Tattercoat Bard

New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

(Yes, if you want to make me an icon to get me to write a flash about it, you can. In that case, I’ll even write 2x as much!)

I’m starting with DW, in alphabetical order. Today’s icon:

Stranded World, Autumn.

Icon & Art by Djinni

Also [community profile] dailyprompt “perched precariously on a ladder” and “beautiful morning”.

This is the prequel to Love Letters and Colder Weather.

“Beautiful morning, m’lady.” The bard passing through waved up at Autumn, who, perched precariously on a ladder, was trying to get her sign hung.

“You hast a strange idea of beautiful,” she muttered; the sky was threatening rain and the wind was ripping at her sign. And he… she glanced at him again, as he climbed up the other side of her booth and reached for the sign. “Thou’rt new, too.”

“Nay, for ‘new’ would suggest someone who was planning to stay, and I am but a vagabond knave, a tattercoat bard.” He sketched a one-handed bow. “They call me Ian the Inglorious.”

“I’m sure they do,” she smirked. “They call me Autumn.”

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold,/When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang,” he recited, and then shook his head. “Nay, thou art ‘more lovely and more temperate’ than even a summer’s day, and no more agéd than a Spring morn.”

“Thou art truly golden-tongued,” she murmured, but he had gotten her sign straightened while he mangled the Bard. “But Spring and Summer art my sisters, and I am the leaves that fall in harvest time.”

“But I hear,” he continued, leaping down from his perch to offer her an entirely unnecessary hand, “that the fruits of early Autumn are the sweetest, the best for the longer to savor them, to wait. And I, Lady Autumn, have been waiting for your like for quite some time.”

Savoring the flattery, Autumn took his hand.

~~

Tattercoats is abusing Shakespeare’s Sonnets 18 and 73.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/129329.html. You can comment here or there.

0 thoughts on “Tattercoat Bard

  1. Ah, who doesn’t love a silver tongued bard? That is a nice little scene. I’m not sure why Autumn is so disparaging of her looks…

      • You’re right. I was reading this while also watching some TV, and missed something: “You hast a strange idea of beautiful,” she muttered; the sky was threatening rain and the wind was ripping at her sign. I hadn’t realized she was responding to his comments on the weather (I read the “beautiful” as aimed at her). Ooops!

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