The Neverending Session was off elsewhere one quiet night in the Pub recently and Finch was tending the bar, so I stepped outside to play a few tunes to clear my head after several hours of doing the Pub accounts. I like being the Publican but doing the business side of it can be bloody boring. Though I do look forward to busman’s holidays with my wife Ingrid, the Estate Purchasing Agent who’s also our Steward, when we go off looking for interesting spirits for the Pub!
So as I started to play ‘The Changeling Reel,’ someone moving in the shadows caught my eye. And he was, even at first look, not human, as his skin was all very small overlapping leaves, so dark that they looked almost black, and his hair was made of dark green moss. I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t encountered him, or a kin of his, in our incarnation of the Wild Wood sometime back.
I watched as he stepped into the light cast by a nearby window in the Pub and pulled a fiddle from, well, nowhere, as he or one of his kin had done decades back when we first met. A fiddle made of living wood, it seemed, with strings of ivy stirring of their own accord, as there was no wind ‘tall.
With a gleam in his golden eyes, he matched me note for note as we played that tune and several more before we nodded to each other and he faded back into the dark. I finished off by playing ‘Banish Misfortune’ and went back to the Pub.
