Part Twelve
Tainted in the Blood
The hedge became a prison. A stifling, deaf cell of green leaves and no answers. Three days had passed uneventfully, most of which Aragorn had spent within the confines of their camp. He aided with the usual chores: searching out dead wood for the fire, repairing and mending what needed to be. He even took a hand at cooking just for the sake of passing the time though the most he had to work with amounted to a bit of leftover rabbit meat and some old, battered parsnips that were the last provisions Zaren had got at the inn.
Crouching beside the bubbling, soup pan, his face sweating and back chilled, he worked at disentangling the snares he'd gathered up that morning. They were empty and had been for two days. The lines were hopelessly tangled and he finally threw them down in frustration.
It was the hedge, he decided, that made him so fretful. He grew so easily sick of enclosing walls especially when they kept him blind and deaf to whatever was happening in other parts of the forest. It was like being shut in a closet in a corner of the house where nobody could find you nor you hear them. No word had come. Not a whisper. Not a rumor. He tried not to dwell on these thoughts but each time he tried not to, he found his gaze drifting towards the empty bedroll and the saber he had stowed beneath it.
Carlóme and the rest of the camp were as restless as he. During the long, dull afternoons, they revolved double watches, attempted to mend the wooden platform to make it sound again and patched up holes in the hedges with whatever they could find.
Kari and Narturi dashed into camp from one of those scavenging trips. Aragorn, watching them, frowned when they crouched beside Carlóme whispering something hurriedly. The woman's face darkened and she rose slowly towards the hedge entrance.
A man, the first Aragorn had seen other than Zaren and Yyrin since the inn, strode into the camp. Lantern-jawed and thick in the shoulders, he was garbed in mottled green like a forest at night. Even his face was smeared with some kind of green dye. The only adornments he carried were a bolas, the leather thongs as thick as whips with boulders the size of small melons, which swayed against a loose belt of snakeskin around his waist. Strangely decorated pouches of all shapes dangled from it and clinked when he moved.
The newcomer's vividly green-painted eyelids flickered as his gaze swept over the small camp, taking in the sagging wooden structure, the fire, near-empty cooking pot, and the faces of the haggard group.
"I hear you're hunting a ghost, Dark Car," the man said, his voice low but smooth as lamp oil.
"Branock. I was wondering when you going to start sniffing around."
At the name, Zaren set down the traces Aragorn had discarded earlier and stood up.
The man, Branock, ignoring the stares of the company, picked up a bowl someone had left by the fire and ladled up a little of the afternoon's frugal meal. He sniffed its contents, wrinkled his nose and poured it back into the pot, his eyes roving again, this time pointedly, around the camp.
"You fixed this place up right well," Warmly, he smiled revealing white teeth. "Pity it still looks like a whore's den."
"You'd know," Carlóme motioned for Zaren to sit down; he ignored her. "Who told you we were out here anyway?"
The man folded muscled arms, the pouches jingling. "You always were desperately impatient. Seeing as we both happen to be out here, I had an idea. Give me a piece of the price on his head and I'll add my half-score of men to yours. This ghost can't hide from all of us."
"I've got all the men I need right here," She said dismissively though Aragorn could see her hands were clenched tightly at her sides and Kari and Narturi flanking her had not stirred once from her side.
"Clearly." Branock's eyes stopped moving and landed on Narturi who flushed but stared right back at him.
There was something about him, about the others' uneasiness around him and the way his eyes roved over and through everything as though judging its value that Aragorn was instantly not easy with. Saeryn was bent over the fire, restacking timber and purposefully not looking up at their visitor.
"Who is he?" the ranger wanted to know as he crouched beside her.
She did not leave off her task. The tips of her fingers shook slightly. "Branock. He was with us for a short time. He's a hired sword."
While Aragorn and Carlóme dealt with this new trouble, Haldir was slipping deeper into his role as spy. Fedorian and Arenath had welcomed him as though nothing had ever separated their brotherhood. Night hunts, old tales and songs told or sung around a pine fire took him back to the years when he was a young recruit, listening in awe of great battles and ancient struggles. He had trouble remembering what he was among.
Their small fire, carefully surrounded and heaped on stones to keep it from igniting the wooden platform, smoldered under the remnants of their evening meal. Tossing his roasting skewer into the ashes, Fedorian hunkered down beside an old chest tucked away near the rear of the talan. Haldir watched him scrunch neatly folded tunics aside, digging for something, but Arenath redirected his attention.
"This fair weather isn't going to last much longer," he said, laying remaining strips of meat over the coals to smoke. "The stream was frozen this morning. I had to break through an inch of ice just to refill the flasks."
"Mind those don't swell too much; we can't afford them splitting in this cold weather," Fedorian told him absentmindedly, still bent over the trunk. "They wouldn't get fixed until spring."
As he straightened, Haldir saw what he held in his hands.
The wood must have been made of some type of hickory, polished to a high, smooth sheen, long and supple enough to sting a horse, and scar a human. The leather tail had a shard of steel affixed to its end, which glinted crimson from the fire. Tucking the riding crop under one arm like a pace stick, Fedorian fetched a knife from another corner, the iron pommel unusually heavy on the end.
"Where is he going?" Haldir asked though he feared he knew the answer, when the older elf slipped down the rope ladder without another word to either of them.
Arenath snapped some small twigs and fed them one at a time into the fire without looking up. "He'll be back in a while. Don't worry about it."
The last twig missed the flames and clattered sparking onto the wooden platform. Arenath leapt up and stamped it out with his heel.
Haldir did not let his friendships rule him and guarded his words in a way he never had before amongst his comrades. He spoke little of the humans he had traveled with and nothing at all of Aragorn. Fedorian seemed curiously intrigued by that particular member of the Harad band and repeatedly asked where he came from though Haldir only ever replied "north."
The floorboards creaked as he rose and chinks of light glinted beneath his boots. The roughly constructed flet held few in the way of possessions, sensible enough for serving soldiers and stealthily concealed. The fixed hammocks that served as sleeping places were draped further up in the branches. Fedorian hadn't returned until late the night before.
In one corner of the main platform stood a beautifully hand-carved desk of pine, the knotted surface arrayed with a wealth of blades: leather-wrapped hilts smoothly attached to simple, elegantly curving steels. A stained rag smelling of oil draped Fedorian's most prized, lebethron-handled fighting knives. The rope ladder though woven from common flax rather than the hithlain of Lórien still unraveled through a hole in the center. Meat hooks for venison hung lower down.
Haldir could feel time trickling away at a speed he had never envisioned before. He had to find Brenn soon and get word back to Carlóme who would be impatient, and Aragorn who would be worried.
"You always were an early riser."
Haldir stepped away from the swaying ladder as his former mentor joined him on the ground. The older Galadhel surveyed him.
"I swear you have grown a full half-sapling since last I saw you. There is some truth then that leaders stand taller than those they lead."
"I have heard it said of wolves," Haldir said mildly as Fedorian slipped a wrist sheath over his forearm and slid a long knife into it. "Where do you go this morning?"
"The wriggling rabbit attracts more foxes to a snare than a dead one," the other replied cryptically as he selected a few strips of the venison Arenath had smoked the other night.
"May I join you?" The question surprised Haldir himself with its bluntness but he couldn't take it back once spoken.
Fedorian, however, did not seem at all bothered by the question though his eyes darkened slightly. "I am rather surprised you did not ask sooner. Why this sudden interest?"
"Arenath is a little too vague for satisfying curiosity," Haldir tried to shrug the question off as though it meant nothing one way or the other to him.
"He is duty-bound to keep the curious at bay," Fedorian was already walking downhill towards a swath he had cut through the long grass the previous eve. "It is better for you to stay here."
Haldir's mind clicked furiously as he wrestled with a way to make Fedorian take him along or perhaps if he could somehow trail him from above?
Fedorian suddenly stopped. With his back still to Haldir, he said, "However, now that you are here, there is no reason why you should not see the fruits of our long labors."
Following the stream for a while, the older elf eventually turned aside and climbed upwards with Haldir close behind trying to memorize the area so he might find it again later. The land even out underfoot and Fedorian halted at the lip of a defile winding down into a grove of close trees.
It was a forbidding place. The trees trunks leaned as though years ago something had plucked them up by the roots and thrown them every which way. They heeled over at crazy angles, their roots sticking up like exhumed bones. At the base of an oak, a split opened just wide enough to fit a man.
A rusted brazier glowed just outside it, close enough to provide warmth but not enough for a hot coal to be used to burn through the restraints. In the curved inside of the trunk, a narrow ledge carved out of the belly of the trunk protruded outward. On this makeshift seat, sat a thin figure like a doll on a shelf.
It was still early morning and dawn's creamy light had not yet touched the defile. Taking a deep breath, Haldir slowly approached the motionless figure, hobbled at ankles and wrists, with a hood over its face. The ragged tunic it wore was ripped and stained in several places.
Striding forward, Fedorian tossed a few more coals on the glowing brazier and whipped the hood off. "Good morning, starling."
Tears stained Brenn's blotchy, red face. Already thin with immaturity, it looked hollow as though he hadn't been fed in a few days and his lips bore the unmistakable plaster-cracked look of dehydration. His eyes were glazed and focused on the earthen floor of his little prison rather than on his captor. His hands were bound behind him with rope though manacles hung over his head, ascending into the dark interior of the hollow tree.
Two of his fingers curling over the restraints were bloody and misshapen. Haldir didn't look too closely but he suspected they were broken. Fedorian's lean frame slipped inside the old tree with practiced ease as he crouched beside the boy. Selecting a piece of the dried meat, he caught the boy's gaze up from the floor.
"Come now, do not fight me today. You cannot starve yourself, child. It's not good for you." His tone was quiet, cajoling even as Brenn pressed his lips together stubbornly and turned his face away in refusal. As he did his eyes found Haldir and unconsciously his mouth dropped open. He nearly choked on the meat thrust between his teeth until he finally had to bite off a little or suffocate.
Every muscle in Haldir's body was tingling and aching but he forced himself to remain impassive even when Brenn, coughing, raised streaming eyes to his face. Blood burned behind the boy's gaze, his voice ragged and creaking.
"He told me you were here," he didn't look at Fedorian. "He told me but I didn't believe him. I knew that if you were here, you'd rescue me. You'd find a way."
He hurled his weight forward, knocking the meat out of Fedorian's hands and nearly sliding off the ledge. "Why aren't you helping me?"
"You should choose your friends more wisely in future, tithenion (little one)," Fedorian said, tossing the dirtied venison into the brazier, the gorging flames sparking in his eyes. Brenn flinched away from the sound of his voice. "They do so have a habit of betraying you."
Fedorian's red-flecked eyes left the fire. "Is that not so, Haldir?"
Haldir made no answer to the underlying accusation in his commander's voice, too torn by Brenn's. It will be all right, Brenn. I'll free you, I swear it—he wanted to say it. But not right under Fedorian's vigilance.
When he remained silent, Brenn snorted with disgust, his small features crumpling with almost palpable pain. "You're a monster."
Haldir looked away.
Fedorian chuckled, ruffling the boy's hair and ignoring his futile effort to pull away. "He is a firebrand, Haldir. The first night he almost crawled to the stream. I had to punish him for that. I don't like to, do I, starling? You made me when I told you I wouldn't if you behaved."
But Brenn had dropped his eyes from both of them and faced towards the back of the trunk.
"He is younger than most of his kind and weak. There is no satisfaction to be had for overcoming him."
"Then why not release him?" Haldir recovered his composure and forced himself not to look at Brenn again as he placed himself between the other elf and the boy's bound form. "Leave this."
Fedorian stopped rubbing the corner of his mottled eye. "What are you asking me?"
A plan had been slowly growing in Haldir's mind the last three days. The idea sprouted and flowered until he plucked it into open air. "Come away from him. Away from this. We can leave. You and I and Arenath can leave together. Let me take you back to Lothlórien—"
Fedorian's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "And how would we do that? That Harad child as you so put it 'will never stop hunting me.' She has even convinced you, Haldir, to brave death in her stead so she can bring me down."
Haldir realized his cover was broken but he did not step back.
"And now what? She will grant me clemency if I give you the boy?"
"No, this was of my own making," Haldir said. "I do not want to see you killed, my friend."
"'My friend,'" Fedorian echoed. "It has been long years since we were friends. Duties change. Loyalties change."
"You were my teacher and you remain my friend whatever else you may think. I no more want to see you killed then anyone regardless of what you have done." His hands were shaking and he clenched them until his fingernails dug into his palms. He hated what had been done to Brenn but he could not just stand by and let Carlóme kill his friend—if she got half the chance he knew she would. Perhaps, Fedorian might find peace either in Lórien or across the Sea if only he could be coaxed away from human settlements.
"What I have done, I cannot change—nor do I want to. I set along this path a long time ago. I will not alter it now though the end of the road looks dark." The crackly, bitter stench of blistering meat suffused the air as the venison untended in the brazier's coals scorched and blackened.
"What you are doing is murder," Haldir said quietly. "There is no reason for it anymore. The humans that—that harmed you are gone. Years ago."
Back-lit by the oily smoke spattering from the brazier, Fedorian's twitching face stilled suddenly. "I did not hear these complaints when you did it. You did not call it murder then. Then it was justice… Retribution well-earned." His words struck like blows and Haldir recoiled from them as Fedorian flung the sack back over Brenn's face.
"I paid for it," The conversation was swerving drastically out of Haldir's control. "A lifetime of guilt and grief for my errors! But I did not continue to heap blood on my hands against those who cannot understand and do not deserve to shoulder the burdens of past sins."
They were bold, dangerous words but he had made it quite clear that Fedorian would not sway him in this. Not again.
Fedorian turned away and raked the meat out of the coals, letting them gutter on the grass. "The humans do not understand you, Haldir. They do not know you and they do not want to. The ranger… the Harad woman…They will ruin everything you hold dear."
"It is not like that!" Haldir snapped.
"They will take you as they took you before. And use you until you are nothing more to them. That is what Men do. Everything they touch, they taint. They are choking weeds in this world and need to be uprooted."
Haldir shook his head. "That is something I cannot be part of."
"But you are already part of it," Fedorian smiled, his lips edged with ice despite the tainted smoke swirling around his face. "I will admit you have new strength in you. But it is a crumbling foundation you have built, Haldir. It will come crashing down around you if you are not careful. You will turn on them, as you turned on them before."
Haldir didn't listen to anymore. He had to get out of there, out of the smoke, the fire, the madness in his commander's eyes. He barely noticed where he was going, working on forcing one deep breath out after another, his heart thrumming a wild tattoo in his ears.
Lintedal made soft sounds under her breath as a woman mutters to herself when she thinks no one is listening.
Aragorn stroked her butter-soft nose. "I know, híril bain (pretty lady). I know. He'll be back."
The horse twitched her ears towards the sound of the ranger's voice as he began to hum then sing quietly as he brushed her smooth sides. Being around horses had always had a soothing effect on him despite that they were easily over eleven hundred pounds heavier than you and a swing of their head or tap with a back foot could put you in a very bad way for a good while. Maybe that was what comforted him.
Lintedal's ear flicked sideways. But Aragorn didn't look up when the other man spoke, seeming still absorbed in his task though his movements were short and brisk, keeping close to the tack where he'd left his blade. He knew what Lintedal heard and smelt because he could as well.
The odor of smoked fish and reapplied dye accompanied Branock as he led a thick-legged bay by a rope. The horse tossed its head restively and tugged at the halter.
He looked over at the ranger without speaking as he tied the bay's rope to a low branch.
He and his men had attached themselves loosely to Car's band though they remained outside the protective hedge in a state of constant vigilance. Aragorn had glimpsed them on his way to check on the horses. Crouching over makeshift fires or checking weapons they looked like a hardened, life-toughened group. Some even dressed bare-sleeved despite the cold.
When the bay finally settled comfortably, Aragorn felt the huntsman's eyes settle on him but he still didn't turn.
After Branock left that morning, Carlóme had called them together and warned them to speak as little to the huntsmen as they had to and say nothing of Brenn, Haldir or their encounters with the rogue elf thus far. The reason she gave was mercenaries like him were always at best, overambitious, at worst, overzealous. And if he was offering his services, it was best to be wary. But Aragorn suspected there was more to it than that. Carlóme obviously bore little love for the man and you had to know someone to dislike them that much.
The mercenary seated himself on the bay's unhooked saddle and watched the ranger for a while. Strips of rosy skin curled off an apple as he took a small curving knife to it from one of the pouches in his belt.
"My name is Strider," Aragorn offered after the silence spiraled a bit too long. "Where do you come from, friend?"
Branock lifted a corner of his lip, displaying his white teeth, and nodded at the bandage around the ranger's forehead, ignoring the question of his origin. "That's quite an impressive lump you have, Strider."
"It can be dangerous out here." Aragorn raised a hand to the gauze ruefully before remembering how Haldir would scold him and lowering it.
"So it seems," Branock's eyes landed pointedly on the elven horse's tack where Aragorn had leaned his worn broadsword and Haldir's saber. "That's a pretty blade."
Aragorn stiffened when the man moved. He'd wanted to keep the saber in his sight at all times but now he cursed himself for bringing it. The covetous look in Branock's eyes was all too obvious and deepened as he admired the weapon from brass-encased locket to vine-traced hilt.
"Surely you don't use two such heavy things in battle?"
Aragorn subtly intercepted the man's slow progress towards the saddlebags. "One is my own. One is in my keeping."
"In your keeping." Branock echoed, his grin widened as though he knew something the ranger didn't. "Had a spot of good luck did you? Some lord's soldier or passing supplies-wagon got a bit of the bad?"
Aragorn didn't like the suggestion in the man's tone. "I did not steal it."
"Sure, I believe you," Branock held up his hands and backed away from the ranger's blockade. "Honest men like us, we ought to stick together. As you said, it's dangerous out here. The more we trust each other, the better our chances. Am I right?"
"Trust is earned," Aragorn muttered the adage he was all too familiar with.
"So it is, so it is," Branock agreed affably. He walked back to his own horse and made a show of rustling through his pack, giving Aragorn a good look at the assorted, jewel-studded daggers, plain knives and jingling pouches of coin he had stashed inside.
Branock gave the man a slow smile over his shoulder. "I heard about you in Merdon. Rumor says you beat off a gang of horse thieves single-handedly up in the woods."
"That was more through…chance than any skill of my own."
The older man laughed. "Right. Chances and ghosts. That's all these farm-men spout when they're in their cups. You believe in ghosts, Strider?" It seemed this was the subject he'd wanted to get around to for a deep golden glow surfaced in his eyes when he looked over his shoulder at the ranger again.
"Sometimes," Aragorn fooled uncomfortably with the brush in his hands, running his fingers through the long bristles. "Specters are not always visible to outside eyes though. Sometimes the only ghosts are those in your mind, those of the past."
"And those are quelled easily enough with a mug of ale," Branock still laughed though he faced away from the other man. "How'd you get that knock again?"
Aragorn knew full well he hadn't told the man how he'd gotten his injury. "Being careless."
"You might be right. The specters might be all in your mind," Branock muttered as he extracted something from one of the leather pouches at his waist. "Unless they got pointy ears."
Puzzled, the ranger gingerly took the ragged, grease-stained parchment the man handed him and smoothed its rumpled corners out. It was a death warrant. The signatures of those who had lost family members to the alleged ghost rested alongside the amount of coin each had put up for the monster's head.
"Passing these all around town," Branock tapped it with a forefinger, a sly smile sneaking across his face. "That "ghost" might put a knife in one or two of ours but by the time we're done with him, there won't be anything left but his head to carry back."
Lintedal let out a shrill whinny, her hoof stamping the ground as she tossed her head towards the pines until Aragorn seized her head to quiet her.
Turning his back on the younger man, Branock tucked the warrant back into his belt and tossed his assorted blades into his pack. He looked back when he reached the treeline.
"You know, Strider, trust can be very profitable when you don't have to share it with women. Think on it." With a last nod in the ranger's direction, he walked past the first flank of trees.
And came face to face with an elf.
Branock stopped dead, the pack slipping off his shoulders with an audible thud. Neither had seen the other until they nearly collided.
Haldir had let his feet take him where they would, scarcely paying attention to where he was going. Unbeknownst to himself, he had wandered right back towards the camp and the horses. He did not recognize the green-painted man in front of him and a slow frown darkened his brow.
Branock lashed out hard. Either he knew more about elves than he let on or he was very lucky for his fist squarely struck the pressure point under the elf's jaw. Haldir collapsed soundlessly.
"Can you believe the luck!" the mercenary shouted triumphantly back at Aragorn as he knelt on the unconscious elf's arms. "Walked right into it!"
The marchwarden stirred feebly as the effect of the unexpected blow eased. At first he felt nothing but the ache in his jaw, a stone grinding into his spine and confusion as to why he was lying on the ground. Then something coarse and abrasive tightened around his wrist and his eyes flew open.
The man leaning over him saw him beginning to waken and smiled a long, slow smile of satisfaction as he wound the rope from his pack tighter. He couldn't believe his luck. "Looks like I won't need Car to tell me where you are after all. I thought elves were supposed to be hard to catch."
Haldir looked up into the man's eyes and did not see either Branock's face or hear his voice but another face, another voice of a man long dead who had said nearly the same thing to him. Talking with Fedorian had brought ugly memories rising viciously to the surface. Memories of days of starvation and labor, nights of whippings and degradation more painful than that…The man's knees straddled him, the weight on his chest heavy and unbearable. But his wrists weren't tied all the way yet.
Catching the look in his eyes, Branock jerked the cords taut.
The marchwarden was too fast for him. He saw the knife in the man's boot and with a powerful twist, wrenched one of his hands free and got his hands on it. The mercenary scuttled off him fast but not fast enough. The knife rammed into his shoulder and pierced deep. His howl sent his men and Aragorn running.
Haldir was on his feet. Putting more pressure behind the knife handle, he forced the man back step by step until his back collided with a trunk.
The ropes slipped from numb fingers as Branock, teeth drawn back in a contorted grimace, hung on the mercy of the one he'd thought had been such an easy catch. He swore he saw a flicker of vermillion behind the elf's stony eyes.
The dwindling afternoon darkened around Haldir as leaves hissed over his ankles. The trunk against which Branock leaned took on a silver sheen, the roof above gold. There were other faces, other voices in the woods around him, not angry ones but ones for help, cries of pain. Branock's face morphed again and it was a much younger countenance with the knife in his shoulder.
The tumbled dark locks of Aragorn's doppelganger, Tergon, the youthful Gondorian soldier who had been Haldir's only friend and ally in a sea of enemies during those horrific days and nights in the Gondorian camp so many years ago. The touch of a wet and hot fluid on his fingers tore his gaze away from the man's whitening face.
A snaking river of liquid pooled down the steel, filling the fuller to capacity so it overflowed onto his fingers which gripped the green-twine hilt so tightly, his knuckles paled. He realized too late that he had not yet pulled the knife out. Branock moaned.
The sound seemed to shake the elf for he blinked and the dark world vanished, Tergon's face melted away and he found himself staring at an older man, his green-painted face a mask of agony as he slid limply down the trunk. Realization turned his veins to ice. Horror-stricken, Haldir stepped back. It hadn't taken anything. One blow and… Fedorian was right.
You will turn on them, as you turned on them before.
Bile rose in his throat, his retreating steps growing faster and more frantic until he tripped over an exposed root and fell against a trunk as though he were the one who had been stabbed. For several endless seconds, he stared at the man curled over his knees, his shirt darkening.
An outraged shout ripped the veil wide open before Haldir's eyes and his head snapped up. More figures were running at him, more men, all with drawn blades. He couldn't fight all of them. The man was still bleeding at his feet; he could feel it drying on his hands like ink. Without thought for anything else, he bolted, so fast he didn't hear one of them call his name.
"Haldir!"
Aragorn sprinted after his friend, dodging around Branock who was getting dazedly to his feet.
Hearing pursuit close behind him, Haldir put on a turn of speed that would have shamed a deer. He was up in the branches of an oak, ash, birch. Bare branches flew by as he flung himself through them, trying to outrun the memories as though he could outrun his own body. The bloodstains on his hand began to burn with sweat. He was hot when all he craved was cold, cold that would douse the horrible flame and wash the stains away.
He returned to the ground when he could no longer hear pounding footsteps behind him and all but collapsed beside a stream. He broke through ice to get at the water but by now he couldn't care. Over and over again, he plunged both hands into blessedly cool liquid; he stared at his hands, bone-white, beneath the dark, glistening surface. They would never be clean enough. The water cleansed him of visible accusation but the blood had already soaked deep into his skin, tainted him from within.
"Haldir?" Aragorn braced himself briefly on his thighs, his breath coming raggedly and head spinning from the run his still-hurting body couldn't take quite yet.
The elf captain didn't so much as glance at him. He didn't seem to have heard.
Worried, Aragorn paused only a half-second before wading forward, ice creaking and snapping under his weight. He ignored the scream of his nerves as cold seeped through his boots when he crouched, drenching him to the shins. "Haldir?"
Close enough now, he could see the marchwarden's eyes were overbright, almost feverish, staring into nothing. Tendrils of his golden hair had worked free from the meticulous tail and matted around his temples. His hands were underwater, upturned like a penitent.
Startled by the blank emptiness in his friend's gaze, the ranger grasped his friend's soaked forearms and pulled them out of the water. "Haldir!"
He could feel the warrior's wrists trembling in his fingers. He didn't know what had set this off but things had been going wrong since this hunt had started. Haldir was drowning in his past and Aragorn wasn't sure how to pull him back.
"Haldir, what happened? Come on, talk to me," he tried to get through to him though his legs were cramping and he could no longer feel his feet. The elf captain still wouldn't look at him and the glow in his eyes frightened his friend.
It looked almost like… madness.
"He's dead isn't he?"
Momentarily thrown by the question, Aragorn glanced back the way they had come with a frown. "No," as though he didn't think the man should consider himself so lucky, "He's hurt but you didn't…He'll be fine."
He watched the elf absorb his answer. Slowly, so slowly, the elf's muscles relaxed. He stopped trembling and blinked, the glow sinking back into the silver pools of his eyes.
"He's alive, mellon nin."
Slowly, feeling filtered back into his mind. Rocks stabbed upward into his knees, his hands were rubbed raw from scraping against sand at the bottom of the streambed. A north wind combed through the locks of his hair and chilled the sweat on his temples. Haldir gently freed himself from Aragorn's clasp and unbound his hair, letting it fall like a curtain. When he opened his eyes, they were rueful.
"You're soaking wet."
"Well, when you drag me into a stream I don't have much of a choice do I?" the man laughed, too relieved to see life rekindle in his friend's eyes.
Aragorn watched him with concern even as he unfolded his stiff limbs and rubbed his legs to get the blood circulating back through them. Something had happened those three days. He wasn't sure but whatever it was had affected his friend beyond anything he could have imagined. I should never have let him go. "You don't have to go back there. We'll find another way to get Brenn out."
Haldir shook his head as he stood, rivulets of icy streamwater dripping off his fingers. "I will be missed." Aragorn was wrong. He needed to be back there more than ever. He had to prove—to himself if no one else—that he had not become what he feared most, what Brenn had spat. A monster.
"You don't need to go back there." Aragorn tried to insist.
"I know where Brenn is," he said, his expression hardening, warning the ranger not to argue with him further. "I can get him out of there. I just need a little more time."
Aragorn's heart squeezed as he realized his friend could not be swayed. And his own resolve hardened. "I just want you to be careful."
Haldir only nodded but his eyes had gone sharp. "Tell me you will not follow."
"You shouldn't go."
"Estel, promise me!"
The ranger exhaled sharply, his breath a long, white stream of smoke into the cold afternoon air. "I promise I will not follow."
"I will come with word myself if I can." Haldir didn't look quite convinced of the ranger's sincerity but he bypassed any further assurances. "At least I hope to come myself. Do not follow me."
Aragorn's face remained level, betraying nothing. "Tomorrow night. Or else, I'm coming after you."
Eerie eyes watched the scene below as a gust shifted the russet cloak. He'd heard all he wanted. Momentarily, Fedorian allowed his attention to waver. Orphaned by the brutality of war and carelessness of men, Haldir had known grief and suffered hatred at men's hands. He could be a great source of anger, of power if only he would tap into it—as he had just done.
But guilt and that human's companionship tore him away from the empowering darkness over and over again. He had to be shown that there was no better way to shield yourself from the evils of the world than to become one. Close yourself off from intrusive feelings like compassion and empathy.
He himself had left such empty emotions behind long ago, when they had left him crippled, when they had not saved those he cared for. Better to shut it all off until those you once feared, feared you and resorted to trickery to bring you to heel. Fedorian's mismatched eyes narrowed. He shouldn't let himself sink into this again. Arenath said he brooded too much as it is.
That and the ranger was looking up.
Fedorian didn't move. Even if the boy possessed the sharp eyes of Elendil, he would have a hard time spotting the elf this high. None knew more than the Galadhrim about concealment. Even so, there was something preternaturally keen in those upward-looking eyes. Full of something deeper than he had ever seen in those whose lives had already passed through his hands. Almost he felt he was indeed looking into the eyes of Elendil the Tall as he had during the Battle on the plains.
The dark Galadhel smiled down at the top of the ranger's head, his gaze trailing after the human as he began the long trudge back the way he'd come.
Use those eyes while you may, pen laeglin, keen-eyed one. Soon, I will close them forever.
