Kestrel saw the figure on the hill only briefly, but that brief glimpse was more than enough to tell her that the man up there was certainly not one of them. He was too upright, too tall. And he didn’t move like they did. He didn’t shamble; he strode. He didn’t hunch over; he held his head high and looked straight ahead. She hadn’t seen any of the Rangers with her own eyes; the warriors saw to that by moving the village when any of the cursed Dunedain got too close to their holdings. Women and children were too valuable for them to risk the Men deciding that the best way to get rid of the threat would be to destroy them.
Still, that had been no Hillman up there. It was someone else, maybe even one of the cursed Gondorians that Wolf and Knife had gone to investigate. It was something she would have to tell them about, immediately. They would deal with the trespasser if he ever dared show himself to them again.
By the time her husband returned, however, she had mostly forgotten the incident. Flint had taken on far too many of the bigger and stronger boys, much more than he could handle. It was one thing to prove his strength early, she thought grumpily as she bandaged his little wrist. It was quite another to take on four or five older boys who were half again his size. The wrist wasn’t broken, but it was quite possibly sprained, and there was a n.asty cut on his head where he’d hit a rock. Besides the two more serious injuries, he had various cuts and scrapes all over him where his roughly-tanned leather shirt didn’t cover, although those were fairly constant.
Of course, being the loving mother that she was, she had personally chased down and thrashed each of the boys responsible for the sprain and the bash on his head. Especially the bash on his head. If those idiots weren’t careful, they could have killed him. And Kestrel would not tolerate losing another child. Iron would be five years old if he’d lived…
She shook herself out of her melancholy and busied herself about the hut. When Knife arrived, she took out her temper on him, cursing the ill chance that led him to be away when his son needed him most. Knife sat silent under her torrent of abuse, then he told her, in the quietly angry voice that he used only seldom, that it was true. There were indeed Gondorians settling in the area around the lake. It silenced her tirade, as he’d meant it to. Though she immediately started a new one, this one was not directed at him but at the cursed Dunedain who dared to invade their homeland. Under it all, the children sat quietly in the corner, Rain with her lopsided basket and Flint with a short stick that he called his spear, silently watching the a.dults. Flint was sucking his thumb.
Kestrel eventually ran out of curses for the settlers and asked her husband what they were going to do. His answer was vague, “Something…”
[ September 14, 2003: Message edited by: Tinuviel of Denton ]
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