#brownwyn

Arondir had spent many nights on top of the tower. Many years worth of nights. He had watched the edge of the forest creep into the belly of the valley, the slow-fingered hands and feet of the leafed ones weaving through the soil. He had guided such movements once: danced with them in call and response, pulled them gently towards his will, sung them with praise for their service. But now he could only watch them from afar, whispering small blessings to the wind. 

He had watched when the men came with sharpened blades and cut the old ones back to the cliffs, so as not to lose precious pasture to their slow advance. Arondir understood. He grieved for the trees, but he did not curse the men. They were simply growers of a different kind. 

Perhaps it was the passive distance allowed by the tower, but he saw them as strangely innocent and harmless: small, foolish creatures, safely contained within the bowl of their own valley, crashing up against the same unbreakable rocks year after year. He felt more akin to the mountains than to the humans, when he stood up there. 

But it was different when he walked among the villages. In the villages it was not so simple. For surely, after several decades, an elf with a mind for careful observation must start to make some distinctions, to carve the shape of individuals from the mass of man he walked among. 

Edar, who worked the forge, whose father had once made Arondir a brass buckle for his quiver.  It was nothing to rival the craftsmanship of elves, but it was stout and sturdy and possessed its own strange grace, and was precious to Arondir in its strangeness. 

Bronwyn, the wise woman, who spoke the secrets of plants, who told him the names of the flowers he did not know and their unfamiliar uses for human ailments. 

Yoric, who kept the largest holding in the valley, and seemed to think this made him superior to Arondir, who was, in Yoric’s mind, only a simple a foot soldier of his own people, at great disadvantage to Yoric’s place as petty Lord.

Metil, the eldest woman on the council, who had not been able to see since she was 5 years old, but who let Arondir guide her sometimes to the high passes, for she remembered the smell of the air there and could not live a year without it. 

Bronwyn, the wise woman, who had once shown him a hidden grove of flowering trees tucked inside the forest’s edge, where few bothered to go. Bronwyn, who had let the blossoms fall from a gently-shaken bough into the bend of her apron, re-filling her stock of medicine without ever breaking a twig or a petal.  

Darin, who brewed the worst beer in the valley, and therefore had the most prosperous tavern. 

Lavia, who kept sheep. 

Bronwyn, who had woven Arondir a talisman from fibers crushed from the stalks of wild plants, a coarse patch of fabric, green-grey and shaped by her fingers. Bronwyn, who had tucked it in the back of his hood one morning beside the well, so quickly and casually he might have missed it, if he was capable of missing anything she did. “For protection,” she said, matter-of-factly, without embellishment, just like her simple cloth. It was starting to burnish now, where his head brushed against it, reminding him with every touch of the hand that had placed it there. 

Bronwyn, whose eyes were like the moon and the valley, bright and dark and deep all at once, and always, always calling him into silent conversation. 

Bronwyn — 

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The elf could not be tolerated. That much was clear. 

Bronwyn lived by a simple set of rules — invisible rules, unspoken perhaps, but rules she respected nonetheless. They gave an essential order and protection to her life. They defined for her the actions that a single, unbounded woman had to take — that a healer had to take, that a mother had to take — to keep herself safe from rumor and scorn. 

She knew what it was to be a stranger, to come from away, even if it was just a day’s walk East. She had come to know the cloying sense of sameness, pricked with just enough difference to make her feel uncouth and half-mad most of the time. She had come to Tirharad to be married, and she knew even then what protection a husband could offer, and what protection he could not.

She remembered the first time she had been betrayed. Whispers and lies passed down an invisible line: she had been mixing poison into her medicines, she had spat in the salve, cursed it with ancient words she had learned from the far hills. That is why the old widow died so suddenly, only 5 days after taking Bronwyn’s draughts. That is why a young woman had disappeared without a trace 3 weeks before, for it was clear she’d gotten with child, and everyone knew the Old Evil loved to eat the unborn. 

According to the villagers, the Old Evil was thoroughly dead in Tirharad, except, apparently, in Brownwyn’s bleeding herbs, which she had not even given to the girl. The girl had run to the Coast where her lover was meant to meet her. Bronwyn hoped she wasn’t dead. 

They confronted her at dusk, a group of ragged, angry townsfolk, lost to their own ignorance. Bronwyn had to fix them with the end of kitchen knife, telling them her husband would find them all on his return and make them pay for their treatment of her. He was away then, as if often was in those times, but the threat of his presence still bore some weight. 

She did not say on his return how she had used him, what she had threatened in his name. He asked her once how the got the cut on her arm, just above the wrist, for she’d been shaking so sorely after the villagers left that she’d become unwary of the blade. She lied. She couldn’t say why. Perhaps she did not want him to know how weak she was in his absence. 

But now he was gone for good, and she could not use his name, not even the ghost of his name. She was alone. So she kept to her rules. 

It was not that she loved the rules. She had not come to care for them as keepers in her husband’s stead. They chafed at her every day like the rubbing of rope on wrists, like the weight of a stone in her shoe. But she knew they were necessary. 

All of them told her that the elf could not be tolerated. 

It was simple at first, for Arondir seemed almost made of stone, or perhaps some gentler material, but one still impervious to the ripples of human emotion — clay or water or the living flesh of trees. He was made of something too old and too powerful for her idle thoughts to touch, and so it caused no harm that she admired him, that she wondered sometimes in the quiet space of night how the world looked through his eyes, how she might measure up in the mind of one who had lived as long as a forest, who had traveled the world like a stream. 

Perhaps her gazing of him was a vain, self-centered sort of thing, for she did not truly notice until it was too late that he was gazing back. She had not been fully aware that she was guiding this into being, thinking her gestures immaterial — as useless as throwing sand against a sea. 

But Arondir was not as wide and ineffable as the sea. Not to her. Not anymore. 

He was becoming more knowable, more man-shaped, his edges defined into something she could touch. He did not mind when she touched him. A handful of flowers brushed into his palm, a twist of hay plucked from his cloak: these gestures were not rebuffed. She pushed the boundary, tested his limits: a small piece of magic tucked inside his hood, her fingers gliding quickly across the back of his neck for one breathless moment. He did not flinch. Once, she had given him a small vial of honey from her own hives, from the precious bees who danced across her wild garden of herbs. She had placed it in his hand, palm hovering over palm, and he cupped his fingers up to meet hers. He traced the edge of her smallest nail. 

She knew then how much she had played the fool.