Solo Thorny Memories

[Dove Brown]

35 Spring 517

A dull, distant growl of sound met Dove as she turned in through the Outpost gate, and the usual guards seemed to be either gone or distracted. Not that that bothered her much, they were all knights anyway, and the less attention she had from them the better. She headed for the market, not because she was out of food - a childhood of starving meant that she kept a stock of food at all times for fear of returning to it - but because she needed to see what there was. The harvest wasn't looking good, hadn't been good, and old fears boiled up that she thought she had buried long ago.

For a moment the sound had her looking up, scouring the sky hopeully for signs of thunderclouds and rain, but the sky was clear. Then she turned the corner and the growl morphed into the roar of a mob. Terror screamed through her bones. She was a child again, trying to hide, trying to flee, failing at both, and the riot rolling over her even as her brother tried to hold it back... She heaved in a breath, clenched her fist so tight that it hurt, and forced herself back into the now. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Her feet wanted to run, to flee back to her cottage and hide there. But her cottage wasn't the sanctuary it had once been. It had been invaded once too often for her to pretend she was completely safe there.

She stood frozen for what felt like bells, but were probably only chimes. Then the sound of the riot surged towards her, and above it, a child's cry of fear. Air jolted into Dove's lungs. Not again. Never again. Wasn't it enough that she had been scarred by it, without more children going through that? She set her fretting feet into motion and ran, not away from the mob, but towards it.

[Dove Brown]

Her feet hammered against the ground the way that her heart hammered against her ribs, and all her instincts screamed at her to run the other way. She was only one girl, with nothing but her wits, her hands, and a sling. She was certainly no hero, like the knights claimed they were, with all their shiny armour and weapons. Yet she also knew bone deep that leaving rescue to the knights was pointless. Her own "rescue" had been left to the knights, and her brother had died of it. Her sister too - she hadn't see her die though, only the aftermath of a dead body waiting with all the others to be claimed.

She turned one corner, then another, and the growl grew to a roar and the pounding drumroll of a running mob. Ahead of it, clutching a bundle in thin arms, a girl came hurtling like a pip shot from an orange. She saw Dove and faltered with another of those thin cries that stabbed Dove to the soul. She looked back over her shoulder towards the mob, and then up at Dove's face. Dove reached for the girl with one hand, and her sling with the other, but the girl flinched away as if she was accustomed to being hit. Then, in a breathless thread of a voice, she said, "Dove?"

Dove flinched in turn, as the fear already racing around her body took her mind down old memories of her father calling her unexpectedly. How did this girl know her name? She left speculation for later, and said only, "This way." She jerked her free thumb at one of the narrower streets between cottages. "Come on." The girl hesitated. "I won't hurt you," Dove snapped, her temper fraying under the onslaught of terror and memories. The mob was going to roll over them any minute now... "Unlike that lot!"

The girl gulped, and darted past Dove and down the street. Dove followed, one eye back over her shoulder. Was this how her brother had felt, when she'd been too scared to move?

[Dove Brown]

They turned one corner. Dove headed towards a second one, for safety, but the girl tripped on a rough cobble and fell. She didn't even try to save herself, instead twisting her body to protect her bundle, and hit the ground hard. Dove winced in sympathy and looked back towards the drum of the rioting mob. It was quieter here, but that didn't mean further away. Another fear battled within her. What if the knights decided to throw her in with the mob? She was here, in the same place, with a weapon in her hands, with someone who'd come out of the mob. Knight justice was a rough thing, as rough as these cobbles, and there was every chance that they would rather throw a few innocents under the wagon than risk missing someone guilty....

The girl sobbed for breath at Dove's feet, and it sounded very much like it was about to turn from sobbing for breath to sobbing in truth. Dove crouched, and put out a more cautious hand to touch the girl's shoulder. There was something familiar about the girl, now that Dove had time to look more closely. A different memory stirred. "Rosa?"

The girl's head came up and she stared into Dove's face. "Yes?" Dove felt the shoulder trembling under her hand, and said more gently. "Come on, one more stretch. Then we can hide in my cottage until everything's over." She urged Rosa to her feet and found herself half-supporting, half-carrying the exhausted girl. Last time they met had been in the wake of disaster too, following a night where cottages had collapsed under heavy snow. Rosa had been scared and shy then too, but not nearly this thin. Clearly the year had been hard on her, as had the growing food shortage. At last, Dove spotted her own front door and hauled Rosa over to it. They stumbled inside, Rosa clutching her bundle, Dove supporting Rosa, and Dove closed the door behind them and slid down to place her back against it.

"Thank you," Rosa whispered, "but I can't stay long. I - I have to get this food," and she nodded at her bundle, "back to Mama and Little Sis, or they'll go hungry..."

[Dove Brown]

"And you?" Dove asked, the question rising out of her own instincts and memories before she thought. "Will you go hungry?" Rosa's face flattened as if a mask slammed down over it, and that was really all Dove needed to know that yes, she would, and like Dove, she wasn't about to admit it. "All right," Dove told her. "I'll make sure you get something to eat before you go."

Rosa's mouth dropped open, and she stared at Dove for a long moment. Then the mask crumbled and she slid to the floor beside Dove and buried her face in the older girl's shoulder. Dove froze for a moment, unsure how to react, and then tentatively put an arm around Rosa. Rosa flinched but clung tighter, and Dove could feel tears soaking though her shirt.

Half formed snatches of broken words tumbled from Rosa's lips, muffled still more against Dove's shoulder. "Why - you - so kind to me? Always. Don't deserve it. Not now, not ever. Can't - even buy a little food without - without things going wrong. Please. I-" Rosa's stomach cut her off with a growl of hunger, and she curled around it into a tighter ball.

Dove patted her awkwardly. "I understand." The words were inadequate, useless, but honest. Everything had always been her fault. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard she worked to make up for killing her mother by being born, it was never enough for her father.

"Nobody understands," Rosa muttered back. "Nobody ever understands. But I don't want Little Sis to go hungry. And Mother has to eat because she's the only one that can work now that Father's gone, and I... I just...." Dove felt her mouth tightening. She'd gone hungry all too often herself as a child, but she'd been the youngest in her family and her older sister Linnette tried to feed them all fairly on whatever Raven could scrounge, and whatever money was left after her father drank his share. Listening to Rosa, she couldn't help but wonder how often her older siblings had shorted themselves to feed her. She couldn't say that it got better, that it would pass. Some things left their mark forever. Rosa though hadn't finished. "I thought it would be over when Father died. I thought... I thought.... He can't hit me any more. I don't get hit any more. But I'm so hungry... And before... Before I wasn't. Not so much. But..." She was sobbing hopelessly now, sounding like the child she was, and yet old beyond her years. "I don't want to be hit again, but sometimes, I'm just... so hungry... and I want... I want to not be hungry ever again... and it seems... maybe it'd be worth it for one meal?"

Dove swallowed the ache in her own throat. "It isn't worth it," she said softly. "Living with someone who hurts you that much is never worth it, even if it seems like it at the time." Her own father still lived, up in Syliras. Lived, and lived alone. She wouldn't go back to that no matter how hard she had to work here to keep the roof over her head. "Look, you get to wanting a meal that badly, you come and find me. I'll make sure you get it. Deal?"

[Dove Brown]

Rosa pulled back a little and gaped at Dove. Then suspicion hardened her eyes. "Why? Why would you do such a thing?" Dove didn't answer immediately. Instead, she eased away from Rosa and padded across to the banked hearth, sensing Rosa's eyes on her back the whole way. Her own fear was fading but, she discovered, it had left her legs shaky with hunger, and a weariness washing through her in fear's wake. She lifted the lid of the pot that had kept warm all day on the edge of the banked fire, and dished out two bowls of the wheat porridge inside. She brought them back to Rosa and handed her one. "Eat this, and I'll tell you."

Rosa took the bowl and spoon and shovelled in a mouthful, all the while keeping one eye on Dove. Dove ate hers more slowly. "When I was your age," Dove began, "and hungry ... and being hit by my father ... someone helped me with food." Wheat porridge wasn't anything like the beef stew she'd had on that one long ago day, but it was what she had on hand. "She didn't ask anything of me. But I don't like debts, so you get to collect. I'll do for you what she did for me. And like her, I don't ask for anything. If it ever comes that you're in my situation, maybe you'll help, maybe you won't. Doesn't matter. You're hungry. I was hungry. Helping someone not be hungry that way is all the result I need."

Rosa was staring at her with a different kind of hunger, a hunger of the heart, to belong. "You? You were like me? I'm not the only one ever?" Dove took another spoonful of porridge while she got her voice under control. "More of us about than you might realise," she said once she was sure her words would come out steadily, "You can't tell by looking, really. But, no you aren't alone." Not now. Not again. Never again.

[Dove Brown]

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Dove Brown

Skills

• Observation 3
• Running 2
• Planning 1
• Endurance 1
• Persuasion 2
• Tactics 1
• Socialisation 3
• Bodybuilding 1
• Childcare 2
• Interrogation 1

Lores

• Childhood hunger means a stockpile later
• Using pain to break out of bad memories
• Act now, speculate later
• Rosa: not doing well
• Rosa: much like Dove
• Realisation: We are not alone
• Feeding Rosa: paying a debt forward

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