A/N: I have decided to push myself in honor of the upcoming holiday. I'm going to forgo my usual practice of avoiding ships and try to write fourteen shorts at least tangentially related to romance/love/hearts/etc. So far I've written three, two mainly fluffy and one very . . . Not.
The title for this one came from Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay." With one obvious change, of course.
. . .
It was winter when she found him. The kind of winter where even the village children no longer cared for the snow and where the adults looked at the pitiful stocks of food and the distant spring and felt dread join hunger in gnawing at their bellies.
The winter had already claimed many of the elders, including her parents. It was just Hunith in their small hut now, Hunith with her shaking arms that couldn't carry enough firewood, Hunith with nothing but a small pot of gruel to eat every day.
And now there was a strange man sitting outside her door.
The snow was stirred up around him. He looked more like he'd collapsed there than chosen the spot. His hair was as tangled as a wild man's, and his eyes look lost as he stared down at the burns on his bare hands like he couldn't believe they were there.
Strange and wild, like the rumors coming over the border. Stranger still for the furs that wrapped around him and marked him as someone of note.
Hunith shivered in her own thin cloak.
The man started as if only just realizing she was there. "Is this - is this your house?" he asked hoarsely.
She forced herself to nod and wished that someone would brave the venting cold to come see what was happening.
The man looked at the door and then back to her, eyes desperate. "Could I - just for the night - Gaius said - "
Gaius? Her eyes went wide at the mention of her uncle.
Her parents were dead. It wouldn't be proper to let the man in.
And it was winter. The kind of winter where she couldn't afford to be kind.
But that was her father's voice talking, and her father was dead now, so she said, "I'll get the fire going," and she held the door open for him to stumble in.
Whatever life had animated him outside disappeared quickly. He ate what she handed him and slept where she pointed. He didn't say another word for a week.
When she handed him the axe, though, he came back with wood, and he watched her with the animals until he knew what to do. She started talking to fill the silence, simple stories about the village, and when that failed to get a reaction, she took to singing as they worked. It distracted her from the others' looks, and her guest always came to a closer semblance of life when she did.
She was humming as she ladled out the gruel for dinner when he finally came back from wherever he'd gone in his head.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
She jumped, but she smiled at him quickly.
He didn't seem to notice. He was studying the hut with pinched eyebrows, like he'd never seen it before.
It made her uncomfortable to think he was judging the meagerness there, so she spoke to break the silence. "You never told me your name."
He looked back at her, put a hand on his chest, and made a gesture that was almost a bow. "Balinor, my lady."
"Hunith," she corrected.
"Gaius's niece."
She nodded and sat. "Is my uncle likely to send more strange men down to a sit in the snow outside my house?"
