Introduction to Nimuviel’s Diaries

She makes a neat pile out of the maps they’ve been studying the greater part of the day, binds them together with a string of ribbon and with a tired smile pushes them into Boridhren’s hands. ‘No, do take them, I have no use for them now. You may bring them back when you are ready.’ She leads her kinsman to the door of her home, they exchange words of farewell; noticing the purplish light of the evening sky she realises that she has been awake for two days and a night with no rest. She waits a few moments while Boridhren walks down the lane that leads out of the valley, watching him until he has disappeared from her sight entirely, the last rays of the sun upon the back of his head making his hair appear to be shining bronze thread. She turns back inside but leaves the door open for the sake of cool air. There are half-empty cups of wine on the table between the assortment of maps, documents and letters; cups also that they had drunk tea out of, leaving an inch of water in the bottom with the cold dregs of tea-leaves; two plates with the crumbled remains of a loaf of bread; a bowl empty of fruit except for a few berries that look like they are past their best. Suddenly there is silence. Standing between the paper-strewn table and the fire place in the back of the room, she hears the absence of Boridhren’s voice; the void is barely filled with the soft whispering between the wind and the grass and the trees outside in her garden. No one here. The warmth of the smouldering embers in the fire place press upon the left side of her face like a stifling blanket; the coolness of the evening air rolling in through the door brushes her right cheek like a plume of goose feathers. Her songbird twitters. She sets to collecting the cups and plates and moves into the pantry to leave them there in a basin of day-old water. A sudden gust of wind breathes through the house. The sound of fluttering paper makes her hurry back into the main room. The table is now near-empty: maps, letters, documents spread over the floor. She quickly closes the front door and begins to collect the assortment of paperwork, piling them one upon another without much regard for date or urgency of reply. Strewn around the fire place is a collection of sheets she recognizes as written by her own hand. The date above most of them is that of four years ago. Remembering it as the time she joined the Reniolwaith, she puts the pile of collected documents to one side, takes a candle from the table and puts it down by her side next to the fire place. Lying down on her front on a rug, she leafs through the pages by the light of the candle and the smouldering embers in the hearth. At first skipping through the pages at a glance, she stops to read them more carefully more and more often, remembering their contents as she arranges them to date. Outside, the sun has now set, and night has fallen.