Author’s Note: This piece was shaped with a little help from AI. It provided assistance on things like the structuring, some names, shortening some verbose language/ideas as I'd written, and gave me the odd turn of phrase here and there. The heart and shape of the story are my own, but I realise it is important to be transparent about my use of AI support in producing it ultimately.
Though it is not necessary to read it beforehand, this story follows on from "The Ferry's Wrath", the concluding part to a three-part story within a chronicle series called 'Signs Along the Road'.
“Healing by the Brandywine”
The battle at the Bucklebury Ferry had left Naridalis with more than a scattering of bruises. A crossbow bolt had pierced her just below the shoulder, and several of her ribs were broken. The wounds were deep and slow to heal, and the hobbits of Buckland would not hear of her setting out east until she had mended.
Mistress Willowdell, a hobbit healer known more for tending kitchen burns and winter coughs than combat wounds, quietly took charge of her care. Her little house smelled of sweet herbs, beeswax, and the damp of the nearby riverbank. Willowdell’s hands were gentle but steady as she worked, dabbing a mix of crushed leaves and warm salve over the bruises. She spoke of the weather, the cost of flour, and which neighbour’s geese had gone wandering, but never of the fight at the ferry. Naridalis found comfort in that, a kindness she had not known she was missing, the way the talk stayed with the small and ordinary.
For a week she kept mostly to the healer’s garden, moving between the shade of the trellises and the sunny patch where mint and thyme grew wild. Willowdell would give her small tasks, like peeling potatoes or tying up bean-stalks, and Naridalis found her limbs loosening with the work.
She began to see that this was the hobbit way of healing. They did not push with sharp words or stern commands. Instead, they wove you back into the pattern of their days, letting you mend almost without noticing. A cup of tea set down beside you before you realised you were thirsty, a stool placed just so when your legs began to tire, a joke told at the right moment to draw out a laugh you had not thought was in you. It was not the deep, watchful stillness of Lothlórien, where rest came in the unbroken rhythm of golden light through the leaves. Here the rest came in motion, in small labours and easy company, in being needed for something simple and real. It worked its own quiet magic, and she could feel it taking hold of her.
When her strength returned enough for longer walks, she began joining a Bounder patrol along the High Hay. The hedge rose high and close, all around Buckland, a wall of living green with bramble at its roots, and the Old Forest pressing on the east side like a sleeping animal that might wake at any moment. The hobbits kept to a steady pace, their eyes always glancing to the treeline, but their voices carried easily along the path. They teased one another, shared oatcakes from their pockets, and greeted every farmer they passed as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do so while keeping watch.
Sometimes they would pause to check a loose gate or mend a gap in a fence where a sheep had nosed its way through. Naridalis lent her hands to the work, easing fenceposts into place, her fingers finding the rhythm of the task without thought. It was peaceful. The hobbits never hurried, but neither did they dawdle; it was a kind of vigilance she recognised, steady and unshowy, yet sure in its purpose.
She matched their pace, her bow slung over her shoulder, and found that each day she could walk a little further before the ache in her ribs made itself known. She was learning again how to breathe deep without pain, how to draw the bowstring without hesitation. Her steps grew easier, her balance surer, until she no longer felt like a guest walking among them but part of the patrol itself.
In the evenings she would return to Willowdell’s hearth, tired but with a tiredness that came from satisfying effort rather than from injury. The healer would always set down a steaming mug of hot tea laced with a bitter herb, and as Naridalis drank it she could feel the knots in her muscles loosening, the warmth settling into her bones. By the time she lay down to sleep, the ache of the day had already begun to fade, replaced by a quiet sense that she was finding her way back to her strength.
In Lothlórien, healing had always been bound to the slow turn of light through the leaves, a golden sameness that blurred the passing of days and let wounds mend without the press of time. The air there had been hushed and still, the great trees holding their own quiet counsel, and the very light seemed to guard and warm those beneath it.
Buckland was nothing like it. The air here was full of kitchen smoke and the scent of stewing suppers, river-mist drifting low over the water at dawn, the cries of chickens and sheep, and the chatter of hobbits who measured the year by seed-sowing, haymaking, and harvest feasts. Children’s voices rang out in the lanes, dogs barked from sunlit yards, and even in the cool of evening there was always the faint thump of a door opening somewhere nearby as visitors came or went.
And yet, for all its noise and motion, there was a likeness in spirit. Here too was a power that could mend, if one let it in. Not by stilling the world into timelessness, but by letting time move naturally around you, its rhythms wrapping about your own until hurt no longer found a place to rest in your bones.
In Buckland, the healing came from being drawn into that pattern: accepting a neighbour’s gift of something warm from the oven, pausing to talk with a farmer mending a fence, listening to a fiddler play in the inn while the fire cracked and mugs clinked on the table. The life here did not pause for Naridalis, but it welcomed her to walk alongside it.
In this green-hedged far corner of the Shire, time moved to the pace of hearth and harvest. Days were marked not by urgency, but by the next meal to share, the next field to turn, the next round of ale to pour. Naridalis felt herself settling into it, and in that steady warmth, she began to find the road back to herself.
The day would come when she must take up her pack once more and turn her steps east, back to the East Road and the work that waited along it. For now, she let the thought rest. When she left, she would carry with her the Brandywine’s steady flow, the laughter in Buckland’s lanes, and the quiet care of its people - a reminder that strength takes many shapes, and that healing can be found in the most unlikely of places, if one is willing to let it in.
For more stories associated with this series, see 'Signs Along the Road'
