Transfixed, Rakhan watched the lesson. Under the woman's tutelage, the boy shot a young stag. They were almost totally silent but their joy was obvious, and then the boy threw his arms around her and she held him close. Rakhan couldn't place the boy's age: he had never seen a young one of his own kind. He himself had been ripped out of the womb, and rushed to his full size in a pit of bloody, nutrient rich slime and dark, unspeakably foul magic. But he knew regular orcs had young like this, their breeders whelping litters in the depths of Moria or the Misty Mountains. Still: this boy was Uruk-hai. It was impossible to understand.
The horse, a dappled bay who blended almost seamlessly into the darkness of the forest, waited patiently while the woman and boy retrieved the deer. The woman was slender but strong enough to drag it along, with some help from the strong boy. She was young, and like the boy dressed in neat deerskins and leather boots. That too was perplexing: the people of Rohan wore clothing of cloth. But she was clearly of that race: her hair was the color of honey and her skin was clear and fair. Rakhan could smell her when the wind changed: the rich, musky scent of a fertile young human woman that filled his senses and made his blood rush.
He dropped back beneath the crest, holding his breath. Killing a soldier of Rohan would have been one thing, an easy thing, but what would he do now? This woman and the Uruk boy she seemed to look after were total mystery. He needed to know what she was doing in Fangorn forest, if there were more of her kind around. Could it be that some of the horse people had come to live in the forest, away from their villages and their king? Or was it possible that they were alone? That sudden thought—that a human female could be a refugee from the world like himself—was enough to stay his hand in killing her. And he couldn't kill the boy. As far as Rakhan knew there was no other Uruk-hai boy in the wide world, and this one had never been Saruman's slave, as Saruman didn't allow his captive bred Uruk-hai to have a childhood.
That thought led to more questions. Had the boy been born? It couldn't be possible that the young woman had born him, surely! The captives in the pits—if they survived the mating—couldn't handle the pregnancy and were almost always near dead by the time the fetus was taken for the pits. No one save Saruman knew how long it took to develop an Uruk-hai baby the natural way, but surely it would be too long for such a slender girl. And Rakhan doubted any human female could survive the birth.
Rakhan had no choice but to follow them. When they retreated, the horse following the woman's soft call, Rakhan climbed stealthy down the mountain.
He followed a ways behind them. The low humming that he had become accustomed to seemed to stop, as if the forest was watching with its breath held. Even the birds refused to sing. Rakhan could hear dry leaves crunching beneath his steps; he wondered how the woman couldn't. But if she was unaware the boy was alert. He turned around more than once, causing Rakhan to slink up against the bark of one tree or another. Rakhan grinned, playing with the young one who was not trained enough to spy him.
Then they seemed to disappear into the wild, tangled brush along a hillside, the horse with them. That was easy enough to understand; they were living in a cave, and someone had hidden the entrance so that it seemed only a tangle of vines, brush, and branches crawling up the hill.
Rakhan leaned against a mossy tree, wondering what he was to do. This was obviously their home. He soon smelled smoke, as it made its way out of some crevice in the rock. The woman wasn't a traveler or with a group of her people, she was alone in the forest with the Uruk-hai boy and her horse. The forest was large enough; Rakhan needed only to travel on in another direction, and return to his wild, wordless existence with the creatures and the trees of Fangorn.
And yet that life—so rich only that morning—suddenly seemed completely hollow to him. He knew he would go mad with curiosity about the boy especially. He wanted to observe the child, he wanted to watch as he learned to hunt and grow to his full size. How long might it take? Days, or many years? Would he speak the Rohirran tongue? Or the orcish? Rakhan spoke both, and the common tongue of men as well, as Saruman had required. As for the woman, Rakhan thought briefly that he could use her too—but then he frowned. A small voice murmured to him that he didn't truly wish to destroy such a beautiful creature with the violence of his desire. More importantly, no one could command him to: even if he had enjoyed it then, now Rakhan felt that this was yet another thing that Saruman had denied him. Even the animals of the forest mated freely with partners of their choice. He was surely no less than them!
Rakhan decided he would find somewhere nearby to pass the night, and then return in the morning. He would watch the cave until they came out again and then follow them at a safe distance. He could satisfy his curiosity about the child, he could see what it might have been like for him had Saruman not seen a childhood as irrelevant. If I saw the wizard today, he thought, I would strangle him.
But Rakhan didn't have to linger on his hatred. It was an old emotion, a boring one, and the image of the beauty and her Uruk boy was much more interesting.
He watched for a few days, learning right away that the woman and young one were alone in the forest in fact. The boy, it seemed, was permitted to wander about the cave, within shouting distance. He touched everything he saw, and ran as fleetly as a wolf cub in the forest. Even more entrancing, the young one laughed often, and called songbirds to land on his fingertips. He could climb a tree faster than the most agile scout in Sauron's army. Rakhan wanted badly to run with the boy, hoping to understand his complete freedom and joy. But he could never get very close when the young one was around. The boy could sense something when Rakhan crept near.
The woman often came out alone to gather water. One dangerous day Rakhan saw her bathing in a shallow pool, and it frustrated him maddeningly that she washed so modestly, cupping her hands full and running them under her loose leather wrap. He wanted to see all of her. He forgot how to breathe when she let her hair down, and it cascaded in a ripple of gold to her hips. As soon as he realized what he was thinking, and how his agonizingly his body reacted, Rakhan brutally forced himself away and left them alone for the day. That day, after hunting, he crept through the forest gathering flowers like he did for the deer. He didn't know what he was doing, as if some other will had possessed him once more. He kept at it until nighttime, roving over miles of forest. With only bits of starlight sparkeling the forest floor to light his way, Rakhan lost himself to a moment of madness and tossed the hundreds of white, pink, and red flowers around the mouth of her cave. He woke furiously in the morning. Fool! He berated himself, the curse so much harsher in his own tongue. She will know someone has found her, and she will take the boy away with her!
Rakhan lept up and ran towards the cave.
But he'd not gone far when he slowed, then stopped entirely, inhaling the air. It was tinged with a thick, salty, metallic scent, overlaid with the deep stench of rotten onions. It was unmistakable: there were men in the forest!
Rakhan hurried, but kept stealth as he went to the hillock where he could watch the cave mouth from. The woman was out alone, and it was as he thought: she was terrified, holding a handful of his flowers and snapping her head about, searching for him. But at that exact moment, two unkempt, wild looking men rushed out from the trees. The woman's scream pierced through the air as one snatched her, raised her in the air, and slammed her down on her back, while his companion pinned her arms. Rakhan leaped up and ripped his hooked sword from its sheath, just as eight more Dunlanders emerged from the rocks.
