Elisef
Convincing her captain to take her friend Signild on a viking had not been easy. Signild's methodical, analytical mindset certainly had its uses, but there was no really good way to spin it so that she would come across as if she'd be useful in the roguelands. In the end, Elisef had simply asked the captain to do it as a favor to her, for which she would have to owe her. It wasn't ideal, but it wasn't any great hardship either.As it turned out, having Siggy along wasn't such a bad thing, although not for the sort of reason Eli could have shared with her friend. Siggy's refusal to take any nonsense did her no harm with the other reavers in the band, but her obvious distaste for the discomforts of roving were a source of amusement. Fortunately, Siggy seemed more than capable of handling the reavers' teasing, and of silencing them with an impressive glower that Eli wished she could master. Maybe it was a byproduct of Siggy's motherhood.
"How are you holding up?" Eli asked, sidling up to her friend.
Signild
Signild shot her friend a wry glance as frigid rain dripped from her ears."I'm managing," she replied dryly. "I can't imagine why I thought that going viking would be any sort of improvement on remaining at home during this season."
She had asked Eli to get her a place in a viking band so that she could try something new and so that she could avoid the deplorable weather that always accompanied breytast vindar. Unfortunately, the deplorable weather seemed to be universal and there was no escaping it.
"I feel like you knew about this," she continued in an accusing tone. In truth, she wasn't angry at her friend. Even with the biting rain and freezing wind, it was very interesting to explore the territory beyond the borders of the Myrsky Syntynyt.
Elisef
"Not in the way you think," Eli protested. "It wasn't as if I set you up for foul weather. But, I mean, weather happens over a fairly large scale, and although it certainly improves if you go far enough from the pride, in this season we don't actually venture all that far away."It was better, according to Eli's captain, not to stray too far from the pride during breytast vindar. For one thing, major changes could occur and reavers out viking could be caught flat-footed when they returned. The example of the former warlord, Ruzski, returning from the quest he'd been assigned by Warlord Aesir and finding that Warlord Njal was in power and Aesir and his kin were all exiled had been held up as an example.
"I'm am sorry. Usually it's not this bad. I don't know why the weather is so very awful. Typically when you move farther away from the shore the weather gets milder, at least as far as wind and rain go." The heat was something else entirely, but Eli didn't see any point in mentioning that. They certainly wouldn't be encountering it.
Signild
"It's all right," Signild assured her friend. "I'm just having an adventure."Those were words she was unlikely to have uttered in her youth. Adventures were absolutely not her style, and Eli knew that, and Signild knew that Eli knew that. Nevertheless, Eli had the vague inkling of a plan for her future which would allow her to build herself something of a comfortable place in the pride and a degree of usefulness she would enjoy. She just first had to find out whether she would be able to manage in the rogue lands.
Admittedly, she had not been impressed with them so far, and with the weather behaving as it was, she foundt hat it was impossible to tell one sodden, squashed plant from another, which put rather a damper on her plans, but she continued to try to discern one form of plantlife from another,
and determine which of them matched the plants she'd seen in Priestess Nadezhda's still room. She was having minimal success, it must be said.
"What else do we do, when we're not being rained on?" she asked, raising her voice over the wind which had suddenly picked up.
Elisef
Before Eli could answer Siggy, one of the other reavers called over a suggestion for things the two of them could do. Siggy leveled another one of her impressive glares at the lion and he laughed, letting the matter drop.In a way, Eli envied her that. She had worked hard to convince the reavers in this band to accept her, and had not fully succeeded, she realized, although until Siggy had joined them Eli had believed that she had assimilated. Now, seeing how effortless Siggy made it look to ignore their banter and yet still move among them, Eli found that she no longer felt as confident in her own sense of belonging.
"He's not entirely wrong," Eli admitted in an undertone, carefully pitched so that there was no way her fellow reaver could hear her. "If there's someone in the band you think you might like to have sex with, it's not frowned upon to suggest it, and it's not a bad way to keep warm. The way the weather is,
no one else would probably even hear you going at it."
Signild
The look Signild gave the other reaver was not much different from the one she sent toward Eli at her suggestion. And yet she did not want her friend to think she disapproved of her sexual forwardness. Signild, herself,did not like the idea of having casual sex with a lion she would have to work and fight alongside, but she wasn't going to shame her friend for not having similar qualms.
"Not in this band," she said to soften the effect of her glare. "But perhaps if I meet a rogue who is both appealing and accommodating, I'll take it under advisement."
Really, Signild had no intention of having sex with anyone before she could have a talk with Nadezhda about preventatives. She had not minded raising her cubs, but she was also not interested in becoming an accidental mother a second time. That sort of thing, in her opinion, reeked of irresponsibility. She already knew that she was not the typical reaver when it came to skills or mindset. She didn't want to give the captain a reason to send her home.
Elisef
"A rogue?" Eli repeated, pretending to be aghast. "You wouldn't sully your exalted old blood with some flowery rogue's seed!"When Siggy grinned at her, Eli grinned back, but her grin faded fairly quickly.
"In all honesty, Siggy, you probably shouldn't. It's okay for the males to have their flings with outlander lionesses, but they don't share the risks we do,
and it would look really bad for both of us if you came home dragging a belly."
Eli hoped that Siggy wouldn't be offended by her words, but it was the truth.
If they were free enough with their favors among the other reavers, any accidental cubs they brought back might be assumed to belong to a proper Stormborn father, but Eli, for one, didn't think she had it in her to face the consequences of getting knocked up by an outlander. She was convinced it would make her a laughingstock.
"Better lower your standards to one of these fellows. Uddard, despite his awful name, isn't too bad once he's behind you."
Signild
Signild shook her head dismissively. "No thanks."She narrowed her eyes as the wind changed direction again and began blowing what felt like ice needles up and under her eyelids, somehow. That shouldn't even be possible, she thought to herself.
"How much farther is it to this fabled outpost?" she asked, hating herself for doing so. She was generally pretty good about limiting herself to one question per day relating to how much longer they would be walking, but this would be the third time she had asked. "I think my whiskers are going to freeze off."
As usual, the very logical part of her brain, which was most of it, pointed out that she was unlikely to freeze anything off. For one thing, it wasn't cold enough. For another, that wasn't how things worked. She was being hyperbolic, and although it was appropriate to the situation, it was still basically a learned behavior. One she had picked up when she was involved with the father of her cubs.
Elisef
Eli had made this trek before. One of the reasons she had been able to convince her captain to bring along a basically useless freeborn was that this viking was not a viking for combat or loot. It was merely a trip to check on the state of a nearby outpost and make sure that it was fit to house a viking band at need. It was not an exciting sort of trip, really, nor was it a long one.Three days out and three days back.
The weather had slowed them so that it would be full dark by the time they arrived, but Eli couldn't imagine that the captain wouldn't choose to push through, rather than camp in this foul weather. Their slower pace combined with the unfortunate weather meant, however, that Eli couldn't be certain about how far away they actually were from the outpost.
"Another hour at the most," she guessed. If she was wrong, Siggy wouldn't really have any way of knowing. The sun was barely doing its job as it was behind the black clouds of rain. It was impossible to discern the hour with any degree of accuracy, so they might end up arriving in an hour, or it might take longer, but it would be difficult to tell.
Signild
"Ugh," Signild allowed herself to groan. "Thank the gods."That was the last of the lionesses' conversation until they arrived at the outpost some indeterminate period of time later. As Eli had privately guessed,
Signild could not tell how long they had actually been walking. Five minutes in that weather felt like an eternity, so an hour didn't really feel like that much more of an eternity. (In fact, it had been closer to two hours, but who was counting?)
Upon arrival, Signild had forced herself to do her share of the work in checking the site for evidence that someone else had been there since the last time a Stormborn band had come through, even though she was cold and tired and completely out of sorts. She wanted to prove her worth. Still, she was grateful when the captain pronounced the outpost safe and acceptable and declared that they would be weathering the storm there. It took her no time at all to fall asleep,and she was even grateful for the press of unfamiliar bodies on either side of her, keeping her warmer than she would have been curled up alone.