[Belin]

Remdil felt no need to see them again. He'd given them his thanks and his hospitality, and they were, after all, Elves, a strange and unsettling people. Or so he told himself whenever he found a chance to think of it, in the long years after, as he watched Eolinda grow older, wiser, and (not to his surprise, though others wouldn't have guessed it) friendlier, and as Livia teased her suitors and studied elves. But he wondered, and he hoped. It seemed like a shame for the boy to have lost his sister. He'd seen the way they laughed at each other, and he'd thought--well, they were gone, in any case, and he'd never know.

But in his mind it went like this:

The horse's journey through the mist came to an abrupt halt, and the rider, clearly a man of no great horsemanship, carefully climbed down. His face wore an expression, not of resigned sorrow, but of worry. He had not given up hope, but hope had become a torment to him. Remdil could never decide whether he'd ridden eastward as he planned, or changed his mind and gone west to seek her, but in any case he'd come to a lonely inn, whose bright windows told a story of their own in the houseless mist. Leaving his horse to the stablehand, who frowned at it as if it were familiar to him, Lenilos ducked his head and walked through the door.

There was a bright fire there, and a pure and cheerful laughter that held no trace of mockery. The serving girl (in Remdil's mind she looked like Livia, and the inn like his own in better days) winked at him impudently, and guided him toward the fire, quietly taking away his dripping cloak. They made room for him around the fire, and gave him such welcomes as were native to them there. Perhaps, indeed, he smiled.

And he looked around the circle, and he saw first the wicked grin of a horse thief he'd known not so long ago, just beginning to laugh at some joke of her own, and his heart stopped within him.

And he was right, for there next to her, watching her as carefully as an apprentice watches his master, sat an elven maiden with long black hair and an impatient smile. And he sat back and waited until the joke was finished, and she looked around the room, and she saw him, and with sudden tears she welcomed him, and when they left the inn they left together.

So thought Remdil when between polishing tables and scolding the customers he had a moment to rifle through his memories, and so the story ran when, years later, he told it to his grandchildren.

THE END

[ January 11, 2003: Message edited by: Belin ]