Fair Meadows father.
‘Tis I, Furlong, who puts ink to page in absence.
I have reached firm ground and safe boarding.
My journey was longer and further than we could have ever imagined. I know my letter’s delay must have caused you much grief.
It is many wide clearing we must grow accustomed to crossing, as our letters travel.
But,
Alas, I am alive and well. My journey has already yielded days’ payments beyond any knight we know. And now I have a few stories that could bend the ears of any order of chivalry.
I have two treasures of my very own, a quarter staff like the ones they let us use to train the horses and a buckler of the finest quality. I can’t wait to show my brothers and sisters.
Give them my love, also let them know I slept in a real bed inside a room that had some stone walls. Like the stories of castles, it had more than one ground above another.
Alas, it was not all for me alone.
I find myself working with three fine compatriots with a distasteful aversion to mining. Every time I ask about the mounds of turf as high as the clouds and the paths to walk inside those stacks of green, they grow angry, or quiet and disturbed. A mountain mine must be an awful place. My new friend Kolbus Daytrimagin had the most words for it. A young lad of only 17 star wobbles was working there too, so it could not be that bad. I would suspect they swore him to an oath of silence. He may yet tell me of his minefull employment. But the last of our group speaks at length about the mine, yet saying nothing I understand or of substance about it, I’m told this is how royals speak. It is no longer a wonder why so many knights go mad as a hatter.
Kolbus and I helped set up for a gathering of clans called “the rat lighting festival” (see reverse side for flier) there are more people here on a regular day than any gathering I have seen in my 22 s-wobbles and im worried for the festival day when there are more folks to come. They have trampled their turf to dust as it is now.
But trample on they must, for they paid us an uncut silver piece, each for the efforts of the first third of a sod warming cycle.
The people here have lots of money and they are especially fond of fire.
Here Their clergy of the six pillars even burned a woman here as some of the crowd cheered. I thought it was a warm-up act to the rat lighting festival, but they listed her charges as sedition, witchcraft and heresy. Then they actually burned a perfectly good woman. Apparently, they have many to spare.
Anyway, I have enclosed two pages of paper for you and my sidling to write back. Please tell my brothers to ignore the side that asks for honorable men seeking glory and fame to join. They are far too young and the flier is deceitfully bitter, in fact.
Even if it pays a life’s fortune, my compatriots are not interested because it would take them too close to their old mining jobs and some forest they seem scared of.
Peaceful meadows father my page runneth out, furlong kohl