Chapter Text
The quiet times between emergencies were necessary, she knew, vital to rest, to heal broken bones and to get back into practice after those bones had healed, but oh, the time it gave her to do little but sit and reflect, that was hard. Sometimes more than others.
She sat on a well-padded bench in her dimly lit basement, staring at the large shrine and reflecting. The sound of water was soothing but her heart still ached, wishing she could talk to her lost love instead of having nothing to remind her of him but this sculpture, made before she ever truly knew him, and thought about what a long strange adventure she’d been on.
Had she known what would be asked of her when she left home, would she have done the same things? Her skills when she left the Steppe were primarily fighting and secondarily herding goats, but it felt like she’d been in the magnificent Twelveswood for barely a week before she was getting tasked to go negotiate things with people! Sometimes people who were hostile to the other people she was dealing with! And often she couldn’t simply challenge one party to a best out of three fighting match, because the people she was venturing forth on behalf of wanted peaceful solutions through peaceful means.
Visit this other city-state, carry our missive, smile and nod and be on your best behavior. Talk to these people, do them a favor, win them to our side. Show them we mean no harm, you're a sturdy and capable and heavily armed adventurer, you can do that. She was pretty good at winning physical fights, but she hadn’t had to learn other kinds of political maneuvers. That was for other members of her tribe to do. Other members who were more adept at those things, like she was adept at using a spear and a bow and a neat little foot sweep. (The foot sweep did not work on goats, alas, they were far too nimble.) Fortunately, she also liked helping people, and it turned out that in most places on the star, you could win most people over by solving various sorts of less violent problems for them, like ferrying wine for miles, or finding something lost, or talking someone into feeling better about their situation. Regardless of how easy those turned out to be, she was secretly glad for the problems that did, in fact, involve killing some dangerous wild animal, since that was where she truly excelled (Thancred had never let her live down her panicked “Uh, kupo?” that one time in Rak’tika). Well; she was glad for most of them. Some of them had been quite terrifying, and some of them had been against foes she ardently didn’t want to fight, let alone to the death.
The last such major problem had required both some of the gentler kinds of working with others as well as rather a lot of incredible violence, and she was still nursing both broken ribs and shattered heart. She wished she could talk to Themis about all the negotiating and go-betweening she’d had to do over the years. She wished she could talk to him about anything, really, but the go-betweening shit was his whole deal, or part of it anyway, and he would have had some interesting stories that no one from her time could. Perhaps some pointers, too. It was something they sort of had in common, though she got the impression he’d been selected for the seat of Elidibus because he was already good at it, whereas she’d simply been thrown into such duties on account of being a competent adventurer who people for some reason trusted to handle non-violent situations as well.
As she gazed at the sculpture and its muted purple glow, she realized that while she may have gotten reasonably adept at the softer kind of politics, the next time she heard the word "emissary" she would probably break something.