Now, it was too late to tell this slain foot soldier how miserably she
felt. Perhaps he, like Habrunt, could have redeemed her vow. Perhaps
not. He undoubtedly could not read, and seeing she was sworn never to
speak, their love would have been something to marvel at, even to
themselves, all their days together.
How awful it now seemed, that now, he would never know that she should
come so soon to mourn and lament him, with his body not yet even cold!
That she should so soon bury him with her own fingers, and here remain
weeping uncontrollably, her face buried in her hands, kneeling over his
grave like the beloved wife of many years that she should have been.
Nay, more than a wife, a spiritual sister also.
Reflecting upon such an unfamiliar notion of spiritual kinship,
Si'Wren, an orphan from her earliest recollection, bent down low again
suddenly, before she could collapse from grief, and wept even more
bitterly at her fate.
This man, whom she had never been privileged to meet face-to-face in
life, lay now at the center of all her attentions, hopelessly beyond
her reach. How she longed that she might but one single time, have
revealed to him what his unintentional self-sacrifice meant to her. And
now, with what grief she must regard his brave act and cruel fate, all
merely for imitating her beliefs!
Who had he been? Would that she had been his wife! Seeing all would
have known that she could not speak, and that he could neither read nor
write, yet would they have remained but strangers to the world only,
but never in each others' eyes.
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