Some Fall By Virtue

Chapter Three: tryin' to learn the lesson in

"She was Fainbarad's and Gilithien's daughter," Clovis said, gesturing for her to keep the volume of her voice down as she began haggling with Dain in the meantime. "There's a reason Fainbarad ain't fond of wolves. Dare I say he's the one who scared them off this place..."

Sakura frowned.

"She'd have been around your age now, I'd reckon," Clovis continued, ignorant of the odd range of feelings it brought up to the surface. But maybe it explained why the couple had been so quick to open their doors to her. Her shoulders hunched, and she hurried to collect the herbs.

"I see," Sakura said, stomach feeling oddly heavy as she said her farewells to the couple, walking down the hill – closer to the heart of the village. She still had to get the vegetables for that night's dinner, but she wasn't looking forward to helping Gilithien with the cooking as much as she had over the last few days. But Sakura soon recognised what she was feeling. How could she not? She had become far too well acquainted with the green-eyed monster there, and the thoughts kept swirling around in her brain after what she had learnt from both Clovis' and Dain's big mouths. Try as she might, she couldn't just forget what she had learnt, and it brought a question to the forefront of her mind.

Was she just a replacement?

::

The longer she stayed there, the more foreboding the feeling grew – the sense that something sooner or later would go terribly wrong, and Sakura found herself growing oddly more anxious. She was a shinobi, and she knew it was a good idea to trust those sorts of instincts. There was only one problem, and that was that she had no idea what this threat would be. Wolves wouldn't have been a big deal to her, though they might have been able to injure the rest of the people in their village, what with how vicious they were rumoured to be. Part of her wondered if she was simply being paranoid, because nothing nice ever happened to her.

"—the furthest place from your old home you've been to, Lothien?" Fainbarad asked over dinner that night, and Sakura blinked as she pulled herself out of the well of thoughts she had dived into only moments before. They were consuming more and more of her attention, and she knew she would have to try and figure out the source. The sooner the better.

"Uh... here, I think?" Sakura said, scrounging around in her brain for names which would mean little to the men of Eriador. The descendants of the Numenor place which Fainbarad had occasionally mentioned over the months she had stayed there. She assumed it had been a fallen city of men, and she wondered when exactly it had fallen. Probably while she had been 'dead' to that world, however temporary that state seemed to be for her. She didn't want to pry too much, not when he had assumed her to be a descendant of them as well. Sakura had already decided to do nothing to subvert that assumption, and she thought that throwing questions around might do just that. "I mean, I've travelled before, through Aglon and Himring before... but I've never ventured into Eriador before now, so this is probably the furthest east I've ever been." She shrugged then, chewing on yet another mouthful of her dinner.

Dark brown eyes bore into her own so intently then, an emotion Sakura couldn't quite get a read of glinting in their depths. "It must have been quite a journey," he murmured, and Sakura inclined her head in acknowledgement.

He had been asking questions occasionally, about her past, and slowly – oh so slowly – she was answering as many as she dared. Of course, she wasn't about to spill all of her secrets, but she had been living with them for a time. She supposed she could give them some information. After all, she hadn't sprung from nowhere, and a good cover story involved her having a history there.