She knew that some folk said she was a witch.

It was no great surprise, really. Any excuse to talk about any of her family was gobbled up by gossips, and what else could she be with hair red like a peppered pumpkin? Everyone knew witches had hair like that. Except when they had black hair. But oftentimes, at least, red was a signifier. Witch, witch, little Ruby Gardner is a witch.

It annoyed her when these things were said, because she wasn't little and there was a large difference between being 'the youngest of the girls' and being 'perpetually thought of as eleven'. She was twenty-nine, her Uncle Pippin had been no older when he set off on the Quest. Ruby liked words that were capitalised.

Anyway, she preferred to think of her hair as red like copper, rather than peppered pumpkin.

If the gossips had seen her out walking in the forest one extremely cold winter morning, chasing the mists her breath made from clearing to clearing, they would have chalked it up to queer witch behaviour, or the more use-worn queer-gardner-behaviour answer that still got pulled out as often as possible. Really, Ruby was just running away, which was a regular event. She didn't go that far, really. Only far enough that it seemed she could keep going and have adventures if the fancy took her.

One day, she told herself, she would keep running.

Her parents knew where she went, of course. Her dad would tap and the ice-reddened toes on her feet and say "Looks like our Ruby's been out witchin' again," and make her sit down by the fire in the study, which was always extra-warm. Uncle Frodo would read her bits and pieces from stories, and Ruby would feel an itch begin down past her ankles; she wanted to gallop through the tales and knock over crockery, tweak the noses of kings with no clothes and help Hansel and Gretel catch a proper dinner so they didn't eat so much gingerbread.

The stories that made her most irritated were the ones about those people unlucky enough to fall in love with Elves, and the Elves silly enough to return the favour. It really did seem far too much trouble, there was so much wailing and gnashing of teeth and shining clean ladies who decided to spend time with men who could do with a bath. There was a story that some of her cousins and siblings had made up, years and years ago, about an Elf and a hobbit, and her Uncle had once confessed to Ruby that parts of this tale were actually a true thing that the story-making children had plucked from their memories without realising and given a happy ending.

And it, unlike the ones about Beren and Luthien (who were very brave but a bit too fond of poetry) and Aragorn and Arwen (who were perfectly sensible nice people on their own whom Ruby liked very much but got so dreadfully goopy when they were together), was not a story of something that ended happily ever after. Which Ruby thought was possibly a truer kind of ending, if stories from the real world can hold different degrees of the truth. After all, Elves understood much better than ordinary people what 'ever after' was.

So even if it wasn't a nice ending, to say that the hobbit maiden had never felt deserving of such a beautiful lover, and that the Elf princess had grown restless with such a simple friend, and that their love had slowly faded back into the air like breath on a winter morning... well, it was better to be true than to be nice, wasn't it?

"Ah, Ruby," Uncle Frodo had said when she voiced these objections. Uncle Frodo was old, older even than Mum and Dad, but his eyes were still twinkly. "You're not thinking about the story. Histories are a different matter, the writing-down of what really happened takes a different part of your head. In stories, things aren't just what happened, they're things disguised as other things. Symbols and the like."

Ruby nodded. She'd heard this sort of argument before.

"Yes, but Uncle, why have the lovers live happily ever after? Nobody really believes that happens to anybody."

Uncle Frodo smiled one of his goopy smiles that meant he'd stopped paying attention to the conversation and was thinking about Mum and Dad. Ruby cleared her throat loudly.

"You're right, Ruby. There's no such thing as just 'happily ever after'. But love is so big, so powerful and strong, that it feels like it could never ever be broken by anything. Sometimes that feeling lasts for someone's whole life, even when they're arguing about messes or money or things like that. And sometimes it doesn't last very long at all, but the hugeness of the feeling made it as big as forever, even if it was only for a little while. You can't write something like that in a story-book - they lived happily and were very very in love and then their stories went apart as easily as they had come together - that sounds too much like a sad ending. Most people don't want to think that stories stop where they do because that's the moment where the happiness feels like it will be forever."

Ruby contemplated this. "No offense meant here, but you and Dad and Mum are still stuck together. I mean, I don't know if I'd call you happily-ever-after, you all make too many jokes about each other and do too much scolding, but in your book it's the other sort of ending. Why?"

"That was a story about something else. It's mostly a history, some of the rougher edges rubbed smooth but not really very different from what actually happened. And when I wrote that ending, it seemed like that was what was going to happen, and it felt right that the whole thing should finish like that. It wasn't a neat story, after all, like a fairy-tale. It was messy and difficult and sometimes it was difficult to tell who was bad and who was good, because nobody's really one or the other outside books. And some parts were long, and some parts were sad, and some parts were silly and strange, but I left all those things in because I wanted people to understand that real things aren't like stories. And that ending... even though, as you say, it turned out not-true after all... it was right for the story. Because it said that, sometimes, happily-ever-afters are just too complicated no matter how much you want them. I wanted people to think about that for a change."

This made sense, somewhat, to Ruby, so she didn't argue. Uncle Frodo blew his nose and blinked a bit, and pretended that the fire was smoking up the room again.

"Stories teach us, that's their purpose. They're lessons for the heart, like facts are lessons for the head. People have been telling lies in stories in order to make the truth clearer for thousands of years. Do you honestly think that Maglor the Elf still wanders the seashores, regret and sorrow weighing him down? He was a storyteller himself, and understood that this was the ending people needed to hear about - otherwise the story wouldn't last the ages, and it was a tale worth remembering. People have a notion that unhappy endings are somehow weightier and more important than the other kind. No, he went home eventually, for even the ageless cannot bear a grudge forever. But you certainly didn't hear that from me, and I certainly didn't hear that from a Queen in Gondor who still keeps an eye on the race she grew up with."

"Didn't hear what, Uncle?" Ruby deadpanned, then sighed. "Stories are so tricksy. I'd much rather have a real adventure, where a thing happens or it doesn't. Symbols and mettyfors make my head hurt."

"Sore head, sore feet! Sounds to me like you're beyond repair, Ruby-blue. We'll have to give up on you, I'm afraid. Nothing we can do."

"Oh ho, if that's the case then I'll just sit here by your fire and ask irritating questions all day long, and you'll rue the day you washed your hands of my fate. Not that you actually do much hand-washing, your nails are horrid. There's moss under them, I'm sure."

"There is not!" Uncle Frodo laughed, pretending outrage. "Moss, indeed. There's a romantic notion for a story, Bronwe athan Harthad and his mossy fingernails."

"Perhaps I'll write just that, someday. When I'm through with real adventures, I'll write about them," Ruby said. "Stories about witches, and loves that aren't forever but are worth remembering anyway."

Uncle Frodo smiled, and promised to put aside a pot of ink for her eventual use.

~

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