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It was a strange sensation, feeling.
It had started as a sort of dull throbbing in the back of her skull, a painful but steady beat that could first be attributed to the head wound she’d taken on the cliffside. It was just one source of pain among the cacophony of bruises and cuts across her body… but something made it stand out, something beyond what she was used to. It was something that she didn’t recognize.
It scared her.
She thought she was familiar with pain.
When she was merely a child, before her father went off to war, she’d learned the pains of riding. How the stirrup leathers would chafe against the lower leg, leaving it painfully inflamed. How an improperly fitted saddle would leave sores on both her and her mount. How a bad fall nearly broke her wrist when she tried to catch herself.
When she was a bit older, when they had to move the village the first time, she remembered the depredations of winter. With their stockpiles of food left to rot in the storehouses, all among the village felt the dreadful pangs of hunger that winter. In the close quarters of the makeshift tents and crowded caves, disease spread easily: she was familiar with the decay brought on by sickness. Most permanent though was the frostbite: she was lucky. It had only taken two of her toes before the holes were patched and the fire stoked onwards.
When she was called for the levy, it was little surprise: the army always needed more bodies to defend the homeland. It was here, she’d thought, that her education in pain had been completed. She’d been bludgeoned and stabbed, slashed and beaten within an inch of her life. She’d been shot and burned, the former several times and the latter only once. She grew to understand the pain, accepted it.
She didn’t enjoy it, of course, but it became a familiar sort of companion to her. Her skin grew calloused and her technique enhanced to the point that the aches of riding were but a distant memory. She’d learned to scourge for food so she’d never go hungry again, to isolate herself from others to avoid the spread of the rotting diseases. She wore armor and leather to shield her from the enemy’s attacks, a thick woolen gambeson underneath to help shield her from the cold.
Each source of pain was merely a lesson to be learned, a weakness to be identified and resolved. If she viewed it that way, it was easier.
This felt different. I wasn’t isolated to one spot, a sort of numbness having grasped her entire body as she lay, half blind from the blood in some kind of dungeon. It was hard to breathe, more so than the fractured ribs would cause, a sort of choking silence having seized her. The moment she thought about it, it became even harder to drag in the necessary breathes of precious air.
She gasped.
She heaved.
She cried.
As she did, it became easier, the cloying and numb sensation replaced by one of panic, each breath dragged in desperately through her painfully dry lips. She needed to know what was wrong, she needed to recover , she needed to be strong .
But all she could think of was Horse.
Her beautiful mare, as graceful and powerful as one could ever wish their warhorse to be. She was as brave as a hundred soldiers and more than twice as bold, always eager to run like the wind and rend asunder those foolish enough to stand in their way. They had always fought together, since she was a girl and Horse a foal. There was never a truer companion with Horse.
It wasn’t that she didn’t get on with the other soldiers, she was perfectly capable of speaking with them cordially, at least as cordially as she needed to… she just didn’t like them. People were complicated, far easier to break than she was comfortable with. They’d get mired down with petty emotion and squabbles, finding more reason to fight one another through their own weakness. They didn’t seem comfortable around her, for whatever reason, though she didn’t particularly care.
She didn’t understand it and that suited her just fine.
She was perfectly content when it was just her and Horse on their own, chasing their shared addiction to the shock of adrenaline and the euphoric terror of the battlefield. Together, they were unstoppable…
Well, that wasn’t true.
People talked about how the screams of horses were similar to those of humans.
Rider disagreed quite firmly with that sentiment: she’d heard the terrified screams of the battle field and the pained wails of the infirmary. They’d be disconcerting at first, sure, but they were easy to grow used to when you hear them enough times.
It was different when Horse screamed.
Horse had always been an unassailable bastion of strength, something so much more than the word ‘partner’ could describe, though she lacked the vocabulary to find a more fitting word. She never imagined that…
1300 pounds of muscle, sinew, and armour made for a great deal of heft on the field. It also made it quite hard to stop.
The scream that Horse let out was different than those she heard before. She heard Horse’s fear, her anger, her desperation as she struggled to gain traction on the crumbling edifice of the cliff.
The pain surged again.
Horse.
Horse was her only real friend.
Horse was gone.
Dead.
She’d lost people before. Her father died when she was younger, a long forgotten casualty in the war: she couldn’t remember his face, though it didn’t hurt anymore. Her mother had passed during one of the winters, buried haphazardly in one of the snowdrifts… She didn’t have the strength to dig through the heaps of snow and frozen earth below but she did her best to honor her matriarch. She’d seen soldiers die, comrades in arms, but never really felt anything: they were here to fight and die like here, it was to be expected that they’d go.
She wasn’t able to give Horse a real name, a proper name, riders weren’t meant to get attached to their steeds. It didn’t work. Horse was constant, always there and always trustworthy. Horse would never steal from her and would always watch her back.
Horse was her only friend.
The young woman refused to cry. She wouldn’t dishonor Horse’s memory like that.
She did her best to ignore the quiet betrayal of the water gathering in her eyes.
It always paid to keep a knife on you. It was good for scrounging up food, be it gutting animals or tearing roots out of the ground. It was good for dissuading anyone in the isolated camps from getting ideas.
In this case, it was most good for getting free. The razor sharp knife sliced through the frayed rope as easily as it sliced through flesh and sinew, each cut bringing her closer to freedom.
Her body hurt but it always did.
It would take a lot more to deal with the pain she felt within.
She just hoped that killing the bastards upstairs would be a good start on that front.