'Tis Time, My Love, For Me To Take The Sword

"Lady."
His voice, as ever, was the deep, gravelly rumble of a well-laden cart's wheel in a new-worn rut in the road, but as he perceived the lone figure, upright at her desk, back to the door and vacant gaze affixed at the shuttered window, it softened. She did not turn, but her posture relaxed, barely perceptibly.

"Lady." Adair tried again. "Reynhild."

She turned. She still wore the black dress she had donned when Corrac passed. Her eyes-- the colour of a forest floor, flecked green and brown and grey and amber and all their intermediate hues-- were no longer red and swollen from weeping. She just looked... blank, empty. He knew that feeling, knew that vast trackless space, knew it intimately from the inside. The room smelled musty, of closed shutters and dusty drapery, of a body that had forgotten how to do most things save continue breathing.

"Lady, it's a beautiful day outside. Won't you come for a ride? You could use the fresh air."

Elena's silhouette passed in the hall, her arms laden with laundered linens. Her eyes, now, were bloodshot and puffed from tears. But she heard him, and she nodded, once, at him, gratitude plain on her sweet, plump face.

Reynhild said nothing for a long moment, and he feared she would sit there motionless for an age, but to his immense relief, she stood, and followed him out the door and toward the staircase.

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"What is that melody you're humming?" she asked, the first words she'd spoken in days. They had dismounted and hobbled the horses, and now they walked along the banks of the Bowstring in the sunlight. Buds swelled on the trees, and tan-and-black ducks bobbed in the river's slow green waters. Adair could sense as the woods eased her heart, at least a little. They'd done the same for him, when his heart had dwelled in the same dark place Reynhild's currently occupied.

"Oh, it's a song from Portage that they sing in Three Corners sometimes." He cleared his throat and sang; his warm baritone found the notes as easily and naturally as stepping stones in a familiar garden.

"'Tis time, my love, for me to take the sword
My father bore, down from the mantel high
And march beneath the duke's proud golden bann
E'en as the larks, through spring's first green buds, fly

A sweet eternity we tarried here,
It cleaves my heart in twain this day draws nigh
I leave the best of me with you, my dear,
E'en as the larks, through spring's first green buds, fly..."

The edges of Reynhild's lips twitched upward, barely, in the ghost of a smile, and his heart leapt to see it. "I've known you for three years and I had no idea you could sing, Adair."

He grinned. "Aye, lady, I can carry a tune. I'll sing you the rest tonight over the cookfire, after you put a few arrows through the fat young pheasant I see scuttling under that yew tree yonder."

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As Cuinn rode west to Portage, making full haste, Aerona and Mara astride their steeds on either side of her, the worry tore at her heart. She could not help but glance north, where the dark fringe of the Aelvinnwode crouched like a waiting beast, and somewhere within it, a man still walked and drew breath, a man with the blood of the young Ghosts on his hands.

Unbidden, a melody came to her mind, graceful even hummed by her unmusical voice. It took her a moment to place it.

"Don't weep, my love, although today we part
For even if this is our last goodbye
Your face is carved forever in my heart
E'en as the larks, through spring's first green buds, fly..."