hlaefdige | open rp post

Enduring her fair share of ribbing from a fair number of her riders, Éomer nonetheless turned her éored around as quickly as she could to make their way back through Hjaroarholt one more time on their patrol, not bothering to give an explanation to anyone as to why she might want such a thing. Many of her riders already knew her reasoning; the fact that she slipped away from the éored to spend the majority of their first night in the village sitting at the bedside of an injured witcher did not go unnoticed, nor the way she stopped in at his cottage to speak with him before they rode out at dawn on the third day.

It's alright. She doesn't mind a little teasing. It gives most of her men something entertaining to think about during dark days, when many of them are separated from their wives and children. Teasing her about a flirtation with an exotic stranger takes their minds off their own miseries.

The seasons are changing, summer shifting inexorably into fall, and so when they pass through Hjaroarholt, the haymaking season is in full swing. Every man, woman, and child who is capable is out in the fields, cutting and collecting the tall grasses that grow so that they can be laid out and dried in time for winter. They pass a few dozen peasants on their way to the village, all of whom raise their hands in welcome. Éomer doesn't do much more than nod at them as they pass, though, not until she spies a rather broad form standing not too far from the road, a scythe balanced on his shoulders, wrists hooked over the shaft. His dark hair would be enough to make him immediately recognizable, even if she wasn't already well-acquainted with the sight of his naked torso.

The witcher is looking much better than the last time she saw him, even if he is just as sweaty. The fact that it's from exertion and not pain makes all the difference.

Ignoring the snickering that crops up behind her, Éomer half-stands in her stirrups and lifts her hand in a wave.

"Westu Eskel hál," she calls out, not bothering to dampen her smile.

"Welcome back." He says, boots crunching on the stubs of grass as he approaches the road. There's an easiness to his walk now, not quite a swagger, but the grace and power of the witcher's form has returned to him. "Told you I'd still be here. And look at me! Fit enough that they turned me into the fields like a plough-horse."

One of the young men in the field titters something about ploughing something, but Eskel ignores him.

"I'd walk my lady back to town but I must earn my keep, regrettably. Where will I find you, when we're done for the evening?"

A ripple of laughter works it way through the éored, but Éomer largely ignores it too, deciding there's no point in chastising her men for jokes made at her expense when all it will really do is just fan the flames.

"You're certainly looking much fitter." The fresh scar twisting across his skin is red and angry-looking, but it doesn't appear to be too badly knotted, and it's obviously not hindering any of his movements. Éomer is well pleased to see it, having been worried that Eskel might lose his profession if he did not heal properly. She's never heard of a witcher retiring. What would he even do, if he did?

Perhaps he could be a farmer. He seems to be doing a good enough job of it here in Hjaroarholt.

"It's a small village," she says in the end. "I'm sure you'll find me eventually."

With that, and a wink thrown in for good measure, she sets her heels to Firefoot's flanks and urges him towards the center of town.

He returns to the fields, which is all well and good except it's fairly mindless work and it gives him time to think. What the hell was he thinking? What the devil was he going to go looking for her for? What was the foolish promise he had made, to be waiting for her as a maid waits for her beloved? What was he going to do when he found her? The thought of her sword-calloused hands on his body at once makes him feel nauseated and thrilled. It makes his scars ache.

The youth titters again and makes some crass joke and Eskel knocks him on his ass with a restrained casting of Aard.

At sunset, by the time he finds Éomer, he's shrugged on a shirt, but there's chaff in his hair and he smells like sunshine and hay and he loiters self-consciously in the doorway.

Once they're billeted again, and the horses have been cared for, Éomer turns her men out into the fields to lend a hand, and the rest of the harvest goes fairly quickly. Many of her riders are the sons of farmers, even if they themselves earn their living by the sword, and so they all know how to wield a scythe and how to collect the grass to dry it into hay.

Éomer likewise rolls up her sleeves and lends a hand, consciously putting herself in a field away from Eskel to keep the flirting and distractions to a minimum. She doesn't mind being known as a woman who goes after what she wants, but she is not the type to shirk her duties to do so.

By the time the day's work is done, she's sweaty and exhausted in a way she's grown unused to, and the offer of a bath is very welcome indeed. She's just redressed in a simple linen shift lent to her by the innkeeper's wife — all her clothing will need to be washed, covered in sweat and dirt and horsehair as it is, and it's been collected along with everyone else's to be taken down to the wash house to be dealt with there — with a pale blue kirtle belted overtop it, her hair is spread loose and damp across her shoulders, when Eskel comes to find her.

"Ah, just the man I was looking for," she says, despite the fact that she obviously wasn't doing any looking right at that moment. "Come with me. I have something to show you."

He doesn't want to be that guy who stares agog at a woman who has changed out of her armor and such into a dress and let her hair down-- she is undeniably beautiful either way, this way just catches him off guard-- so he finds himself very interested in the roof thatching all of a sudden.

"Oh! Yeah,sure. Lead on, my lady." He says, gesturing to indicate that he'll follow. She smells like soap and clean linen and it startles him because he only ever knows her to smell like sweat and leather and gleaming steel.

Hopefully she'll smell like sweat again before the night is through, if that will put him at ease.

Rolling her eyes fondly, she huffs at him. "If you insist on continuing to my lady me, you might as well escort me properly. Give me your arm."

Despite the fact that she stands at just over eighteen hands tall, and can lift around four trusses of freshly-mown hay at a time without straining her back, Éomer was still raised in the court of her king, and she has been forced to learn some womanly graces. She can pretend well enough for a joke, at least.

Meanwhile, Eskel might as well have been raised by literal wolves rather than metaphorical ones as far as one's training in etiquette was concerned. Thankfully, he had picked up a thing or two in his century and a half of life and he could be quite smooth when he wanted to be. He takes her arm.

"You're taller than I remember." He jokes. As if he had noticed slumped against her shoulder and bleeding all over the place.

Tucking her hand securely in the crook of his arm, she curls her fingers in the fine linen of his shirt and enjoys the thrum of anticipation that suffuses her at the nebulous promise of what's ahead for them tonight. It's been a long time since she's been able to anticipate any kind of intimacy with a man, even just a harmless flirtation, and it's a surprisingly effective balm to the bruises her soul has suffered lately.

"You were at death's door, the last time we spent any time together. I'm amazed you remember me at all."

"How could I forget my knight in shining armor?" Okay, maybe he does still remember now to flirt a little from his younger days. The prospect of her asking to go to bed with him still makes his scars throb like some kind of warning. He could completely fuck it up between them, and he doesn't want to.

"Hm." She's not much of a knight, banished as she is, and her armor certainly doesn't shine any longer, as battered as it is, but the flattery isn't ineffective. She squeezes his arm as they walk, pressing it against her side briefly before stepping away and reaching for his hand.

"Come see what I've remembered," she says, walking half-backwards as they reach the bottom of the hill where the stables are situated.

Tangling their fingers together, she tows him along behind her until the reach one of the far paddocks with high walls and a sturdy gate that is securely locked to keep the horse inside from escaping. Trapped within its walls is a young filly, old enough to show hints of how big she'll be when she grows, but still young enough to be trainable.

"Isn't she beautiful?"

"Whoa!" Eskel says, and his enthusiasm shines through even a witcher's emotional defenses. "Look at you!" He says, letting go of Éomer to lean on the gate. The filly is the same warm buff color of barley and regards him with black eyes that are both wary and curious.

"Can't pay you much." He admits. "Just odd jobs here and there. Probably not what your horses are worth down here. But I can pay you some of it. Next year I'll pass back through here with a fat coinpurse, providing nothing tries to eat me between now and then, leave it with the alderman to give to you."

She really is a gorgeous little thing, still a little coltish with youth, with a flaxen mane and tail just like the people whose lands she comes from. If Éomer felt safe returning to Edoras, she might have kept the filly for herself, bringing her back to the royal stables and training her there, but her current nomadic lifestyle isn't well-suited to the kind of permanence it requires to really train a horse properly.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," she replies, folding her arms on the top of the fence and resting her chin on them, watching the filly as she watches them warily back.

"I haven't named her yet."

"I'll think of something. We don't always name our horses and I have a brother that names all the horses he has the same thing. 'Roach', after the fish. It's good to not get too attached, when you live as long as we do." He smiles at the horse. "But we do take care of our mounts-- we have to, traveling so much-- and I think this little lady would be the most precious thing I've ever owned in my century and a half on this earth."

She's about to gently tease him for his brother's horse-naming habits when Eskel continues and she gets distracted.

"No," she breathes incredulously, turning to look at him and grinning. "Are you really a hundred and fifty? I don't believe it."

"Somewhere in there. I dunno how old I was when I was brought to the witchers. That's nothing, the witcher who raised me and my brothers is at least double that, if not a little more." He laughs. "I mean, that's nothing compared to the elves. Or the dwarves, even. I don't know how many of us usually make it to be as old as my teacher. There's a whole generation of witchers after me that didn't. My younger brother is the only one in his class to make it this far." He cuts himself off and shakes his head. "Sorry, I'm running my mouth, huh?" He turns his attention back to the horse, who has taken a few tentative steps towards them, nostrils flared and ears pricked forward, clearly curious. "There you go. I'm not so scary, I promise."

"Oh, I know all about the elves and the dwarves," she says, waving a hand dismissively. That's not news to her. Elves live until they die, and dwarves nearly as long as that, that's not interesting any more. What's interesting is that this man beside her, who she might have said was somewhere in his thirties if she had to guess, is old enough to have known her great-grandfather.

Maybe he did. Isn't that a thought.

Strangely enough, she doesn't want to bed him any less. He may have visited Edoras when it was little more than a hamlet on a rock and not the bustling capitol it is now, but that doesn't dampen her interest in him at all.

"No, you aren't so scary at all," she says eventually, reaching up to pluck a bit of straw out of his hair, pleased by the way he talks so gently to his new horse.

"Don't go telling everybody." He says, with a laugh. "It's bad for the guild's reputation." He drapes an arm loosely over the gate, where the horse can give him a sniff if she wants. She leans forward to snuffle the back of his hand, looking a bit like she can't make up her mind. Eskel isn't surprised, witchers smell slightly different from normal men. But in his experience, she'll get over it after a little while.

No, not so scary at all. It's hard to look at a man so carefully offering his hand to a skittish horse to sniff and think him frightening, even with the scarring that skates down his face and twists his lip like that, dimpling his cheek and even touching the edge of his jaw.

She wonders if he'd let her touch it.

"Tell me, Eskel, are all your brothers like you?"

Animals are easier. This horse isn't going to try to cheat him, attempt to beat or rob him (less a problem for him, but he never likes having to kill stupid people in self defense), hang him, burn him at the stake, chase him out of town. This horse won't care about anything but his capacity to keep her comfortable and fed on the Path. She won't ask him to make decisions with terrible and far-reaching consequences. "What do you mean?" He asks.

She shrugs, shifting a little to get more comfortable leaning against the fence as she is, watching the filly grow more comfortable with his presence the longer he goes without startling her.

"Gentle giants," is all she says in the end, smiling a little.

His brow furrows. He resists the gut urge to snap at her, feed her some kind of line about how badly she's mis-estimating his temperament. A tension rolls though his body, but he tries not to let it show too much, the hand not offered to the horse curled tightly.

"Depends. If you met my brothers after they'd been mauled half to death, they'd probably be reasonably tame too." That's probably not true, Lambert would resent, curse and rail against the kindness of every stitch, every gesture of kindness from this brave and noble woman with the same volatile disposition one might expect in a wounded beast. Geralt would probably try to sleep with her even mangled as he was (not that there was anything inherently unkind or dangerous about that, it was just kind of ridiculous).

Quiet for a moment, she watches the tension roll over him and notes that away for future introspection.

The stories she's been told of witchers is that they're more beast than man, savage beings closer to the monsters they hunt than the men they once were. She'd been warned to be wary of them, to avoid getting too close, not to trust the things they said and to avoid trusting them in kind.

Her brief acquaintance with Eskel has turned all those tales upside down, and she had been wondering if perhaps somewhere beneath all those muscles and all those scars lay a man who hoped for gentleness. There are times when she aches for it, herself, and her life is not nearly so bleak and lonely as his appears to be.

"I did not mean to offend," she says quietly, resisting the urge to reach out and touch the hand curled into a fist. "My apologies."

"It's alright." He says. "You'd think I'd be happier about it. That there's somebody who wants to see me as a man and not as a witcher. Somebody who isn't overcome with the urge to scream or faint when she looks at me. I just don't want you to think I'm like this all the time. Maybe I'm not a monster, but I'm not a good man either. I'm not nice, I'm not kind or patient or loving. I'm rough and mistrusting. And I've done a lot of shit I regret, or didn't do things I should have done. And I don't want you to think that I'm gonna stick around if we...you know." He sighs.

She turns her back to the paddock, leaning her shoulders against the fence, and lets herself reach out to pick up Eskel's curled fist in both her hands so she can coax his fingers to spread out again.

"Eskel," she starts, looking down at his fingers, "do you know why I like you?" A beat, and then she huffs. "There are many reasons why I like you. Do you know why I would like to take you to bed?"

She looks up at him again, her hazel-green eyes meeting his golden ones boldly. "Your body appeals to me, it's true. I think you could be capable of much gentleness if you tried. But more than that, you are not intimidated by me. I do not frighten you. You do not want to dominate me, to tame me, to make me a wife and a mother. You look at me and see me as I am, not as what the world wishes me to be. I am rough, myself. I am impatient and stubborn. I speak plainly and do not consider how my words might offend until they have already left my lips.

"We all have regrets about things we have done, or left undone. I do not ask you to stay for me, to keep a home for me, to do anything more than remember me fondly in the years to come."

She tugs his hand until he extends his arm enough that she can place his palm firmly on her hip, laying her own atop it to keep it in place.

"You do not have to accept my offer. I will not be angry if you do not. But know that it is open to you tonight, or maybe the next, until our paths part again."

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