Iron and Wood #Wattys2017

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ella stood in the tallest tower of Logir's hall. It was cold in the bright white light of the early morning, and the sky was covered in silvery clouds.

The wind gnawed her cheeks, but she didn't care. Her hair whipped around her face. Ella held the window frame and balanced her good leg on the sill, and then the wooden one, leaning out towards the void.

Her fingers tightened on the rough stone as adrenaline shocked her heart.  Far down below she could see the dirt road to the farms she had never been to.  The peasants passing below had only the vaguest idea their Thane had been married. They did not know their new lady's name. They had never seen her.

It is not safe.  Logir often repeated when she asked to walk down there.

She wanted to ride in the woods.

It is not safe, the Empire...

Could she not at least walk the battlements without a hood and guard?

It is not safe, Ella!

This was not safe. She swayed on the windowsill.

Asbrandr had hidden her away here, and hardly a letter since. Skod wrote, and often, but her letters prattled on with motherly concern and normal affairs, as if Ella was the same naïve maid who left for Ceyose months ago.

She looked back up at the horizon. She could not see the sea from here, something she had never remarked back home. 

The black-eyed Templar haunted her at night. She would lie in her soft nightgown and close her eyes, and the too-big master bedroom would shift and change to the dirty room of the tavern.  The mattress would dip, and Ella would turn towards her lover, reaching out only to feel Logir's long hair and stubble instead.  His body was all wrong to her.

He wore armour too, but his was mostly ceremonial-- so shiny, without a single scratch-- no matter how much he recounted his war stories about how he gained his title. 

Ella felt sick for hating him. He never asked about Shal, although she knew he'd seen them leave the feast together.

A bard would sometimes arrive in the hall and sing while they ate. Ella would always ignore the crowing love songs they pointed in her direction, only smiling once the subject was changed.

"ELLA!"

Lost in thought, she didn't notice Logir entering. She glanced over her shoulder to see him rushing to the window, grabbing her around the waist and lowering her back to the ground.

"What were you thinking?" he grabbed her shoulders so that she looked at him. "You might have fallen."

Ella stared at him, blinking. His brown hair was falling over his forehead, his armour dull in the silver light.

"I was trying to see the farms."

"They say that more Templars are arriving in the port." His arm slid protectively around her shoulders. "The captain is in Haugr. We must be extra careful."

Ella's heart sank as she let him lead her further down into the castle, grabbing her walking stick from a pillar as they passed. "Extra careful" happened every so often when Logir decided that Templar activity in Haugr was growing too dangerous. Ella had not seen a Templar since Shal left.  For her, "extra careful" meant even more confinement, and an announcement to any new guests arriving that she had taken ill.

They descended into a long hallway not unlike the one back home, but greyer and colder.  Ella felt the leather straps of her wooden leg begin to chafe. The cold always made the false appendage heavier. The buckles were ice against her skin.