Most of his conversations with the herbalist never amounted to much. Usually, they would chat about the weather – the climate in Ginstber seemed to change variably – but her insights were always interesting because she would explain how it affected her plants.

It was Olivier who had recommended him the herbal shop after he told him he had trouble sleeping at night. At the time, Roel must’ve been fifteen or sixteen years old. It was still a few years before the Battle of Wetshard, but he had seen his fair share of battles, and his name was beginning to surface in the stories.

He hadn’t worn his armor when he visited the shop, donning a cheap tunic instead, and if the herbalist had recognized him, she didn’t say anything. He explained his troubles and she prescribed him a flower extract that he took before bed. He wasn’t sure if it really helped, but he went back to the shop whenever his supply was running low, and eventually, like flower petals in the spring, he and the herbalist opened up to each other.

She was a year older than him. Thin and a bit taller than average, she had flaxen hair with her bangs cut straight across her forehead, and her almond-shaped eyes darted around constantly. There was a restrained nervousness about her, and that was reflected in the flat, clipped way she spoke. However, he discovered that when he asked her questions about her plants, there would be a lilt to her voice and she would speak slowly, as if carefully choosing each word, and a soft smile would blossom on her face.

Of the many conversations they had about the weather, there were a few that were more serious and ambiguous. One such conversation must’ve happened after his assignment in Magerra. His nightmares had intensified once he learned what he had done, and desperate to escape from himself he had found himself at her shop. He had been a mess then, insisting that there must be something else that she could give him, but she firmly denied him.

“Anything stronger would permanently damage your health. I won’t do that to you,” she had said, and there was something plaintive about the way she spoke as if she had seen the outcome too many times. “I don’t want to say anything that would make you uncomfortable, but…is something eating away at you?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s nothing.”

She clearly didn’t believe him, but she just nodded and let it drop. “You should stay inside tonight. There’s going to be rain.”

“Oh, yes. What about your plants? Your, uh…” He tried to remember the name of the plants she was growing.

“My sage? I brought them inside. They’ll be alright.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so rude earlier. It’s just…nights have been a little rough.”

“You weren’t rude. I don’t mind if you don’t want to talk about it, but I know how it is.” Her expression clouded over, and her eyes trailed around the small herbal shop. “Sometimes, we have rough days, and sometimes those days become weeks and those weeks become months.”

He should’ve asked what inspired those words – in the years that would follow, he’d torture himself for not asking her more questions about herself – but he was too absorbed in his own grief. There’s a narcissism to grief that makes it difficult to consider that other people were grieving or had ever grieved before.

Instead, he kept his eyes down and said, “Sometimes, I feel like I’m walking up a hill with an ever-increasing load on my back. And people keep stopping me to pile on more bags and boxes, and they don’t hear me when I tell them not to because I’m buried so deep underneath it all.”

He had never thought or said anything like that before, but the moment he spoke it he knew it to be true. He had taken so many lives, both innocent and guilty, under King Maxime’s orders, but his accolades only continued to grow. It was perverse to gain so much from loss, and what happened in Magerra felt, in a way, like a long-deserved punishment.

He was too ashamed to look up at the herbalist. She hadn’t said anything, and desperate to fill the silence, he spoke again. “And I wonder a lot when exactly I started up this hill. When did I make the wrong decision?”

“Is that how you see it?” she said. “That there’s some kind of…root cause for why we are where we are?”

“It feels that way sometimes.”

“But there are good things, too, right? Things that only happened because you walked up the hill? We met, didn’t we? Are we on the same hill,” she smiled kindly, “and I’m picking herbs as you walk past me?”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

“I don’t know if I agree with you. I think there are a lot of smaller reasons, teeny-tiny choices, that we make to get to where we are.”

“Maybe,” he said, unconvinced. Again, there was the narcissism of his grief – he wanted to continue wallowing, refusing to capitulate to optimism.

“I like to believe,” she started, but then became lost in thought. He finally looked up at her. Despite all the time she spent in the sun, her skin was pale, and there were always cuts and bruises along her arms and legs that she said she got from running through the underbrush. She was listlessly rubbing a thin, white cut on her forearm.

“I like to believe,” she continued, “that the Lord tried His best. There’s too much suffering in the world, so there’s only so much He could do. And every day, we make our small, little decisions, and we do what we can to ease the rest of the suffering that He couldn’t protect us from.”

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. It felt like anything he said would only diminish the glow of what she had just confided in him. He admired the optimism of her words and he admired her for being brave enough to say them. In his attempts to appear more heroic, he had abandoned optimism; heroes were supposed to be confident. When asked if he could kill a rampaging dragon, “I hope so” was not the right answer. “I will” was what the townspeople wanted to hear.

But as much as he admired her words and as much as he tried to repeat them to himself and others, he could never say he was entirely convinced. Because, after thinking about it for so long, he had identified the root cause of why he had become the person he was. There was one incident that had brought him to the foot of the hill.