Sam Linnfer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necessary_child) wrote2021-04-05 11:22 pm
necessary_child) wrote2021-04-05 11:22 pm
Extract from Chapter One: The Linguist
"An eagle scared of heights." That was how one colleague summed up Sam Linnfer. "Probably has a mad wife in the attic, too."
Like all rumours, in time this comment circulated back to Sam, whose boyish face split in a grin of delight.
If there was one thing Sam liked about working as... whatever he was, he enjoyed the mystery accorded him by other people. It gave him great satisfaction to take the same trains, eat the same meals, wait at the same bus stops, and still be above it all, if only in the wild, fantastical tales told by everyone around him.
Though Sam was indeed different, everybody throughout the university somehow managed to know him. His sparky smile and disregard of authority endeared him to the undergraduates, and certainly he was bored at the very idea of the life led by the dons, as they ambled through a daily ritual whose high point seemed by exchanging Latin puns while dining in hall. But neither did Sam truly resemble a student, for despite his seeming youth he had an air of command, one that came from a long, unsung history.
He mostly wore black- a black coat buttoned up around a baggy black jumper, worn over a shapeless black shirt. Sam wore bad clothes as a kind of protection, which no-one had yet penetrated. People speculated, most of them inaccurately, on exactly what shape he was beneath all those layers. The idea that he wore black from vanity never survived a first meeting: with these clothes went a pair of terrible old trainers, and a scruffy blue and grey scarf hand-knitted for him by some person unknown. The whole effect was finished off by cuffs that were never done up, shirt buttons that didn't match and sometimes a jacket, haphazardly patched, that gave him the look of a fashionable scarecrow.
To round off this character, whose contradictions so attracted other people. He had thick black hair, and eyes so dark that they too seemed black. Not that many had met Sam's gaze for long enough to confirm this, since his gaze was something of unrivalled intensity. Though his voice bore the slightest accent, no one was sure where that accent came from. Some said his speech was northern; others held that there must be a touch of Gaelic in him. At one point he was credited with the ghost of a Welsh accent, so it became rumoured that Sam Linnfer had grown up in the wild Snowdonian mountains. A few who cherished difference in any form said he had to be a gypsy. Sam himself, when questioned on his past, was devious.
Like all rumours, in time this comment circulated back to Sam, whose boyish face split in a grin of delight.
If there was one thing Sam liked about working as... whatever he was, he enjoyed the mystery accorded him by other people. It gave him great satisfaction to take the same trains, eat the same meals, wait at the same bus stops, and still be above it all, if only in the wild, fantastical tales told by everyone around him.
Though Sam was indeed different, everybody throughout the university somehow managed to know him. His sparky smile and disregard of authority endeared him to the undergraduates, and certainly he was bored at the very idea of the life led by the dons, as they ambled through a daily ritual whose high point seemed by exchanging Latin puns while dining in hall. But neither did Sam truly resemble a student, for despite his seeming youth he had an air of command, one that came from a long, unsung history.
He mostly wore black- a black coat buttoned up around a baggy black jumper, worn over a shapeless black shirt. Sam wore bad clothes as a kind of protection, which no-one had yet penetrated. People speculated, most of them inaccurately, on exactly what shape he was beneath all those layers. The idea that he wore black from vanity never survived a first meeting: with these clothes went a pair of terrible old trainers, and a scruffy blue and grey scarf hand-knitted for him by some person unknown. The whole effect was finished off by cuffs that were never done up, shirt buttons that didn't match and sometimes a jacket, haphazardly patched, that gave him the look of a fashionable scarecrow.
To round off this character, whose contradictions so attracted other people. He had thick black hair, and eyes so dark that they too seemed black. Not that many had met Sam's gaze for long enough to confirm this, since his gaze was something of unrivalled intensity. Though his voice bore the slightest accent, no one was sure where that accent came from. Some said his speech was northern; others held that there must be a touch of Gaelic in him. At one point he was credited with the ghost of a Welsh accent, so it became rumoured that Sam Linnfer had grown up in the wild Snowdonian mountains. A few who cherished difference in any form said he had to be a gypsy. Sam himself, when questioned on his past, was devious.
~Catherine Webb, WayWalkers