Dragon's Blood

Sadice - Meeting

I thought I was over her until she rode into town with her company of one hundred and fifty men.

Arden had aged since the last time I saw her. A scar ran down one side of her face and her hair had a white streak where the scar disappeared up into her scalp. There were lines where there had been none and her normally quiet face kept a slight frown in place as if it belonged there.

But I would know those eyes in any crowd.

Steel grey and flinty when she was mad, I had seen her pin a drunk soldier to the ground with them and keep rowdy subordinates in line with a glance.

She was captain now. I wasn't surprised. Only a sargeant when I met her, we had both known she was meant to do more. Be more.

That was why I had let her go.

*

When I had first glimpsed her riding at the front of her men toward the center of town, I had spun around and frozen in place, shot through with a fear and hunger so fierce it almost brought me to my knees.

Arden. My heart. My soul. Eight years... She had survived. She probably wouldn't remember me.

We had met near the beginning of the war. Her battalion was stationed in our town and while the war wasn't too bad yet, the soldiers had laughed and danced and spent money. Arden had been young and fresh and full of quiet passion. We made love as young people do, with abandon and without a care in the world.

The war got ugly. And vicious. And inhuman. Our soldiers came back from the front lines bleeding and missing limbs and dead. The light left their eyes. After six months, our soldiers became hard and vicious themselves. And Arden...

Arden became distant.

I cringed as I recalled my own fear and horror and how I had clung to Arden when she visited from the front. She had tried. I know she had. But her anguished eyes and shaking hands still haunted my dreams.

*

I kept myself busy that first day the company was in town, hoping to avoid both Captain Arden and my feelings. I helped unload the supplies they brought and got underfoot in the kitchen until Cook shooed me out with a curse.

Jaden laughed at my inability to focus, assuming a general swoon over the young and virile company and sent me to pick apples until the call for supper. I barely filled one bushel all afternoon. In the hubbub of everyone getting food and drink, I quietly slipped to the outskirts of town and to my little house.

Relieved to be away from the noise and excitement and the possibility of having to interact with Arden, I gratefully closed my door behind me and set myself a small supper of bread and cheese. Sinking down into my chair, I realized for the first time that my hands were shaking. Taking a long, slow breath, I gently blew it out and willed calm into my body. It took four more deep breaths to still the trembling.

I chastised myself as I ate, wondering why the sight of Arden eight years after we parted would trigger such a dramatic response. Was I terrified of seeing her? Or of her seeing me, staring into my soul with that piercing gaze of hers?

A shiver ran down my spine, but was it from fear or anticipation? I didn't look at that too closely.

Arden had left when her company was reassigned closer to the front lines, which had moved away from my town. Nine months after the soldiers had come, they were gone, taking my heart with them.

Our last night together, Arden had set aside the war and her nightmares and been fully present with me, as she hadn't been able to in months. We made love, desperate and passionate love. We talked of what might have been if we had met under different circumstances. We swore our love to each other in this life and the next with tears and an overwhelming sense of fatality.