“Enjoyed your time with the good master Gurth, did you? Perhaps if you are very good I shall let him get drunk next time. A right little party you two could have down here.”
Lin's worried gray eyes followed the pair of beasts nervously as Gurth and his dog ascended the stairs, but the look she threw in Scyld's direction was scornful.
"Your master is more a fool than I thought, to use such a creature. No tool is Gurth, but a liability to any task that needs doing." An acknowledging spark in her jailer's eyes told her he saw the truth of her assessment. Lin was feeling curiously--detached. Yelling and screaming and fighting did not work; her pathetic appeals to right feeling could not work: not with that brute, nor with this amoral, logical man standing before her cell, appraising her coolly. If she met someone else...then perhaps.
"You surely know that this cannot go well for your master, in the end?" Lin did not look at the man, but instead used the scant light to examine the wounds on her body, wondering if a request for a healer would be granted by her captors. "It can only end three ways: I am ransomed, I am rescued, or I am killed: and from none of those will you escape the consequences. You are a mere lackey in Sorn's eyes; do you think he will have loyalty to you?"
Scyld smirked at her. "You'll be ransomed, or, more likely, killed. And they'll never know it was us."
Lin fought off the sudden chill that threatened her at his words.
You cannot be afraid! If you are afraid you cannot act! "Are you sure? I made a lot of noise today. Are you sure no shepherd or travellor heard, and remembered? And the men Sorn surrounds himself with are not the type that cannot be bought..."
And you not least, she didn't say.
~<*>~
Torim Ploughman felt only relief when he topped the last rise and saw the lights of Edoras twinkling in the dark of a perfect spring night. It had not been an eventful trip, but a long one afoot, and it was good to see his goal ahead.
Only one really untoward thing had happened: crossing over-field to make shorter work of his sojourn in Lord Sorn's land, he'd looked down into the road to see a curious site. Sorn and a group of his roughest men were gathered around a loaded hay-waggon, black looks on nearly every face. The expressions were fairly usual for that crowd, but the hay-waggon confused him. Sorn had never shown any interest in the farmers of his land before: in point of fact the man was notoriously neglectful. Why would he be escorting a hay-waggon? And wasn't he supposedly in Edoras for the Fair? Had Torim known the man was in his own lands, he'd have chosen a different route.
Suddenly his mind registered muffled thumps and soprano shouts coming from the waggon and he froze, running over all the blacker rumors he had heard of Sorn. Better he stay out of this one. His own small farm was too close to Sorn's lands for comfort, should it ever come to the Lord's ears he'd spoken of what he'd seen here. He backed slowly down the hill, confident at least that he hadn't been seen by any of the men in the road, and continued on his way.