~oOo~
A cloaked woman passed through a field thick with gray mist. Around her in intervals were half circles of bundled hay that rose above the fog as though the whorls of great mollusk shells.
The woman wore over her head a thick wool scarf as she focused on her steps. There was a satchel over her shoulder and rucksack on her back. As she traversed through the fog, she kept the bag that rested near her thigh protectively stilled with a hand, as though she worried it would be taken from her or that it might spill its hard-won contents.
Rain had fallen some time before, and her wet skirts were close to her legs. The woman, Morgan, was making her way to her house. It was a short distance away, beneath a canopy of trees in a forest beyond the edge of the field.
The area where she lived was sealed away from the rest of the woods. The high branches and leaves of the copses above her cottage acted as a shelter, keeping the small circular area beneath them free from the rain. A sanctuary for both herself and her husband.
As she slipped between the thin trunks to enter the glen, she could smell woodsmoke, dense and strangely calming in the cool air.
When she came to be directly outside the cottage, she could hear her husband exclaim as he exited its door and rushed to her with a blanket in his hands. He'd heard her approaching steps as she plowed through the thick carpet of leaves. "Oh love, I knew you'd be soaked." He took the bags from her shoulder and back, and led her to sit by the fire. "Get out of those wet clothes. I'll get you into something clean and warm."
Morgan complied, wanting to feel the fire closer to her skin. He took her wet dress, cloak and scarf and threw them over a screen to dry. Drops of rain fell from them and to the worn dirt path beneath.
He returned with a plain off-white tunic and dark brown sweater. Frik bent to hand her the smaller accouterments, gray and red stripped socks, fingerless gloves, and as he did so Morgan traced his ears to their pointed tips.
He smiled as he shakily moved back to tend to a cauldron hanging over the fire. She liked that his face still colored with her touch, even after all this time. She grinned to herself, her crooked teeth resting on her lower lip. The scent of tea and soap saturated the clothes she slipped on over her long, straight hair.
"You really should be more careful when you go out. I don't want you to get sick," Frik said as he looked to the contents of the cauldron, a stew to which he added a few pinches of spices. The brown curls of his hair moved with the breeze.
"I'll be fine, Fwik. You welly do fwet too much."
"Maybe I do." He paused. "But you mean an awful lot to me." Frik brought to his wife a restorative along with her dinner of stew and bread in a bowl fashioned from a knot of wood. He dished out some stew for himself and sat beside her. On a more airy note, he asked, "So, what did you find on your travels today?"
Morgan answered without waiting first to swallow. "Oh lots of things. Some seeds, some woots and beawwies. Lots of things."
Before he could respond she raised and drug the two bags she'd been carrying toward the fire. She returned to her seat, and setting down her bowl, started rummaging through the pockets of the rucksack, bending from her waist, her chest pressed against her knees. She unrolled a square of cloth and dropped onto it a handful of stones she'd found glittering in a creek bed.
At the right angle, spots of iridescence could be seen against the gray of their bodies, shining through as though soft tissue. "I found those," she said, her voice deepened with exhaustion, "and these." Another group of stones fell. The second cluster were brown water smoothed pebbles.
Frik picked one from the mass and turned it over in his hands. "Choice specimens, really, Morgan."
Morgan knew her husband had now come to expect an assortment of stone gifts on her return trips from market. She'd collected them with him in mind, hearing his praise in her mind like the lyrics of a song as she walked.
These rocks, like the others found before them, would be kept on a shelf by their bed. A collection of hundreds of stones bedded in moss. Morgan had heard Frik confess that he believed the stones in some way protected them. That they signified another level of their relationship. One that couldn't be spoken.
As Frik fingered the stones and held them to the light, Morgan continued to search her bags.
"See what I found at mawket." She removed a small collection of items she'd discovered between stalls that would otherwise be discarded. Rubbish to most.
As she looked over her spoils, her eyes gleamed to see them anew, having forgotten some. She picked up a painted clay bead and placed it in her pocket.
She set on display her purchases as well, two neat little bottles of powder, some ribbon.
Frik sighed as he used a piece of bread to clean his bowl. "I do wish you would have let me come along."
~oOo~