Dagnell’s eyes fluttered open to a brilliant blue sky and blazing sun that made her eyes water. She groaned. Her head was pounding, especially in the back where the blow had landed. Reaching to test the spot gingerly, she found the hair matted, sticky. Her hand came away bloody, but it was thick blood, and well congealed. Good, she thought. I’m not still bleeding. Every part of her hurt, though; she’d hit the ground hard when she fell, she was scraped and bruised in a dozen places, and she was going to have a miserable headache for some time. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, slowly, wincing. Ugh.
The raid hadn’t been a complete surprise; they’d heard it coming. But there were only two of them, and the raiders had been many more than two. J’hall had put up the fight of his life; several of the raiders would be wearing the marks of his claws for the rest of theirs, but in the end he’d come up short. She’d also done her best, taking down several of the bandits at the outset. Maybe the long days of riding in J’hall’s cart had stiffened her muscles, though, slowed her reflexes a bit, she wasn’t sure; but one of them had managed to get behind and flatten her. It was fortunate that he’d assumed she was dead and not double-checked to make sure the job was done. She stretched her neck, wincing again, and then looked down at herself and growled.
“Oblivion take the lot of you.”
Dagnell was sitting in the middle of the worn cobblestone road in her light tunic and not a shred of clothing else aside from her basic foot wrappings. They, along with her feet, had been in a pair of supple, well fitting boots. Her leathers were gone – the ones she had worn for so long that she knew the name of every scratch and mark on them. She sighed. It was just leather armor but it – and the coin purse and one or two healing potions tucked into it – was all she’d had in the world.
Those, and the pair of deadly sharp Redguard scimitars that had served her well for so many years. She’d acquired them on the island of Stros M’Kai as a girl, when a different bandit raid had taken her parents and all of their modest wealth. The blades had gone flying when one of the raiders had ineptly stepped into a brother’s path, and she had retrieved them once she’d crawled out from her hiding place. She regretted their loss even more than the loss of her coin purse. Coin was easy to come by if you knew how.
It stank. The air carried the unpleasant aroma of bird eggs laid too long past and then broken open. She was used to the fresh, salty tang of the sea, not the greenish-yellow, bubbling, steaming pools among which the roadway snaked. The ground was hard-packed and yellow, with only the barest of ground cover here and there.
It was not a pleasant place to awaken with nothing to your name.
For a moment she wondered what had possessed her to think herself tired of life on the docks of Stros M’Kai. “Well you wanted to see the rest of Tamriel,” she muttered. “And so you are.”
There was deep, constant rumble here, as though the earth itself was complaining. Above that sound, though, were regular, heavy thuds that she could feel as well as hear. The source of these was anything but difficult to find. A giant – a, grubby, bearded behemoth carrying an enormous club — lumbered with his two mammoths about a huge bonfire, just a wee bit shy of entirely too close for comfort. Giants were supposed to be peaceful as long as you left their mammoths alone, but she wasn’t keen on testing that theory. It was time to get moving.
The Khajiit trader’s cart in which she’d been riding lay tipped on its side, the barrels and crates of goods it had carried strewn onto the ground. Opened and looted, it would seem, aside from some unfortunate cabbages that had rolled onto the dirt and were shrinking away from the blazing sun. The air wasn’t hot here, no, not anywhere in Skyrim that she had been, but that sun could be like the inside of a baker’s oven when it wasn’t raining. Or snowing. An involuntary shudder rippled from her core as she imagined what it would be like in a Skyrim snow with what she was currently wearing or, rather, not wearing.
Dagnell stood up stiffly and surveyed the damage.
“Damn.”
J’hall’s head was a ruin, his arms spread awkwardly out to either side in a pool of his own blood, his beautiful tail in tatters. They’d met in Dragonstar, near the northern border of Hammerfell and Skyrim. He was heading through the province of Skryim, east to Morrowind and then southwest again to Cyrodiil. “This one has been riding alone,” he had told her, “but would be happy to travel with the pretty one with sharp swords,” as some insurance against the civil war that had raiders all over the roads. She’d pulled her weight; she was good with a bow and had some small talent for sweeping a stray coin from the table here and there. He’d told her tales of his journeys, in that odd but comfortable Khajiit cadence, and he’d listened to her complain about Skyrim’s weather in good humor.
Dag had grown up hearing that dark colors helped warm a person. She had dark Redguard skin and dark brown shoulder-length hair, but it wasn’t helping her much here and she hated being cold. “This one also prefers warm sands,” he had told her with a Khajiit’s fang-laced smile. “You should come to Stros M’Kai with me,” she’d replied. “The sands are red – and hot.” Cyrodill was not sandy, he told her, but the southern parts of it were much warmer than Skyrim. It had seemed as good a place to go as any.
She was sad that he was gone, and regretted that there was nothing with which she could give him a decent burial. Even if she managed to wrestle a board from the wreckage of the cart, the ground was too hard-packed to dig. There was nearly nothing left of any sort, tool or otherwise; the horse was long gone, the wagon’s wheels broken.
What was left was on his corpse. He’d been wearing some leather armor and hide boots; the armor was stiff with blood and not remotely a good fit for her, but it would serve until something better came to hand. Untwining her foot wraps and stuffing them into the toes of his boots would help them at least stay on her feet, though blisters were going to be inevitable; still, it would be better than shredding her soles on the bare ground. At least she wouldn’t be facing a trek to nowhere in particular in just her tunic.
Under J’hall was a steel warhammer, of good steel at that. Dagnell sighed. She hated using two-handed weapons. She could swing one well enough, but at her size she could only swing it a few times before fatigue set in and accuracy vanished. It was something, though, and she would gratefully take it. In the bottom of one of the barrels she found several apples that were neither rotten nor too overly dried. They would do, as well.
“Thank you, my friend,” she murmured to the dead Khajiit. “I hope that your road has led you to those warm sands.”
Which way to go? J’hall had spoken of the cities here in the eastern part of Skyrim, though she had no idea how far away she was from any one of them. Whichever she came to first would have to be good enough, and would certainly be better than where she was. Shouldering the warhammer with a sigh, she started trudging up the road, hoping that her head would stop throbbing soon. It was going to be a long walk to whatever was next, as there was nothing aside from the giant’s bonfire to be seen anywhere.
It wasn’t long before she heard the first howls. Wolves seemed to be simply everywhere in Skyrim, and they were a nuisance as well as a danger. She and J’hall had picked off dozens of the gods-damned things along the roads. Now she was facing a pair of them with an unfamiliar weapon and ill-fitting clothing, and was not happy about it. The first wolf went down easily with a hammer blow to the head, but the second kept circling her, snarling, nipping at her legs, drawing blood, forcing her to cry out. She hadn’t recovered from the raider attack; she had no spare strength with which to swing the hammer again more than once, a wide swing that missed the wolf’s head but struck him in the hindquarters. Her only hope was that her barest-of-minimum training in flame magic might save her hide. She mustered her will, hoping against hope that the fire from her left hand would be enough.
“Die, you miserable son of a horker!” she screamed. The wolf yelped and burned, enough wounded from the hammer blow that it couldn’t get out of the flame’s path, and it dropped.
She was drenched in sweat, panting. It took her longer than a comfortable amount of time to generate the little bit of healing magic she knew, to stop the bleeding in her legs. Good, she sighed, examining the damage. More scars to add to the collection whose premier specimen was the long pale trail down her left cheek. That had been a fool’s errand, for certain. For reasons she still didn’t quite understand all these years later she’d tried to take some small revenge for her parents’ deaths on a solitary bandit. It was fortunate that he’d been enjoying a drink that slowed him down a bit. She’d barely escaped a bad end by virtue of his ale and her own fast legs, but not before the tip of his scimitar had caught her cheek. Now, whenever she was inclined to hasty action, she just had to look at her own reflection.
She stared at the dead wolves and again regretted the loss of her blades. Pelts were always good for something, tanning for leather or selling if nothing else. She needed to take these, and a warhammer wasn’t going to do the job. A few minutes of searching gave her a rock sharp enough, once she worked it a bit against another, to make a basic cut — not even as sharp as a flint knife by any stretch, but it would have to do. It was a rude skinning at best and the edges of the pelts were ragged by the time she got done, but a bit of decent leather might possibly be had of them in the end. She left the meat. These things sometimes carried the rockjoint disease and she had no way to counter it if she got sick.
As she resumed her trudge along the cobbles, she thought to collect some of the unfamiliar, low-growing berries and bright yellow flowers alongside the road. Alchemists were always looking for fresh ingredients. If she was fortunate, she might sell them for enough coin to buy a flagon of warm mead or a bit of bread. If nothing else, she could learn what they were when she made it to civilization.