================================== Bree Time ==================================
Real time: Thu Jul 15 20:59:01 2004
Bree time: Mid Afternoon 3:56 PM on Mersday of Autumn - September 8,1432
Moon Phase: Waning Gibbous Moon
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Breelands Weather
The mid afternoon autumn air is cool but pleasant around you. The day sky still dumps copious amounts of rain down upon you.

Common Room
This large and rectangular room serves the purpose of Common Room for the Prancing Pony. Red curtains drape down from large windows that look out to the west and the Great East Road, which runs outside the Inn. There are long tables with bench seats for the patrons in the center of the room. Nestled into the wall is a large fireplace, with several bundles of wood piled next to it.

Large bunches of glossy leaves cunningly woven into fat swags of bronze and red and yellow-gold festoon the walls; their undulating rhythm is punctuated by bright berries on branches, lending a festive air to the usually stolid Common Room. The red curtains that hang down from the windows are tied back, providing a good view of the Road outside.


Rain falls in sheets outside upon the thick windows of the Prancing Pony Inn. What was merely blurred before is now utterly indiscernable, though the windows look like white crystal against their dark wooden frames. While it is mid-afternoon, it might as well be evening for the number gathered in the common room today. Farmers have left their fields to the rain, and merchants have closed their shops early (or simply left them closed after lunch) until the rain abates.

It is from a ill-lit corner of the room, further shadowed by the haze of pipesmoke, that a pair of grey eyes watches the patrons in mild interest. The young woman looks as any traveller of long roads and many trails. Her garments are spattered with mud, the leather of her boots still darkened from the rain. The dampened cloak is draped over the back of a chair nearest the fire which burns low in the hearth. To those in Bree she is simply known as "Tir," and few pay her any mind upon her travels to Bree anymore...'.


Another young woman steps in and, taking a look around, makes her way through the crowded room looking for a seat. A few drunken farmers seem to want her to join their group, but she moves on, and eventually she finds herself toward the back of the room. She idly notes an empty chair near Tiriel. "Mind if I share yer table?" Her drawl is like the locals', and she seems not to know the woman already seated.


A low sound of voices arguing comes through the poorly-shut door. The murmuring is punctuated by a few raised words, easily heard.
"I didn't!"
"...work here..."
"...never!"
And a few minutes later, the door creaks open the rest of the way and a furiously scowling lad drips his way towards the fireplace.


As the other young woman makes way for her table, Tiriel leans to sit back against the chair, nodding as the other asks if she might join. "If you wish," she replies quietly, drawing the full mug of ale set before her away from the center of the table.
The sound of raised protest from another room then captures the woman's interest. And then, as the scowling lad approaches the fire's warmth, Tiriel brings the mug to her lips for a long sip, looking towards the hearth--and the lad.


There soon appears the silhouette of another figure within the doorway. A rougish man stops just within sight, and casts a long, silent glance at the folk about the room. A thick grey (and now soaked) hood covers his head from the rain; this he pulls back, and soon enough he is recognized. 'Stider' most call him in these parts, though there are other names not so becoming that he has been given by certain folk. He is commonly known to be one of the mysterious (some would say dangerous) Rangers.

He slowly paces the room, dodging a table here and there, and all the while dark glances are cast in his general direction by the locals. Whispers begin wherever he passes. Finally he comes to sit at a table on the opposite side of the room from the two women.


The second woman takes the empty seat, settling in comfortably and taking a better look around the room from this vantage point. Her gaze falls on the lad who entered so loudly, and she watches him for a moment.


Toby stands before the low blaze and stretches out his hands to its warmth. His shirtfront begins to steam slightly and he turns to warm his back. Defiant brown eyes are raised now (finally) to look around the room, meeting a few random gazes with a silent glare. Yet before his glance works its way over to where the two women are, it falls on the tall figure of the one known as Strider; and the boy's eyes widen, his face turning pale and losing its determined grimness. He takes an involuntary step backwards, all but landing in the flames; smothers a yelp of pain and dances quickly forward again. And red embarressment joins the almost comical play of emotions across his face.


Even though Tir's point of interest seems to be the ruffled young lad nigh the fireside, she casts a quick glance in the direction of the tall Ranger who has arrived. That glance might have lingered but for Toby's misstep.

Tiriel's reaction is immediate. She rises but halfway from her seat before seeing that the lad's flirtation with fire is arrested. Just as quickly, then, she sits back down, silver gaze narrowing.

"Are you alright then?" she asks him.
The words are quiet. Calm. Though her watchful mien continues.


Hanneth also looks concerned, but the other woman acts faster. When Tiriel speaks to the lad, Hanneth turns her attention to her fingernails, cleaning them a bit and keeping out of the situation.


A wary glance is cast upon the lad as Strider seats himself, but a raised brow is the only sign he has acknowledged Toby. The antics apparently over, the Ranger quietly removes a long wooden pipe from a pouch at his side, and lights it without much fanfare. A few wary glances are still being cast by the townsfolk to the dark corner in which he now sits. Odd, considering he has come here often in the past.

Yet Strider takes no notice of that fact, seemingly. He simply lifts his hand in a silent call for a tankard of ale.


"I'm fine." Toby swallows convulsively and sneaks another glance towards the ranger. "I-I'm fine," he repeats, but there is a tiny quaver to his voice, and his hand twitches once towards his hip. A darting look notes that there are two women to one side, one of whom has spoken to him; and then his eyes return irresistably to Strider.


Whispers run from table to table, heads bowing together then raising to peer towards the corner where the ranger sits; eyes shying from any possibility of catching his eye. The common room is oddly unsettled.


Following Toby's nervous glance towards the Ranger seated opposite them in the room, Tiriel nudges an empty chair out away from the table with her foot. "Move the cloak there, and have a seat if you want. Safer..." She almost conceals a wan smile, her glance once more flicking across the room before turning to Hanneth briefly. "The rain has driven us all indoors this day, it seems..." Once more she looks from Strider back to the young lad.


Hanneth turns to scoot her chair a bit further, not that she's close to the cloak-laden chair in the first place. She concentrates on her nails, working out a stubborn bit of dirt. She does glance over at Strider, like everyone else, though.


At last Strider's ale is brought. A young hobbit rushes out to his table, sets it down and is rewarded with a rather large coin as pennance. Yet he seems to have caught at least one eye, or several. As he raises the tankard to his lips he glances toward the fire and his gaze falls upon Toby, cautiously eyeing him.

"Yes?" he asks.


"I ain't a-scared of no witchery," Toby asserts, bold he no doubt wishes it to sound, and surely it would for his voice no longer quivers. But his face is white, so white the freckles stand out, and he fumbles for the cloak to move it. There is a soft sigh, as of many people letting out their breath together. Witches. Sorcery...
The ranger looks up, looks at /him/... speaks. Toby flinches and braces himself, one hand welded to the top of the chair, the other clenched about a dagger hilt at his waist. "Nothing," he says. "I didn't say nothing."


The ale passes the Ranger's lips, and down the hatch it goes. He shrugs, Strider, and with a sidelong glance to the two women across the room takes a draw from his pipe. Smoke is added to an already smoky room.


A glint of curiosity alights to Tir's gaze, and the young woman allows another half-halted smile. "Witchery?" she echoes softly. "What tales have come to Bree since I've been away?" she then wonders, though that curiosity fades quickly to vigilance as the lad's hand moves to grip the chair's top, and the other moves to his waist--out of sight.

"Come now." Tiriel's voice is soft, almost coaxing. "Come, friend. Let me buy you an ale, and you can tell me of these tales?"


The boy slides gingerly into the chair, turning it as he sits so that his back is not to the ranger across the way. "I'll take an ale," he says gruffly, and he at last looks at the woman long enough to see her.. and her companion. His face stiffens and he comes half out of the chair again, until some stray sound reminds him of Strider. He hesitates, then slumps back into the chair and glares at Hanneth. "T'weren't tales," he says sullenly. "I seen it myself."


No sound comes from Strider's corner to interrupt the lad's speech. He merely sips his ale, smokes his pipe, and casts an occassional glance about the room. Yet his eyes always come back to Toby, and he listens intently to what the boy has to say.


If Hanneth notices Toby's reaction to spotting her, she doesn't show it. Anyway, she's busy taking her just-delivered ale from the server.


Another ale is ordered before the server can slip away, and a curious glance is sent to Hanneth as well before Tir takes a sip of ale and sets the mug down in front of her. She turns it once in a slow circle as she considers Toby's declaration. "What, exactly, was it that you saw?" she wonders, allowing some surprise to show in the placid gaze.


"All them birds." Toby's gaze twitches from Hanneth to Strider and back again, and his fingers flex nervously around the handle of his dagger. "At the Healing House." The words come in fits and starts, interrupted by the need to watch every move two people are making; two people who happen to be on opposite sides of he himself. "With no mark on 'em."


Hanneth sips her ale, and finally looks back at the lad when he tells his story. Her nose wrinkles. "Tha's powerful strange," she agrees, quietly. It's as if she's just noticed Toby, or just been drawn in to the conversation by his words.


"Birds?" Tiriel takes another sip from her mug and nods to Toby to continue as the server sets a full mug of ale before the lad. "What sorts of birds....and what happened to them? You say you saw it happen?"

While the young woman is undoubtedly concerned at the other's report--or at least at his anxiety in reporting it--she maintains a steadiness of tone, of quiet, in her words, and a softness in her glance, even as it strays once more in the direction of the Ranger Strider.


"Blackbirds. And they was all dead." The dying fire snaps behind them and Toby jumps, then settles down with only one furtive look over his shoulder. "Every one of them." He takes a minute to look at Tiriel. "They was witched." The clunk of the mug distracts him for no longer than it takes for the fingers of his empty hand to curl around the handle and lift it, shaking slightly, to his lips.


Tir says nothing at first, brows lowering as she further considers the strange tale. She reaches a forefinger out to trace along a spilled circle of ale surrounding the base of her mug. "I once saw a very strange thing," she starts to say, as if about to weave a tale herself. "Not here in Bree," she is quick to say, her gaze flicking upwards to meet with Toby's before she continues. "But near enough. You see, an old woman liked to feed the birds that fluttered about her garden, so she set up a post and a sort of ...house...and filled it with seeds and nuts and dried pieces of bread."
Pausing, Tiriel takes a slow sip of ale before she continues.


Hanneth listens, sipping her ale, and is soon drawn toward the other woman's story.


Despite himself, Toby is enveigled into listening to Tiriel's tale, though his eyes never stray far, or for long, from the ranger who might at any moment and with no warning, kill him dead. It seems he has forgotten his feud with Hanneth, at least for the time being.


"Well..."

Tiriel continues her tale now, once more turning the mug in a slow circle--this time as she speaks. "One morning the old woman came out to find at least a dozen birds lying scattered in her garden. All quite dead." Tiriel looks to Toby, shakes her head, and continues. "She was distraught over the poor things, and buried each and every one of them under the spread of a great rosebush. "The next day, she came out to find yet more of her feathered friends fallen in the garden...some of which she had seen just a day before at the feeder. And so it was that the old woman looked inside the feeder and found that some of the seeds had grown moldy from the bread." The young woman takes one more sip of ale before she finishes her story. Solemn still, she continues.

"You see, the birds were poisoned from the food, and quite by mistake. And not a mark was left upon them...as you said. Mayhap this is what happened here?"


"Maybe they was poisoned," Toby says darkly, "But it were done by witching. Nobody else would do a thing like that, leaving 'em all about for a warning, like." He takes another deep swallow of his ale, darts a glance towards the peacefully smoking Strider and leans forward, trying to make the woman opposite him understand. "It weren't nothing natural. There was.." He shudders convulsively and lowers his voice. "..they was all /carrying/ things."


This admission gains yet a new curiosity from Tiriel who meets Toby's gaze and urges him to continue. "Carrying...what?" she wonders next.


"Poison things. Them plants and such that they use in their brews. For magicking people. It were a warning." Toby is all but whispering now, yet still his nervous gaze darts from person to person. No one is near enough to overhear, but..


Now a shade of disbelief comes to Tiriel's gaze. "Magicking?" The term almost seems to confuse her. "I've never heard of such things in Bree, for all the time I've visited here. Who is it who's been speaking of ...magicking?" she asks, clearly intrigued by the very idea. "And what sorts of plants and brews?"
The young woman chuckles a little (is she amused?) and taps at her chin before quelling a smile. "I think someone's been trying to scare you, Master....?" She fishes for a name. "And they are doing a very good job of it. The only 'brew' to be found in Bree is Barliman's best. Or at least so it's been said for years now."
Her smile is warm and assuring.


Toby's expression wavers and settles into a resentful glower. "Witching," he says sullenly. "And I ain't scared." He drains the mug, plants it on the table with loud clunk and shoves his chair away from the table, not without another glance at Aragorn. "I don't know what sorts they were, not by names like. But nobody'd go putting dead birds out around the healer's and filling their beaks with them plants to try and just scare me. It were a warning."


The smile fades a little as Toby's disquiet is unassuaged by Tir's reassurances. She then leans forward a little in attempt to meet the other's gaze. "I'd be scared, I think," she says softly, nodding her head. "But tell me...who has been talking of 'witching' in Bree? For it's not been a subject ever before...."
Even more than the loss of the birds, it might be this that concerns Tiriel most.


"Everybody," Toby says, a little startled. "Everybody's talking about it. They don't all of them think it's so," he clarifies. "Granny says it's all foolishness and nonsense."


Tiriel sits back once more and sends her glance over her shoulder to the small windowpane behind her. The rain still falls, though in less of a downpour now. Taking a final, long, drink from her mug, the young woman sets the mug down and pushes it slowly away to the center of the table. "We do know the birds are dead," she finally says, the lowered grey gaze a veil to the thoughts working behind it. "If uncertain of how or why...
"Do you have any of these leaves...these plants that were found among them?" Tir wonders, looking quickly to Toby. "I know some lore of herbs, myself, but I'd have to see them to know what they were--"

"But how did you know that these plants there were carrying were used in ...special brews?" She wonders suddenly.


The boy settles back into his chair, after looking carefully around the room, with special attention paid to the shadowed corner that holds a ranger. "Because they said so," he answers. "No, I ain't got any of them, they maybe do at the Healer's. I saw 'em dead," he repeats. "With no marks on 'em or nothing. Like they just fell from the sky, dead."


"Who said so?"
It is almost a whisper that Tiriel offers, restraint cooling persistence to concern.


"Everybody," Toby repeats, baffled. "I told you that already. I heard it from," he pauses to think. "A man in here once, and some other folks in the market, I overheard 'em. Everybody. Mam and Pop were talking about it at home when they didn't think I heard them."


The young woman merely nods, her thoughts still tangled somewhere behind the lowered gaze. A small smile is offered, and then one more nod of her head. "I might go looking for those herbs now," she says at last, rising from her seat and reaching for her cloak. "My name is Tir," she then offers, looking to Toby.
"I'll be staying here at the Pony for a few days, waiting for my brothers. If you hear anything more about this...these birds...you'll tell me when you see me, won't you? If they have been poisoned from something they've eaten, I don't want my horse to be eating the same..."


"I wouldn't feed the horses nothing like that," Toby says indignantly. He looks at her suspicously, then gives a short reluctant nod. "If'n I hear something else," he agrees.


"I thank you," Tir says, unflustered by the other's indignance. She retrieves a backpack from underneath the table, and sweeps her cloak over her left shoulder. After offering one more barely perceptible smile to the lad, it might be noticed that hardly a sound is heard of the young woman's footfalls as she starts across the common room and towards the door....


And Toby is left by the coals of the once-bright fire, to brood and to watch. Though how long he will remain in the same (rapidly emptying) room as Strider is up for betting.