It had been for more than a month that Cerrynt wandered the hilltops of Kymry without direction, other than to avoid being seen by those of her own clan, the Dwrgi-lûth, or those of the Eryr-lûth. Actually she'd avoided pretty much everyone, for the Kymru themselves had soured on her, and she no longer trusted anyone. At night looking at clouds passing the moon she would think back to how, only a month earlier, she'd burned with such a fire to go put Trindân in his place, and now, that was like a smoldering twig, which she barely kept alight, and only because she felt like somehow it would be wrong to let it go out entirely, though she couldn’t say why. "Save my clan," of course. But how could the brenin not yet see that his new champion was a fool, and finally step up to the duties of being a chieftain, to lead? Ultimately that would be better than her original plan of restoring things to how they were when her father was champion. Better for the brenin to lead, than to patch over his lack of leadership by ensuring the champion was wise. Not that she was wise. She would just not be foolish in the same ways as Trindân. The twig sputtered, and threatened to go out, and she blew on it just enough to keep it from dying, but no more, and without knowing why she did.
No, her problem wasn't losing that purpose, it was failing to find a new one. No purpose, no home, no family, no path. Also, no food; late winter wasn't a good time to be wandering, far from rivers, with nothing but an axe (her bow has been lost along the way). There's not much you can hunt with a war-axe, not much you can fish without a river, not much to forage when the ground is grey and dusty and the air tastes of the snow on the mountains in the northeast. It never occurred to her to go back to the Otter Clan and humble herself before Trindân again and try to struggle on in her old life, however hungry she got, nor to seek out the mocking Witch of the Gravenwood in hopes of finding some better wisdom, nor of hoping the family of the brenin of Tros Hynt would forget her impudence and welcome her again. She didn't consider and reject these ideas as untenable. They simply never occurred to her.
She just wandered, and grew thinner and weaker, and had fewer and fewer thoughts, as hunger gnawed more and more at her until she moved past it into that state of barely-being, barely-thinking that precedes the hollow end. One day she thought she had wasted away so much that she had become one of the spirits. Or that she had always been one, and that's why the spirits did not guide her. Perhaps she was neglecting someone else's entreaties as they had neglected hers. Perhaps she was the one who had neglected her own calls for help. When hunger had gotten so far that her thoughts were like the mist off the river in morning, fleeting, insubstantial, and unclear, all these things seemed possible. Even compelling.
She might have indeed wasted away into a spirit had it not been for a chance encounter. As empty of thought as her stomach was of food, she'd spotted, from her hilltop perch, a strange figure: a short, slight woman, smaller even than herself, clad in a helmet and leading a train of forgoil horses, clearly trying to avoid notice. And good at it, too. Most of the Kymru she passed, even the scouts and guards, never saw her, despite the burden of her leading horses. When they did spy her, to a casual glance she seemed like some unknown Kymru who happened to wear a helmet (unusual, but not unheard of), who perhaps had stolen horses and was leading them back to her clan. But from Cerrynt's viewpoint, high atop the hills where few eyes ever strayed, she could watch for hours, for days even, and see how cunningly the small woman eluded the Kymru and the orcs alike. And in the few cases where stealth did not avail, how easily the woman's knives left orcs in a steaming pool of their own blighted blood.
She was able to pace the woman, despite the numb emptiness of hunger, by taking advantage of the little-seen and less-travelled paths of the hilltops; but in the emptiness of mind that came with her hunger, she could not have said why she bothered. After a few days of this, in the tight, winding canyon paths of Carreglyn, her high viewpoint revealed something: on the one side, the woman quietly nearing a turn in the path, and on the other, around that turn, three Kymru hunters moving quietly, stalking some of the White Hand orcs that had recently come to those lands. Neither would hear or see the other until they were too close to avoid a conflict. Cerrynt wasn't sure who would win, but she was certain that someone would lose, and she wished no such fate on either party. And whoever won would be injured for their trouble, which she also did not wish.
If she were not so dull-witted from starvation, she might have thought about what to do, if anything, but in her malnourished somnolence, she simply dropped from the hillside onto the path in front of the woman. She at least had enough wit to hold her hands up to say she was no threat. The woman spoke little of the Kymru tongue, and Cerrynt spoke little of the duvodiad language, but somehow -- she couldn't have told you how a day later, so numb were her thoughts -- she managed to convince the woman she meant her no harm, and persuaded her to take another path to avoid the hunters. And more, to guide her on from there, past the clans and their settlements, past the roving packs of wolves and wargs, past the other dangers of Kymry, all the way to the quiet lands between her own clan's lands and those of the Algraig.
There, they stopped to rest and eat. Cerrynt felt sullied, shamed, that she had so little to offer at that meal, just a few scraps of smoked fish and a few berries she'd been saving in case things got even worse; but the woman, who called herself Adri, was gracious about it, and they both shared what they had and ate what they needed.
The next morning Cerrynt remembered only dimly how she'd come to this point. A good meal, the first in weeks, had restored enough of her wits (though not yet her strength) for her to start asking herself questions she hadn't been present enough to consider before. She recalled the woman speaking of her destination, far north in the empty lands beyond those of the Algraig, where she had not known anyone lived. She'd said these lands were welcoming and prosperous, and somehow -- this seemed too strange to believe even as the hazy memories floated out of the mists in her own mind -- she had agreed to bring Cerrynt there, and let her use one of the horses she'd rescued from a destroyed forgoil village. It would be a journey of almost a month, and just as the first hints of spring had been coming their path would take them into colder, not warmer, nights. Exactly why Cerrynt would go into this faraway and cold land, leaving Kymry itself behind, she couldn't state clearly. That had apparently been her own idea, or had it? She couldn’t really remember, as the struggle to not overfill her cramped stomach had taken up most of her limited wits at that time.
She had no other path, though. And this one promised at least to have food (so Adri reassured her). As they rode, they sometimes taught each other their languages, but most of their journey was spent in silence (the stranger clearly carried deep and sorrowful hurts of her own which Cerrynt was cautious to not probe at). In that quiet, the Kymric exile wondered to herself at her own reasons. That she had nowhere else to go hardly seemed enough reason to go so far. Did she still nurse some hope that in the strange, empty lands of the north, she might learn how to defeat Trindân at last? Or that she might find some other purpose? Could the spirits have arranged her meeting this woman for some fate she had yet to glimpse? She set these ideas in front of herself, toyed with them, but no spark came from them. She could not say 'no' to them, but there was definitely not a 'yes' either. There was still no path before her, but at least now she knew which way it led.
