I know it's been longer than I first thought since I've written you but things have been a lot more...eventful than I first thought. I traveled to Brindol to sell the mules and left over corn like mama told me too but on the way things happened...
It was a crisp fall day and although a hint of the coming winter could be scented in the air the early afternoon sunlight was bright enough to make one squint. The road was more dust than gravel and constantly teased the young man's nose as he guided the compliant mules and their creaking cart of produce on their way. The lightly forested foothills where silent except for the irregular crunch of the ill made cart's wheels and the ever present hum of insects.
Hump Greenhand had traveled this path a half dozen times before with his father, taking the grain and any surplus livestock to the hamlet of Brindol, but never before on his own. The bright sunshine and understated beauty of the rolling foothills belied the evil that recently been taking it's tol on the area's inhabitants. Folks had gone missing, folks Hump and his family had known all their lives. Hump was here by himself, his father and brothers back at the stead with it's stout oaken doors and rammed earth walls. The other children, even those on the cusp of manhood safe with them.
No one would tell him why the old Wainwright place was a smoking ruin but in his mind's eye he could see his father's skin turn ashen under it's weather worn facade when he put his militia sword in his son's hand and bade him good luck on the journey to town. Lamp oil, salt and new seed was essential if the Greenhands where to make it through the desperate winter and replant their land come spring, so here he was with this stupid rickety cart and stinking mules going to Brindol with nothing covering him but a sword that had been sharpened and resharpened so many times it was barely thicker than the knife he used to cut the hogs.
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