Angharad of Llyr is heir to a matriarchy: a line of enchantress-queens that has ruled her island for centuries. Her destiny from birth: to rule as sole authority and ensure that her powerful bloodline endures for another generation. Devoted to her p...
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Geraint sat back on his heels in the dirt, squinted at the blue-and-white marbled sky, and frowned to himself. He was beginning to wonder exactly what he was doing here.
Planting vegetables, at the moment, but that wasn't the point...though it was rather part of the question. He contemplated his small plot of green leaves. Among Angharad's gifted provisions there had been a bag of turnips and onions, and he, loathe to waste anything, had dutifully saved the leafy tops of his produce, and settled them in a square of earth he had marked off behind the hut, near the stream, where he might easily divert the water to irrigate them. They had looked so well there that he had decided to add more, and had traded and performed for various seedlings in the village, so that now, respectable rows of transplanted greenery stood proudly in the earth, marking it as his.
Turnips and onions planted this late would only produce edible greens, of course, not full roots. But a garden was a garden, and a garden indicated a certain amount of...permanence. A permanence that, for the first time in years, he actually desired...and, ironically, could not have. Not really.
He sighed. It wasn't practical at all; no matter how many improvements he made to the hut or grounds, he could not reasonably expect to overwinter here - at least, not without relying even more on the charity of the villagers, which he did not wish to do, or of Angharad herself, whose endless generosity was beginning to frustrate him over his inability to return it with much of anything better than a few driftwood piles and stories. She had visited nearly every other day for almost two weeks, always bringing some gift, and had never suggested that he owed her in kind - indeed, had denied it vehemently, more than once. He dared to hope that she might, perhaps, take less pleasure in showing him kindness if he were anyone else - but this was daring much, and either way, it chafed him as somehow backwards to the natural order of things. She would, no doubt, scoff at this - but then it must seem natural, to someone in her position, to provide for a subject with no thought of return.
Of course, he wasn't her subject.
He wasn't sure precisely what he was.
Geraint rose from his knees with a grunt, brushed the soil from his hands, and propped his makeshift hoe against the hut wall, next to a frame where two salted rabbit skins were drying in the sun. He paused, staring at them, raw memory pushing fresh into his mind.
"Poor things," she says, squinting at the creatures dangling from his snares.
"If you want to eat," he remarks, with a shrug, pulling out his knife, "you've got to be more practical than sentimental."
She sighs, "I know," and sits, with her back to a boulder, to watch while he guts one. He watches her from the corner of his eye while he slices the skin and pulls it back; to his surprise, she betrays no horror or disgust. "It peels right off," she exclaims, with some fascination.
He laughs. "It's not as easy as it looks. Want to try?"
It was meant in jest, but she holds her hands out for the other coney; he hands it to her, then the knife, with raised eyebrows. She pokes at the soft underbelly. "Where do I start?"
