I met up with Elena at the evening feast. She was wearing a completely ranger-friendly outfit of animal hide and fur. She looked like the women here at the camp. I, on the other hand, was still the same clothes that I work in, the kind that I clean horse crap and piss daily in. Maybe that was why everyone was giving weird looks all the time, because I smelled really bad. It must have been bad enough to have them be thrown off of their spruce and evergreen scents. I decided I would have to find some new clothes while I was here, preferably before Degamux’s trials. I had a bad feeling that I was going to be singled out for the duration of his tests.
I wasn’t exactly ready for that kind of attention.
But my mind quickly escaped my growing dread of what was to come when Elena came up out of nowhere and hugged me.
“You’re alive, again,” she said, smiling.
“Yeah, for now,” I said, scratching the back of my head. I figured I was going to have to tell her sooner or later.
“What happened at the meeting?” she asked. “What did they say?”
“I’m going to become a ranger,” I said with a sad tone. “It was that or stay here for... forever.”
“That’s... good, right?” she asked, trying to make things better. It was a good effort, but failing. “I mean, you would be able to leave here on your own, right?”
“Yeah, but I figured I would be able to have more of a choice,” I said, resenting my situation.
“I didn’t get the choice, Hage,” Elena said, her expression sad. “They’re going to relocate me tomorrow morning.”
“That’s not fair at all,” I protested in her favor. “Where are they taking you, better yet, why?”
“No, you’re right, its not fair at all,” she said after sighing. “They said they would be taking me to someplace near the marshlands. They said I was too much of a liability. And they said something else but it didn’t make much sense.”
Then there was awkward silence. It was sad that she wouldn’t be able to stay in one fixed location for longer than a day ever since she left Crossroads, which was also not so much her choice. In that case, it was live or die, but still. If I had few options and choices available, Elena had fewer, mostly because she was a one-name servant. And a girl. Andurovia, from what I could tell, was still pretty much a man’s world, meaning that men would benefit more than a woman ever could. The only way a woman could succeed in life was if she were to be married to a high-ranking official, and even that was only limited to woman born from certain lineages. Local rulers, like Orin Daunderfell were the exception. Lady Daunderfell was not born to any particular lineage, save from her father being a merchant, and his father before him, and so on. But there was little Elena and I could do to change our situation. We would have to fight through it.
“You’ll be fine,” I said, trying to reassure her. I knew that no matter how hard I tried, she would always have it worse, because she was a girl. The best I could do was to try to make her feel better. “The marshlands are far away from the war. And there’d be no reason for him to go there. No resources or fortifications there. I don’t even know if anyone lives there.”
And that was when I realized I was beginning to make things sound worse. Her face drooped in sadness. Elena’s face look constricted until she began to cry. I immediately went in to hug, to hide her from the others. She didn’t deserve to be seen like this. She deserved better. But I don’t know who or what could give it to her.
We took part of the evening feast. Everyone was sat at a long fallen tree, which had been cut in half and prepared as a table. There were a couple of trees manipulated like this to support the general camp population. I looked past the other side of the tree-table and saw the clan leaders, feasting at a designated place specifically for them.
