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Having nowhere better to go and nothing better to do, Elián followed the rest of the procession back to the Meduseld. His first impression of the place was that it was just a big, rather elderly inn, but as he entered the Great Hall, he soon discovered that, while it did have certain elements of an inn, it was indeed the Eorl’s seat. Elián watched with carefully concealed interest to see how the prisoners were disposed of and smiled to himself as they were stowed in the wine cellar below decks. It wasn’t much of a jail in his opinion and probably wasn’t in much of the opinion of the outlaws either. With the right tools, he figured that he could let himself out of there in no time. Ghem probably could, too. The question was less how effective was the jail cell itself as it was how effective were the guards? He would be interested to see how events unfolded. The knowledge could come in handy if he ever found himself on the wrong side of the Eorl’s cellar door.
In the meantime, though, the fate of the outlaws wasn’t really his problem. Nonetheless, he did find himself looking around for the woman with the dogs and, not seeing her, assumed that she must have gone off somewhere either to clean up or to find suitable space for her pets. He had forgotten to ask her name, but thought that he had heard someone call her Rowenna… Rowena… Helena… something like that. It was a pretty name, but he still had not quite made up his mind about the woman herself. Oh, she had a pretty face all right to go with the name, but there was something of Mrs. Snorrisson about her that put his teeth on edge. Maybe it was that toughness under the surface that conjured the image of his former captain’s wife. Of course, the woman would have had to have been tough even to have survived two years with the bunch of fellows she had been running with. On the other hand, there was still the matter of the lock picks. The fact that she had done nothing to alert the Eorl’s people as to the existence of the picks in the hands of her former captors still bothered him.
And where did that leave him? She knew that he knew and Ghem knew him, and, in fact, Ghem had gotten the cursed lock picks directly from Elián himself. In fact, Elián had made them with his own hands. Before running away to sea, he had spent several years apprenticed to an unscrupulous cutler who had taught him, among other things, how to craft a very efficient set of lock picks. The tiny dagger that went along with them had been Elián’s own invention. He had made at least fifty sets of both over the years and sold all of them for a tidy profit. That is, all but one. He still carried a set himself. Elián sighed. It left him in a very precarious position, particularly if word came up from Belfalas that he was a wanted man.
They couldn’t possibly be looking for him this far north. Could they? He was just a member of the crew…
Rowenna-Helena-whatever-her-name-was had something on him. While it was not much, especially if she had not picked up on the slip he had made in calling Ghem by name, it was enough to make Elián feel vulnerable. He very much wanted to find her, to get to know her a little better, and, in doing that, find out if he could trust her. If she could be trusted, then everything was lovely. If not? Then he had some decisions to make. Either he needed to disappear or she did.
In the meantime, he would have a flagon of mead and get a feel for the atmosphere in the Eorl’s great hall. Already, the Eorl had launched into a tale of the day’s doings and of all the events leading into the death of the two-headed chap and the capture of the outlaws. Elián listened with great interest as he knew almost as little of the events of the day as the local serving girls did. He was silently relieved when the Eorl made no mention of him at all or of how he had happened to join the party in the woods. With any luck at all, the Eorl had completely forgotten his existence. That way, maybe, he would not have to answer any uncomfortable questions.
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