[For the opposite perspective of the same moment in time, because I enjoy torturing the made-up people in my head, see this.
Boats and Birds - Gregory and the Hawk]
Orenn Orennson was, generally, an easily contented man. For the entirety of his life, he had lived the same routine with relatively few interruptions – a routine whose greatest worry was whether the cows had got out the east fence or the yearling colts had got into the feed barn and how much rain would fall during the summer. It was a good life, peaceful and respectable and one which would have been good enough to spend the rest of his days living out.
It had been enough, before Nauraa upended things.
It is odd, to think that she of all people could upend anything at all – reserved, non-confrontational, nearly terrified of causing a scene. She had slipped into Orenn’s life so seamlessly that it was startling. Without ever realizing it, waiting for the woman at the end of the road just where the trees thinned out had become as much a part of his day as checking the waters in the pastures or picking stalls. There had been no upheaval, no turmoil, no giddy excitement. She was simply there, as though she always had been.
The thought worries him now, as the cart-wheels rattle up and down in the bumps in the road left by the last storm. How empty would his life seem when she was gone?
It is rare that he has this much time to think on the ride to the farm, since Nauraa generally has some question or comment or story to tell. Today, though, she is staring off across the field and towards the forest. She gets like this sometimes, and Orenn wishes he could see whatever far-off landscape she walks through in her own memory. He wonders, of course, but never asks. He thinks he is afraid of how she will answer if he does.
She will say she is going home, or going to Gondor, or someplace else in the great wide rest of the world. For all her talk about not being a fighter or an adventurer, there is something in her that calls her elsewhere. Bree could no more shut her in than you could pen in a stallion used to hills and plains. Half the time he waits for her at the end of the road or the gate to the city, a part of him wonders whether this is the day she will leave and not come back. The thought makes him miserable. He had been perfectly content before she arrived, perfectly satisfied with the horses and the farm and the same beginning and ending to every single day. But there is something in her eyes when she gets like this, some wistfulness for something he cannot understand because he has never seen it, and his heart hurts that he has no part in it. Her heart is somewhere else, some place no farrier’s son could ever reach for all the trying in the world.
This is not her home. It could be, he thinks. He sees the way she looks off into the distance at nothing, but he also sees the way she offers to help with the horses and feeds them her extra sweet rolls when she thinks no one is looking. He sees the way she has taken the old abandoned house in the woods and made it into a place a person could actually live. The way she has started to dress like the women of Bree-land, but never stopped doing her hair as she always had. The fact that when they take the horses out, just the two of them, she doesn’t look so far away. He sees her, not as an outsider like she thinks of herself, but as a friend.
No, friend is not quite the right word for her, either.
With this disquieting personal realization, the cart rumbles up to his house, the smaller children already shrieking and waving at the door, and he helps Nauraa down the same as every other day. When her eyes meet his, she smiles, but he wishes she would really look at him – not in the cursory way of practiced habit, but he thinks that if she held his gaze just long enough, he could catch a glimpse of whatever far-off somewhere she walks through in her mind. For all her talk, it is he who has no restlessness for the road, but wherever that somewhere is, he reckons he would follow her there if it meant walking off the far edge of the world.
When Nauraa shepherds his siblings into the house, he waits a while outside. Part of him wants her to recognize his absence, to want him there, to turn and ask him to follow.
She does not. He goes in alone.
