Eternal Beasts

Awkward Questions

"So, young lady, you can begin by telling us who you are and what you're doing here with your tall friend," Master Quinn sternly stated as he gazed down at the slender, exhausted young woman sitting hunched in a rough wooden chair pulled up to their kitchen table. Her hands were cupped around a earthen bowl filled with hot broth, a ward against the autumn chill biting through clothing with eager teeth with night's arrival and she gazed steadfast at the table's rough-hewn top.

If she had looked up at the gentleman farmer's curt question, she would've seen a big man, broad as a wagon yoke in the shoulder and thick in the middle. Balding and bluff, he still on occasion took work smithing or as a farrier in town to earn extra money for repairs to the farm. This day he wore a smith's heavy leather apron, protection against the forge he built behind the barn to make shoes for his horses and fittings for his farm equipment. Brought from the forge directly to the house by Morgan's cry, he had yet to doff it, his face still flushed from the forge's fires and heat.

Despite appearances, Quinn was a thoughtfully intent man, caring deeply for the land he had bought with his toil and skill. That land was now beset by raiders and bandits, who threatened not only his holdings, but his very family and neighbors. In that kind of atmosphere, it was natural to be suspicious of any one new or unexpected, even a tattered and worn slip of a girl who looked to be near the end of her strength. As the big man gazed down at the slender stranger, all around his thick body small, curious faces stared with wide and bright eyes at one of two mysterious figures that had appeared out of nowhere, borne in the arms of a wounded man now lying unconscious on a canvas cot in the storeroom.

They didn't go unnoticed for long.

"Alright, you lot," declared Quinn's wife, Gwenne. Like her husband, the Mistress of Black Bend was a big woman, bluff and oversized, both in physical appearance and in manner, her graying hair pulled into a tight bun. She wore a plain dress and apron, both wrinkled and soiled from the day's labor. With a quick look at the exhausted young woman at her table, she reached behind her husband to place heavy hands on the shoulders o fher children.

"Off to bed with you. You'll learn the rest of this in the morning. Come on with you!" Despite their protests, the heavy set woman steered the three young children back to their beds, her powerful voice still audible in its chiding long after she and the children were gone from sight.

That left Quinn and Morgan alone with the stranger. Grimly Quinn turned back to the silent young woman.

"Well, little mistress? What have you to say?"

The stranger looked up at Quinn, exhaustion wearing heavily on her attractive face.

"My name is Diedre, an apprentice healer in the town of Battiskor, near the borders of Kalas," she began, her voice low and drained of energy.

Quinn frowned. Kalas? That was one of the Western Kingdoms, near the eastern fringes of the Cael Nerath. And easily 3000 leagues southeast from South Fork, over half a year's travel by horse. His answer to how she got so far from home followed quickly.

"I was taken in a torith raid on our town and carried deep into the Kasidian to a Cholim encampment. A number of my fellow prisoners and I managed to escape a day ago and we came here."

"We, as in your companion and yourself?" Quinn pressed and got a tired nod in confirmation.

"He was the one that freed us," Diedre clarified before lifting the bowl with trembling hands to take a careful sip of the broth.

The big man couldn't help the quick glance over his shoulder towards the storeroom where the second stranger lay, unconscious. Not a healer himself, he couldn't tell how grave the man's injuries were but even a blacksmith could see he had been hurt badly in the near past. It was still astonishing to him how he managed to walk, little yet carry an exhausted young woman as far as he had. How could he have affected the escape?