Chapter 51: Insurmountable
The next few months were among the most satisfying days that Simon had ever known. He’d spend a few days on the road helping to defend the Barony from some monster or another. Then he’d come home to spend weeks with his wife as they slowly turned their strange situation into a life together.
She was never happy to see him leave, but she was always overjoyed to see him come home, and that was enough for him. Little by little, they made a thousand minor touches that slowly turned their life from bearable to amazing. Simon learned to redo the plaster walls, and though he never quite mastered the brickwork, the man he hired did a good enough job that Freya never complained about smoke while she was cooking again.
It seemed like every time he left Crowvar, he came back with some souvenir. When they rousted a nest of bandits just before the first snow, Simon chose to take a nice set of stolen silverware as his prize from that tidy little horde. After that was gnoll raiders, where he found a lovely necklace for Freya, which she swooned over. In the spring, he was called upon to defeat an actual goblin infestation and then to put down a tax rebellion. In the former case, he finally found a lovely spinning wheel in a house where the occupants had been murdered. In the latter, he actually chose to give a few gold coins from his stash away to resolve the situation peacefully when he decided that the Baron was in the wrong.
He didn’t want to spend those coins, of course. He knew they’d never get that sort of windfall again. However, his only other option was to crush the skull of the headman and hang every poor bastard without a coin to their name or join them and overthrow the Baron. Simon was fairly sure he could do the latter, but the chaos that would have been introduced into his life would have been awful. He needed peace to enjoy this time with Freya more than he needed a couple of gold coins anyway.
He felt like both of them were improving and growing closer all the time, which made their time apart that much more unbearable. While she learned to spin yarn and knit it into a blanket to replace the threadbare one that had barely got them through winter, he focused on other things that were almost as important.
Simon spent the winter getting halfway decent with his long bow and forcing the men he fought beside so often to train to work together a little better. Quite frankly, he thought their performance was a little embarrassing because everyone used a different weapon and style. Still, it took forever to improve that situation. He doubted they’d have even made the effort if they didn’t secretly call him the miracle worker behind his back.
That was a rumor he’d tried to quash, but it had only grown since that first fight. Even the Baron had pulled him aside to ask if it was true that he had magical healing powers. Simon had learned the hard way that the more he denied it, the more they believed. Now he just ignored it and tried not to add more fuel to the fire. Still - it was hard to do that when you watched someone bleeding out on the battlefield and knew you could save them with a few whispered words.
These days he tried to heal just the internal part of the wound. That way, he left it bleeding but no longer life-threatening to allay suspicion. However, even with that little trick, people still noticed that of all the Baron’s patrols, his routinely came back with the fewest casualties. So, they tried things his way and practiced things like shield walls and short bows, and by spring, he had a halfway capable fighting force.
By spring, everything felt like it was starting to fall into a routine for the first time since he’d entered the pit. That was when Freya told him that she was pregnant.