“I would like you and Brona to spend this summer with my cousin in Belfalas,” Paega announced. 

Hild looked over at him, seated the other side of the fire from herself, part in shadow, part illuminated by the flames and the candle close by. She laughed. 

Hearrd, the assistant smith, entered the forge to find Ethel already at work on removing a dent from a helmet nose piece. Her expression was one of intense concentration, her eyes were narrowed and focused, her hand raising and lowering her hammer to an already practiced rhythm. She was doing very well.

The final story in the short trilogy. Directly follows A Letter In the Library: Part the Second.

This story directly follows Letter in the Library: Part The First.

In Imladris, the previous autumn.

((neatly penned in Lumi-kieli))

To Raimo and Nôra of Sûri-kylä, from their daughter Ristiinnä:

I am in love, I have been almost since the first day we met. Something drew me to him but I know not what. Our courtship was difficult for me. He was not monogamous. But I felt it was not his choice exactly but more one of low self-esteem. It came from all his past loves. Men who used him, men who abused him, and men who left him. If the men I had loved been such to me, would I have been the same as Egfor, I can’t say. I think I would have become a complete loner, standing where no one could see me but I could watch everyone. But who am I to say. 

Egfor lofted a brow as he heard a young man singing. A young man singing a love song. Egfor walked towards the cow pasture, carrying a small bale of hay over one shoulder. He stopped at the base of an apple tree and looked up into it's budding branches, "Darel...?"

A young man yelped and dropped an apple he was eating on poor Egfor. Egfor fumbled and caught the apple before lobbing it back up towards it's owner, "Come help me sow the seeds, lovebird?"