Chapter 637: Sir Ollie’s Surname (Part Two)
"I never trusted outsiders much," Old Nan said as everyone in the great hall turned to listen to her story. "I thought that Lady Nyrielle abandoned those of us who lived in the outlying villages. I never once thought of ’returning’ to the Vale of Mists, even when the Black Merchant visited with his offers of safety and security behind the Vale’s curtain walls."
In hindsight, she’d been wrong to hold out for as long as she had. If she’d accepted Marcel’s offer more than a decade ago, she might not have lost her son, Lako, to Owain Lothian’s savagery, and that was a regret that she would carry to her grave.
"I never hated the humans either," Old Nan continued. "I didn’t have any great sense of fear of them or animosity toward them. So long as we kept to the wilderness in the hills, they left us alone, and we left them alone. I thought that it would continue that way until long after my old bones were dust. I was wrong," she admitted with a tail that drooped so low in shame that it brushed against the boughs of cedar on the floor.
"Ollie wasn’t wrong," she continued in a voice that sounded small and frail among the many strong warriors filling the great hall. "If humans were my enemy, then he should have been my enemy, but he came to my village with a warning. My old ears were stuffed full of wood shavings, and I couldn’t hear the warning from Marcel... but I heard it from him."
The entire hall sat quietly, leaning forward in their seats as they listened to Old Nan telling her story. They heard the bitterness and pain in her voice as she spoke of losing her son, Lako, and of the deep desire that built within her chest to die and join her fallen family members.
She held nothing back and made no attempt to excuse her weakness when a deep sorrow overtook her and even chewing food felt like more effort than she was capable of, but once again, Ollie refused to give up on her, bringing her rich broth and thin porridge to sustain her while her family tried to pick up the broken pieces of their hearts to make a new life.
Finally, when she reached the end of her tale, it was Milo’s turn to step up and offer his own testimony about Ollie’s deeds. Even though his mother had told much of the story already, he refused to let her to be the only one to bear the weight of speaking up in favor of the man who had given them all a second chance at life.
"Ollie didn’t give up on any of us," Milo said, standing next to his mother and gently wrapping both an arm and his tail around her in quiet support. "For our clan, the things we carve with our own claws contain the splinters of our hearts and the last traces of our departed loved ones. We lost most of those treasures when Owain Lothian burned our village to the ground, but once Ollie understood, he ventured out to our village, digging in the still-smoldering ashes to find any trace of the history and loved ones we’d lost."