Despite their lack of proper rest, they started off again right at the very first crack of light and made a decent amount of relatively swift progress on the dryer grassy ground before the skies fully unloaded upon them. The rain soon got so hard that they could barely see ten yards in the woods ahead of them, so they risked a more dangerous but open path across several meadows to speed their course.
Driven slightly south, to avoid a large hill that Gwenda feared had an
Eorfleode
watchpost on it that guarded one of their army routes south, they found a relatively swiftly moving stream that followed their desired route nearly due east. But where did it go? At length Gwenda thought that it must merge into the large Elm River, which ought not to be too far ahead. Once at the river, they could turn north upstream to easily find the ruined town of Silana, and to soon be hopefully reunited with his friends.
Following the stream appeared to be quite a simple plan until the waters began to rush considerably faster, now swollen by the heavy autumn rainstorm as warm humid air from the Great Western Sea now meet colder air now coming south. They tried to follow what little of the stream bank they could that was level and smooth, but they were nearly washed into the rushing currents at least twice, until Rowan, dizzy with fatigue and his festering leg that could no longer bear his weight, fell right into the current entirely. With but a moments hesitation, Gwenda, who was just in front of him on the path, leaped in as well to join him, and they grasped hands tightly so that they would not be separated by the increasingly faster flowing, and deeper stream.
They worried about possible rocky rapids ahead, but for here at least the water was deep enough that they were being carried quite rapidly and smoothly away. Able to keep their heads mostly above water, the two decided that at least for the moment, they were making a much more rapid progress this way, albeit in a rather more dangerous manner.
*********
Just when the flowing stream slowed enough for the couple to consider swimming over towards the shore, they passed through a turn in the stream and now found themselves suddenly in the much deeper and even faster flowing water of what must undoubtedly be the Elm River. The current bore them quickly, every minute taking them a bit closer to their destination, but the waters were choppier and rougher here, and it was harder to stay held fast together against the whims of the river current. Slowly, they began to work themselves to the eastern shores of the river and after about an hour they began a very precarious climb up the muddy and very slippery riverbank. With every weary step, they nearly lost their footing to slide back down to the mercies of the raging river once more, but finally they climbed up some reasonable stable flat grassland along the shore. Exhausted and unable to move another step, they hid themselves in the tall river grass to weakly laugh at their lucky escape and to rest just a bit more for the final walk north to the relative safety of the sacked town.
"I feel like a half-drowned river rat!" She laughed
"And I feel like I've been greeted by angels sent to carry me across the border to the Shadowlands!" A weak but not unfriendly strange voice said from the hidden depths of the tall grass, not twenty yards away from them. "You
must
be angels sent to come gather me, or else my fading eyes hallucinate and see a naked couple fresh from a river-frolic, in the worst possible weather."
Rowan and Gwenda grasped hands for a moment and drew their weapons in protection. Rowan's sword did not flame with anger or peril, and his companion drew her long stabbing dagger and the shorter knife that had wounded Rowan's leg in each of her hands. Together they searched through the grass until they found the near bloodless and wraith-pale form of the former Sergeant Worrel, still lying in a dried pool of blood where he had fallen, when his former traitor in crime had dumped him after running him through nearly a week ago.
Although Rowan and Gwenda knew nothing of the former bodyguard's treachery, the direly wounded Sergeant made no effort to conceal his crimes. Apparently he had done a good bit of repenting while he lay helpless and slowly dying by inches from his mortal wounds.
"Aye, my old commander led me false in wickedness and then he betrayed me too, but those lads were not the first throats that I had slit in the dark for the sake of some sweet silver! It will go hard on me for my crimes in the Shadowlands... of that I have no doubt or fear! I'd ask you for but a sip or two of wine to sweeten my mouth for my passage but it seems that you two have but barely escaped with only your very skins! It appears young Rowan, that you are indeed now quite a hero of note and we all indeed much misjudged you. So then, the rescue party was successful then?"
"If the loss of one life weights well against the rescue of more than a dozen, then I would say 'yes', and the rest of the raiders should have returned back to the ruins of the town quite safely some time ago. In my rescue of this young lady, I became quite separated and we had to take a different and rather difficult path towards home."
"Difficult indeed, I can see and even smell your wounds. Already they are turning ill from hardship and ill-treatment, and the wound-fever is full upon you both! If you can lift my back and head up against that nearby tree, I believe I have yet strength enough to clean out and stitch those wounds. As a trained soldier and a veteran of several campaigns, I always keep my medicine kit on my belt, to have needle and gut at hand for immediate and ready use. Indeed, this wasn't the first time I've had to stitch up my stomach to keep my guts from falling out! I've already given them quite a few stitches as well, but before I was done I'd lost too much blood and strength to even crawl. A deep belly wound is always tricky. Three out of four men with that wound die, even if a good camp surgeon or medicus is at hand, and over the years I've learned near every trick that they know! Wounded out here, away from help for many days, my own chances will be much slimmer, but I would like some river water to wet my mouth full before you leave me to my eventual but very certain fate."
They got the Sergeant his water, but from a clean pool of rainwater rather than the muddy torrent that was the river below. Then propped up carefully against the tree, the crusty old veteran put gut thread to his needle, and together the three of them carefully attended to the young couple's wounds with the last good clean bits of his clean linen wound patches from his aid-kit.
"Already corruption infects both of you deeply and if you're not safely in the hands of a very good healer by tomorrow, the blood poisoning will likely take the pair of you! Wave me goodbye and get quickly then on your way! The town is little over two hours ride to the north along the river and if you walk hard and fast you can be there by dark tonight. You can come back for my bones later... I'll still be right here!"
Instead, unwilling to leave the treasonous but repentant soldier, Rowan cut a pair of long poles from two young sapling trees and using the Sergeant's heavy leather coat and trousers, they formed a rough stretcher that would support his weight even with some rough handling. Each of the young couple then took a hold of a front pole and together they began to drag the direly wounded man along behind them, with his boots and the bottom pole ends scraping the mud and grass as they doggedly pushed onwards, to the north and to safety.
**********
They had to stop to rest all too often to catch their breath and rest their arms, as Rowan found that his great strength had nearly entirely now failed him. With Gwenda's wounded and dangerously inflamed shoulder, she could only use a single arm to assist Rowan, and more and more he had to assume the full weight of both stretcher poles on their crude travois. Somehow they stumbled along. With his eyes now closed from the tears of pain that even chewed tree bark wouldn't dull, and Gwenda gently guiding his path, he willed his dreadfully infected leg to keep moving, if even for a few inches at a time, to ignore the awful pain to keep pulling the wounded Sergeant yet another hundred or so feet ahead at a time before he would have to stop for yet another and increasingly longer rest break, when he became overcome by his weariness and excruciating pain.
Gwenda helped the best she could to pull even a bit of their burden, and she clung to him to help support her lover's increasingly weak and near useless leg as they shuffled along well after dark. The night was quite black, the darkest night that he could ever remember yet in his travels, but he trusted Gwenda to lead him yet onward along the riverbank, and to avoid their falling down over the slight embankment back into the river. Theirs was a world of uncounted moments of near insufferable pain and abject misery, but they knew that if they stopped to take any sort of proper rest that night that the Sergeant might die before reached help. They also were now both too feverish from their wounds, and without Gwenda by his side, Rowan feared that he would have given up and collapsed quite a long time earlier, but somehow she found the means to encourage him to take one more another step, and then yet another forward.
*********
How Rowan dragged himself and his exhausted companions through the burned wooden gate into the ruined town and into the astonished and welcoming hands of his friends and the town's survivors, he never quite knew. For the last hour of that fateful death-march in the early hours of the morning, he felt that they had walked with but one foot left in the real world while their other foot had treading across the border into the Shadowlands.
Oddly, it was the Lady Ayleth who ran first into Rowan's arms, outracing his frantically worried pal Boyle to lend him an arm as the wounded couple staggered their final steps into the town, and then utterly collapsed, surrendering themselves to the internal fires of their wound-fevers. Rowan wanely smiled, and clutched Gwenda's feverish hand and squeezed it with the very last of his strength as he closed his eyes, seeing with blurred and tearful eyes, Oddtus, the Lore-Master now kneeling by his side.
