the crow

The sunlight beyond my closed eyelids paints the inside of my eyes red. Which day now?  ... is it hours or days ... my horse finds his own meandering way, I cannot help him or guide him. The loose stones click against his hooves. We are climbing, swaying in the saddle, weaker than a newborn, slumped over my belly. Where the crow and the girl and the dunlander are I have no knowledge. Mayhap he can follow my trail ... I am too enfeebled to care.

The Dunlander is certain he has located the second stone. Nestled like a ravenous cookoo in the soft bounty of the halflings' Shire. By report a pretty, placid land of nothing and no-one, populated by childlike bumbling farmers intent on buccolic pleasures. Insular, isolated and adrift in a fantasy where the sun always shines and the butter is as fat and yellow as their own creamy cows. For folk such as these, not even lesser Men, but for these bovine- bellied gardeners, the last blood of the North spends itself.

Let it be remembered - I gave her a choice.

I place my pen down, push the stopper back into the blue-black ink bottle, lean back into my chair. The lad quietly takes away my papers, placing them neatly to one side. He gathers them reverently now, as though anything I touch is imbued with some vital essence.

No time to think of what I have sown there. It is done.

But what is sown now?