I am still here.
I hearken back to the diagnosis given me by the old physician. Though he did not promise a timeline, he did swear that my days were numbered. A cruel prank to play upon a soul. "You shall live less than most, but more than others, and no number can be given to you." I linger on, and continue in the only way I know.
The townspeople harry and fuss and gossip and meddle, just as they ever did, and as they always shall. I keep to my cottage unless need for sundries or restless drive takes hold of me. I have never been like them, and that shall not change. The faces and voices are a shifting slideshow of both variety and consistency; the particulars change, but the tales never do.
The young girl who thinks she can flirt with a man her father's age; coarse and uninhibited. Even men who court women of the evening enjoy the game of cat-and-mouse, or at least the show of it. Rare is the man who enjoys having the entire pursuit done on his behalf by a girl hardly out of her nursery.
The men who use provincial inns to lurk in corners and by shadowy posts. A man who conceals himself is rarely up to any good. They are often thieves, waiting for drunkards to stumble out the door, in order to follow them and beset them at some lonely spot on the road home. Or they are lechers, probing the crowd with their eyes for women in too-tight bodices, or children left unattended. Rarely, they are the Men of the Wild, spoken of in old tales and in suspicious whispers.
Always, there is at least one who determines to probe at me and learn who I am. They shall fail, of course, but politeness is only a vague torment. If a woman travels hundreds of leagues to take up a life with little semblance of her former identity, is it likely that her tongue will spill of ancient things, inexorably locked behind iron bars and stone walls?
The girl from the Soothery is unpleasant, to say the least. No manners to speak of. She stares crudely, she sits without asking, she waves her hand as if people are animals to be beckoned and dismissed. The physician there is a singular man to begin with. But to employ such people in the delicate art we practice? I cannot pretend to understand that. The ailing and hurting do not need crudeness and harshness, but the very opposite.
She had with her a man of Gondorian descent. No questions were needed to fairly smell the salt air on his skin. Let me correct myself; he was not with her, but arrived during her converse with myself, to greet her. There are no finer faces and forms in the world than those of the beautiful southern reaches. I was reminded, ever so briefly, of two other men. No need to record their names here, as no one will ever read these pages. The tortured beauty, and the carrion bird.
I have taken a room in the upstairs of the inn for now, while I see to the young lady with the bleeding ailment. There is some advantage to being a woman among such rustic folk. Many of the women here will not seek out a male physician for their ills.
If my constitution holds, I may go south again for the winter. I care little for the snow of the northern lands.
