Post by Tallaith on Apr 8, 2009 19:59:03 GMT -5
This is the first installment of the background of a story I'd like to begin for the Kinship to RP. It will tie together many of the past plots I've played and also make some connections between the Angmarim, Saruman, Sauron, and the common folk of Middle Earth.
The influence of the approaching Darkness is now being felt even in the Shire, since the Fellowship and the Ringbearers are no longer present. Evil is creeping into the lands, but now just on the borders, in the forms of Sharkey's Men, a band of brigands, and orcs and goblins taking up residence in the far North of the Greenfields.
For more information about where I want to take this, read the end of Return of the King, about what the Hobbits in the Fellowship faced when they came home from their long absence. I'll add more posts and a few chat logs as background as soon as I can to get this story moving along.
Breakfast was no mere meal to her; the finding and preparing of suitable items that could pass as food was a full-time occupation.
The first and most important meal of the day, second only to second-breakfast and luncheon, then tea and supper, but slightly surpased only by the much longed-for official Dinner, was Caspia's endless source of woe.
When she was at home with her family, the day began with a tuck-in that was nothing short of a race to the finish. She squeezed herself onto a long bench in the tavern's kitchen between five long-legged brothers and a sister, like a runty piglet mewing for a teat. The contest among the siblings was to see who could fill their bellies before the platters of stewed fruit and crisped curls of bacon or slabs of sweet venison were scraped spotless with crusts of home-baked black bread.
The meager fare of life as a bachelorette with no skills with a pot or pan was a sore disappointment.
This cold, foggy morning was like every other dawn on the hunt for Caspia as she rolled out of her dewy blankets, blinking in the thin grey sunlight. Mist trembled in the breeze over the droplet-laced hillsides surrounding the little pond in the northern meadows of the Shire. The panorama would give any soul with an eye for beauty reason to pause and relish the starting of the day.
Caspia was not such a lass, however. She was crabby already, having slept beneath the vaulting roof of an oak sprouting roots up through the silky grass in disagreeable toes; as she neatly packed her bedroll into her saddlebag, she groaned at the throbbing spot in her lower back where the tree nudged her impolitely all night just above her right kidney. And she was hungry, ravenous, even.
The little Hobbit lass's perpetual state of starvation was not just a hallmark of her race; her lack of finesse with cooking and general state of poverty meant that unlike other Hobbits, Caspia was accustomed to doing without the finer luxuries in life. She did not like being cold, hungry, or lacking a safe haven by a hearth after the sun reclined for the day. However she tolerated these sorts of inconveniences with a patience that far exceeded her withstanding of smaller annoyances.
She rubbed her eyes with her tiny, grubby fists. The sun was beginning to thaw her sluggish blood as she staggered, still half-blind with sleep, to the edge of the little pond. The water was shallow all the way across, nearly enough to wade to the other side without her feet drifting from the bottom. The pond wasn't suited to a good swim but the depth meant that on a spring morning such as this one, where the frost was surrendering into dew at the touch of the sunlight, the water was not so icy as that found in a stream. Still, she gasped and spit and blew mist in surprise as she slapped handfuls of water onto her face.
Caspia grinned to herself as she straightened from the water's edge, licking sweet drops of water from her chin. At least she was awake now, though the gnawing cavern of her belly was sharper in her clarity.
Torla, her pony, was cropping grass and blissfully scratching her neck on the trunk of a oak sapling on the far side of the pond. Caspia shook the last of the water from her hair and eyes and whistled for Torla. The pony had a kissable, velvet muzzle and long, silky hair that dangled before her delicate eyelashes; beneath her affectionate and patient nature and sweet, homely appearance the little mare was a trained mount for a warrior despite her diminutive size.
The Hobbit lass gathered up her things in the matter of moments the pony took to gallop around the pond. The mare halted a few paces short of her mistress, her ears perked to say, "What now, Lady? There's no danger at hand. Why are we moving again?" Torla served not so much as a beast of burden on Caspia's travels, but rather as a watcher whose sharper sensed detected stealthy foes far before the Hobbit's clever eyes and ears could do so.
The little lass suited herself up to face the day, taking her ragged, colorless cloak from over an oaken branch. She whirled it around her shoulders with a flourish and armed herself efficiently; a short sword to a Man or Elf, but nearly dragging at her heels, an axe with a wicked blade enscribed with Dwarvish sayings, and her dark crossbow and treasured quiver, betrayed the downtrodden state of her armour. She was prepared to fight with no fear of dying, only a terror of pain that of the sort that lasts.
With a great heave, Caspia cast her bags and saddle onto the pony's back. The work took her seconds now, when only a year ago outfitting the mare was such a clumsy chore that Caspia lost patience more times than was reasonable even in her eyes. Now, tightening the stirrups and slinging herself into the saddle, Caspia felt a bit of true pride, and not the artificial, gleaming, boastful sort, at her accomplishments of late.
As she guided Torla away from the camp, the sun now warming to white light glittering over the pale dew on the grass, Caspia could not help but grin. She was hungry, aye, and far from anything that could be considered a home. But, though she'd never say it aloud even in a state of utter torture, she had a few folks she considered friends now. That was an oddity she never imagined; having companions she had an inkling may help her if she called them, or forgive her many unconscious slights and rabid outbursts.
She turned to head down the rough road on the far side of the meadow, following little more than vague wagon tracks towards a farmhouse she'd spied the night before as she sliently crept past. Perhaps the farmwife here would offer her a bite to eat in exchange for a few fat coneys she could quickly pluck from the fields with her clever bow.
Torla slowly circled the crumbling stone wall that surrounded the low house and crooked barn, her ears flicking in a signal that caution would be most appropriate at this time. Caspia arched a brow, laying her hand on her sword. The house was traditionally built, as far as Hobbit architecture went, a squat structure of wood and wattle with a thatched roof; only the very richest Halflings, or the very poorest, commonly lived in holes. The homestead was well-tended, too, the front door shining with a fresh coat of blue paint and a few cold-hardy pansies growing in a cracked urn by the stoop. There was no sign here of disquiet or conflict. This was just another country farm tucked in a nook of nowhere.
Caspia bristled slightly, her nostrils flaring though she had no reasonable cause to be wary. Nothing stirred in the silence of the dawn, though last night, not more than an hour after the moon was up and the stars whirled in their frolicks across lavender and indigo clouds, nearly every window in the farmhouse was ablaze with lamps or candles. Perhaps the farmer was a lover of drink and now laid abed with a headache; but not even a chicken or goat stirred in the yard, as was proper for any rustic creature to do at this hour.
Her belly snarled for breakfast. The farm's animals should be begging for a meal now too, but only silence, broken with the rustle of the breeze through the grass, greeted her. A squeaking clack started her, her hand flying to her crossbow in the passing of heartbeat. Torla stood solidly, however, only tossing her head as it to comment on her Lady's misplaced concern. Caspia exhaled slowly as she lowered her hand, her muscles coursing with the delicious tracers of adrenaline that fueled her every pleasure. The sharp sound broke the placid dawn again, this time eliciting only a minute stiffening from the minature huntress.
Caspia patted the pony's neck, pulling the reins with her free hand to guide Torla around the west side of the farm's enclosure, behind the barn. A stand of apple trees, likely planted by the great-gaffer of the current tennant, would offer her a bit of shadowed shelter to size up the place carefully.
The apples were in full blossom, a few dozing and chilly bees nuzzling among the drifts of ethereal white flowers. Petals rained down in spirals to the gentle blades of grass, still gilded with frost in the shade. The soft storm of disrupted blossoms and a few half-moon hoofprints marring the silver grass were the only marking of the quiet passage of the pony and rider. Torla snuffled carefully, testing the breeze for any sign of hazard. Caspia mirrored the pony, sniffing and catching only the honeyed scent of the trees and the faintest underlying traces of an old wood fire.
Caspia dropped from the saddle and landed as a leaf lands on the slow courses of a stream, her tiny boots stealthy as she crept through the apple orchard. A Hobbit was only surpassed in skill at moving undetected by Elves and a few of the sneakier sorts of Dwarves, and this was without effort on the behalf of the Perian. Hobbits were smaller and weaker than the other races, but a few modest favors perpetuated their mostly-unknown existence.
Torla kept pace behind her mistress, close enough that her warm breath dampened the back of Caspia's neck beneath her cropped hair. At the edge of the treeline, about ten paces from the stone wall that surrounded the patch of beaten dirt that served as the yard behind the sagging barn, the Hobbit gestured with a waved hand for the pony to stay hidden. Caspia had no worries that the mare would wander off; rather her concern at times was that Torla would be overeager to help her mistress and ruin Caspia' plans of a quick or silent bit of work.
Caspia hesitated at the verge of the trees for a long moment, as still as the disturbingly lifeless farmyard before her. Her blue eyes went dark, almost black, as she smirked. She was daft for involving herself in other people's business like this. More likely than not she'd end up with a pitchfork speared in her belly for waking the drunken farmer from an ale-induced daze. She was better off making haste towards Brockenborings and begging some lunch from Halson; it would be noon if she rode with all haste and the innkeeper was likely planning a bit of mutton stew for the midday meal.
She actually turned back to summon her pony before curiousity and a dropping feeling in her belly that had nothing to do with hunger, what most people called a "conscience" and what she named "foolishness," halted her departure. Torla flicked her ears to the Hobbit, tossing her head to the side as if to say, "Something is wrong. Either fight or fly."
Shaking her head, Caspia turned back to the farm, slinging her cloak over her left shoulder to free access to her quiver and bow. The leather of the quiver warmed and curved to her shoulderblades, comforting her with it's familiarity in all sorts of darkly uneasy situations.
She had a dozen quivers, perhaps, but all were fitted to a single, care-worn leather strap she crossed over her chest and hip. The strap was a gift from the same giver who provided her with Torla and her saddle and riding gear; an Elf commissioned their making by a Master craftsman of the First-Born. The craftsman enscribed the supple and durable leather of all Caspia's gear with elaborate runes, some in Quenya, some in Dwarvish, some in Sindarin, others in a shimmering script the lass could not name. The runes and scraps of verse seemed to change over time, moving perhaps while the Hobbit slept into exquisite whorls and leaping patterns. Countless times the magic worked into the very making of her gear had aided her in battle and perhaps even saved her life.
Caspia hooked her right thumb beneath her quiver's strap, her left hand alighting on her sword, as she made her choice on impulse. A nature of exploration and a relish for the fire that throbbed through her small body at any sign of adventure pushed her across the narrow opening of grass between the trees and the rock wall; she was not conscious of her choice to jump into potential danger, acting only on what, in hindsight, she may have called instinct.
She ducked behind the wall, out of sight to any soul in the farmhouse or yard. If an enemy approached her from the West, from the orchard or slumbering, just-tilled field behind her, Torla would warn her.
Caspia peeped over the wall between a few crumbled, cracked stones. Nothing stirred to announce her arrival. The bare dirt was as desolate and quiet as ever. The breeze stirred once more, bringing the scent of a dead fire, rather than a blazing hearth, to the Hobbit, and she discovered the source of the sound that had startled her before. The back door of the farmhouse was unbolted and swung freely, clacking against the doorframe before swinging back inward with the squeal of rusted hinges. From what she could see, the door opened into a dark kitchen. She squinted and made out a hearth, dark and cold, and a hallway that lead to the front of the house.
She efficiently scanned the farmyard with the intensity of a scout appraising a field of battle. The barn, to the right, was apparently deserted, the low double-doors propped open with chunks of stone as if to welcome it's tennants home for the evening. No tracks scuffed the neatly-swept dirt between her place half a dozen steps from the wall's rear gate; it did not appear that there was a fight here, or a captive dragged unwillingly from his home in the dark hours before dawn. A well with a lichen-crusted roof was positioned just beyond the barn, the bucket awaiting it's first use of the morning with a patience that might never be satisfied.
To the left of the house's back door, and butted up against the rear wall, cellar doors were bolted shut against robbers, if such a thing existed in this part of the world, but more likely were locked against a filching farmer's youngster with a taste for more than what was laid out for supper. Caspia's eyes lingered on the cellar doors for a long while, something stirring in the back of her recollection that she quickly stifled with the weight of the matter at hand.
She clamped her tiny teeth on her lower lip as she took a deep breath and vaulted herself over the wall. She was across the yard with the quickness of a hawk's shadow flicking across a meadow of hay. Her feet were silent as she dove through the back door of the house, her sword drawn in her right hand before even her eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the kitchen. If there were watchers around the house, they likely would have noted the intrusion and an alarm would sound now.
The kitchen was cold and dead. The dishes from last night's supper were laid out to dry next to the basin they were washed in; the long table bore the preparations for this morning's breakfast, still fresh enough to make a meal. The house had been empty for less than a day. Caspia scanned the room, her ears straining for any sign or call to betray her presence. Not even a robin chirped in the yard.
A sweet thrill ricocheted through her muscles as she crept through the kitchen and to the corridor. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness of the low-roofed house; only the shutters facing the rude bit of "road" past the front dooryard were open to greet the sunrise. No lamps burned to stave away the shadows.
The corridor was short, with a closed door to her left and one to the right. Ahead it opened into what she assumed was a parlor or common room of sorts, where a jovial farmer's family would gather to tell tales and put up their feet after a day in the fields. She paused, crouching nearly to the stone floor as she appraised the house; nothing made a sound, not even the settling of a bit of furniture or the creak of a rope-framed bed sagging inevitably to the floor disturbing the infuriating silence.
Caspia ignored the doors, likely leading to bedchambers. She would check and clear the front room of the house first, assuming that in this quiet the sound of a door opening would resound as clearly as the cry of a war-horn.
Her boots padded with a softness that perhaps only the ears of a wild creature, or of another scout, could detect. She slipped to the doorway and scanned the room, her eyes going wide in shock. The front parlor was destroyed; unlike the placid and everyday state of the kitchen, it was more than clear that some dark and murderous event had passed here.
The low settee was turned on it's back, the rounded wooden legs jutting into the air like the death-frozen limbs of a rodent who's eaten a poisoned scrap of food. Everything in the room that could be violated had been. The settee was likely the most costly furnishing in this house but now the fine velvet upholstery was slashed and ruined, the horsehair and straw stuffing scattered among the remnants of what was once a domestic paradise to a simple family. A small bookshelf was turned on it's face with indignity, a handful of books torn to bits and thrown aside with abandon. Every piece of adored treasure, mathoms and crockery pots that held the spring's first flowers, were battered to crumbled bits. A painting had been wrenched from the wall over the hearth and broken in two over the mantle. Even the dead ashes from the grate were scattered all across the floor.
Caspia tiptoed through the scraps that were left of this farmer's haven to where the painting lay in limp shreds atop a neat stack of firewood. Her breath froze in her throat as she turned it over, the frame finally giving way and falling to peices. A crude thing, it was, the likenesses in the portrait likely at best an approximation of what the family actually looked like. Against a background of apple trees that were rendered with much more skill than the figures, a red-faced Hobbit gent in a wescot with an overblown bit of lace at the neck stood with his arm around the shoulders of a slightly younger, no less rotund, Hobbitess in a blue checked gown. Before them, four bairns posed, stiffly seated on what was apparently meant to be a stone bench. The eldest was perhaps approaching his tweens while the youngest was small enough to be barely toddling on her own. There were three boys and the little lass.
Caspia fingered the shredded edges of the canvas thoughtfully. The badly-scripted signature at the corner detailed the family as being "The Likeness of the Farmer Medo Applestone and His Family, Wife Clairie and Children. Wrought by the Esteemed Wm. Smandle." The portrait was dated from the past summer.
She settled down the ruined painting with something approaching reverence, her eyes darkly troubled. She gnawed her ragged lower lip as she cast her eyes around the room once more. Where was the farmer and his family? Had they come to their end in one of the far rooms down the corridor? Who would do such a horrid thing to simple Hobbits who had harmed nothing but perhaps a pie in their whole lives?
She began to turn to investigate the corridor when a tiny sound, as soft and frightened as the cry of a startled house mouse, halted her. Caspia's muscles shimmered with something like the vibrations of a cornered coney's poised body; she was ready to flee through the front door so quickly she left no shadow. Her nostrils flared, her eyes dialating in her readiness. The sound was cut off shortly, as if by a hand being clamped over a mouth.
Caspia tilted her head to the side, her energy torn between listening and preparing herself for flight. The barest hint of a muffled whisper came to her from... beneath her feet? Her eyes glared to light at a realization.
Her coiled speed had her through the house and out the kitchen door in an instant. She threw back the bolt of the cellar doors, the loud clack disregarded in her haste. She did not know that tears stood on her eyes as she struggled with the heavy doors, the bolt freely moving but the latch jammed from a frantic closure. Almost half a minute passed, her breath in ragged pants, before she yanked the doors open and spilled the brilliant golden dawn's light onto the scene below.
Four Hobbit children dressed in nighgowns and robes, a bit larger now than they were when their likeness was clumsily captured in oil paint, huddled at the foot of the tiny cellar's steps. A matronly Hobbitess tried to sheild them from the approaching doom with her arms, wrapping them as best she could around her children. The Hobbits in the cellar froze as if to pose for another portrait, this one to be the rendering of a family that witnessed it's undoing with glassy, tortured eyes.
Caspia realized she was likely just a horrible shadow against the dawn's light, a specter with sunshine gleaming off of blades and arrow points, albeit too small to be a Man or Elf. Her sword found it's home in her scabbard in a flash of reflected sunshine. She wiped her cheeks, thinking perhaps dew dampened them, and held up her tiny hands in a gesture of harmlessness. Her voice crackled as she tried to find something to say to them.
At last she managed, "What the bloody hell happened here?"
The children burst into tears, their silent cries now robust as they huddled around their mother and hid their faces against her. The farmwife looked to Caspia with something like gratefullness flooding her features.
"They came. The Men what work for Sharkey. Just after I finished tha washin' up from supper last night. My husband, Mister Applestone, met them up the road past tha old pond. He... he had words with them an' said he sent them on their way when he came back."
Missus Applestone hugged her bairns more closely to her. "So we got ready fer bed like we always do. Weren't tha first time Sharkey sent Men to make demands on us, bein' so close ta Brockenborin's an' tha road ta Oatbarton. Strange folks been passin' by here, even on our little track out front. My eldest, Johnny, he said last fall he saw somethin' like they say orcs, or maybe goblins, is in tha old stories."
Caspia waited for a long moment for more, and when nothing appeared to be forthcoming, she grew impatient. "What next, ya daft lass? Did tha Men come? An' is there more o' them about here now?"
Missus Applestone shook her head, then appeared to have no confidence in her reply. "Tha Men, well... We got ready fer bed, an' we was late to it since Mister Applestone was so long up tha road. It was near ta midnight before I had tha bairns wound down enough ta start on their way. They was noddin' off on their feet, they was."
The Hobbitess tried to capture her thoughts and put them in order, still trembling in fear. "We heard them at tha gate out front, just afore we tucked tha lil ones in fer tha night. Mister Applestone, he had nothin' ta say about tha Men bein' back. He just said, 'Hey now Clairie, you an' tha bairns get ta tha cellar. I'll come get ya when I've sent this rabble off.' An' he took up a stick he uses fer walkin', in case he runs inta a big dog er tha like, an' made us come down here. I heard him bolt tha doors ta tha cellar. An' then he walked across tha floor ta tha front an' I heard no more outta him."
The farmwife shook her head, now crying openly. "Mister Applestone, he din't give tha Men what they asked fer all winter. We didn't have enough o' our crops from last fall ta pay tha Men tithes like they demanded o' us. Said they worked fer a Big Boss, whass named Sharkey, now that Bag End been left open an' Lobelia's son is in charge. Said Sharkey an' Lotho wanted ta work together fer tha good o' tha Shire, though this is tha first I ever heard o' it.
"All I know about Men bein' here is that they's rumors o' a camp o' brigands down by tha leaf farm outside Woodhall. Regardless, I guess Mister Applestone refusin' ta pay tha Men what they wanted, alla our seed an' what lil we had left from last year's harvest, made tha Men angry an' they took him off. An' all I heard after that was tha Men tearin' about in tha house upstairs."
Caspia bit her lower lip so hard she nearly drew blood. She nodded after thinking this over for a moment. "So, ya dunno what went wit' yer mate er if tha Men are still about?" She threw her hands up in the air. "What are ya waitin' about here for? Ya gotta leave here, at least fer now until we can figure it out. Come along, ya ken come back fer yer thin's later. I'll take ya as far as Brockenborin's an' ya ken talk ta tha Bounders there."
Missus Applestone shook her head almost frantically. "I cannot tell tha Bounders about this business! Tha Men, they already said most o' tha Bounders are in their pockets an' do what they demand. By force, most o' them. They're still good lads, tha Bounders. But they'll be no help ta me!" She rose to her feet unsteadily, shooing her children away. "Yer right though. We best be gone afore those Men come back from wherever they took Mister an' start lookin' about fer us." Her voice was flat and almost empty as she said this, her eyes raking over her children. "I got a sister in Scary what ken keep us fer a while. Come on then, lads, Daisy. We're goin' ta Scary ta see Auntie."
The children were snuffling and trying to contain their bawling now, their emotions now moving toward the stunned state of their mother. They stood in a little clump, wincing in the bright sunlight that poured into the cellar.
Caspia stepped back, scanning the barnyard and the orchard and fields with intensity. Torla had moved to just beyond the stone wall, equally watchful but showing no warning to her Lady that ill folks were about.
"I'll take ya ta tha front gates o' Scary. An' then I'm through wit' ya." Caspia folded her arms. "Come along, now! Be quick! Stay close at hand an' try ta be quiet. I ken getcha there by lunch time if ya heed me."
The children wimpered, likely from a lack of breakfast as much as out of their anguish, but herded like lambs before their mother they stepped to Caspia's side, eyeing her as if she was a rare sort of horse with two heads. Missus Applestone followed, clutching her own dressing gown around her.
"'S not safe ta go inside an' get some clothes, then?"
Caspia shook her head. "Even askin' that took more time than is safe if those Men plan ta come back fer ya after takin' care o' yer mate." She turned on her heel and headed towards the gate in the wall that opened to the fields.
She threw herself onto Torla's back, watching as the children and farmwife took a moment to look over their home. She granted them this, then shook her head in self-disgust.
She was mad for helping Hobbits who could not aid themselves, and likely would have run her away with pitchforks at the first snide word that slipped her tongue if she'd come even the day before to beg for breakfast. She was endangering herself and delaying a much-needed return home for some rest now that her scouting was done in Evendim.
Caspia was not the sort of lass to show kindness to others without the promise of a rich payment involved in the end; as she turned the pony in the direction of Scary and started off across the field, expecting the Hobbits to follow, she tried to swallow down the uneasiness in her belly some folks called "conscience."
The influence of the approaching Darkness is now being felt even in the Shire, since the Fellowship and the Ringbearers are no longer present. Evil is creeping into the lands, but now just on the borders, in the forms of Sharkey's Men, a band of brigands, and orcs and goblins taking up residence in the far North of the Greenfields.
For more information about where I want to take this, read the end of Return of the King, about what the Hobbits in the Fellowship faced when they came home from their long absence. I'll add more posts and a few chat logs as background as soon as I can to get this story moving along.
Breakfast was no mere meal to her; the finding and preparing of suitable items that could pass as food was a full-time occupation.
The first and most important meal of the day, second only to second-breakfast and luncheon, then tea and supper, but slightly surpased only by the much longed-for official Dinner, was Caspia's endless source of woe.
When she was at home with her family, the day began with a tuck-in that was nothing short of a race to the finish. She squeezed herself onto a long bench in the tavern's kitchen between five long-legged brothers and a sister, like a runty piglet mewing for a teat. The contest among the siblings was to see who could fill their bellies before the platters of stewed fruit and crisped curls of bacon or slabs of sweet venison were scraped spotless with crusts of home-baked black bread.
The meager fare of life as a bachelorette with no skills with a pot or pan was a sore disappointment.
This cold, foggy morning was like every other dawn on the hunt for Caspia as she rolled out of her dewy blankets, blinking in the thin grey sunlight. Mist trembled in the breeze over the droplet-laced hillsides surrounding the little pond in the northern meadows of the Shire. The panorama would give any soul with an eye for beauty reason to pause and relish the starting of the day.
Caspia was not such a lass, however. She was crabby already, having slept beneath the vaulting roof of an oak sprouting roots up through the silky grass in disagreeable toes; as she neatly packed her bedroll into her saddlebag, she groaned at the throbbing spot in her lower back where the tree nudged her impolitely all night just above her right kidney. And she was hungry, ravenous, even.
The little Hobbit lass's perpetual state of starvation was not just a hallmark of her race; her lack of finesse with cooking and general state of poverty meant that unlike other Hobbits, Caspia was accustomed to doing without the finer luxuries in life. She did not like being cold, hungry, or lacking a safe haven by a hearth after the sun reclined for the day. However she tolerated these sorts of inconveniences with a patience that far exceeded her withstanding of smaller annoyances.
She rubbed her eyes with her tiny, grubby fists. The sun was beginning to thaw her sluggish blood as she staggered, still half-blind with sleep, to the edge of the little pond. The water was shallow all the way across, nearly enough to wade to the other side without her feet drifting from the bottom. The pond wasn't suited to a good swim but the depth meant that on a spring morning such as this one, where the frost was surrendering into dew at the touch of the sunlight, the water was not so icy as that found in a stream. Still, she gasped and spit and blew mist in surprise as she slapped handfuls of water onto her face.
Caspia grinned to herself as she straightened from the water's edge, licking sweet drops of water from her chin. At least she was awake now, though the gnawing cavern of her belly was sharper in her clarity.
Torla, her pony, was cropping grass and blissfully scratching her neck on the trunk of a oak sapling on the far side of the pond. Caspia shook the last of the water from her hair and eyes and whistled for Torla. The pony had a kissable, velvet muzzle and long, silky hair that dangled before her delicate eyelashes; beneath her affectionate and patient nature and sweet, homely appearance the little mare was a trained mount for a warrior despite her diminutive size.
The Hobbit lass gathered up her things in the matter of moments the pony took to gallop around the pond. The mare halted a few paces short of her mistress, her ears perked to say, "What now, Lady? There's no danger at hand. Why are we moving again?" Torla served not so much as a beast of burden on Caspia's travels, but rather as a watcher whose sharper sensed detected stealthy foes far before the Hobbit's clever eyes and ears could do so.
The little lass suited herself up to face the day, taking her ragged, colorless cloak from over an oaken branch. She whirled it around her shoulders with a flourish and armed herself efficiently; a short sword to a Man or Elf, but nearly dragging at her heels, an axe with a wicked blade enscribed with Dwarvish sayings, and her dark crossbow and treasured quiver, betrayed the downtrodden state of her armour. She was prepared to fight with no fear of dying, only a terror of pain that of the sort that lasts.
With a great heave, Caspia cast her bags and saddle onto the pony's back. The work took her seconds now, when only a year ago outfitting the mare was such a clumsy chore that Caspia lost patience more times than was reasonable even in her eyes. Now, tightening the stirrups and slinging herself into the saddle, Caspia felt a bit of true pride, and not the artificial, gleaming, boastful sort, at her accomplishments of late.
As she guided Torla away from the camp, the sun now warming to white light glittering over the pale dew on the grass, Caspia could not help but grin. She was hungry, aye, and far from anything that could be considered a home. But, though she'd never say it aloud even in a state of utter torture, she had a few folks she considered friends now. That was an oddity she never imagined; having companions she had an inkling may help her if she called them, or forgive her many unconscious slights and rabid outbursts.
She turned to head down the rough road on the far side of the meadow, following little more than vague wagon tracks towards a farmhouse she'd spied the night before as she sliently crept past. Perhaps the farmwife here would offer her a bite to eat in exchange for a few fat coneys she could quickly pluck from the fields with her clever bow.
Torla slowly circled the crumbling stone wall that surrounded the low house and crooked barn, her ears flicking in a signal that caution would be most appropriate at this time. Caspia arched a brow, laying her hand on her sword. The house was traditionally built, as far as Hobbit architecture went, a squat structure of wood and wattle with a thatched roof; only the very richest Halflings, or the very poorest, commonly lived in holes. The homestead was well-tended, too, the front door shining with a fresh coat of blue paint and a few cold-hardy pansies growing in a cracked urn by the stoop. There was no sign here of disquiet or conflict. This was just another country farm tucked in a nook of nowhere.
Caspia bristled slightly, her nostrils flaring though she had no reasonable cause to be wary. Nothing stirred in the silence of the dawn, though last night, not more than an hour after the moon was up and the stars whirled in their frolicks across lavender and indigo clouds, nearly every window in the farmhouse was ablaze with lamps or candles. Perhaps the farmer was a lover of drink and now laid abed with a headache; but not even a chicken or goat stirred in the yard, as was proper for any rustic creature to do at this hour.
Her belly snarled for breakfast. The farm's animals should be begging for a meal now too, but only silence, broken with the rustle of the breeze through the grass, greeted her. A squeaking clack started her, her hand flying to her crossbow in the passing of heartbeat. Torla stood solidly, however, only tossing her head as it to comment on her Lady's misplaced concern. Caspia exhaled slowly as she lowered her hand, her muscles coursing with the delicious tracers of adrenaline that fueled her every pleasure. The sharp sound broke the placid dawn again, this time eliciting only a minute stiffening from the minature huntress.
Caspia patted the pony's neck, pulling the reins with her free hand to guide Torla around the west side of the farm's enclosure, behind the barn. A stand of apple trees, likely planted by the great-gaffer of the current tennant, would offer her a bit of shadowed shelter to size up the place carefully.
The apples were in full blossom, a few dozing and chilly bees nuzzling among the drifts of ethereal white flowers. Petals rained down in spirals to the gentle blades of grass, still gilded with frost in the shade. The soft storm of disrupted blossoms and a few half-moon hoofprints marring the silver grass were the only marking of the quiet passage of the pony and rider. Torla snuffled carefully, testing the breeze for any sign of hazard. Caspia mirrored the pony, sniffing and catching only the honeyed scent of the trees and the faintest underlying traces of an old wood fire.
Caspia dropped from the saddle and landed as a leaf lands on the slow courses of a stream, her tiny boots stealthy as she crept through the apple orchard. A Hobbit was only surpassed in skill at moving undetected by Elves and a few of the sneakier sorts of Dwarves, and this was without effort on the behalf of the Perian. Hobbits were smaller and weaker than the other races, but a few modest favors perpetuated their mostly-unknown existence.
Torla kept pace behind her mistress, close enough that her warm breath dampened the back of Caspia's neck beneath her cropped hair. At the edge of the treeline, about ten paces from the stone wall that surrounded the patch of beaten dirt that served as the yard behind the sagging barn, the Hobbit gestured with a waved hand for the pony to stay hidden. Caspia had no worries that the mare would wander off; rather her concern at times was that Torla would be overeager to help her mistress and ruin Caspia' plans of a quick or silent bit of work.
Caspia hesitated at the verge of the trees for a long moment, as still as the disturbingly lifeless farmyard before her. Her blue eyes went dark, almost black, as she smirked. She was daft for involving herself in other people's business like this. More likely than not she'd end up with a pitchfork speared in her belly for waking the drunken farmer from an ale-induced daze. She was better off making haste towards Brockenborings and begging some lunch from Halson; it would be noon if she rode with all haste and the innkeeper was likely planning a bit of mutton stew for the midday meal.
She actually turned back to summon her pony before curiousity and a dropping feeling in her belly that had nothing to do with hunger, what most people called a "conscience" and what she named "foolishness," halted her departure. Torla flicked her ears to the Hobbit, tossing her head to the side as if to say, "Something is wrong. Either fight or fly."
Shaking her head, Caspia turned back to the farm, slinging her cloak over her left shoulder to free access to her quiver and bow. The leather of the quiver warmed and curved to her shoulderblades, comforting her with it's familiarity in all sorts of darkly uneasy situations.
She had a dozen quivers, perhaps, but all were fitted to a single, care-worn leather strap she crossed over her chest and hip. The strap was a gift from the same giver who provided her with Torla and her saddle and riding gear; an Elf commissioned their making by a Master craftsman of the First-Born. The craftsman enscribed the supple and durable leather of all Caspia's gear with elaborate runes, some in Quenya, some in Dwarvish, some in Sindarin, others in a shimmering script the lass could not name. The runes and scraps of verse seemed to change over time, moving perhaps while the Hobbit slept into exquisite whorls and leaping patterns. Countless times the magic worked into the very making of her gear had aided her in battle and perhaps even saved her life.
Caspia hooked her right thumb beneath her quiver's strap, her left hand alighting on her sword, as she made her choice on impulse. A nature of exploration and a relish for the fire that throbbed through her small body at any sign of adventure pushed her across the narrow opening of grass between the trees and the rock wall; she was not conscious of her choice to jump into potential danger, acting only on what, in hindsight, she may have called instinct.
She ducked behind the wall, out of sight to any soul in the farmhouse or yard. If an enemy approached her from the West, from the orchard or slumbering, just-tilled field behind her, Torla would warn her.
Caspia peeped over the wall between a few crumbled, cracked stones. Nothing stirred to announce her arrival. The bare dirt was as desolate and quiet as ever. The breeze stirred once more, bringing the scent of a dead fire, rather than a blazing hearth, to the Hobbit, and she discovered the source of the sound that had startled her before. The back door of the farmhouse was unbolted and swung freely, clacking against the doorframe before swinging back inward with the squeal of rusted hinges. From what she could see, the door opened into a dark kitchen. She squinted and made out a hearth, dark and cold, and a hallway that lead to the front of the house.
She efficiently scanned the farmyard with the intensity of a scout appraising a field of battle. The barn, to the right, was apparently deserted, the low double-doors propped open with chunks of stone as if to welcome it's tennants home for the evening. No tracks scuffed the neatly-swept dirt between her place half a dozen steps from the wall's rear gate; it did not appear that there was a fight here, or a captive dragged unwillingly from his home in the dark hours before dawn. A well with a lichen-crusted roof was positioned just beyond the barn, the bucket awaiting it's first use of the morning with a patience that might never be satisfied.
To the left of the house's back door, and butted up against the rear wall, cellar doors were bolted shut against robbers, if such a thing existed in this part of the world, but more likely were locked against a filching farmer's youngster with a taste for more than what was laid out for supper. Caspia's eyes lingered on the cellar doors for a long while, something stirring in the back of her recollection that she quickly stifled with the weight of the matter at hand.
She clamped her tiny teeth on her lower lip as she took a deep breath and vaulted herself over the wall. She was across the yard with the quickness of a hawk's shadow flicking across a meadow of hay. Her feet were silent as she dove through the back door of the house, her sword drawn in her right hand before even her eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the kitchen. If there were watchers around the house, they likely would have noted the intrusion and an alarm would sound now.
The kitchen was cold and dead. The dishes from last night's supper were laid out to dry next to the basin they were washed in; the long table bore the preparations for this morning's breakfast, still fresh enough to make a meal. The house had been empty for less than a day. Caspia scanned the room, her ears straining for any sign or call to betray her presence. Not even a robin chirped in the yard.
A sweet thrill ricocheted through her muscles as she crept through the kitchen and to the corridor. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness of the low-roofed house; only the shutters facing the rude bit of "road" past the front dooryard were open to greet the sunrise. No lamps burned to stave away the shadows.
The corridor was short, with a closed door to her left and one to the right. Ahead it opened into what she assumed was a parlor or common room of sorts, where a jovial farmer's family would gather to tell tales and put up their feet after a day in the fields. She paused, crouching nearly to the stone floor as she appraised the house; nothing made a sound, not even the settling of a bit of furniture or the creak of a rope-framed bed sagging inevitably to the floor disturbing the infuriating silence.
Caspia ignored the doors, likely leading to bedchambers. She would check and clear the front room of the house first, assuming that in this quiet the sound of a door opening would resound as clearly as the cry of a war-horn.
Her boots padded with a softness that perhaps only the ears of a wild creature, or of another scout, could detect. She slipped to the doorway and scanned the room, her eyes going wide in shock. The front parlor was destroyed; unlike the placid and everyday state of the kitchen, it was more than clear that some dark and murderous event had passed here.
The low settee was turned on it's back, the rounded wooden legs jutting into the air like the death-frozen limbs of a rodent who's eaten a poisoned scrap of food. Everything in the room that could be violated had been. The settee was likely the most costly furnishing in this house but now the fine velvet upholstery was slashed and ruined, the horsehair and straw stuffing scattered among the remnants of what was once a domestic paradise to a simple family. A small bookshelf was turned on it's face with indignity, a handful of books torn to bits and thrown aside with abandon. Every piece of adored treasure, mathoms and crockery pots that held the spring's first flowers, were battered to crumbled bits. A painting had been wrenched from the wall over the hearth and broken in two over the mantle. Even the dead ashes from the grate were scattered all across the floor.
Caspia tiptoed through the scraps that were left of this farmer's haven to where the painting lay in limp shreds atop a neat stack of firewood. Her breath froze in her throat as she turned it over, the frame finally giving way and falling to peices. A crude thing, it was, the likenesses in the portrait likely at best an approximation of what the family actually looked like. Against a background of apple trees that were rendered with much more skill than the figures, a red-faced Hobbit gent in a wescot with an overblown bit of lace at the neck stood with his arm around the shoulders of a slightly younger, no less rotund, Hobbitess in a blue checked gown. Before them, four bairns posed, stiffly seated on what was apparently meant to be a stone bench. The eldest was perhaps approaching his tweens while the youngest was small enough to be barely toddling on her own. There were three boys and the little lass.
Caspia fingered the shredded edges of the canvas thoughtfully. The badly-scripted signature at the corner detailed the family as being "The Likeness of the Farmer Medo Applestone and His Family, Wife Clairie and Children. Wrought by the Esteemed Wm. Smandle." The portrait was dated from the past summer.
She settled down the ruined painting with something approaching reverence, her eyes darkly troubled. She gnawed her ragged lower lip as she cast her eyes around the room once more. Where was the farmer and his family? Had they come to their end in one of the far rooms down the corridor? Who would do such a horrid thing to simple Hobbits who had harmed nothing but perhaps a pie in their whole lives?
She began to turn to investigate the corridor when a tiny sound, as soft and frightened as the cry of a startled house mouse, halted her. Caspia's muscles shimmered with something like the vibrations of a cornered coney's poised body; she was ready to flee through the front door so quickly she left no shadow. Her nostrils flared, her eyes dialating in her readiness. The sound was cut off shortly, as if by a hand being clamped over a mouth.
Caspia tilted her head to the side, her energy torn between listening and preparing herself for flight. The barest hint of a muffled whisper came to her from... beneath her feet? Her eyes glared to light at a realization.
Her coiled speed had her through the house and out the kitchen door in an instant. She threw back the bolt of the cellar doors, the loud clack disregarded in her haste. She did not know that tears stood on her eyes as she struggled with the heavy doors, the bolt freely moving but the latch jammed from a frantic closure. Almost half a minute passed, her breath in ragged pants, before she yanked the doors open and spilled the brilliant golden dawn's light onto the scene below.
Four Hobbit children dressed in nighgowns and robes, a bit larger now than they were when their likeness was clumsily captured in oil paint, huddled at the foot of the tiny cellar's steps. A matronly Hobbitess tried to sheild them from the approaching doom with her arms, wrapping them as best she could around her children. The Hobbits in the cellar froze as if to pose for another portrait, this one to be the rendering of a family that witnessed it's undoing with glassy, tortured eyes.
Caspia realized she was likely just a horrible shadow against the dawn's light, a specter with sunshine gleaming off of blades and arrow points, albeit too small to be a Man or Elf. Her sword found it's home in her scabbard in a flash of reflected sunshine. She wiped her cheeks, thinking perhaps dew dampened them, and held up her tiny hands in a gesture of harmlessness. Her voice crackled as she tried to find something to say to them.
At last she managed, "What the bloody hell happened here?"
The children burst into tears, their silent cries now robust as they huddled around their mother and hid their faces against her. The farmwife looked to Caspia with something like gratefullness flooding her features.
"They came. The Men what work for Sharkey. Just after I finished tha washin' up from supper last night. My husband, Mister Applestone, met them up the road past tha old pond. He... he had words with them an' said he sent them on their way when he came back."
Missus Applestone hugged her bairns more closely to her. "So we got ready fer bed like we always do. Weren't tha first time Sharkey sent Men to make demands on us, bein' so close ta Brockenborin's an' tha road ta Oatbarton. Strange folks been passin' by here, even on our little track out front. My eldest, Johnny, he said last fall he saw somethin' like they say orcs, or maybe goblins, is in tha old stories."
Caspia waited for a long moment for more, and when nothing appeared to be forthcoming, she grew impatient. "What next, ya daft lass? Did tha Men come? An' is there more o' them about here now?"
Missus Applestone shook her head, then appeared to have no confidence in her reply. "Tha Men, well... We got ready fer bed, an' we was late to it since Mister Applestone was so long up tha road. It was near ta midnight before I had tha bairns wound down enough ta start on their way. They was noddin' off on their feet, they was."
The Hobbitess tried to capture her thoughts and put them in order, still trembling in fear. "We heard them at tha gate out front, just afore we tucked tha lil ones in fer tha night. Mister Applestone, he had nothin' ta say about tha Men bein' back. He just said, 'Hey now Clairie, you an' tha bairns get ta tha cellar. I'll come get ya when I've sent this rabble off.' An' he took up a stick he uses fer walkin', in case he runs inta a big dog er tha like, an' made us come down here. I heard him bolt tha doors ta tha cellar. An' then he walked across tha floor ta tha front an' I heard no more outta him."
The farmwife shook her head, now crying openly. "Mister Applestone, he din't give tha Men what they asked fer all winter. We didn't have enough o' our crops from last fall ta pay tha Men tithes like they demanded o' us. Said they worked fer a Big Boss, whass named Sharkey, now that Bag End been left open an' Lobelia's son is in charge. Said Sharkey an' Lotho wanted ta work together fer tha good o' tha Shire, though this is tha first I ever heard o' it.
"All I know about Men bein' here is that they's rumors o' a camp o' brigands down by tha leaf farm outside Woodhall. Regardless, I guess Mister Applestone refusin' ta pay tha Men what they wanted, alla our seed an' what lil we had left from last year's harvest, made tha Men angry an' they took him off. An' all I heard after that was tha Men tearin' about in tha house upstairs."
Caspia bit her lower lip so hard she nearly drew blood. She nodded after thinking this over for a moment. "So, ya dunno what went wit' yer mate er if tha Men are still about?" She threw her hands up in the air. "What are ya waitin' about here for? Ya gotta leave here, at least fer now until we can figure it out. Come along, ya ken come back fer yer thin's later. I'll take ya as far as Brockenborin's an' ya ken talk ta tha Bounders there."
Missus Applestone shook her head almost frantically. "I cannot tell tha Bounders about this business! Tha Men, they already said most o' tha Bounders are in their pockets an' do what they demand. By force, most o' them. They're still good lads, tha Bounders. But they'll be no help ta me!" She rose to her feet unsteadily, shooing her children away. "Yer right though. We best be gone afore those Men come back from wherever they took Mister an' start lookin' about fer us." Her voice was flat and almost empty as she said this, her eyes raking over her children. "I got a sister in Scary what ken keep us fer a while. Come on then, lads, Daisy. We're goin' ta Scary ta see Auntie."
The children were snuffling and trying to contain their bawling now, their emotions now moving toward the stunned state of their mother. They stood in a little clump, wincing in the bright sunlight that poured into the cellar.
Caspia stepped back, scanning the barnyard and the orchard and fields with intensity. Torla had moved to just beyond the stone wall, equally watchful but showing no warning to her Lady that ill folks were about.
"I'll take ya ta tha front gates o' Scary. An' then I'm through wit' ya." Caspia folded her arms. "Come along, now! Be quick! Stay close at hand an' try ta be quiet. I ken getcha there by lunch time if ya heed me."
The children wimpered, likely from a lack of breakfast as much as out of their anguish, but herded like lambs before their mother they stepped to Caspia's side, eyeing her as if she was a rare sort of horse with two heads. Missus Applestone followed, clutching her own dressing gown around her.
"'S not safe ta go inside an' get some clothes, then?"
Caspia shook her head. "Even askin' that took more time than is safe if those Men plan ta come back fer ya after takin' care o' yer mate." She turned on her heel and headed towards the gate in the wall that opened to the fields.
She threw herself onto Torla's back, watching as the children and farmwife took a moment to look over their home. She granted them this, then shook her head in self-disgust.
She was mad for helping Hobbits who could not aid themselves, and likely would have run her away with pitchforks at the first snide word that slipped her tongue if she'd come even the day before to beg for breakfast. She was endangering herself and delaying a much-needed return home for some rest now that her scouting was done in Evendim.
Caspia was not the sort of lass to show kindness to others without the promise of a rich payment involved in the end; as she turned the pony in the direction of Scary and started off across the field, expecting the Hobbits to follow, she tried to swallow down the uneasiness in her belly some folks called "conscience."