Chapter 1: "Reunion"
Author's note: Welcome to Part 2! Reminder to my longtime readers- I love comments. And to my new readers- I love comments. Happy reading!
Legolas was screaming again. The shrieks woke him with a jolt, panting, sweating, heart racing so hard it may as well just pound free of his body.
He sat in a puddle of his own sweat, small whimpers escaping his throat as he tried to breathe, to reorient himself, but the nightmare clung to him. He always woke like this, though the memories he relived were different. In this one he could still taste the human flesh that the Terkmar Empire forced him to eat in a bone broth, overly sweet and oily. As a child soldier, he had helped skin the dead soldiers killed during the day on the practice plains, helped prepare the meals.
"Long pig," the Terkmar cook would say, a greasy, unwashed man with sores on his face as he skinned the thighs. "We taste like a pig, elf."
The memory, the nightmare, was too vivid. He leaned over the bed and vomited into the bucket sitting there, which was caked on the sides with vomit already.
Legolas shook his head to throw that voice from his mind, to forget the clipped, rough Terkmar language. It had been almost seven years since he wore those chains, since the emperor called him "Dragon Soldier," since he had found his way back home.
His breathing started to calm and the dusty desert and the scorching sun disappeared, the dregs of his nightmare beginning to pull apart.
His room was dim, the white cotton bed sheets tangled around his legs. Since moving to Doriath, the once fallen city of Mirkwood, it had been nice to sleep in a small room with only one window that he could shutter. Those shutters were open now, the window cracked to let in the cool breeze. It tugged at his hair, which only brushed the tops of his shoulders, growing slowly since being chopped off… But being human slowed a lot of things down, even if it made other things speed up.
A kettle whistled from the kitchen outside his bedroom door, which was half open. Warm candlelight flickered over his bare walls. It calmed him to not have decorations, reminders, keepsakes. He liked to look around and see empty space, not the clutter that rattled around his brain.
Someone pulled the kettle off the fire. Hot water poured into a mug and a kitchen chair scraped, creaking as someone sat down.
Routine. It was nice.
With a sigh that he had to get up now, he kicked his legs free of the sheets and let the cool wood floor wake him some more as he stumbled into the common area of the house.
His keeper, Sard, looked up from a book. After studying him for a moment, nodding at whatever he saw, he pushed one of the two mugs across the table and went back to reading.
Legolas sat across from him, pulling the mug close and smelling the steam. Mint. His favorite.
Sard let him sip it for a few minutes before folding down the page in his book and closing it.
Good morning, his keeper signed, fingers skilled as they moved.
Sard had brought him back to Mirkwood, his rescuer, his retired black magician. Everything about him was warm and familiar. Safe.
Legolas signed 'good morning' back and studied the worry lines pressed into his keeper's forehead. Not for the first time, it hurt to be unable to remember what his voice sounded like. Sard's tongue had been cut from his mouth when he rescued Legolas from Terkmar.
They both lost so much to that place.
Do you want to talk about it? Sard asked, glancing at the bedroom door from under his heavy black brows that made him look sterner than he was.
Legolas sipped his mint tea, wondering what his keeper would say about him eating humans. That would be considered cannibalism now, since he was one himself, since he let the dragon Kagnirrok take his immortality to save his kingdom … six years ago? Really. Time as a human was not the same as when he was an elf.
Instead of bringing up what was painful for both of them, Legolas just shook his head.
Which was just as well, as the door burst open then.
"We're going to be late!" An elleth with fiery red hair that desperately needed combing flew into the house like a wave crashing on the beach, splitting in every direction as the bow swinging from her shoulder knocked over an empty vase on the shelf below one of the windows.
Sard didn't even jump. He just took a slow drink of his own tea and pulled his book open again.
Do you want tea, Tauriel? Sard signed, glancing up at her through his brows.
"Sard," she laughed, grabbing Legolas by the wrist and hauling him to his feet. "Crown Prince Kasslad is arriving this morning. The cadets have to greet him."
She looked so excited that Legolas laughed. Whatever piece of his nightmare that still clung to him was being thrown away by her frantic excitement.
You remember that Kasslad is his brother, don't you? Sard signed, then pointed at Legolas.
Tauriel blinked at them, enormous eyes astounded, then focused on Legolas.
"No, I didn't remember," she said, dripping sarcasm like she was pouring honey onto toast. "I never do because look at how he dresses. This is not a royal elf, Sard."
She disappeared into his room and came back out with the cadet's dark green tunic, shoving it over Legolas' white undershirt.
"Hey!" he shouted, but it got muffled by the cloth, which he forgot to wash from yesterday. It still smelled of dirt and the creek he tripped into. Oh the joys of being human.
"Are you going to help me, Sard?" he asked as she shoved one of his feet into a boot, the wrong one. She huffed and tried the other foot.
Sard took another, louder sip from his tea.
Tauriel brushed her fingers through Legolas' short hair, frowning at him. Legolas just smiled back at her, studying the concentration in her delicate face, wondering why she bothered with him.
Sard knocked on the tabletop. They looked at him.
Tauriel, you should brush your own hair, he signed. You're a sixteen-year-old elleth, not a wolf in the woods.
She huffed at him and then marched for the door, dragging Legolas behind her by the sleeve.
The early morning sun lit Doriath in gold and green. Legolas breathed in the flowers, the dirt, the fact that even after dwarves decimated this place however many millennia ago, the wild elves that saved it made it into something new. They didn't bother coating the marble towers and granite castle in gold again, didn't bother rebuilding the crumbled streets or scrub the charred jade walls back to how it all must have shined.
Instead, he walked on rubble overtaken by moss and grass, crawling with vines sprouting with white flowers. He walked past forgotten towers where birds nested in the highest windowsills and a rabbit colony ran the space. He saw curious brown ears beyond the windows, some scampering around the front steps with white tails and feet jumping out of sight.
Instead, the Kindi and Silvan elves built their own homes and shops out of beautiful oak and cherry wood, where grass and rose bushes grew on the roofs. The old city was a shadow behind the lively city that grew through it.
It was a calm place to be. Legolas lifted his face to the early sun as it pinched through the tree canopy to dance on his cheeks. When his ada decided he needed to live here after everything that happened, it was possibly the wisest action the elven king had ever made.
Never mind that Thranduil had never visited him….
"At least he comes to see you." Tauriel's voice broke through the cotton around his head, the mixture of sleepiness and pain all missed together.
"Who?" he asked, turning surprised eyes on her.
"Kasslad."
He shook his head at her frown, at the fact that she knew what he had been thinking.
"Kasslad always comes to see you." Her hand on his arm was warm and firm, as if telling him she was always going to be there too.
"And you act like it's the first time." Legolas pulled on the end of her long hair hanging by her elbow.
She laughed at him and gave him a shove, which knocked him off balance and into a bush.
"Don't hurt him!" a voice shouted down the road, followed by the muted thump of cloth boots on the grassy cobbles. "Our human-cursed prince is too fragile as it is."
Legolas spat leaves out and tried to shove his way back out of the blackberry bush, its unforgiving thorns long, thin and dug into his cadet uniform, hair and any inch of skin they could reach. He cursed in both the common and Sindarin tongue.
"Good morning, Belven," Legolas greeted, straining to see his friend through the branches.
"Don't lie to me," the healer-in-training snapped, sounding far meaner than he was. Even through the spindly blackberry leaves, Legolas could see his scrunched orange-blond brow which hung over furious eyes like storm clouds.
Tauriel sniffed at him and then reached into the bush, gripped the back of Legolas' uniform and hauled him out like he weighed about as much as a cottontail.
Almost immediately, Belven's hands were on him and his angry muttering has started. Tauriel steadied Legolas under the jarring barrage of his inspection, sharing an eye roll together.
"You can't be rough with him, Tauriel," Belven lectured, biting off some cotton from a roll he carried with him. Typical healer. "How many times do I have to tell you? You shove him, he will one day die because his skin is fragile, his bones are fragile, the very air he breathes is fragile. Valar!"
"I'm an elf, Bel," Legolas reminded, exhausted of telling him again. "I have friends out looking to bring back my immortality, bring back everything. That includes the Balrog Slayer you love so much."
Belven was muttering again, wrapping one of the worst scrapes from the thorns on Legolas' upper right arm. Legolas sighed and let him work, not that Kasslad would be surprised when he saw him in new bandages. Everything hurt him, but he was used to it. He wished everyone else was too.
Tauriel looked down the road, tapping a foot.
"We're officially late," she announced.
"Done." Belven backed up with both hands in the air, checking Legolas over with intense green eyes, frowning as if he was now forever imperfect. Then Belven turned on Tauriel with an accusatory index finger. "Now don't you touch him!"
In the woods behind him, Legolas heard … breathing.
He tilted his head, surprised that he heard anything before the other two did. Then again, they were bickering. Tauriel wanted to run to the lineup while Belven wanted her to walk so Legolas didn't have to run anywhere and maybe trip and crack his head open.
"Do you hear something?" Legolas asked.
They ignored him.
Legolas turned to face the trees, but then a cloth bag shoved over his head and a string pulled tight around his throat. Strong hands pulled him forward then to the side.
"Wait!" Tauriel screamed and it wasn't the playful scream when she and Belven got into fights.
But instead of hearing if she and Belven got away, pain erupted on the side of his head. He expected to fall onto the mossy cobbles or back into the blackberry bush, but instead he just kept falling.
O
It felt like a dream. Legolas heard the Terkmar speech, the rough syllables, the angry, guttural participles. In the darkness of his mind, he deciphered words like "example" and "make him scream."
Frantic hands untied the rope around his throat. What felt like a bag was pulled away, sparking static in his hair.
"Leave this land, dirty humans," Belven warned through the shadows swimming through his head and he winced at "dirty humans." He'd heard that term before, had felt it in his bones. "Do you know who you're crossing right now?"
The answering clap of knuckles on flesh made Legolas jerk out of the spinning black pit he had fallen into. This wasn't a dream. Valar, it wasn't a dream.
He blinked his eyes clear in time to watch Belven crash sideways into the dirt, smacking something on a root that cracked and he screamed. That scream drove Legolas up, head tumbling in on itself, but he kept on his feet, kept his eyes forward, and lunged at the nearest soldier, hoping he got the real one of the three.
But his hands clamped around an arm through the black and cream uniform. Legolas snatched one of the loose ends of cotton hanging over the man's shoulder and wrapped it around his neck twice. His mind shut down to instinct, to the Terkmar orders on the training field with the other child soldiers, and he pulled the cloth tight, gritting his teeth.
The soldier's neck snapped with a gross, wet crunch and then his body went limp, suddenly heavy like Legolas was strangling a tree. He fell with it, dust flying up in clouds.
Before he had the chance to look for another soldier to kill, hands grabbed him from each side, restraining him on his knees.
The world spun in a dizzy swirl of color. Cool fingers snaked under his chin, gripping his face like one would a bad dog.
Legolas blinked and fought to concentrate through the ringing pain behind his eyes.
After a few hard tries, the man holding his chin came into focus and so did Belven's arguing. Of course he was arguing.
"Don't you touch him, you dirty scum," Belven shouted. "You aren't worthy to even look at him!"
Legolas' stomach dropped. Shut up, Bel, he thought, wishing he could throw that into his friend's skull to make him be quiet before giving anything away.
The soldier in front of him … Valar, it was a Terkmar.
The telltale uniform wrapped around his wrists, waist and ankles, but hung loose everywhere else. Dark eyes evaluated him from over a hooked nose, filled with suspicion. From the scarred lines above his left brow, this was a general.
Legolas cursed at him in Terkmar.
It was a mistake. The second he did, a light went on in the general's eyes and he shoved Legolas' face to the side.
"Show me his back," the general ordered.
"No," Legolas muttered.
More hands ripped at his cadet uniform, rough and a cold blade nicked the back of his neck.
"No!" Legolas screamed at the general, who watched with an intensity that brought back too many memories, the nightmares, the vomiting. He tasted vomit now.
A collective gasp passed between the trees and then the soldiers holding him in place let him go. Boots crunched over leaves as men backed away.
"It's him," one soldier said, sounding both awed and terrified. "It's the Dragon Soldier. We found him."
"But he's so young."
"He was a child when the emperor had him, fool."
Legolas let his head hang, arms useless in at his sides, heart knotted in his chest as a wave of emotions punched through him. He knew what his ripped and cut uniform revealed on his back. Beneath the long and gnarled scars from the Terkmar whips was the dragon tattoo forced on him by the cult that worshipped Kagnirrok, the beast that ruined his life and killed his naneth and oldest brother Oroduil and took his immortality, everything that made him an elf, from his ears to his elven hearing and eyesight. Everything.
Dirty human. That's all he was now.
And the dragon rage that used to run in his family was gone from him now that Dekriem was dead, the dragon his grandfather had made the deal with that made his family special in the first place.
He was nothing now. The title that Terkmar emperor gave him was just a lie.
But that tattoo of the spindly dragon stretched from the back of his neck down around his spin and to his hips. He was just happy that his hair was long enough to cover the top of it.
He glanced up then to Belven. His friend held his left arm close as he sat in the dirt, a look of horror on his face as he realized what was happening.
"What do we do with him?" a soldier asked, marching to stand next to the general who had a sickening grin curling up his tanned face.
"We use him against the elves," the general answered. "He'll kill them all for us now. He'll end this war and we'll take him home with us. Terkmar will finally have its Dragon back."
A new horror emptied itself into Legolas' stomach. Since when was Mirkwood at war with Terkmar?
A tear of blood wept from one of the general's eyes. He blinked and dabbed at it, looking at his fingers in shock as more red tears streamed down his cheeks.
A cry of terror rang through the soldiers surrounding Legolas. Some of them screamed at him to stop, begged him to stop, but he kept his eyes on the general, who didn't look away from him either.
"You are cursed," the general said as he folded to his knees. Life evaporated from his eyes as they rolled into his head and he fell forward, inches from where Legolas still knelt.
Belven's heavy breathing was all that remained.
Legolas couldn't look at him, feeling too dirty to look at him. He just stared at the general, trying to understand why there was war, how he didn't know there was war.
"Sard?" he asked and his voice broke.
Gentle footsteps, if footsteps could ever be gentle, came up on his right. A cloak was draped over his shoulders, covering that damned tattoo, and strong hands helped him stand. Even when he was on his feet, those hands never let him go.
"How?" Belven stood, stumbling to the side, looking around at the bodies. "Sard, how did you…?"
"He's the last black magician in Mirkwood, Bel," Tauriel said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, stepping over Terkmar bodies as if they were nothing but logs. "You don't ask them how they do anything."
Legoals finally rose his gaze to his keeper. A well of sadness swam in those dark blue eyes, layered in shadows from those heavy black brows that scrunched together in a worry so encompassing that Legolas couldn't look away, wanting to tell him it was okay and what happened all those years ago wasn't about to happen again … but he couldn't.
You ada kept this war from us both, Sard signed.
O
Legolas let Sard lead him back to their hut, cloak pulled tight over his shoulders. Behind them, Tauriel helped a grumbly Belven.
"Just set the break," Belven told her.
"But it will hurt," she argued.
"It won't heal right if you don't," he said. "I'm not Legolas. This is going to heal fast."
Sard's hand on Legolas' shoulder tightened, as if he knew how much those words hurt even if it was a joke and also true.
The door to their hut was wide open. Legolas stared at it as they got closer and realized when Tauriel fetched Sard, they left in too much of a hurry to close the door.
Before they reached it though, the clatter of hooves made them turn around. The royal caravan was riding headlong toward them, followed by part of the Doriath guard and the cadets they were supposed to have joined to greet his brother.
Crown Prince Kasslad led the charge, pulling back on his palomino steed. The golden horse bandied to the side as he stopped, front hooves kicking out in irritation.
Kasslad's golden hair spun around his shoulders as the wind caught it, his bronze eyes flashing as he took in the blood along the side of Legolas' face and the cloak. He frowned at that and whatever else he saw, though Legolas didn't know what else there could be.
"Brother," Kasslad breathed and swept to the cobbles.
He looked like an old Doriath statue, gilded in his gold Kindi tunic, a gold pendent hanging on his forehead from his gold crown. Even the handle of his broad sword was slatted in gold, catching the sun as it shifted on his hip as he ran.
Legolas was as tall as him now, but the way Kasslad grabbed him with gentle, insistent hands made him feel small and protected, like the six-year-old scared of their ada's dragon rage.
"How long have we been at war with Terkmar?" Legolas asked.
Kasslad's eyes widened, suddenly as broiled as a desert storm across sandy plains. Those beautiful eyes shifted from Legolas to Sard and back again. Understanding melted the shock from the firm edges of his face, settling his brow and lips into a look of regret.
"Since you've been back, little brother," came a sweeter voice, a singsong one that could have made a bluebird jealous.
Legolas looked over Kasslad's shoulder. Atop a dark gold horse who flipped its mane from side to side sat an elleth so stunning it hurt to look at her. Long warm honey locks hung in curls across her chest, her face both familiar and strange.
Though everything about her was pleasant and calm, unnerving blue eyes sharper than any steel pierced right into Legolas.
"It's all your fault, little brother," she called to him, thin fingers running along the reigns in her hand. "Ada has been lost to revenger since the day you rode off to this," she looked around and rose a brow, "place."
Seven years?Sard signed to Kasslad.
His brother gave a small nod.
"Seven years, keeper," the elleth said, smoothing her riding skirt. "Seven long and ruinous years."
Legolas turned his horror on Kasslad.
"Our sister's back," Kasslad said. "She came back from the Golden Wood a month ago. She says she's done grieving for Naneth and Oroduil."
Celeena. His sister.
He had forgotten he had one.
She smiled at him. By the venom in it, she hadn't forgotten him.
O