things you said under the stars and in the grass

Another of the ones @atomicpen asked for:

things you said under the stars and in the grass

She leaned heavily on her staff as she made her way through the kitchen and out into the garden. Not content to sit on her favorite bench in the moonlight and smell the blooming flowers, she continued onward, though the ground was damp and uneven beneath her slipper-shod feet. She plucked a few sprigs of the Andraste’s Grace she found near the gate and shoved them into one of her voluminous pockets.

With one moon full and the other waxing, moonlight painted the hills silver. She stumbled when her staff misjudged the depth of a depression in the grass—a rabbit’s warren, perhaps, or one of the holes the dogs were forever digging. By the time she reached the top of the knoll, the one with the view out over the lake in one direction and all the way to the village in the other, sweat beaded on her brow and her breath came heavy. She eased herself to the ground, mindful of the sore hip taking its sweet time healing, and leaned her aching back against the stone plinth.

“You missed quite the row tonight, love,” she said, weary eyes finding and following the lines of constellations the way she’d done with the astrariums all those years ago. The specks were blurrier than they’d been; perhaps Cassie was right and spectacles would solve the problem. “Livvie’s eldest wants to go to Seheron. Livvie’s having none of it. Then Dany said he might join his nephew for the trip, and poor Livvie turned the most unhealthy shade of puce. She kept looking to me to say something, but what could I say? When I was Rowan’s age I was traipsing the length and breadth of Thedas closing rifts with a magic-marked hand.” She sighed, a faint smile pulling at her lips at the memory. “You’d have known what to say, I think. You always do. Did.”

She closed her eyes, hiding the blurred stars from sight, closing her hand in the grass as if it were a hand she could hold. For another hour, she sat in the darkness, telling him the events of her day, the contents of her messages, the stresses and the struggles and the antics of the children. Finally, when the ache of her bones could be ignored no longer, she heaved herself once again to her feet, letting her staff take even more of her weight than it had before.

Pressing her lips to the cold stone grave marker, she emptied her pockets of the flowers she carried, turned, and began to retrace her steps home.