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Since Eodwine had held court and fatefully taken Manawyth the Dunlending under his own protection, a great silence had fallen upon the foreign singer.
His music was utterly quashed, certainly. Every time he picked up a harp Manawyth felt like a usurper. He was no bard, he felt now, and he had lied within himself when he sold the sword that had protected him and marked him out.
It was the act of telling his story that had muted all subsequent stories.
They were all too vivid now, brothers living and dead, enemies living and dead, parents dead and sister...who knew? But they all spoke to him at night, and made him weep, secretly.
He kept his own company. He could not leave the Inn alone by the Eorl's edict, and so he rarely did at all. He drank, not in publicly in the mead hall in the raucous forgoil way, but alone, with a Dunlending passivity he took pride in. Defeated pride.
Falco Boffin's friendly greetings still occasionally reached him, but he rarely replied, and his tentative rapport with Thornden had quite decayed.
Often and long he lay on his straw pallet with furs about him, and waited for winter like a weary boar. But it was the very coming of the colder, crisper, autumn, that rebuked him, and reminded him of when he had been something better with better prospects.
Manawyth pulled himself from beneath the coverlet, struggled into a pair of boots and walked, more or less steadily, downstairs, following the call of chattering voices. They seemed more reassuring than mocking now; but he remained on his guard still.
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