Aethelwynn's Dream
I wrote this for our paladin's warhorse ages ago
On the night of the eighth, Aethelwynn dreams. She is an old woman, a widow, hobbling along beside a horse - an unassuming mare, one of the shaggy-haired northern breeds, with matted coat and ugly face, but three hands higher at the shoulder than any of her neighbours’. Little stones flick against her from the hard earth as her and the beast plough the field.
Sound and movement from the brush; arthritic fingers clutch at the belt-knife. A man in black armor, thick iron plates stained with running blood, half-crawls on a found stick toward the fenceline. Behind the tooth-painted snout of the bascinet, his eyes beg for mercy.
She spends two days with the half-dead soldier in her house. The man can scarcely walk - an arrow has pierced his thigh, and he has been wounded a dozen places besides. On the third day, he sits outside and washes clean his plate; he asks after the horse’s age, and looks at its teeth. He asks of the price, and he pays in steel. The last thing she sees is the black armour, the hound’s teeth on the bascinet snout, the ringsword’s fine scabbard.
Aelfwynn wakes with a start. Outside, people throng the streets despite the dark. The bright trail of a comet crosses the sky.
The little farm is perhaps a day or two north from Felling.