[Envinyatar]

Derufin was just coming down the steps to the Inn when he saw the chestnut stallion turn up the path to the Inn. ‘A beautiful horse,’ he thought to himself, as he watched the spirited gait of the charger, held somewhat in check by the thatch haired man who rode him. The sun glinted off the charger’s coat and caught the lustrous hairs of his tail and mane. ‘Well taken care of, I see,’ he said approvingly.

He took the reins and held the rider’s mount steady as he got down. Flithaf, it was, whose head he held still, and Eodwine, the rider. It startled Derufin when the man gave him coins for his slight service, and he almost returned them, saying that it was not necessary. That it would be his pleasure to take care of so fine a creature. But take them he did, smiling graciously, and put them away in his pocket thinking he could find some use for them.

He led Flithaf to the stable, speaking gently to him as they walked along. The horse’s ears flicked with interest, and he nodded his great head at times, almost as if he wished to join in the conversation. ‘Come,’ said Derufin, leading him to an empty stall, ‘let me free you up a bit.’

His saddle and bridle removed, the tangles and burrs combed from his tail and mane, Flithaf was then given a small nosebag of oats to tide him over until the evening hay would be put in hayracks of each stall. Once done, Derufin led him out to the large pen on the greensward at the side of the stable.

‘Run about, Flithaf. Meet your stablemates!’ Derufin shooed the horse in through the gate and latched it behind him.

He went to the wooden bench that circled the great oak in the Inn yard, and sitting down, he stretched out his long legs before him. His pipe was soon in his hand, filled with Southern Star and tamped down to his satisfaction. ‘I should go into the Inn and get a light for it,’ he thought lazily to himself, without stirring from his seat.

Instead he placed the filled pipe back in his pouch and was in the process of placing them back into his vest pocket when his fingers brushed the letter he had put there earlier. He pulled it out, his pipe and pouch now quite forgotten on the bench beside him. His fingers ran over the dried ink on the front of the folded letter, then turned it round, slipping gently under the waxen seal to lift it from the paper.

‘How like her,’ he said to himself, a half smile creasing the corners of his eyes, ‘to use the face of her cloak pin to impress it.’

There were two pages to the letter, a lengthy, and somewhat droll accounting of how her life had gone since her departure, the people she had met, the little details of a life she wished to share with a distant friend. She asked how he was doing, hoping this found him still at the Inn and settled somewhat, his grief a little lighter. He grinned, knowing she was a practical person, and liked the pieces of her life in order and proceeding as she thought they should.

Her broad, bold signature was at the end, and he almost missed the hurried note she had scribbled beneath it. There was a sharp intake of breath as he realized what she had so casually written. He laughed out loud, scaring a small wren from one of the oak’s lower branches, and caused the resident squirrel to scold him shrilly.

Derufin read the words once again, then carefully folding the letter up, he stowed it in his inside vest pocket, and whistling some fragment of a Fair Folk’s song, he got up and went in to the kitchen to speak with Cook.

[ May 30, 2003: Message edited by: Envinyatar ]