Brynleigh

Khaki was the colour of Bree-land. Green, the colour for sleep or delusion, and beige yellows, dulled, sedately corrupted passions.

It was the type of place to lull those who stayed too long into a sense of trouble despite their luxury and wellbeing. People invented trouble here, and sometimes willed it into harmful reality. A side-effect of so much peace and, Ryheric figured, boredom.

Brynleigh was in Bree. She was even in the Prancing Pony, still. Ry knew it, but amusingly, the two seemed to keep missing one another. Sometimes, if word of mouth was to be believed, by mere moments. He knew now that the woman sought him in kind. It was only a matter of time...

Early one morning, just after the sun had risen, he came to the stables, thinking he might find her attending her chores there. Alas, the woman had either been by early, else she was attending horses elsewhere that day, or on some other errand.

Some goodbyes felt like they took ongoing tolls. Long after the person was out of sight. Left behind, or gone away on the horizon. Or simply parted ways from. In bad blood, or in the best of circumstances.

Ryheric knew it was more than just a person, or even two people, or three. It was more than fifty.

It was hundreds. What had happened to the people at the Hamlet was a weight for him to carry. The weight went deeper, and further back. Some memories were not yet safe to revisit.

Click here to listen
 

Hild was thinking hard.

It was not as if she didn’t have enough to do with trying to make her supplies last out. Or with talking to folk in the village about dropping in for a drink and some of her ‘special’ onion and bean pottage. It was never as popular as her mutton stew for some reason, but she had to make the meat last.