[piosenniel]

Three days after Cami and Maura’s departure

The breakfast dishes were done and dried, the kitchen swept up, the big kettle dragged out and put on the hob for the dinner soup. Ruby and Buttercup sat at the kitchen table, a diminishing pile of vegetables in front of them to be chopped up and simmered in the kettle’s broth.

Cook took her cleaver to the chickens Hob had brought in, chopping them into good sized pieces. The mound of them and the herbs she had snipped earlier would go into the kettle first. She scrubbed up her chopping board once done, and counted the loaves of bread she had left from the morning’s meal. Wiping her hands on her apron, she looked round the kitchen with a satisfied smile. All was in order once again.

‘When you’re done there,’ she said, eyeing the growing pile of cubed tubers and vegetables ‘go on and help out with the rooms to be cleaned and tidied. It’s mid month and the fellows from Buckland should be here with their cartloads of supplies from Bree. We’ll want to make sure the rooms are ready for them.’

‘I’ll do it!’ cried Buttercup, laying down her knife on her cutting board. ‘You finish this and I’ll start on the other.’ Ruby nodded in agreement with her; she was loath to pick up a dust rag and broom at the moment, preferring to finish the task before her, and then sit back with a cup of tea, if she might.

Broom and cloth in hand, Buttercup trudged down the hall to the room just a way beyond Mistress Piosenniel’s. Pio’s door was wide open, and as she snuck a peek in, in passing, she noted Mithadan methodically packing piles of things into wooden crates. She could not help giggling when he called out to the Elf, unseen by her, in a mockingly exasperated voice. ‘You came here on horseback, Piosenniel. How in the Sundering Seas did you manage to collect so much . . . stuff!’ He winked at Buttercup as she stood in the doorway. ‘Don’t tarry too long, Hobbit. I’ll draft you into packing all this up!’

Buttercup laughed and backed out of the doorway, just as Pio came into view. ‘Do not take him seriously, Buttercup. He is master of the Lonely Star crew, but not the Inn!’ Mithadan Hmmmphed at her and reached for another crate. ‘And besides,’ confided Pio in a loud whisper, ‘he can be quite fussy in how things are stowed away for a journey.’ The two watched as he fitted . . . and sometimes jammed, various items into the crate. ‘Really!’ assured Pio to the skeptical Hobbit, ‘there is a method to his seeming madness.’ Another Hmmmph! followed, and a request that perhaps the ladies could find something else to do and let a poor man get his work done. Pio bent to give him a quick kiss, noting he held the bound stack of books in his hand they had found by the pool. ‘Oh, let me deal with those,’ she said, taking them from him. ‘I shall just put them with the items I am packing. With any luck, I can look through some of them on our trip back to Minas Tirith.’

‘Wait for me, Buttercup. Let me just put these in the back room.’

The sound of her hurrying footsteps faded away and then returned just as quickly. ‘I am going to the kitchen for a mug of tea. Is that where you are bound?’

The Hobbit explained that Cook had requested the rooms be cleaned for the guests expected that day. ‘I’m just going down to do that little room, down the hall, then I’ll work my way upstairs.’

‘. . . that little room . . . The phrase rolled around in Pio’s mind as she walked with Buttercup. She had avoided ‘that little room’ – the one where Cami and Maura had been - since the brief visit the morning after their “departure”. Hadn’t wanted to see it, to be reminded again that her friend and her family had spent their last minutes there. Reluctant, in a way, to be prompted with anything that would bring the stinging memories of the loss flooding in again.

As it was, she had no reason to be worried. The room was tidy, the bed unslept in, a few odds and end lay in the bottom of the clothes cupboard. Most of their possessions had gone up in smoke, she recalled, when the ruffians had come to the Shire.

Buttercup was at the side of the bed, stripping it of its sheets and covers. Pio stepped over to her, saying she would give her a hand. ‘Extra hands make light work,’ she said, then catching the words as they came from her, smiled. Some one had taught her that phrase. Cami most likely, reminding the Elf that Hobbits preferred to work together to get a thing done rather than alone.

A small cry wrenched her from her thoughts. ‘Oh, now, what’s this,’ hissed Buttercup, stepping back from her side of the bed. She had jammed her toes up against something, and now stood with one foot propped on the bed, rubbing them.

Pio knelt down, and reached her hand into the dark interior under the bed. ‘Hmmm. What is this?’ she asked, fishing out the offending item.

She gasped as she hauled it into the light. It cannot be! She gave that journal to Andril on the Star. The leather bound day book she found under the bed looked much like the one Cami had left out for them to write in on the Star. The leather cover was worn, like that first one she remembered, but not smudged by the imprint of numerous fingers from the hands of all those who had written in it as they passed by the open door to the Hobbit’s room. Cami had usually left the Star journal lying open on her table for anyone to come and have a look. She had encouraged her friends to add their own thoughts into the narrative. Those scattered notes had been like a trail of memory that bore witness to all they had seen.

Pio ran her fingertips over the soft leather of the day book, remembering something her friend had said to her back then. She could see Cami just taking up her quill to write a few comments at the end of a day. Hopeful ones she had told her friend, who lay resting on her bed beside her, head propped up on her hand, as she watched the Hobbit dip the quill into the inkwell, then carefully rub off the excess before laying it to the vellum. There was a quiet rhythm to her movements, and a pleasure in setting words upon a blank surface reflected in her face.

‘Hopeful?’ Pio had asked, catching at least part of what the Hobbit spoke to her. ‘You mean you are certain how this will end and this gives you hope?’ She remembered that she, herself, had not been hopeful, finding it too slippery a concept to base one’s actions on – or at least that is how she had reasoned it out at that time.

Cami had put down her quill and looked closely at her friend. ‘No, Pio. I’ve learned that certainties are few. For even as one story ends, another begins. And it is rare for people to recognize in their own lives where that point of transition is.’

There had followed a comfortable silence as she recalled. The scritch . . . scritch . . . of the quill point against the paper the only sound in the room. Pio had lain back against the pillows, her eyes closed, thinking about endings and beginnings. It was a lesson, she realized now, that had surfaced, would continue to surface, again and again, as she made her way through this life she had chosen.

A flurry of activity drew her attention away from the unopened book she held in her hand. Buttercup had unfurled the clean sheets and was busy making up the bed. She nodded at Pio. ‘I wonder who left that behind,’ she said. ‘For the life of me, I can’t recall who last stayed in this room.’ Pio said nothing, but left her to her bed-making and took the daybook back to her room.