At This Time: Bree

Tom sat back in his Pony chair and looked sidelong at the tall man slumped on the bench beside him.  ”She made her bed,” Tom said quietly.  ”You gave her the choice.  She chose.”

Barry raised his head from his folded arms.  ”It’s so stupid.  This is so stupid.  He’s just going to step out on her again.  Shit, I think she knows it.  Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s him.”  He spoke the last word with loathing, but his voice gentled as he went on.  ”I would have treated her right.  I did treat her right.”

“You did,” Tom said.  He kept his tone light.  ”You could again, after he stomps on her heart again.  If you’d even want her after.”

Barry let out a rough laugh.  ”Maybe she’s to me what that idiot is to her.  Can’t stop thinking about her.”

Tom patted Barry on the shoulder.  ”Look.  He’s bedding half of Bree-town, rumor says.  That’s going to get back to her.  And he won’t stop.  That’ll get back to her too.”

Barry turned his head to give Tom a bleary stare.  ”I don’t want to be anyone’s pity man.  Even hers.”  To that, Tom had no reply.  He ordered another round.

***

There.  Perfect.  Nidhil trailed her fingertips over perfectly aligned ledgers and perfectly sorted stacks of papers for Sir Arrowheart to review and sign.  Even with all the distractions the hall’s administration required, everything was finally organized.  Finally.  She looked down at herself.  No ink marred her white skirts.  With Fury back at the Bree-town house, those same skirts were free of fur and paw-prints.  Perfect.

She drew a cobalt blue shawl around her shoulders.  Spring was coming; she could smell it in the air even when frost still tipped the grass.  Spring would bring flowers, flowers would bring perfume.  For once, her typical rose oil palled.  She’d try something more delicate this year, something more…in a word, Breeish.

She glanced toward the window.  The morning sun limned the rippled glass and cast prisms on the opposite wall.  On impulse, she walked over and slipped the casement’s latch free.  Fresh air.  The room could use some fresh air, and the sun was strong.  Perhaps -

As the window opened slightly, wind caught it and grabbed as rudely as a rival at market.  The frame leapt from her hands; a gust whipped the shawl half-off Nidhil’s shoulders and blustered into the room.  She gasped at the sudden chill and leaned far out to fumble for the clasp.  Finally she set the window to rights again, after a breathless fight against the wind.

A dark patch on her skirts caught her attention.  She glanced down to see a dark streak of dirt crossing her belly where she leaned across the window-sill.  ”Bother,” she said aloud.  A lock of glossy black hair fell free of its careful braid and flopped across her face.  As she pinned it back into place, a dreadful thought hit her.

If she never turned around, she wouldn’t have to see the mess made with the careful stacks of papers.  She imagined an overturned inkwell spilling over her beautifully sanded desk.  Her tea…where had she left her tea?

She turned slowly.  The word that left her mouth was one she’d only ever heard Gaelyn say, and only then after Fury attempted to remove a chunk from his ankle.  Stupid spring.  Stupid wind.  Stupid Bree.

*****

Gisala kissed the top of Solstan’s head.  ”Go on, go run around with Ciri.  Gif’s got to talk to rocks.”  She bowed her back slightly as she watched the little boy head off toward his aunt.  Everything hurt today, back and belly and breasts, everything.  Wouldn’t matter soon enough.

Her long legs carried her to her favorite tree in Ravenhold’s broad yard.  Her cloak made a decent seat; the tree offered her a knobby, welcome seat-back.  Her breath slowed.  As her eyelids drifted shut, she let her awareness drift throughout her, into skin and toes and fingers and scalp.  When it all tingled, when every part of her seemed to join her heart in its slow and steady beat, she took a deep breath, exhaled, and let go.

Earth accepted her into its heavy embrace.  Her spirit swam among its layers.  She could never explain to Oendir how warm it all felt, like drawing a perfect downy blanket up to her chin on a cool day.  Her body basked in the solidity of it all.  She reveled.

Not alone, an earth-spirit said.  A vein of sparkling, dense mineral almost seemed to glow in her stone-speaker’s sense.  Its spirits were playful and small.  Not alone, they said as they danced around her.  I know, she responded, with the spark of spirit that meant laughter.  She floated along the streaky vein as if it was a river.  A spirit drifted over her, through her, and tugged her attention inward.  Not alone, the spirit said.  See.

A light sparked.  Not mineral, not stone.  Not earthen.  A little light, barely flickering, barely real.  Not alone, the earth-spirits said.  Inside.  The spirits moved close to see and marvel.  Gisala drifted in earth’s embrace, her spirit bright with joy and bearing that tiny light within her.

The Watcher: No More Summers

Daernil’s voice, though distorted beneath his mask, was tender. “There will be another summer for you.”

I do not want more summers.  I have had enough summers, fifty and more of them, and I want no more of their false warmth.  Summer lies.  Winter always comes.

I do not want Morramarth’s accusatory looks, or Atan’s grim expression.  Thragan’s stoicism, Arod’s pain.  Panja’s anguish.  All these howling words in the wind.  In my dreams, my hair catches around my arms and legs and holds me down while wind strips me of clothing and skin and flesh, until I am nothing but bones.  The wind laughs at me.

He was so light at the end.  Light and ruined, with his beautiful long form twisted beneath his leather.  I must remember how he seemed in the light filtered through autumn leaves.  How his chest was silk beneath my hands.  How it felt to finally – finally – be filled with him, to be fully and wholly complete.

Ai, Daernil.  You are with Lothiril now.  Will you wait for me?  Will you let me track you again, to be a hunter once more?  I know where you are this time.  Just beyond my sight and my knowing.  Just beyond the veil through which I cannot see.

There are no more summers.  Ice is all around me, ice and memory.  I will not show it.  You will not see.  But there are no more summers left for me.

Welcome Yule

Thank you, Wayfarers and Rohirrim and all the rest — you’re all wonderful rp’ers and nifty people, and I’m glad to know you.  Merry Christmas and Happy Yule!

—–

Kaithin sat with a letter in her lap.  The crinkled parchment looked as if it had been made wet and dry and probably wet again before reaching her over all the long miles.  She let it flutter from her fingers, then looked into the middle distance and said, softly, “Oh, bugger.”

—–

Sifilwyn smoothed down her crimson skirts and took a breath.  In the frosted window-pane, she could see a faint reflection of herself, wavery and indistinct.  She brought her fingers to her cheeks and gave each a hard pluck.  There.  Now she would look high-spirited, to go with all her other virtues.

The foreign lord seemed kind, kind and grave.  His gaze always roamed.  His ears always heard, and Sifilwyn was certain that in this hall of bragging warriors, the Nihtseld man saw more than all of them.  “The boy lord,” Gebba called him, but Sifilwyn saw age in those eyes.  He was lonely, just like her.  And the Nihtseld was warm, they said.  Warm and peaceful.  It might be nice to live somewhere peaceful for once.

Sifilwyn brought her mother’s pendant to her lips and kissed it for luck.  Her practiced smile began before she even knocked on the heavy stone door.

—–

When Oendir woke up, she’d have to tell him how she dreamed of Solstan wearing a seal’s skin and swimming around ice floes and the masts of sunken boats as if he’d been born to the water.  “He’s no captain,” her dreaming self said.  “He’s half-fish.”

“He’s a fine, small thing,” a warm voice said, and Gisala looked up from where she stood on one shifting floe.  Alduara sat cross-legged on another, dressed in as little as usual, and with the coins in her hair making soft jingling noises in the wind.  “I always liked children,” the spirit said.  “A good thing too, considering how many I pushed into this world.”  When she laughed, her whole body shook with the pleasure of it.  “All of them different.  Different fathers, different dreams.  Like elements.  One was my north baby, another my south.”

“Which one made me?” Gis asked, while Solstan’s seal-form circled and circled.

“My east baby,” Alduara said.  “I loved that babe’s father with every inch of me.  He gave me a son.”  Forochel lights rippled above the waters, with all their brilliant colors mirrored in the sea below.  Solstan’s dark form swam in light.  Alduara’s hair blurred into the edges of violet sky-ribbons.

Gisala watched seal-Solstan swim by.  “My east baby,” she said.  A smile stretched her face.

“One of them, at least” Alduara said.  “You’re snoring.”

“I don’t snore,” Gisala said irritably, and woke up.

—–

Sunnild wrapped long, olive dresses around padded wooden rods.  Silly silly Aebba to take them all.  After all, her lord husband would want her in black and gold as soon as her dainty little feet set foot in Wulfmunt.  Well, not quite so dainty.  Sunnild laughed aloud as she tossed slippers into a basket.  Aebba did have big feet.

A mountain hold might have fine sunny views, she told her mistress.  It might have new vines and good grapes and hearty trees with knobby roots and mushrooms growing at their base.  Just because a place was high up didn’t mean that men didn’t eat, that life didn’t grow.  “Something grows everywhere,” she told Aebba when the lady was making a list of who should get her carefully cultivated flowers.  “You’ll just have to find out what it is.”

“I bring every seed,” Aebba admitted, with one of her very faint smiles.  “I bring more seeds than gowns, and I bring a good number of gowns.”

Sunnild asked in an arch voice, “And good Rumwold manure, do you bring that?”  Aebba laughed, then offered a sheepish nod.  Of course she did.  In one covered basket, her mother’s creams and tinctures and fine bone brushes.  In the other, shit.  It figured.

Well, tomorrow, they’d begin to find out who this Lord Iestyn was, and if he was good enough, and if Aebba’s dream would come true.  In the meantime, she’d pack dresses and big slippers and carefully separated packets of seeds, and try not to toss things in the shit.

—–

“The furry-footed?” Dryfa asked, while flopping face-down on the bed she and Harry shared.  “Do you have a preference you haven’t told me about?”  Her merry grin showed the words’ jest, though, and she said, “Aye.  Let’s go.  Moss grows on my feet, and we get no younger.  We’re Shire-bound.”

Letters to Forochel

Dear Hal,

I hear you’re gone again.  I hope it’s all right to write.  I just … ((Several lines are scribbled out fiercely here with heavy ink, unreadable))

Barry Turner asked me to marry him.  We’ve been stepping out for a few months, and he just asked, and I told him I wasn’t sure.  We got in a big fight, because he thinks I’m saying ‘wait’ because of you, and I think I’m saying ‘wait’ because it’s only been four months and when I do things fast, I sort of do them dumb.

Well, and you.  I see you sometimes at the Pony.  I see you smiling at girls, and I figure you’re taking them to wherever you’re living whenever you can.  I don’t get mad about it anymore.  It’s hard to sleep alone when you got used to a warm bed.  And besides, you’re just you.  It’s like no one ever taught you that glass breaks, so you bat at it and then look all surprised when it ends up on the floor in pieces.  But that’s all done.  I think I still love you, but that’s all done.  Isn’t it?  When I see you, you seem happy, and that mostly makes me smile.

It’d be easy for people to say I like Barry because he’s the opposite of you, but he isn’t.  He’s funny too, and he’s kind, and he’s steady, sure, but he isn’t a stick.  I like him a lot, even though he isn’t you.

Stay as safe as you can, Hal.  I miss you.  No one’s ever made me laugh like you do.

Kait

—–

Dear Gaelyn,

An early freeze set in.  My feet are blocks of ice, and I would give perhaps everything I own save Fury and my grandmother’s gems to set my feet on your warm stomach.  There, now you can be glad that you’re in Forochel.

I miss you terribly.  I would like to say “without complaint,” but the first paragraph of this letter certainly proves that wrong.  So, I will condense all my complaints here in this one sentence:  I am freezing and it is always dark this time of year, and I will stand with your family at Yuletide and show all of them good cheer, but in the nights my teeth chatter and my feet are cold and I am furious that a six-year-old was able to accompany you and I was not.

But there, now I am done with complaint.  In fact, the daylight world sees me in far better spirits.  I sold an entire batch of a new perfume blend to a grand lady in Bree-land, though I’m choosing to not ask what her business with all that perfume might be.  Our personal coffers grow.  I have still heard nothing back from our interests in the Misty Mountains, though.  Perhaps you and another six-year-old –

This paragraph will be free of complaint.  Perhaps you might look into the matter upon your most welcome return.  In the meantime, I have secured a new dress for some Yule event that I will push my way into, just to feel festive.  It’s red – an oddly vulgar color on me, which makes me love it completely – and close-fitting, and I think you will like it when you see me in it upon your return.

You may need to offer Hal a listening ear.  Kaithin considers marriage to another, and I think it is the wisest thing she has perhaps ever done.  In her life.

I think of you in waking and sleeping, and even when I complain, it’s because I miss you and love you, and am jealous of every sunbeam and snowflake that gets to touch your skin before I do.  Come home safe to me.

Nidhil

At this Time (Rohan Edition)

Lady wife,

Beadwof carries this back to you, along with my reasons for remaining in the mountains of the west.  I have told him this:  that for now, he speaks with my voice to your brother.  Give your son what good counsel you always provide, my lady.  He may not think he needs it, but in that he would be wrong.

I enclose a few written words for Ormond.  To my daughter I offer my regrets that I will not see her until the mountain snows thaw.  I have become accustomed to her cheerful presence yet again, and it saddens me to be robbed of it.  And you.

As always, my lady, you know the words I do not write.  In great esteem, I remain,

Athelstan

—–

Morcaer slumped on a wide wooden bench and watched, wearily, the destruction of a decade’s corruption.  Around him, servants pried ornament from furniture, scraped layers of fanciful paint from good wood.  The rugs stayed, along with the tapestries.  The hall was as snug-built as craftsmen could make it, but only idiots scorned a good rug.

He heard Ranforth approach before the man ever cleared his throat.  The newly elevated thane was no light man.  “It’s getting there,” Morcaer said while lifting his hand in an idle wave.  “Soon it’ll look like it was built in the Riddermark, at least.”

Ranforth set his fists on his hips and said, “Some of it was pretty, I suppose.  Maybe it was once.  This is better.”  As the two men watched, a servant tugged on one end of a massive length of golden bunting.  The cloth fluttered down as light as clouds, and Morcaer found himself on his feet and walking to meet that golden fall.  Servants paused, uncertain, as he ran his rough palm over the silken cloth.  An edge of fingernail caught at the cloth and snagged.  Morcaer grimaced.

“Put it with the rest, my – “  The servant stopped his question abruptly.  Ranforth might be a temporary thane, and Iestyn was lord, but Morcaer was some strange in-between that defied titles.

Morcaer shook his head.  “This should dye, aye?  Or something.”  No one answered him.  He went on.  “Send it to the Trumgard women.  The noble women.  Can’t be easy to get good cloth up there right now.”  He let out a non-committal grunt and walked back to Ranforth, all the while seeing the gold flutter down soft as hair.

—–

Battle had its own music.  Roars, clanging steel, the shouts of orders and the cries of wounded.  Hildrith heard her own shout add to it, a frenzied cry of, “Loose the wagon!”  Three barrels of spirits with rags stuffed in their taps, just ready to …there.  It rumbled down the settlement’s one road, down through grey stone and scrubby pines.  “Not yet, not yet, not yet – now!”  She lowered her hand; Aldmona let her flaming arrow loose.  The results were fine and fiery, and the pained howls of the orcs were sweet music indeed.  A grin spread across Hildrith’s face that lasted while the archers finished those orcs not set afire or driven back.  “Last barrels,” Garwick then reported, and the grin faded.

“There’s still mead,” Aldmona cried in fierce reassurance as she jogged back over to Hildrith’s side.  “We’ll still toast when Eldburgh comes.”  A weak cheer came up from Banhurst’s defenders:  surely, its lord and reeve of Eldburgh would not desert them.  Nearly a fortnight of seige was long enough.  Tomorrow, they would come.  Tomorrow.

“The watches report nothing?” Hildrith asked of her two closest aides.  Aldmona shook her head.  “Some withdraw, for some purpose.  It can’t be good.”  Garwick nodded and added his words to his sister’s.  “The wagon will cripple this wave.  This one.  But tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”  He let the words hang.

“Tomorrow, the Reeve will come,” Hildrith said.  “Hear that?”  She called it to the riders in their lookouts with their mighty bows and their quivers that began to run low.  She called it to the men at the gates with their pitch and flint and tinder.  Her few remaining shieldmaidens formed a bulwark at the stone hall, ready for a last defense.  She hollered it again when no cheer came in response.  “Do you hear that?”

“Aye, lady,” Garwick said, only to have Aldmona bash his shoulder with a mailed fist.  “Thane,” he corrected, quickly.  Aldmona said, “Yes, my Thane,” and then it traveled down the small and ragged lines:  Thane Hildrith, Thane Hildrith.  Hildrith gave them all a fierce and feral grin she didn’t feel, and turned back to watch the road.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow someone had to come.

Snippets!

Various things that have been niggling at my mind, mostly at work between transactions.

_____

“You should marry me.”  Barry tugged at a lock of Kaithin’s sandy hair.  Before she could say anything, he added, “I have a good trade.  My mother thinks you’re the best thing to ever happen to me, not that that matters.  Well, it does, but it doesn’t.  You know what I mean.”  Barry’s wide mouth curved into a grin that almost made Kaithin cave.  Almost.

“It hasn’t even been half a year,” she said.  “Not even.”

“You’re right,” Barry said, while looking at her steadily.  He always did that.  He always looked her straight in the eye and told the truth, as far as he knew it.  Every word.  When she made him mad, he told her.  When he was happy, he said so.  She never had to wonder.  “I don’t care,” he continued.  “I could step out with you for ten years or four months, and I’d still know what I want.”

“Me,” she said lamely.  “The baker.  The mouse-girl.”

Barry slipped an arm around her narrow waist.  He always moved with such deliberation.  Slow, like he was afraid his big, tall body would run someone over.  Sometimes it did.  She found his klutziness endearing, even as she wondered how he’d climb a tree.  Stop it, she told her thoughts.  Stop it stop it stop it he’s gone.

Barry was smart; that was the other thing.  As soon as she began chastising her thoughts, his smile faded.  “It’s him, right?  Making you pause.”  He shook his head, which sent his dark hair drifting over the hand she rested on his shoulder.  “You told me you wanted me for me, not for being different from him.”

“I do want you,” she squeaked.  “I do.”

He sighed.  “Are you taking me to the Cask this week?  Finally?”  Her expression must have shown her uncertainty, because Barry’s rubber face hardened.  “Kait, I’m all-in with us.  I know what I want.  You’re …you’re still wondering.”  His broad hand rubbed her back.  “I won’t step out on you.  I won’t lie to you.  I live here.  Bree-rooted, like a big oak tree.”  At that, she had to smile, even if a snuffle accompanied it.  Barry’s expression softened when he saw her lips curve.  “Come on, Kait.  You’ll make me sweet rolls, I’ll bring home coin.  We’ll have babies.  We’ll get old, a long time from now.  What do you say?”

_____

Gisala crossed her hands over her chest.  “I need snow gear.  For a boy.”  For once, Nidhil’s placid, helpful expression made Gis want to snarl.  “For Solstan,” Gis added.  “For him.”

She could almost see Nidhil’s thoughts:  Solstan, snow, gear…there.  Nidhil asked, tentatively, “Does Solstan accompany you to Forochel?”

“That he does,” Gis said.  “So he needs kitting out.  I figure there’s good stuff that someone can cut down for him.  If there’s an extra suit so he can have two, that’d be good.  In case one gets wet.”  She shrugged.  “Gets wet up there.”

“I remember,” Nidhil said.  “Gaelyn dipped in the bay and brought me a shell.”

“Course he did,” Gis said.  “Can you see it done?”

Nidhil nodded.  Her quill pen made a flick across paper and beautiful looping letters appeared.  No ink dared mar Nidhil’s sleeve.  No blots dared form.  When the note was complete, Nidhil glanced up at Gis.  Her words were slow to form, but then she asked, “If Solstan goes…why not me?”

“Uh.”

“I’m resourceful.  Well-funded.  Helpful.  I could assist with the diplomatic side of your mission.  I could be of service.”  Nidhil’s voice remained smooth, even casual, but Gis could almost see the gears working behind Nidhil’s ice-blue eyes.

“Uh,” Gis said again.  “Not sure you’re the adventuring type.”  Behind her back, she dug the thumbnail of one hand into the meat of another, as if to say stupid, stupid.

Nidhil’s eyes narrowed slightly.  “And a six-year-old boy is far more qualified for journeys?  Lady Arrowheart, that seems…silly.”

Gis sighed.  “Didn’t mean…you know I can’t talk.  I don’t know.  But I thought you were happy here.  Good here.  Kept things going and all.  Happy planted in your pot.”

“It would be nice,” Nidhil said in a formal tone, “to be asked.”

Gis said lamely, “Maybe something to bring up with, y’know, Gaelyn.  Oendir.  Yeah.  Have to go.  Healing lessons with the leecher.  Combe.”  She waved in a busy-busy sort of way and sprang up from the chair beside Nidhil’s desk.  “Yep.  That.”

Beneath the Earth and Waters

Sifrun wore grey for the last time when she saw her father buried.  He died easily, she was told:  poisoned water, given with no fanfare.  How Borstan must have hated it when he awoke in the world to come and realized he was denied his last blustering.

Linen covered the corpse from head to toe.  Sifrun watched the first spadeful of dirt scatter over his face and chest in the well-dug grave.  No warg would unearth him, no wild dogs would eat him.  No rider’s fire would send his ashes up to meld with sunshine and wind and grasses.  No one would help ease his ashes into the Entwash, so they could merge with the dead already sent to their ends.  Cold earth would press on him and press on him until his bones became soil and something grew from his waste.  Such a waste.

One of the diggers glanced at Sifrun and said, “You can say words if you wish.  Sing.”

“I don’t want to,” she said.  Her charcoal-colored dress itched at the cuffs and the collar.  Tonight she’d toss it in the hearth and be done with her father’s grey.  Whether the color that followed was Nihtseld blue or some other hue with no allegiance, she had no idea.  Her mother’s swamps were muddy olive and brown and mist that almost seemed golden when the sun rose.

The guards shrugged and kept digging.  Only two of them, thankfully, and they spoke little.  No one stood at her elbow, no one tried to tell her what to feel or to comfort her.  In the distance, blue banners fluttered over the Nihtseld’s palisade.  It would be a hungry winter for everyone, after her father’s commands.  Few of the tithed supplies survived the battle.  Children would cry and have bellies that ached for more food, all because of the man now mostly covered by rock-strewn dirt.  Sifrun stared dry-eyed into the grave and wondered for a moment if she should follow.

The thought fled almost as quickly as it arrived.  She said, “Stop,” though it took two tries to say the word aloud.  The two men paused.  Sifrun slipped a reed flute from an interior pocket of her grey cloak.  “This isn’t for him,” she said, so the guards would not think she honored her father.  The tune she played was quiet, only loud enough to be heard by the guards and whatever spirits waited to carry the dead man to his ending.  “Mother’s Song,” she might have called it.  It had no real name.

When the last note faded, she tucked the flute back into her cloak’s pocket.  She reached down and grabbed a fistful of earth held together by scrubby grass.  A bit of stone drew blood from one already-bitten cuticle.  “Goodbye,” she said.  The earth landed on Borstan’s midsection and scattered wide.  She turned away and began the walk back to the palisade, alone.