[piosenniel]

Berilac

Lily and Kari hung back with Berilac for a while, watching the Ranger as he sketched the hole that Willowfain had shown him. Willowfain walked closely alongside the Hobbit, her finger darting out to point out the places where the hole entered the hedge and then exited on the outer side. The dike at the exit point, she had said, was all crumbly and the ditch nearly filled in there. It was easy to scramble across it to play in the forested lands that side of Bree.

Soon, all the children had surged ahead of him again. There were a number of crows perched along the top of the hedge, at this far northern section of it, and they squawked and shook their feathers at the little group as they passed by. Kari threw her apple core up to them, and one of them sailed toward the fruity missile, catching it neatly in his mouth. The others raised a ruckus and squawked louder at the group. They were rewarded with a barrage of cores flying in the air – some caught by the clever crows, some falling back to the ground to be fallen on themselves by the ever hungry birds.

They drew in sight of the gatekeeper’s lodge for the Northgate. His high stool, was empty, Berilac noted, and the door to the lodge was ajar, and swung slowly back and forth on its hinges when the breezes reached it. ‘Where is he?!’ muttered, the Ranger, as he shaded his eyes, peering toward the gate.

It was Mondy who tugged at his sleeve and pointed back in the direction of the Inn. ‘He goes every afternoon to the Prancing Pony. Same time – when the sun’s just about where it is now. Gets himself a skin of Ale, talks to the fellows who sit about on the Inn steps; then; he wanders back to the lodge and settles in for the night.’ Berilac filed this appalling bit of information away, to be shared later with the Mayor and with Rosco.

His attention was drawn away from this problem by an insistent tug on the sleeve from one of the other children . . .