Imenry furrowed her brow at the idea of a Templar of all things trying to spy on a woman in the bath. She wondered who it could have been, and though she’d heard of some sort of disturbance upon her arrival to Amaranthine it had been too busy for her to get any details. Personally she could think of only one Templar who would have the gall or the interest in peeping on a woman and she stifled a smile at the thought. Clearly the man had bothered Hilda, though Imenry had to wonder which mage he had been attempting to peep at. She smiled at Hilda’s declaration of a bath in a stream being refreshing and brisk and nodded in agreement. “Perhaps they could. Some mages can master fire and I suppose they could use that to warm the water, at least in an area.” She wondered if anyone had ever tried to do that. None of the mages in her village had ever demonstrated such an ability, though they’d used their powers to start fires which was then used to cook and heat.
“Perhaps that is true. They say that the Ferelden people also come from nomadic tribes. I think this was the common way of living before people began to farm and raise livestock. Some still hold to the old ways though; like the Dalish and the Avvars, or even the Chasind.” She wrapped the meat again, carefully in strips of treated leather and tied them closed with twine. With those set aside to be added to the food stores she began to work on making the sausages, grinding up bits of meat and innards and mixing it with dried herbs, spices and the saved blood. “As a hunter,” she began, her gaze focused down on her work, “it’s important to preserve the land. If you kill everything then you will have nothing left to sustain you in the seasons to come.”
It seemed an obvious concept, but it was also something that she had come to learn many did not understand. People who lived in the more ‘civilized’ places, as they claimed, thought nothing of what they used from the land. One day they would be the undoing of the world, taking and never giving back. It would be long after her death before the land would run out of resources, but the thought that it could happen some day still saddened her.
She listened to Hilda speak of ‘kennings’, a word that Imenry wasn’t familiar with, but from the Skald’s words she could gather the meaning. It seemed to be the story of a life. At the same time, in most cultures only the lives of those of importance were remembered; great heros, kings, religious leaders. What Hilda claimed was that the life of a housewife was just as important where she came from. She mulled this over in her head, and found that she liked the idea. Her own mother had been a housewife, but Imenry would always remember her and think the best of her. “How many lives do you keep with you? How many stories do you know?” She wondered if Hilda would take the stories of the people she had met here back to her home, if one day Imenry would be remembered in a story of Hilda’s own life. It was a sobering thought and she took a moment of silence, the sound of her mortar working the meat and bits with the flavors she had added. Setting it aside she began to stuff the mixture into the natural casing, more specifically the intestines, which she had thoroughly rinsed and seasoned with salt.