, reminding herself that the man is grieving and has not slept in thirty hours. “Go to sleep,” she grits out. Eitri crouches behind her for a long time, still and silent, before she hears the soft flap of the hide tent falling closed. The wind sends powder hissing over the snow.

With jerky movements Freyja unsheathes her dagger, squinting in the dusk before giving up and testing the edge by feel. It’s dull, of course. It could hardly fail to be after all the action it saw in Northwatch Keep. She feels the long night’s march as she sinks to the ground, pressing her back to the trunk of a big spruce and pulling her whetstone from its pouch. Drawing her cloak more tightly about her shoulders, she settles in a watchful huddle between two large roots, dagger braced across her knees.

Freyja learned to care for a blade before she learned to wield one, watching her father hone the edge of his hunting knives. His beard smelled constantly of woodsmoke for all the evenings he spent before the firepit keeping the tools of his trade in good repair. Once she learned how, her father used to let her sharpen the smaller of the knives while he fletched arrows. It’s not a task to be rushed or brute-forced, and as she draws the stone across her blade Freyja feels her mind begin to settle, calmed by the repeated sound and the smooth, firm strokes.

For as long as she can remember, she has understood that the Thalmor kill Talos worshippers. Freyja was conceived the night before her father left for Cyrodiil to fight with the Legion; she did not meet him until the end of the Great War, and she still has fuzzy memories of how thin and weary he was. How he clutched her mother and cried. Her mother cried too, which had frightened her. Sonje of Whiterun raised a child alone through three years of famine and war and the very real chance that her husband would never meet his daughter. She had a common name, and in later years citizens of Whiterun would distinguish which Sonje they meant by calling her the steady one – you know, Torstein’s wife – until it almost became a title, like the epithets won in battle. Freyja was too young to grasp any of this at the time, of course, but at three she believed her mother to have the answer to every question and the solution to every hardship. She had never seen her weep. Naturally she regarded the man who provoked such a thing with suspicion. Eventually he released her mother and knelt before her, eyes shining very blue in his weather-darkened face, beard trimmed neat and short in the Colovian style, not full as he wore it for most of the rest of her childhood. Freyja had glanced warily up at her mother’s tear-streaked face, but ultimately she found that she did not have it in her to be afraid of this stranger with his hopeful, heartbreaking, hesitant smile.

Perhaps due to this enforced separation at its inception, theirs was a tight-knit family. Her parents never made a secret of the fact that they still worshipped Talos, but neither did they make a secret of the fact that discreetness was literally a matter of life and death. At six Freyja made a playmate cry, wondering matter-of-factly why men still trailed their fingers over the shrine as they passed the statue in the square when they could be killed for it. The neighbor woman had been none too happy – it’s not a subject to discuss with children, she had said – but Sonje did not back down. She needs to know, her mother had said. They all need to know.

So Freyja knows, and always has. She’s seen the truth of it all over Tamriel. In Hammerfell she heard stories about the vicious guerrilla war in the years after the Concordat, stories that made her stomach turn. She met a tavern keeper with an easy, jovial manner and half his face burned away, skin melted and shining and woven with the intricate twisting tendrils of magical fire. She’s seen the ruin of Bruma’s Great Chapel. And she still worships the warrior’s god, but “By the Eight” falls easily from her lips, an old and cautious habit.

None of it prepared her for the brutality on display in the dripping dark of Northwatch Keep. She can still taste death at the back of her throat. She can still feel the scalding pulse of blood across her fingers.

(Another thing she saw in Hammerfell: a greying warrior in the traditional dress of the Alik’r, straight-backed and whip-thin in a dignified sort of way, whose horse had broken a leg when a cartful of heavy wine barrels overturned in a narrow alley. The creature was shrieking piteously. Tears rolled silently down its master’s face as he drew his sword, and everyone walking past was pretending not to see him.)

She is afraid. She was a fool not to be afraid before. But she is also angry, and not only at the Thalmor. Her jaw clenches hard as she thinks back to Eitri’s words. Of course she wouldn’t leave Thorald, if he collapsed. Freyja takes a deep breath, forces herself to relax her grip on the whetstone lest she notch her blade. There is a difference between abandoning a man to his fate and giving mercy when it is all that is left to give. She has never done such a thing before, but she would do it again, if given the choice. Whether it made Eitri angry or no. The damn fool.

Freyja wonders briefly how much of her anger is righteous outrage and how much is frustrated longing. She’d forgotten she was alone until a man on his own lonely quest edged up against the fringes of her life, like the brush of shoulders in a narrow tent. She’d liked him, with his homespun bravery and self-deprecating humor. And she wants camaraderie now, with the recent pitiless reminder that she is far better at ending lives than saving them, but she’s not like to get it. So much for that victory kiss, she thinks. Freyja has rarely felt less victorious.

* * * * *

After that initial mad flight, their pace slows to a more sustainable one. The stark beauty of the coastline is still more striking beneath a coating of new snow, but Freyja can no longer appreciate it; the terrain leaves them terribly exposed, trapped between the flat grey sea and the unforgiving wall of the mountains. Freyja is absurdly grateful for the blizzard that erased any initial traces of their footsteps. Wary of pursuit, they continue to snatch sleep in five and six-hour increments. There’s only room for two in the tent, but none of them is keen to sleep without a watchman anyway, not with the spectre of Northwatch dungeon padding along behind them. Thorald has an alarming tendency to twitch awake and stare at the tent roof with fixed pupils and rigid limbs, stiff and still and breathless as a corpse. Trapped in some brutal memory. It’s an inescapable reminder of what awaits them should the Thalmor track them down.

They speak little. Months of ill treatment have left Thorald weak, and he toils along with his head hung miserably between his shoulders, dumb with exhaustion. Eitri, by contrast, stalks through the snow like a bear just emerged from its winter den. Freyja is reluctant to disturb either of them for conversation.

She worries about the ground near Solitude. Their headstart serves them well now, as they weave through fir and scrub or pick their way over the rocky, tide-scoured coast – terrain too rough for even Skyrim’s hardy horses. But their course funnels them to the narrow spit of land beneath Solitude’s Great Arch. It’s a natural choke point. For some two miles they will be forced to walk one of Haafingar’s main roads, the only escape to scale a sheer cliff or swim the broad, burly shoulders of the Karth River, with its swift tidal current dangerous even for ships. If they turn aside now they might avoid it. But they’ll lose a full day just making the climb into the mountains, especially with Thorald in the shape he’s in; once they top out on the ridgeline they’re sure to encounter frost trolls, ice wraiths, and – most dangerous of all – the road. Wild and weatherbeaten as it is, the narrow track will have travelers, and quite possibly Thalmor search parties. And it will take them closer to the Embassy.

They’ve no choice but to hold their present course. Freyja just hopes there’s not a party of justiciars waiting for them.

If nothing else, it is rewarding to watch Thorald grow slightly stronger as they travel. When he isn’t angry Eitri is closed and quiet, but he makes it his mission to ration out little chunks of smoked fish and dried snowberries to the other man throughout the day, taking care never to let Thorald’s shrunken stomach deal with too much food at one time. One morning, as they are packing away the tent and Eitri is filling the waterskins, Thorald glances up at her. “So – Olfina’s old playmate.” He gives her a haggard smile. “You used to be all arms and legs and temper. I don’t actually think I’ve thanked you.”

Freyja flushes in spite of herself. “It’d take a harder heart than mine to leave a man in that pit,” she says, tersely. “A Whiterun man, at that. How is Olfina these days?”

“Well enough, when last I saw her.” Thorald clenches helpless fists, voice quiet. “I don’t really know.”

“How long have you been locked up?”

“What day is it?”

Freyja counts on her fingers. “It’s the ninth of Sun’s Dusk.”

“Just over three months, then.” He shakes his head. “It seemed longer.”

From what she’s seen, three months in a Thalmor dungeon is plenty long enough. “Jarl Balgruuf seems to do a good job of keeping the justiciars out of Whiterun, else that mad priest in the square would be long dead,” Freyja says. Uneasily, she thinks of the shrine above White River Gorge, the one her mother used to take her to. “How’d you end up a prisoner?”

“My brother and I joined up with the Stormcloaks,” Thorald says. “I was captured in a skirmish outside Morthal. They brought the prisoners back to Solitude, and…I don’t even know what happened, truly. Can’t have been more than ten minutes after walking into the city that the Thalmor showed up, demanding I be turned over to them.”

“The Legion just gave you up?” Freyja asks. Thorald spits bitterly, and eloquently, into the snow.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” he says, looking moody. “Tullius himself got involved – they had a signed order from the Embassy. The general looked like he’d taken a sip of a bad batch of mead.”

Freyja shakes her head. “What did they want with you?”

Thorald’s face twists briefly, as though she has gripped an old wound in iron fingers. “I don’t know,” he says. “At first they accused me of being a Stormcloak, a secret Talos worshipper. But they already knew I was a Stormcloak, else the Legion wouldn’t have had me. They just…wanted a confession. To what it didn’t matter, they simply wanted me to admit to something. I think they wanted to break me. Use me as a way to get to the rest of the Grey-Mane family.” He lifts his chin, pale and defiant. “I gave them no such pleasure.”

Freyja considers. “But what would they want with the Grey-Manes?”
“My father is the best smith in Tamriel,” Thorald says, without conceit.

“Hmm.” Freyja doesn’t think the Thalmor have any use for Nordic steel, not even from the Skyforge. She lashes the tent to her pack and stands, kicking her filthy boots against a tree. The early-season snow is growing slushy after several warm days and turning the ground to mud. “I’m glad we happened upon you, for what it’s worth.”

“I won’t say I’m disappointed. Though I could do with Hulda’s roast goat and a bottle of Honningbrew’s finest, after three months of that place. And maybe a pretty girl to serve them up? Something to keep in mind next time you stage an impossible rescue.”

Freyja laughs, startled. It echoes loudly in the morning air, and she sees Eitri glance towards them as he emerges from the woods with the newly filled waterskins. “They didn’t starve out your sense of humor.”

“I’m happy to be alive,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the sky again. I owe you far more than I can repay.”

“Don’t be a fool. Did you expect us to leave you there? It was nothing.” Freyja sighs. “At least someone got out alive.”

Thorald considers for a moment. He darts a sideways glance at Eitri. “He’ll come ‘round, you know,” Thorald says, lowering his voice. “I’ve seen worse lovers’ quarrels.”

“We aren’t lovers,” Freyja says, too quickly. He looks surprised, which makes her scowl. “What?”

“It’s just – nevermind,” Thorald backpedals, as her frown deepens. “At any rate, you did the right thing.”

Freyja swallows. “Did I?”

“Of course you did.” He puts a hand on her forearm. “He was past saving, the poor bastard. Maybe we could have gotten him out of there in body, but not in mind. If it had been me—” he shudders. “I’d have thanked you.”

It’s absurd that he’s comforting her over it. Freyja recalls the sunny youth he once was, and abruptly remembers why she developed such a silly selective muteness in the presence of her best friend’s handsome elder brother. She glances over at him, half-starved and bruised and earnest. It seems even the Thalmor couldn’t beat the kindness out of him. “Thank you,” she says, heartfelt.
He shrugs, echoing her. “It’s nothing.”

As they finish packing up camp Freyja glances again at Eitri. He looks terrible, she realizes: his eyes are dull and distant, ringed beneath with ashy half-moons, and his mouth has the same hard set as a man forced to limp along on a broken ankle. Freyja feels a tiny twist of guilt. She has been avoiding him, knowing that he’s angry with her, but his wordless grief is so palpable she can taste it. The man is an orphan, she recalls. His cousin was his last remaining family. “Eitri,” she says, and he cuts his eyes in her direction.

Freyja squirms a little when he meets her gaze; she’s not very good at comfort. “I’m sorry about your—”

Eitri’s shout makes her turn, and it is only years of finely honed reflexes that save her from being the sabrecat’s next meal.

Freyja dives and rolls, already scrambling to her feet as the cat’s lunge carries it past her. Thorald has the glass sword that he stole from his dead guard in hand; Eitri has shoved the other man behind him, feet planted in a protective stance, his own axe drawn.

The cat roars, prowling uncertainly. Clearly it expected easier prey. Then Freyja watches its yellow eyes narrow upon Thorald, picking out the weakest member of the party with a born predator’s instinct. With a long, gurgling snarl, it steps forward – and springs. Eitri leaps between them. He has just enough time to bring up his axe before he falls, with six hundred pounds of brindled fur atop him.

Freyja is already running. She plunges her sword to the hilt beneath the animal’s ribs as Thorald hacks at its muscled neck. Eitri groans and she rips her blade free, ready for another blow, but to her surprise the creature is limp and twitching, Eitri’s own blade lodged in the roof of its mouth. He is gasping for air, flat on his back beneath the enormous cat, but otherwise he looks unharmed.

It must have started stalking him in the woods and then followed him back to camp. After he filled the waterskins, most likely, or it would have leaped on his back as he crouched beside the stream. He’s very lucky. All of them are, Thorald most of all. Eitri probably saved his life. The sabrecat would have torn him open; the man has nothing but a thick fur cloak that might have defended him against the beast’s vicious claws. They are sunk so deeply into Eitri’s hardened leather armor that Freyja has to pry them loose before he can get up.

“That’s two life-debts I owe you,” Thorald says faintly, but Eitri just shakes his head, still heaving desperately for breath.

When they get moving at last, Freyja drops back to walk beside Eitri. A wire-thin line of blood is beading along the side of his throat, just below his left ear. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“You’re bleeding,” she says, reaching for the livid graze on his neck. He jerks fiercely away from her hand.

Freyja stiffens. “Are we going to do this all the way back to Ivarstead?”

The name of his hometown does not seem to soothe his temper; he bristles like a wolf at bay, mouth set in tight line. “I can find my own way back to Ivarstead.”

“And I never leave a job half-done.”

“It’s not a job,” he says, through gritted teeth. “I’m not paying you.”

“I promised to bring you home.”

“Home.” He snorts bitterly through his nose.

“Look, I am sorry about your cousin. And as for the other fellow, I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just how it is.”

“A man is dead and that’s all you have to say?”

“Yes,” Freyja snarls. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not a hero. I’m just a sellsword, and I can’t save the whole world.”

“We could have tried.”

“Go to Oblivion. I would have tried if there had been any chance at all, but there wasn’t, and I’m not going to weep and wail over something that couldn’t be helped. I am a killer,” she says, frank and fierce. “Look at me and tell me that that isn’t what you see. Look at every scratch on my armor. Look at every notch in my shield.You think the jarl hires me to walk into a bandit camp alone and talk the bastards down? You think men pay me just to crawl through some damp cavern after trinkets like an alchemist’s assistant after mushrooms? Men pay me to kill. If you want a woman with a soft heart for a hopeless cause, find a pretty tavern bard without scars on her face.”

“You made it very clear that it doesn’t matter what kind of woman I want.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

Even as she says it Freyja wonders if it’s true. She steadies her voice with an effort. “What is it that you want from me? Because if it’s an apology for doing what any warrior would have known needed doing, you aren’t going to get it.”

“I want you to let me be.” He slings his pack over his shoulder, striding brusquely ahead.

Ungrateful bastard. Freyja watches him stalk away, the carriage of his shoulders high and stiff. Calls after him. Her voice is clear on the cold air. “I could’ve, you know,” she says. “Let you be. There on the road, with the Thalmor.”

He pauses, one knee bent, foot not quite fully placed back down in the snow. He does not look around. Freyja watches the back of his head while wind ruffles his tawny hair, the fur of his cloak. When his voice comes it is quiet. “Maybe you should’ve,” he says, and strides off along the beach.

After that Freyja stops trying. The coast grows rockier, pierced through like an archer’s dummy with jagged clefts and coves. With each passing day her apprehension about approaching the capital grows. When the Solitude Lighthouse looms before them as they round a steep little bluff, she pauses.

Thorald glances at her. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ll strike the road in a couple miles,” says Freyja. “I won’t feel safe until we’re off it, and well out of this hold.”

“It’s been days since we had sight of anyone,” Thorald says. “We had a good headstart – I know I’ve slowed you down, but do you really think they can catch us? They’d have done it by now.”

“They don’t need to catch us. They only need to guess which way we’ve gone. There’s a good reason folk in Dragonbridge fear the war. Without that bridge you’ve got to go twenty miles upstream to cross the Karth; downriver there is no crossing, short of a boat or a swim. And I wouldn’t swim that river with a full pack, not for a hundred septims. It’s not very wide there, but it’s deep and rocky, and damned fast. If they’ve any sense for the lay of the country they can cut over the mountains and get there first – and that’s if they haven’t blocked the roads past Solitude. Short of a few mountain passes into the Reach, there’s only one way out of Haafingar by land.”

“They won’t know for sure we’ve gone that way.”

“They can make a guess,” Freyja says. “You don’t go over the mountains with an injured man, and you don’t head for Markarth when you’re running from the Thalmor.”

He shakes his head, seeing the sense of it. “I know what the salmon feel like, watching the net close in.”

“I’m hoping we can find a fisherman at the Solitude docks to ferry us over the river, funny enough.”

“Freyja,” warns Eitri, as they crest another broken rise.

Below them, so well hidden that it appears as if by magic, looms a great sea-going ship, with the curved prow and shielded sides so favored by Nordic shipwrights. Freyja is no sailor, but she spent enough time in the ports of Hammerfell to see that it has nimble lines, and that the men bustling about the deck are preparing to cast off. She spots a crateful of furs, and another of jumbled weapons. It doesn’t take much to see that her crew is up to no good, moored in a hidden cove when the Solitude harbor is so close. A sudden idea strikes her. “That could work,” Freyja muses, almost to herself.

Thorald looks at her, brow furrowed. “What – oh. No. They’re pirates, Freyja!”

“They look more like smugglers to me.”

“What’s the difference? They’re as likely to sell us to the Thalmor as smuggle us to safety.”

“Oh, they’ll sell us out in an instant, but hopefully by then we’ll be halfway across Skyrim.” Freyja strides forward, determined, and hops down a short ledge. Eitri follows, and Thorald shakes his head, bringing up the rear. “We’re bandits, by the way,” she says, as they clamber down the rocks. “If they think we’re on the right side of the law, they won’t give us the time of day.”

“We certainly look the part,” says Thorald, running a hand through his stringy hair. All three of them are grimy and worn from a week on the run.

A sharp-eyed scout spots them as they reach the bottom of the hill. “Grushnag,” mutters the sailor, over his shoulder.

Immediately an orc, dressed like a dandy but painted like a warrior, comes stalking down the gangplank. “Enough! We’re headed for Dawnstar. You can tell Erikur he’ll see his shipment when we see his coin, and not bef- who in the name of Malacath are you?”

“Not who you were expecting, I take it.”

His hand drifts to the mace at his hip. “If you’re smart, you’ll turn around and forget you were ever here.”

Freyja lifts her hands, empty palms outward. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“I don’t care if you’re looking for it – you’ve found it if you don’t walk away. Sayed,” he growls, and a wiry Redguard on deck nocks an arrow.

“Even if you stand to make some coin? We only want passage to Dawnstar. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?.”

“This ain’t a passenger vessel for noblemen, sweetie,” he sneers.

Freyja gives him her fiercest stare. “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a noble, isn’t it?”

He’s quiet for a long, tense moment. Freyja continues to stare him down; orcs in general respond well to bravado. Out of the corner of her eye she watches the smuggler on deck, waiting with his half-drawn bow.

“Go get the captain,” the orc finally barks, to one of his crew.

The captain turns out to be an old Nord named Volf, with a long grey beard and a wicked scar just beneath his left eye, red and raised and curved like a fishhook. He takes one look at them and steeples his fingers under his grizzled chin. “What are you running from?”

“The double-crossing son of a whore who took over my gang,” Freyja says, without missing a breath. “We had a good operation going before he staged his mutiny.” The captain just smiles at her.

“I’ve got a sense for people,” he says. “You’re no common bandit, lovely - I can see that just by looking at you. Why are you really in such a hurry?”

Freyja pauses for only a beat; men like him can scent weakness. “Got me,” she shrugs, and then winks at him. “I’m a jailbreaker - someone hired me to pull these sorry louts out of a cell.”

“Who?”

She scoffs. “A moment ago you were telling me I looked like a professional.”

His grin shows a gold tooth. “Fair enough. You any good?”

“I got them out of Castle Dour, didn’t I?”

“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. Where else you work?”

Careful, Freyja thinks. She’s willing to bet he’s familiar with the inside of several prisons, and ready to grill her on what they look like. “Markarth,” she says.

He laughs. “Now I know you’re lying. No one escapes Cidhna Mine.”

“I did. Or didn’t you hear? I’d have thought a man like you would know the latest rumors.”

The captain regards her with new respect. “I did hear about a breakout, a few months ago,” he says. Then he smiles again, slyly. “If you’re so good, you must have plenty of coin.”

Damn.

“Aye,” she says, “and I’m not in a hurry to donate it to the jarl’s coffers. You think I carry a load of gold on me when I’m aiming to get myself jailed, you’re a much bigger fool than I took you for.”

He smiles again. “How much do you have?”

In the end he takes every coin they have between them. Later, below deck, Freyja shrugs, settling into a pile of straw between crates in the hold. There are no empty berths for them, so it will have to do. “I’ve been poor more than once, but I’ve never been to Thalmor prison. And having seen one, I don’t intend to start.”

They can’t really argue with that. “Cidhna Mine, though,” Thorald says. “Where did you come up with that story?”

“It wasn’t a story.”

“You didn’t really break out of Cidhna Mine!”

"No, I did.” He raises an eyebrow. “What? I hadn’t done anything - it was a cover-up, some arrangement between one of the Silver-Bloods and the leader of the Forsworn. I had to go through him to get out, actually."

“The Forsworn are magic users, and dangerous ones. How in Oblivion did you manage that?”

“With a small, sharp blade between the ribs,” Freyja says, dryly - though she thinks better of it, when Thorald makes a choking noise and she recalls that he remembers her when she was six. “He had it coming, believe me.”

It’s at that moment that Eitri stands, wordless, and walks out. The door shudders in its frame when it slams behind him.

The ship shifts and groans, a small puddle at the bottom of the hold sloshing. Freyja glares at the low tarred beams above them. Thorald shifts awkwardly. “Like I said, he’ll come ‘round,” he says. For a moment it’s silent. “Someone ought to bring him back,” he adds. “I don’t trust these pirates worth a Riften dice game.”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”

“I’ll go.”

“Thanks.”

“I owe him that,” Thorald says, voice low. “His brother—”

“Cousin.”

“Whatever.” His voice is rough. “He was in the cell next to mine. I could see him walk by when they took him for interrogation, the red hair was easy to spot. When they dragged him back I’d knock on the wall, and he’d knock back, on the other side, let me know he was alive – he did the same when it was my turn. I waited – gods know how long, once, before I heard from him, I think he was unconscious, or maybe he just didn’t have the strength. But eventually he always knocked back. They wouldn’t let any of us talk, but we had our little code. It made you want to stay alive. You didn’t like to think of the other fellow knocking and knocking, and not getting an answer.” Thorald swallows. “Well, the guards caught us at it. They chained us up in the interrogation room and left us, and he was already bad, he was dying, but for two days I sat across the room and watched it happen. That’s the only reason I knew his name – that’s the first time we ever spoke. Funny, right? That you can make friends with a man, and never speak to him.”

Freyja stares at him, feeling winded. Thorald just plunges on, as though he cannot stop the words now that they’ve begun to tumble out. “Like I said – he was dying. But they wouldn’t have done that to him, if not for me.”

Freyja finds her voice. “You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do,” he growls. “I told you – they wanted to break me. They would have killed him anyway, I know that. But they strung him up by the wrists and let him die in his chains because they wanted me to watch him sweat and shake and rave with fever from fifteen feet away, and not even be able to give him a sip of water. And then they just left him there to rot. Because they wanted that corpse staring back at me every time they brought me in for another torture session.”

“Divines,” Freyja breathes, dry-mouthed. “Whatever you do, don’t tell him that story.”

“Do you think I’m thick? I just—” Thorald swallows again. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

Imagining him shackled to the wall, left alone with the decaying body of a friend and a festering guilt over the manner of his death, Freyja concludes that Thorald is probably an authority on that subject.

A party of three, and every one of us alone, she thinks, as she settles back against the groaning hull of the ship. Divines, what a fucking mess we’re in.

Yes! Yes! I do so adore your little story you've got going here, A!A. I'll cry a little when it's finally over, but until then, I'll be reading this like a fiend. Keep it up!

Thank you very much! I'm having fun writing it, so I'm glad somebody is having fun reading. :)

And I thought I hated the Thalmor in the game...

Thanks! I'm glad you think my Thalmor live up to the standard of shiver-inducing loathsomeness set by the game, which is a pretty high one.

how I only just got onto the bandwagon now, I'll never know, but damn A!A, this is a nice fic :)

Thank you very much! I hope you continue to read and enjoy it.

Their first night aboard ship, a storm whips up. All three of them are seasick; the smugglers watch them heave over the rails with thinly veiled amusement while Freyja silently vows never to leave land again, as though seafaring is a vice like Colovian brandy. The remaining two days are calm, but gloomy. The tarry, low-ceilinged hold is oppressive, and Freyja tries to spend time on deck, away from the ribbed hull like the belly of some monstrous whale. Away from Eitri. He has been more subdued than snappish ever since he spoke with Thorald, but Freyja is still simmering over his words. It irks her to see the instant friendship that has sprung up between her companions. Eitri practically hovers over the other man, determined to nurse him back to health, and Thorald engages in constant murmured conversations whenever Eitri seems inclined to brood. Freyja knows the bond is fueled by guilt on both sides, shared grief for a man that neither of them could save, but she resents it all the same. It is not fair that she alone should bear the brunt of Eitri’s rage when she’s done nothing to deserve it.

So she avoids the hold. A few of the sailors aren’t bad sorts, though they’re unmistakably rogues. Sayed the Redguard archer is young and rather talkative, with an impressively colorful vocabulary for describing Skyrim’s weather. Freyja likes him in spite of herself. She keeps a wary eye on some of the others, suspecting they’re murderers or worse, but apparently she herself radiates enough of a dangerous air that they leave her alone. Mostly she just stays out of their way, watching the mist-shrouded coastline to the south and the sea like sullen, rolling iron to the north. Occasionally a pitted chunk of gray-green ice floats by.

Undoubtedly reluctant to reveal whichever furtive cove they use as a hideaway, the smugglers put them off several miles west of Dawnstar. There’s nothing to do but continue trudging east. It’s a grey, windy afternoon. No snow is falling, but now and then a gust whips up a stinging fog of icy powder from atop the snowdrifts. It’s in the midst of one of these miniature gales that they hear a distant scream of rage. “Thief!”

Freyja shades her eyes. In that moment a fur-clad shape comes pelting over the nearest rise; he skids to a halt when he spots them, rusty iron in one hand and the gleam of jewelry in the other. There is panic in his eyes, the sort of desperation that makes even the scrubbiest bandit dangerous. When he moves to raise his blade Freyja levels her own at his throat.

He hurls the bauble at her face and runs, clearly deciding it isn’t worth the effort. Clouds of snow trail at his heels. Bemused, Freyja sheathes her sword and kneels, feeling around in the snow. After a moment she comes up with a necklace. It’s a silver disk of curious craftsmanship, inlaid with pale, glowing mother-of-pearl. She passes a thumb over its smooth surface. The pendant is still warm.

With a clank of steel a Khajiit bursts into sight, sweating visibly in his heavy plate, ears flat against his head and eyes spitting blue-green fire. “Which way did that landless scum go? Kharjo is going to gut him!”

Freyja tips her head toward the snowy hills. “He went that way,” she says, dangling the amulet from her fingers. “I assume this is yours?”

“Ah,” gasps the Khajiit, snatching it from her hand. “This was given to me by my mother when I was just a cub. It is my only memory of home in this cold land.” He speaks with the throaty, rolling accent that Freyja cannot help but liken to a purr. It makes her smile. Thorald and Eitri are hanging back a little, wary, but even their lips twitch when he slips the amulet back over his head, with a very contented and very catlike arch of his neck. Eitri puts his hand to his collarbone, where his cousin’s Talos amulet hangs hidden beneath his armor.

“But I see not all Nords are as cold as the snows,” their new acquaintance says, and makes Freyja a Khajiiti bow, with its strange little flourish of the tail. “Kharjo is at your service, Ra’Shurh.”

Khajiit are always so terribly charming when they wish to be. Freyja shrugs, smiling. “My pleasure.”

“You are heading for Dawnstar, yes?” Freyja nods. The Khajiit hesitates. “You will walk with us?”

Deserved or no, the caravans have an unsavory reputation amongst traditional Nords. Her comrades will probably be shocked if she accepts. Let them be shocked, Freyja thinks, rather vindictively.

So that’s how they finally limp into Dawnstar: surrounded by the grey dusk and the warm, incomprehensible sound of the caravan members bantering in Ta’agra. At the outskirts of the city the Khajiit fling down their packs, erecting tents and with the near-magical swiftness of career nomads. Kharjo presses a small coin pouch into her hand. “A thousand thanks, Nord,” he says, with a whiskery grin. As they walk into the city the crackling of a fire and the notes of a strange flute drift after them: a mournful, wavering sound, like the wind moaning through a rocky canyon.

“So that’s a Khajiit caravan. They aren’t like I expected,” murmurs Eitri.

“They usually aren’t,” Freyja says, shortly.

Kharjo’s gratitude won’t make her a wealthy woman, but it’s enough to cover dinner and a room at the inn – a welcome surprise, as Freyja expected to spend half the evening splitting logs to feed the innkeeper’s firepit, in exchange for hot meals and warm beds. It would be safer to spend the night in their tent. But with several hundred miles between themselves and Northwatch Keep, she feels justified in taking a breather – and they need supplies for the road. Their last meal was a sad handful of dried snowberries each, and hunting for their dinner on the road will slow them down considerably. Game will be scarce. Evening Star’s not yet arrived, but the northern reaches of the Pale are already locked in winter’s icy claws.

For an extra coin the innkeeper is happy to heat a bath. Freyja leaves Thorald and Eitri at the bar while the man and his daughter drag a wooden tub into the room they’ve rented. Like those in so many rustic inns it does not have doors, but the tub is tucked out of sight in the far corner and Freyja sinks gratefully into the steam, submerged all the way to her chin. The grime that clouds the bathwater when she’s finished doesn’t bear thinking about. She always feels naked and strange without her armor, but she can’t bear to put it back on when her skin still feels tight and clean; instead she slips into her tunic of blue-grey wool and simple farmboy’s leggings, with their crossed stitches up the sides. Then she slides her boots and belt back on. And her sword, of course.

The men have retreated to a shadowed corner of the tavern, where they sit with empty bowls and half-filled mugs. Freyja is glad to see they’ve the sense to avoid drawing the crowd’s attention. Patrons of village inns often gravitate to travelers, eager to hear the latest news. With its deep harbor Dawnstar likely sees plenty of unfamiliar faces, but the war is bound to have disrupted the trade from Solitude, and with it the steady flow of sailors. Thorald catches her eye and gives her a wordless nod. Standing, he downs the last of his ale and makes for the room, stopping to ask the innkeeper for new bathwater.

Freyja turns toward Thorald’s empty seat – and then hesitates. Eitri is studying her with a crease between his brows, looking oddly lost. She scrapes a hand self-consciously through her hair, still damp and loose from the bath. It’s very soft, as it always is following the first wash after a long and dirty march. With a jerk she turns for the bar to order her dinner.

There’s an animated argument going on around the firepit. “I tell you, I saw it,” says a craggy old Nord wrapped in furs. “Big as the inn, and as black as a storm. It flew along the ridge. Up into the mountains. Ask Sorcha, she’ll tell you.”

A dark scrap of a huntress in the corner looks irritated at being made the center of attention, but she confirms his story. “Dragon, all right,” she says, shortly. Then she goes back to shaping an arrow, with a decisive flick of her horn-handled seax.

“It’ll be long gone by now,” barks another man.

“And if it’s not?” A woman in miner’s clothes plays nervously with the handle of her tankard.

“Best start praying to Akatosh,” says another. “No walls, no catapults, and everything’s made of wood.”

“Don’t forget Skald sent half the guard to fight for Ulfric,” mutters a third.

“Divines’ sakes, all of you.” An elderly woman swivels in her seat by the bar, where she’s been chatting with the innkeeper’s daughter. “That pass is thirty miles away, at least, and the dragon much further than that. It’s probably flown off toward Mount Anthor.”

“We could use another Olaf One-Eye, if that’s the case.”

“And the Greybeards have called the Dragonborn,” says the woman. “Even my old deaf ears heard that, Leigelf.”

“Bread and stew,” Freyja mutters to the innkeeper, while an Imperial scoffs. “That’s naught but a story. Age-old Nord nonsense!”

“Did you not hear it, then?” says the old woman.

“We all heard it. But who’s to say he answered? Who’s to say there is one to answer?”

“They say the Whiterun guards slew a dragon.”

“Well done them – doesn’t make’em Dragonborn.”

The argument continues as Freyja tosses a coin on the bar and slips back to the corner table, head down. She’s so lost in her thoughts that the voice at her elbow startles her. “Did you hear it?” Eitri murmurs.

“Hear what?”

“The Greybeards,” he says. “When they called the Dragonborn.”

Freyja pauses, spoon hanging over her bowl. “I heard it,” she says, after a moment.

“I thought it was thunder, at first,” he says. His elbows are braced on the table, one hand rubbing at the nape of his neck while he looks off toward the fire. It’s the first time he’s begun a conversation with her in days. Freyja is not sure what to say. I knew it wasn’t thunder. I thought Whiterun’s gatehouse would come down around my ears. I’d just helped slay a dragon and I could still taste hot metal and raw power at the back of my tongue.

It’s me they summoned like some kind of fabled hero, and I’m nothing but a sellsword.

She settles for saying nothing. It’s probably better that way; if they spoke she might say something she’d regret, still quietly furious over his refusal to see reason in her decisions. Instead Freyja fills the silence with a mouthful of horker meat. It’s incredibly rich after weeks of trail rations, swimming in a thick broth of roast tomatoes and garlic and its own grease, and the steady way she spoons it down is due as much to real hunger as to the desire to avoid conversation. By the time Eitri goes to take his turn in the bath she’s mopping up the stew with a heel of bread.

“Hungry, were you?”

Thorald slides onto the bench beside her. When Freyja turns to greet him she raises an eyebrow. “You look…better.”

He looks like a different man, in truth. Still too thin, with greying yellow bruises splashed in a lurid circle round his left eye and cheek, like Reachman war paint. But his hair is clean and unbraided, his skin free of filth and sweat. The stark angles of his cheeks and the fading black eye make him look a bit disreputable, but no longer pitiable.

“You should have seen yourself,” Thorald says, teasing.

“No doubt.” She takes another bite of bread.

“It isn’t you he’s angry with, you know.”

With her mouth full of the dense, crusty loaf, Freyja has to chew deliberately before answering. When she does her voice is flat. “Really.”

“He told me about how you freed him. Took on three justiciars, he said.”

Freyja shrugs. “He got the third himself.”

“Still.”

“And I’m supposed to be glad – what? That he knows I saved his life? He’d be an idiot if he didn’t.”

“Gods, woman,” says Thorald, suddenly terse. “His only family is dead back in that—”

“He’s not the only one who’s ever lost someone,” Freyja snaps. “And he wants me to be something I’m not. He’s alive because I’ve spent the better part of ten years selling my sword arm all over Tamriel, and I’m alive because I don’t hesitate when something needs doing. He can’t have it both ways. I’m not some sort of noble wandering heroine out of a ballad.”

“No one’s asking you to be.”

Freyja looks up at the bar, where the patrons are still arguing about dragons, and snorts.

“Look, just give him a chance,” Thorald says. “It’ll be a long, silent walk back to Ivarstead if you don’t.”

“He can find his own way back, according to him,” says Freyja, mulishly, but her heart isn’t in it. She’s got to go to Ivarstead anyway, if she’s to finally heed the Greybeards’ call. A stubborn fool Eitri may be, but he was right about one thing: no one else would have looked for his cousin if he had not, and wishing her fate on someone else will not make it so. She should have gone to the Greybeards a long time ago. And she’ll be damned if she’ll let the man be recaptured by the Thalmor, or even fall to a bandit ambush, after the effort she’s put into keeping him alive. So to Ivarstead it is. Freyja shakes her head, sick of talking about it.

“Or you could come to Windhelm with me,” Thorald says.

Freyja looks up quickly. Thorald tilts his head, regarding her, elbows braced earnestly on the table. “You’re going back to the Stormcloaks, then?” Freyja asks.

“Aye. I swore my blood and honor to Ulfric’s cause, and that was before...before.” Something raw and haunted sparks in Thorald’s eyes, so close to the surface that he blinks and swallows it down. Freyja nods. She’s heard some deeply unsettling things about Ulfric himself, but the idea that the Legion would simply hand over a prisoner to the Thalmor – however reluctantly – is troubling too. She can’t blame Thorald for being angry. She’s even half-tempted by his proposal, but it would only be another way of running from her fate.

She keeps her voice soft, deflecting. “I don’t think I’d make a good soldier.”

“It’s not like joining the Legion. Regulations and orders and lists—”

“My father fought with the Legion,” Freyja says, sharply.

Thorald softens. “Aye, and so did mine. So did half the old men in Whiterun, right up to the jarl himself. It was something to be proud of then, but it’s different now.”

“I’ve lived in Cyrodiil for years,” Freyja muses. “It’s been my home. There are fields, in the West Weald, where nothing will grow. Empty far as the eye can see. You’re walking through these golden ripples of grain high as your waist, and then you step over a rise and it’s nothing but cinders and earth. The elves did something to them, with magic. Like sowing salt.”

“And that justifies throwing the provinces to the wolves?”

“Of course not. Hammerfell’s worse, far worse – the Empire’s got a lot to answer for. But they didn’t make the decision lightly.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Freyja sighs, recalling the nameless dead man in Northwatch Keep. The brief catch of resistance before her dagger drove home, the scalding blood on her fingertips. “Sometimes right doesn’t have much to do with it.”

Thorald doesn’t reply to that. “At any rate, I can’t go back to Whiterun,” he murmurs, after a moment. “The Thalmor know I’m a Grey-Mane – it’s the first place they’ll look. It wouldn’t be safe for my family.” A deep crease forms between his brows. “Gods – they must think I’m dead.”

“Whiterun’s not so far out of the way on a trip to Windhelm,” Freyja says. “Nor to Ivarstead, for that matter. You could get a message in – I’ll take it myself, if you like. We can keep company till it comes time to cross the White.” Thorald gives her a grateful smile.

They retire early. The beds are simple, low and latticed, stuffed with straw and covered in furs; Freyja’s has a broken slat, but it feels soft as down after weeks of lying on the ground. And yet she cannot sleep. Long after the clamor from the tavern dies down she finds herself staring up at the ceiling, watching the light that drifts in from the firepit flicker amongst the rafters. She wonders if the dragon the hunters sighted is still in the mountains somewhere, feasting on goats it snatched from the edge of a crag. Or perhaps it did make its way to Mount Anthor; perhaps even now it hunches vulture-like over the peak, nearly invisible in the dark, slitted golden eyes glaring down at the battlefield where one of its ancient kin met his foe. Freyja wonders if dragons care for their own history, if they hate like men and hunger for revenge. Shivers. She can hear the innkeeper and his daughter arguing softly behind the bar. “She would want you to be happy, father,” murmurs the girl. “Entertaining the guests, and drinking, and making your lewd jokes like before.”

Her father is quieter; Freyja has to strain to make out his words. “…sorry,” she catches. “…Just don’t feel up to entertaining anyone.”

The bed-straw rustles as Freyja turns restlessly, pulling the furs more tightly around her shoulders. He’s not the only one who’s ever lost someone, she said to Thorald earlier. She wonders how the innkeeper’s wife might have died.

“Do you want to talk?” asks the girl, a little more gently.

Freyja can’t hear the innkeeper’s answer, but it must be a refusal. The two do not speak any more. Only the dull clink of tankards and the scruff of a broom remain to lull her to sleep.

“Nothing kills it!” screams a battlemage, frantically.

Dimly, she is aware that she ought to be afraid. Just a moment ago she was, but now her temples throb with the pressure of a boiling, inexplicable rage: at the dragon, at the panicking mage, at the Legion’s bindings on her wrists and at the Stormcloaks who never thought to cut them. The dragon wheels overhead, gleaming like ebony granted life – and here she is helpless, earthbound, BOUND. A house near the center of town goes up in flames. Freyja screams in fury, and her throat feels empty.

“Please tell me you’re not going to shout ‘Victory or Sovngarde,’” says a voice at her elbow, darkly amused.

She turns. Indros looks back at her, warpaint vividly white against the charcoal of his skin.

“You’re dead,” she tells him. He gives her a silent cipher of a smile.

The smell of cooking flesh makes Freyja look around. A charred body crawls from a doorway, only to collapse in the dust of the street. “I built you a pyre,” she says to Indros, over her shoulder. She can’t seem to look away from the flames.

“I know.” In his voice is the same fond exasperation she remembers. “Stop being a fool and run. You are outmatched, Dragonborn.”
She glances back at him, startled – and comes face-to-face with the dragon himself, red-eyed and glowing blue-black and cloaked in flame. His laugh rolls low and all-consuming as mountain thunder. Freyja grabs for her sword, and remembers her hands are bound.

She wakes with her dagger in hand, panting as though she’s been sprinting. Eitri is looking down at her, very calm and still. He meets her eyes over the cold blade kissing his throat.

Freyja releases him instantly, sits up gasping. “Divines, I’m sorry,” she says. “I was dr—”

“I know.” He steps away from her.

In her freshly-wakened state Freyja misses his proximity; there’s security in seeing a face she knows, feeling a warm body close. “Where are you—”

“Thorald,” he murmurs.

She looks up. Thorald is quaking on the floor, curled into himself, whimpering in an unrestrained animal way that chills Freyja’s blood. For a moment she stares, lungs clenching in her chest. Eitri steps past her without hesitation. As she shakes herself and swings her feet out onto the freezing floor Freyja sees the innkeep hovering near the doorway, looking hollow and unkempt. “What’s wrong with him?” he asks.

“Nightmare,” she mutters.

“Him, too?”

Freyja squints at him, sharply. “Have you had one as well?”

Thorald keens in his sleep, so loudly they both jump. “Not like that,” the innkeeper says. He looks unnerved.

Eitri kneels quickly, pulls Thorald into his arms like a child, and angry with him as she’s been Freyja is still struck by the gentleness and surety with which he does it. He would make a good healer. Or a good father, she thinks, and then wonders where that thought came from. “Shh,” he murmurs, looking pained. Thorald shudders, choking terrified open vowel sounds against Eitri’s shirt.

In the end it doesn’t take long to quiet him; once he’s been prodded into wakefulness Thorald blinks at the tentative gazes turned his way, a dark flush creeping up his neck. He drops his head, rubbing at his temples. “Shor’s bones,” he mutters. Trying to give him some privacy, Freyja tugs the innkeeper aside and spends their last few coins buying trail rations for the journey. It won’t be enough – they’ll have to shoot the odd rabbit for dinner – but it’s better than nothing. When she returns Thorald is in a chair with his elbows braced on the little table. Eitri sits on the edge of the bed, looking worried but giving him space. Freyja starts to divide the rations between them.

“Is it morning yet?”

She looks up at Thorald’s hoarse question. Freyja nods. “Must be two hours or so till dawn. I’ve got the supplies – we can catch a bit more sleep before we set off, or—”

“Let’s go,” Thorald mutters, not quite looking at her. “Let’s just go.”

“We’re already awake,” Eitri concurs. Freyja shrugs her pack on wordlessly, rolling her shoulders under the added weight. Thorald slips past her with his head down. The fresh tight braids curtaining his face are all that remains of the rejuvenation of last night’s bath. For the first time, he looks defeated. Freyja sighs. What do you say to a man who’s escaped torment by the Thalmor, only to encounter it again from his own sleeping mind? She is good at solving problems with sword in hand, but Thorald’s ghosts cannot be slain with steel. And even if she were blessed with compassion by Mara herself, she isn’t sure he would welcome it. They leave in silence.

The inn’s wooden porch is dusted with spindrift, fine and light as sugar; it’s too early yet for foot traffic or the innkeeper’s broom to have swept it away. Their tread sounds crisply against the cold planks as they file down the steps, leaving clean-edged bootprints. The morning star for which the port long ago took its name winks above the sea.

They keep to the road this time, grateful for a beaten track no matter how obscured by blowing snow. In the distance the Pale’s thick taiga is a deeper black against the morning sky. But the hilly, barren coastal plains are drifted in rolling waves, flowing downhill toward the sea like a frozen mirror of the surf, and in places deceptively deep. At one point Thorald steps off the edge of the road and finds himself thigh-deep in powder. Eitri has to seize him by the wrist to haul him out. The open palm he extends is far from threatening, but Thorald still wrenches back before swallowing, hard, and taking the proffered hand. “Fuck,” he grits out, as Eitri pulls him floundering from the snowdrift. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” Eitri says, lightly. “You’re carrying the mead.”

And just like that, Thorald’s blank, cornered expression melts into a tentative smile. “Oh, I see how it is,” he murmurs, with a light shove of the other man’s shoulder. When Eitri jostles him back he raises his palms. “Easy now – I’m carrying the mead.”

“Just wait.”

“Promises.” He flaps a mocking hand in Eitri’s direction. Freyja actually stops to watch under the pretext of fiddling with her shoulder straps, eyebrows climbing as the men stroll past trading comradely insults. She marvels at Eitri’s ease. With a joke and an open hand he’s banished the nightmare like so much morning mist. She thinks of the way he gathered Thorald in his arms back at the inn, not a hint of awkwardness or hesitation. He made it look as natural as breathing.

It’s odd to her, such gentleness in a man. But then for many years her experience of men has been mostly other mercenaries: aging rogues and one-eyed veterans, the lean, tough gristle of humanity. Not everyone keeps such company. And not everyone was fashioned to be a warrior. Eitri is gentle, but he isn’t soft. He can shrug off a grueling day’s march that leaves both Freyja and Thorald strung out like scraped hides; he fights with an earthy, dogged fierceness that makes up for a good deal of his inexperience. And he would have walked to his death with a clear-eyed courage that still astounds her, rather than leave his cousin to his inevitable fate. That’s more than she can say. When faced with a hopeless quest and an unwanted responsibility, Freyja dropped everything and ran.

She watches Thorald pelt a snowball at his head, and smiles faintly. A stubborn fool, maybe. But a kind one. At the moment she can barely find it in her to be angry with him.

By evening they’ve reached the deep forest cloaking the foothills of the mountains, and found shelter. It's not really a cave, just a grudging overhang of rock with a great drift of snow on the windward side and icicles clinging to the lip. But the ground is dry. And it blocks the wind, as the snowdrifts prove. They pitch the tent and build the fire, then eat what feels like a feast: chewy dried venison, slightly soft apples from the inn’s root cellar, and buttered potatoes baked directly in the coals, tasting slightly of ashes. Then they wash it down with the much-joked-about bottle of mead. It’s flavored with snowberries.

It’s Freyja’s turn to take the first watch; she feeds the fire as night draws its cloak around them. Gazes into the darkness. The wind has been picking up all day, and now the huge black conifers creak with it. We Nords were born of the wind, she remembers her father telling her on a childhood hunting trip, round a campfire very like this one, while an autumn blast hissed through Whiterun’s tundra grasses. Kyne breathed upon the land to form the first men – thus we name the mountain Throat Of The World, and thus you have a measure of safety that the most hardened Imperial general does not, little one, even from the bitterest winter chill. She remembers his wry smile, just visible in the dark. Though it’s good to have a fire, no?

The cold itself is a bright raw smell as she inhales, braided with spruce and woodsmoke and the promise of snow. Through a gap in the forest canopy Freyja watches clouds drift across the faint light of the stars. Skyrim, she thinks, for the thousandth time since crossing the border, is beautiful. She wishes she’d paid more attention to it as a girl. She wishes she could have shown it to Indros.

“Freyja.”

Eitri’s voice is soft and unexpected behind her, and when she turns his face looks grim. It puts her on the defensive. Freyja sits up, shoulders pressed to the rock. She speaks more harshly than she means to. “What do you want?”

"To apologize," says Eitri. Freyja just looks at him. He doesn't sit - remains on the other side of the fire, flexing his off hand in the way that's become a nervous habit.

"You did right," he says. "But I couldn't stop thinking whether he might have a brother or a friend somewhere, wondering what happened to him."

"I know."

"It's just - they'll never know."

"I know," she says again, feeling very tired.

"I'm sorry."

Freyja shrugs. "Me, too."

Eitri is quiet for a moment. "I do know," he murmurs. "Thanks to you. Don't ever think I'm not grateful."

She softens, a little. "I wish we'd found him alive."

"Me, too," he echoes. Fidgets.

Freyja nudges the cold ground beside her. "Sit down, then. If you're not going to sleep."

He does. Frost-coated spruce branches tinkle against one another as the wind moves, sending a swirl of snow to hiss and sputter in the fire. Otherwise the night is very quiet. Not even a wolf howls. Both moons are hidden behind the clouds of an impending storm, and all the creatures of the forest are bedded down, awaiting the coming snow.

“I’m going with Thorald,” Eitri murmurs, after a long while. “To Windhelm.”

It doesn’t surprise her, not after all the talking the two men have done. But Freyja finds it strange to picture Eitri in the padded mail and mismatched blue wool of the Stormcloaks. They talked of his home so much that the idea of him anywhere else – without the wind in the golden leaves, the sun on the laughing river, the sweat on his brow from the heat of the forge – seems wrong. She feels a sudden pang. She’s going to miss him; even after the chilly silence of the past few weeks, she’s going to miss him. She wonders if he’ll survive the war. Wonders if she’ll ever know, if he doesn’t.

“It’s safer that way,” she assures herself, and then realizes that she’s spoken aloud. “If the Thalmor are still hunting you, you’ll never be safe in Ivarstead.”

“Aye,” he says. Gazes into the fire. “Brokkr meant to join, I think.”

It’s the first time she’s heard him say the name since Northwatch Keep. Suddenly Freyja aches for him. After losing Indros she buried herself in the forest to hunt and rage and weep herself insensible in solitude, but the three of them have been squeezed into such close proximity; Eitri’s only privacy has been during the lonely watches in the night. "It helps to talk, you know."

"I know," Eitri says, but he doesn't seem able to find anything more to say. The wind gusts again. The fire flickers.

"I had this friend," Freyja offers, suddenly. "Some scholar with more money than sense hired us both for an expedition to Morrowind because he thought he’d found the resting place of some relic. I--" she laughs ruefully. "I hated his guts at first, he was so unbearably snide. I wanted to take his head off. We fought better on the same side, though - right from the beginning we could move in battle like one person, like we'd been doing it all our lives. It was uncanny. After we got back to Cyrodiil I think we spent the next year shaking ash out of everything we owned, and we never quite got rid of each other, either. Worked together - five years, almost." It's a vast oversimplification, but she doesn’t feel up to telling him the full tale. Even now her throat is tight. Freyja swallows, the skin of her face and throat feeling stiff in the cold.

"What happened to him?" Eitri finally murmurs, when she does not continue.

"Bandits, if you can believe it. Only two of them. Stupid ones, too, to attack a couple of armored sellswords, but we were laughing over a joke he'd made and they caught us off guard. He just - missed his footing," she says, through numb lips. "I'd seen him fend off two and three men at a time, it should have been easy, but he stumbled at the wrong moment and this bandit's axe caught him in the throat. It was that fast. It didn't take me more than a moment to finish them off, and by the time I did he was already gone."

That was the part that had stayed with her at the time, gone round her head in dull, incredulous refrain - the suddenness. Even now she can see it happen: a shear of awkward motion, a gurgling yelp, and nothing. By the time she dropped to her knees his pupils were fixed and the dust of the battle was sticking to the glassy surface of his unblinking eyes. There were no last words, no tender touches or darkly-humored quips. Just a slip and a cry.

Eitri is looking at her with too much sudden understanding. "A friend," he repeats, slowly. “Is that why you don’t...?” Then he stops, his mind catching up with his mouth. Freyja looks away.

“He fought bravely,” Eitri finally says. You’ll see him in Sovngarde, is what he means.

Freyja closes her eyes. “He was a Dunmer.” Eitri has no answer for that. “A Dunmer of House Hlaalu, he used to say, the proud bastard, nevermind Hlaalu hadn’t been a Great House since before he was born.” Her throat closes. Freyja watches the sparks from the fire rise into the night and whirl themselves out.

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.1

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.2

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.3

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.4

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.5

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.6

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.7

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.8

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Re: Songs for Nomads 5.9

Songs for Nomads 6.1

Songs for Nomads 6.2

Songs for Nomads 6.3

Songs for Nomads 6.4

Songs for Nomads 6.5

Songs for Nomads 6.6

Songs for Nomads 6.7

Songs for Nomads 6.8

Songs for Nomads 6.9

Songs for Nomads 6.10