A/N: To be safe, I'm putting a trigger warning on this one, because the material isn't quite as lighthearted as in the last chapter.
Interminable thanks to cairistiona7 and levade for their advice and encouragement and ability to spot all of my mistakes. Have you read their stories? They really are excellent.
All recognizable elements belong to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Fifty-eight
For three months he has patrolled the haunts near Fornost where even the dourest are troubled to go. He feels the foulness upon him still like a sliding ooze beneath his clothing, but Dírhael's settlement begins to break into view through the trees and already he feels cleaner. The prospect of a good scrub and a long unguarded sleep in front of a snapping fire is enough to quicken his step. It is approaching dusk, and near to freezing. When he crossed the forest stream an hour ago it was turning to glass among the reeds.
The palisaded gate is closed. For a moment he debates if it would be quicker to shimmy up an oak and drop into the village over the wall than it would be to hail the watchmen and wait for them to recognize him, and then wait for them to stumble down from their turrets and fumble with the barred side door, and then wait for them to give their report of the last three months, which undoubtedly will include the latest scandal of the village tart, and how Handor broke his ankle attempting to climb for the highest chestnuts, and how the gooseboy and the pigboy came to fisticuffs over who deserved first forage at the stubble fields, and Dírhael had made them stand nose-to-nose in the square through the entire Fading feast, and everyone who passed by bespattered them with turnip greens….
He elects the route of the oak.
The light is warm in the window of Halbarad's house when he crawls over the wall on a low branch and swings down and drops to the hard ground. The impact sends a darting ache from his cold feet to his knees. He knows he should go around and knock on the front door like a civilized caller, but his ears catch the shrill, laughing voices of two women passing up the path, and the thought of being accosted by gossipers is too wearying to contemplate. Instead he creeps up to the narrow door of Thaliel's tiny scullery and raps as loudly as he dares.
From within comes a drone of voices that cease at his knock. Footsteps, too heavy to be the lady's. Then the door flings open abruptly enough to catch him a ringing blow on the cheek and send him reeling to the side. Halbarad's voice booms out into the dusk, "See here, you vagabond, I've told you already if you want to share the plenty, you'll join the others in the work—"
Aragorn slides into view from around the opened door, rubbing wryly at his cheekbone, and Halbarad's eyes go very wide. Then he begins to laugh.
"Ai, vagabond indeed, skulking at the back door. You sly rascal. I did not hear the gatemen call!"
"I thought I'd not disturb them," says Aragorn, waving a vague hand behind him at the wall.
"Thought you'd not let them disturb you, more like," says Halbarad with a knowing grin.
"Halbarad?" comes a voice from inside. "You're letting out the heat… Aragorn!" And then he is being accosted and hustled through the dim tunnel of the scullery and into the large and flickering room that is the house of Halbarad, long table and crackling hearth, and the smells of roasting and baking and sweet heady ale….
"Your cloak, my lord," says Thaliel, reaching already to unpin the damp thing.
"No, I shall not intrude tonight, I only meant for Halbarad to know—"
"Such nonsense you speak! You are just in time to be fed, and you shall not go to your own house this night; it shall be aired and heated first. No arguments, my lord," when he opens his mouth to do just that. "I shall not be crossed!"
She whirls away with his cloak and coat and beneath the wad of them pressed to her belly he notices for the first time.…
"You know how she gets," says Halbarad, coming alongside and pressing a frothy tankard into his hand. His face is soft as only his wife and girls can make it, all the sharp lines smoothing away.
Aragorn claps him on the shoulder, feels himself begin to grin. "I am happy for you, cousin. How long?"
"Three months yet, she reckons. A babe for Yule." But for a moment Halbarad's grey eyes darken, and Aragorn swallows his first mouthful and lowers the tankard with a soft exhale.
"Is she well?" he asks quietly.
"Aye, she is well enough," but his gaze does not leave her as she stoops and levers their youngest onto her hip. "I am only edgy, after…." Halbarad trails away.
Aragorn sweeps her with an examining eye, and though the skin of her face is slightly sallow and her collarbones sharper than he would like to see... "She is not as thin as last time."
"We have made certain she eats well." Halbarad turns his own ale slowly in his hands. "She was bleeding, a month or so past," he goes on after a moment. "But Ivorwen put her to bed and said not to worry, if she does not strain herself, all will be well."
Aragorn receives this silently, and takes a long draw from his tankard. Then he sets it on the table and crosses the room and divests Thaliel of her four-year-old daughter and tosses the delighted, squealing child high enough to dust the rafters with her billowing skirt.
-o0o-
Sometime in the night he awakens uneasily, not knowing why. He is flat on his back, as near to the hearth as he can get without singing his breeches and shirt. The pallet beneath him is more cushion than he has felt for months, and the relentless vigilance that guards him in the Wild has retreated somewhere into the recesses of his mind. He was sleeping deeply enough that it takes him a moment to remember… Halbarad's house.
From the shadows at the rear of the room a shape detaches itself and crosses to the little cistern near the scullery door. Aragorn hears the faint ascending scale of water filling a cup and rolls over to drift back into oblivion.
But a second pair of footsteps shuffle and there comes the rustle of the curtain being pushed aside, and Thaliel's voice, wavering strangely, "Halbarad…?"
And then there is a muffled thud and Halbarad at the water cistern dives for her, the cup clattering on the wooden floor, and just as quickly Aragorn lunges to his feet and seizes a brand from the fire and with it lights the lantern in the center of the table. As the glow chases back the shadows he sees Halbarad crouched over his wife where she sags against the table-leg, and beneath her is a dark stain spreading and spreading and beginning to run into the cracks between the floorboards….
Aragorn kneels beside her and lifts her wrist, feels her pulse faint and fitful against his fingertips. The skirt of her pale nightdress is clinging darkly to her thighs and he snatches the lantern from the table and sets it near her feet. He mutters, "I am sorry, Thaliel, I must…" but then there is not time to speak for he has peeled away bloody cloth and seen the dreadful hemorrhage, recognized its source, and he shifts and pushes both fists hard against her belly, as low as he can fit them against that sturdy bone.
"Halbarad."
His cousin is cradling Thaliel's head and does not look at him nor answer until Aragorn lifts one vital hand and seizes Halbarad by his shirt front.
"Look at me! Ivorwen. Go and bring Ivorwen, Halbarad, you must go now." He sends him with a shove. Thaliel has begun to shake, but Halbarad scrambles to his feet and races out the front door. For an age it seems Aragorn sits with her, pushing both hands against her rounded belly, praying that his efforts to stop the bleeding will not harm the babe within, praying that the girls in their bed in the loft will not wake to see their mother collapsed in a pool of her own blood on the floor. She does not speak, but grips his knee beside her hard enough to bruise and fights to stay still beneath the relentless crush of his hands.
"Breathe, Thaliel, good girl, deep breaths. I've got you, I'm not going to leave…" Ai, Halbarad, make haste….
And then Ivorwen is there, murmuring, soothing, her slender, nut-brown hands pressing and gliding, slipping beneath the bloodied skirt to emerge bloodied themselves. Still his hands compress Thaliel's abdomen; he can feel each contraction as it comes and grips her like a claw. They are now so near together her womb does not soften completely from one before the next takes hold. He cannot tell if the bleeding has slowed. He knuckles down more firmly.
"Halbarad," says Ivorwen sharply, taking her younger grandson by the wrist and tugging him to the floor beside her. She pushes his fisted hands against Thaliel's belly as Aragorn's had been, and as soon as she is satisfied she pulls Aragorn to his feet and draws him out of earshot. The sudden relaxation of his forearms and wrists makes them feel watery with fatigue. He flexes his fingers and lowers his head so Ivorwen does not have to stretch to speak to him.
"Eight fingerwidths, at least," she says in a hushed voice. Her blood-slicked hands are trembling; she clenches them tightly. He glances and sees her bright eyes are dull with sorrow. "She is losing it, but we will lose her as well if we do not slow the bleeding."
There is more she needs to say—he can tell the words are hovering on her tongue. She does not wish to speak them, and so he speaks them for her.
"If you reach inside to stem it, you will harm the child."
There are tears in Ivorwen's eyes when she says, "Aragorn, I cannot… I cannot do what must be done… if it is still alive…."
"Perhaps enough liquor…."
"We can only try, but she is already far gone. And so much blood… I fear the placenta has detached." Ivorwen looks up at him, and the first tear spills and trickles. "Why? Why so many, and this the second for them…."
Aragorn does not answer. He does not have an answer. But in that moment Thaliel groans and levers herself up on her elbows and the answer is not Aragorn's to find; in flurried seconds later it slips still and blue-skinned into his hands, already capped with a thatch of dark hair. And Ivorwen's eyes are no longer shadowed, but intent on her task as she kneels between Thaliel's thighs with arms bare past the elbows and determinedly begins to press back the torrential flow of blood.
Aragorn sits on his heels. He draws the limp discolored body to his chest as if to warm it. It is already warm, but at some nameless compulsion Aragorn closes his eyes and unfurls a tendril of his mind and finds no responding presence. Warm from Thaliel's body only. He bows his head and turns the impossibly tiny babe enough to see….
"Give him to me," says a voice, flat and resolute. Aragorn obeys without thought. As carefully as if he holds a live and fragile child he gentles Halbarad's son into Halbarad's hands. And then he turns away, and reaching down to the well of healing deep within himself he lifts Thaliel's hand and begins what will be a long battle to ensure the three who sleep unheeding in the loft will not be robbed of a mother, this time.
-o0o-
Dawn is beginning to bend around the shutters when he draws the curtain behind him, concealing Halbarad and Thaliel as they lie together memorizing the face of their firstborn son, come far too early. He is weary as he has not been for many years. He wonders fleetingly if this is how it is to feel very old—thin and tired and sick in the soul. But then a rustling at the top of the loft-ladder draws his eye and he sees them there in triplicate, each a little smaller than the last, frowsy-haired and nightgowned and afraid. The floor near the table has been scrubbed but there is still a mark, and he passes it and stands at the base of the ladder.
For a moment he does not look up. He knows they are awaiting reassurance, and raises his hand and grips the rung before him as if to climb and join them in the loft. For the first time he notices a dark stain splattered on the cuff of his right sleeve, and though he knows it has been dry for an hour he tries to paint it away with his thumb. This does nothing to erase it, so instead he drops his hand and folds the sleeve up until the dark smear is secreted in the crease.
Then he takes a steadying breath and raises his head and says, softly, "Shall we go to Daeradar's for breakfast?"
They do not dress out of their nightgowns, but slip bare feet into doeskin shoes and wait near the door while Aragorn banks the fire and ensures the kettle is filled. He cloaks Iolanthe and Lútha against the chill morning and lifts Eluned and envelops her inside his coat.
Somewhere along the path Lútha sidles close without looking up at him and tucks her hand into his coat pocket, and this is how they arrive at the house of Dírhael, walking abreast, unspeaking. Aragorn shifts Eluned to his hip and raises his fist and raps upon the door.
Dírhael answers, stepping aside as he does so, as if he has been expecting them and would wait no longer to have them in his kitchen. He drops a kiss on Iolanthe's dark head and pokes a gentle finger into Lútha's belly. He takes Eluned from Aragorn and stands her on the floor and pats her towards the stove, where Ivorwen, blessed Ivorwen, has begun to fry pork and poach eggs and steep fragrant tea. She looks weary enough to fold boneless to the floor, but she has changed out of her bloodied shift and kirtle and welcomes the girls and immediately engages their help in kneading out the breakfast bread.
Aragorn hesitates, only halfway through the door. He casts a look behind him and sees it has begun to snow, hefty flakes that drift all the slower for it, unflurried by any wind. Through them at the far edge of the village sits a stone shed, re-chinked and thatched into a shabby but serviceable cottage, and he knows it has lain empty since last he was here in the village. In it is a tiny fireplace of stone, and a jar of pipeweed on the single shelf above the water barrel, and a cot heaped high with skins and blankets. It offers a small pocket of solitude, and suddenly he feels as if he has done all he can do now for his cousin's family. He reaches behind him for his hood, even as his shoulder begins to lead him out the door.
A clasp above his elbow halts him. He turns to see a broad hand, the skin between thumb and forefinger furrowed with a dark scar. For a moment he stares at it, as his fatigue-laden mind tries to fathom why he is being detained. His gaze flickers to Dírhael's face and he is struck for the first time how very like his mother this man looks. They have the same lofty cheekbones, the same expressive, heavy brows, though Dírhael's are dusted with a fine frost.
And beneath them are eyes that meet his own unfalteringly, and there is nothing in them but knowing, and a wrinkle of sorrow at the corners that no amount of laughter can completely smooth away. Aragorn realizes that somewhere in his years of wandering, of ghosting in from distant countries to stay no longer than duty demands, of secluding himself and sequestering himself and contorting in his efforts to cause these hardy folk no inconvenience, this man has learned him anyway. Learned his mind and the lonesome spaces in his spirit and how he feels in many ways adrift, unfettered to the people he was born to but knew not until he was a man full-grown. Dírhael need not speak these things. They are there in the quiet of his keen grey eyes.
His grandfather shifts his hand to circle Aragorn's bicep and draws him, gentle and unyielding, into the fire-warmed and glowing kitchen.
"Come and tell us of your long patrol," he says, pressing the door closed behind them. "And we shall tell you of all the good things that have happened in your absence."
-o0o-
Thank you so much for reading, and for all the favorites and follows and kind words. And many thanks to Random Rohirrim, whom I couldn't PM, but your lovely review made my day!
The next installment shall be along directly.