hello everyone!
Massive thanks to readers and especially to reviewers. The reviews really fire me up and I know people won't always have the time or inclination, so I really, really, really appreciate you sharing your time and thoughts to help me be a better writer and a better member of this community :) I've started sending out responses, but hardly enough... RL is so crazy lately, but I know not just for me. So I am posting now, in the earnest hope that a bit of a distraction soothes a bit of all of us :) Stay safe, healthy and positive everyone! As always, c&c's are welcome, and I hope you enjoy the read as much as I enjoy the writing :)
# # #
14: Stolen
# # #
Mirkwood, T.A. 2851
# # #
When they next stopped for a few hours of rest, Legolas purposefully stalked to the space next to Glorfindel. The older elf received his company with a mix of suffused delight and mild embarrassment. He was being claimed brazenly, as he never had been before.
They lay side by side to sleep, close enough that Glorfindel suspected their hair splayed about the leaves on the ground were catching and tangling. Glorfindel could feel the mildest shift and hear the slightest breath of the younger elf beside him.
It was an inexplicably warming feeling, having such connection with someone, to claim and be claimed.
They did not speak, but their breaths eventually matched. Glorfindel stared up at the canopy of leaves overhead, and he opened his soul to Legolas, unobtrusively welcoming him through if he so desired. It was like beginning a familiar tune low on the breath and waiting for someone to join in and make it a duet.
Legolas' sweet strains followed as hoped, and the quiet hum of a new song lulled them both to sleep.
# # #
A jarring awakening.
Glorfindel felt Legolas' presence wrenched from him, and his eyes snapped open in sudden awareness. He looked at the elf beside him, still asleep, still there but... elsewhere.
His elegant brows were furrowed in distress, his mouth parted slightly in quiet gasps, his half-lidded eyes lost in foul dreaming. Once in a while his head would jerk or his body, and Glorfindel reached to wake him.
He stopped at a hiss from Silon, and Glorfindel raised his eyes to find Legolas' loyal second-in-command awake. Tauriel, assigned the watch at the time, was also up and looking at him and Legolas.
Silon shook his head at Glorfindel in wordless prohibition, and he remembered then, how lethal Legolas could be when startled awake.
"That is an occupational hazard," Glorfindel murmured.
Tauriel gave him a dry, humorous look, but her eyes softened as she said quietly. "We all have them, sometimes. He has more cause for nightmares than most, unfortunately."
Silon found a serviceable pebble from the ground, and he sent the little thing sailing in Legolas' direction. It barely made a sound landing near Legolas' head, but it did the trick; the ernil's gaze sharpened in rapid waking, and his jerking body regained its careful control. He sat up easily, and without acknowledging any of the three elves, he went up the nearest tree with an enviable feline grace that almost had him flying.
Glorfindel did not wait for an invitation to climb, this time.
# # #
Legolas' eyes were unreadable, feral. He'd confessed to being more fey in the shadow of the woods and the embrace of the trees, and Glorfindel saw it to full effect, now.
He was waiting.
The moment Glorfindel broke through the canopy of the impossibly high tree they had both climbed, Legolas, that wild child of the dark forest, pounced.
The Woodland Prince leaned over the ancient warlord and pressed his lips to the other's - mouth open from the very moment they touched. He took Glorfindel's air, tore through his defenses, robbed him of his senses...
Save for the taste of his desperation and soundless anguish.
Legolas' kiss was a silent scream into Glorfindel's mouth and he took it, for all that it was – the destructive force, the claim and use of his body. If Legolas regretted any of it later – a possibility, Glorfindel conceded – he would take that too.
Legolas was incendiary, and Glorfindel was on fire.
# # #
"Why does fear always trail so closely after love?"
The quiet question came from Legolas minutes later - a breathless kiss later, a lifetime later... for after it things have changed, irrevocably.
"I don't know much about, about love," Glorfindel said. He hesitated, because they've not spoken openly and directly about "love" before. He wasn't sure that was what this was, or if either of them had any right to claim it so.
"But I know a lot about loss," Glorfindel went on; a concept he was surer of. "And the fear of it. That is the missing link, I suppose. To love something is to fear the loss of it. Love and fear are such brutal complements."
They went together. But what made his heart ache for Legolas was how quickly the bad trailed after the good – that he should find affection and not even have a few hours' reprieve from the fear that inevitably followed it.
Not even a few hours' reprieve.
"Almost everything I love I..."
I lose, Glorfindel filled in for Legolas, who found no heart to say it, just as Glorfindel did not find the heart to lie and contest it. He watched the other's face quietly instead, drawn from the despair of memory, eyes overbright.
"I will tell you the last memory of my brother that I have," Legolas said, mustering a stronger voice. "He was in my sights, and it was a shot I had to make, do you understand? I had to make it."
Glorfindel's blood turned cold, and his breath caught, and whenever he felt he had an understanding of this place and these people and this prince, he would hear something like this.
"He knew he was being taken," Legolas said. "He knew he was lost. And when I aimed at him he looked at me with such, such gratitude. I let the arrow fly. They told me I hit the mark perfectly, that he did not suffer. That I'd made the most important shot of my life, the shot I couldn't miss. But I did not look – I only have the word of others for it. My courage failed me then. But the last I remember of my brother - gratitude." He licked his dry lips. "I wonder if you'd ever have seen him, over in Mandos' Halls."
"I do not think so, Legolas."
Legolas nodded grimly. "Probably not, otherwise you'd know it. He is-was-would be hard to miss. Very formidable, more like adar than me. And... well, I suppose there's an unhealthily large population of dead wood-elves over there. How could you possibly find one, the place is probably gods-be-damned lousy with dead wood-elves by now."
# # #
The trees were uneasy.
Soon into their resumed journey, Legolas noticed it first and best; he was Woodland Prince after all, and his awareness of the forest ran in his veins. But soon the sensation had become unmissable to the rest of the party too, including the foreigners among them.
If the trees could speak coherently of what bothered them though, then there would have been little need of messenger birds to begin with. All they could convey was a churning disturbance that seemed to grow as the traveling party ventured northwards.
They moved forward on high alert, in a protective formation that had non-combatants well-covered by Tauriel at the lead and Renior at the rear. Between them, Silon and Istor flanked each of their commanding officers, Legolas and Glorfindel, with the non-soldiers of the party clustered at the very middle. They formed a slow-moving diamond shape, each of the points manned by a skilled and fit warrior.
Tauriel wordlessly motioned for a halt and for the members of the group to stay low. She conferred with Legolas behind her in a low voice.
"We should have encountered or at least sensed a patrol from the northernmost outpost by now," she said. "And yet it cannot be an orcish enemy incursion that has caused this anomaly – the trees do not feel as they usually do in such attacks."
"But what else could it be?" hissed Silon beside the thoughtful prince, "some new evil yet unknown to us?"
"You've reviewed the latest intelligence reports from our northern outposts before we began our journey?" Legolas asked.
"Of course," Tauriel said. "The threats from the north are the same as they have always been – existent, but dormant. Minimal and containable at worst."
Glorfindel remembered his own intelligence briefings on the matter as well. To the north of Mirkwood was a vast territory of such potentially powerful forces that even they have all been keeping to themselves and preferring not to stir the pot, lately. The Grey Mountains covered the entirety of Mirkwood's north. At its westernmost end, they met the Misty Mountains at Gundabad. Here dwelt orcish forces of particularly high caliber. At its eastern end, the range split to form a valley, the Withered Heath, where long-unseen dragons bred. In the mountains between the east and the west, there used to dwell dwarves in settlements, sandwiched between both menaces. They have wisely long decamped, even if they had good claim to the territory as its original and most benevolent settlers.
"What is the 'minimal and containable' danger, when it does happen?" Istor asked.
"Spiders every now and again," Tauriel answered. "Mostly orc incursions from Gundabad but nothing large or organized. They make sport of the occasional skirmish with us at the edges of the woods, but there is no real strategy to break through into the forest kingdom. Other times, we are not the targets but we still choose to engage them if we spot them from our northern outposts. When they venture down from their mountain strongholds and skip us, it is usually to raid and harass travelers or mannish settlements at the edges of our territories. These are more vulnerable peoples than Thranduil's soldiers, so we try to help when we can. Like I said – minimal and containable. But I do not believe this is what distresses the forest. The unease of the trees do not suggest an orc threat." She jerked her head at Legolas' loyal Silon. "Scout?"
"Aye, Captain," he said, straightening up and securing his weapons; he needed stealth more for this task. Instinctively, he looked at Glorfindel before leaving, and said of Legolas:
"Look after him for me."
# # #
The company stayed low, save for Legolas who was apparently unused or ill-fitting in the position of waiting. He stayed on his feet, arms loose but ready on his sides, his posture stooped slightly forward, all his senses on high alert. He looked like a wild animal tasting the wind.
"Get up," he commanded his people in a soft but authoritative murmur, even before Silon's whistling signal pierced the hushed forest. It was not a tune of immediate alarm, and so at Tauriel's lead, they ventured forward warily, continuing on their path to the northernmost outpost. But they certainly moved faster.
Silon met them partway through, and he was flushed and breathless as he reported, "Ah, Legolas. You are not going to believe it."
Legolas gave him a clipped nod to continue.
"The entire place is heavily asleep!" Silon exclaimed.
The response was an alarming but mostly confusing one to Glorfindel. What did it mean, for a whole group of hardened Silvan soldiers to be asleep at their posts? He was not the only one to feel this way.
"What madness is that?" Renior asked. "Some wizardly spell? Some drunken irresponsibility? An unheard of illness? A new evil we are yet to encounter? How could that possibly be?"
Legolas grit his teeth and his hands fisted at his sides. "Silon..."
Silon grimaced; he knew the opening of his report had been an inadequate one. He corrected quickly, and even added in information that the non-soldiers and foreigners among them might not know.
"This outpost – the northernmost point of Eryn Galen – is comprised of a handful of high telain up on the trees with an unobscured view facing the mountains. These elevated telain include archer-armed lookouts and soldiers' living quarters. Beneath them, there is a grounded outpost of spearmen and a homestead. There is a stable and a paddock, a garden and some farmland to sustain the contingent, supply storage, and living quarters for families of the few soldiers who have accepted long-term assignments here. When I say everyone is asleep, Captain, I mean precisely that. A population of forty at least, soldiers and noncombatants alike – heavily and unnaturally asleep with their eyes closed, based on my initial survey."
"You are certain they're alive?" Tauriel asked.
"Yes, and seemingly otherwise unharmed." Silon glanced at Rossenith. "The healer will be more able to ascertain, of course."
Tauriel glanced fleetingly at Legolas, but the command was going to be up to her and they both knew it. Her gaze quickly turned steely.
"Could it be some form of malady?" Tauriel asked.
"There is nothing in all of our people's recorded history that can account for a sleeping sickness of the like Silon describes," Rossenith said. "But I can tell you this with absolute certainty – there are many plants and waters in our rich forest that can certainly do the job. Mayhap someone had harvested a foodstuff they are unfamiliar with, and fed it by accident to the entire group..." Even she, with her kindly heart, sounded skeptical.
Silon shook his head. "This was no accident, in my eye. There was deliberation and caring here, Rossenith. All the sleeping people are cared for – the young ones tucked into their beds, everyone laid out neatly either in the elevated telain or in homes with closed doors to keep away from wild beasts, their positions arranged so as not to obscure breathing... Whoever did this did so intentionally, but did not want harm upon the community. They even cared for the horses. The stables are emptied and the beasts released to the paddocks so they have mobility while unattended. There is food and water accessible."
"But who would do this?" murmured Renior.
Legolas shook his head in dismay and said nothing, but his intelligent gaze had taken on an abstract, thoughtful look. He had the beginnings of an answer of what was going on perhaps, but one he was not ready to divulge.
"I will need to examine all the ailing as quickly as possible," Rossenith said anxiously.
"Not yet," Tauriel countered. "Silon - in your scouting, did you see any secure and defensible area where the non-combatants can stay while we make further explorations?"
"The emptied stables should satisfy that requirement," he answered.
"Silon, Renior," said Tauriel, "Take the noncombatants there and then leave them to secure the surrounding ground area." To the healer Rossenith and the gamekeeper Garavon and his apprentices she said, "Arm yourselves and stay at the stables until we come for you. We do not expect an attack, but you have to be able to defend yourselves in some fashion if one should occur. Remember - you have weapons and you have some training. You will know what to do if you had to. Rossenith, I know you want to examine our people but you cannot help them if you are harmed. Security will take precedence – they've been on their own this long, a few moments more won't matter. Once the outpost is safe, we will give you the time and resources you require to do your job."
The pretty healer looked nervous but determined. She nodded despite her fears, and Tauriel gave her a grim but approving smile.
Tauriel next turned to Legolas, Glorfindel and Glorfindel's loyal Istor. "You three belong with me. We will see if the telain above can provide us some answers."
# # #
The outpost was eerily quiet, save for the occasional thunder of horse hooves and neighing coming from the paddocks.
It seemed that whatever had happened there happened recently enough, though. Things did not look neglected; the homes and gardens were well-tended, there were even loaves of bread that weren't stale.
Tauriel, Legolas, Glorfindel and Istor climbed cautiously up to one of the flets – the soldiers' shared living quarters, with beds occupied by sleeping wood-elves. Though assured by Silon that the occupants of the outpost that he had seen were alive, by instinct they still checked at pulse points and breathing, before moving to another flet. They were connected by narrow bridges and a quick and easy walk.
This talan belonged to the outposts' commanding officer – he had a sleeping space to himself, along with a simple dining area and a well-used working desk strewn with papers anchored by a tankard of an unknown drink. The officer was asleep on his bed too, like the other soldiers.
"Let's try to rouse him," Tauriel said, which Glorfindel and Istor set to, promptly. When shaking and calling out did not work, Glorfindel closed his eyes and attempted to connect to him by soul and song. He shook his head at failure.
"He wanders meandering paths," he said in dismay. "Deep, dark and labyrinthine."
Istor sprinkled the officer's face with cold water, and Tauriel stepped forward with a smelling salt from her soldier's pack. The officer stirred minutely, but did not wake.
Legolas, Glorfindel noted, did not participate in these futile efforts. He had drifted to the fallen officer's desk, and was rifling through the papers there.
"Was anything of value kept at this outpost?" Glorfindel asked. "Something someone may have wanted to take without harming your people?"
"Our people hold no such valuables now," Tauriel said, somewhat cryptically. Glorfindel raised an eyebrow at that.
"If you mean jewels and baubles and similar such things," she expounded. "They make people quite mad, I understand. Aran-nin has only ever loved a few, but once lost, does not bother much with them anymore. They are vanity and vulnerability. If you notice, even his crowns come from our trees."
"We live only as the gods originally intended," Legolas murmured distractedly. "For all the good it's done us, with everyone else all about making machines and rings and digging up the earth stirring up dragons... ah." He found what he was apparently looking for. He drew out a sheet of paper to show the others.
"What's that?" Istor asked.
"A register of soldiers and noncombatants assigned to and/or residing at this location," replied the prince. He presided his lips together grimly before continuing. "This is where we sent Rochanar's sons and his wife. The sons are two soldiers and the noncombatant youngest, who served in the gardens and the kitchens." He picked up the tankard on the desk and sniffed its contents carefully.
Tauriel's eyes widened, first to grasp what he was suggesting.
"We need to take account of everyone who is supposed to be here," she said urgently, "and determine if anyone is missing."
She grabbed the register and started going through the list and comparing it with the soldiers in the vicinity.
"Stay here," Legolas said to Glorfindel, "Neither of you can help in this matter – you do not know the people we aim to identify. Try to waken the commanding officer again. His name is Echador. He has no wife and no children, but he adores music and dotes on his hummingbirds."
Glorfindel smiled at him slightly, warmed by the other's trust in his ability to connect with others, but also endeared by Legolas' intimate knowledge of his people.
"I will try," he said. "But I cannot promise you anything."
Legolas was satisfied nonetheless, and left him and Istor to the task with a nod.
"What could have happened here?" Istor asked Glorfindel quietly, the moment they were all alone.
"There is a possibility that the fallen Rochanar's sons took it upon themselves to come after their father," Glorfindel deduced. "Knowing they were being watched and likely would have been stopped by their peers, they put the whole place to sleep and then escaped."
"But escaped to what?" Istor asked. "To bloody Dol Guldur in the benighted south?"
Glorfindel winced. "Love makes fools of all – and unchecked grief can make one quite mad. We know this firsthand, from events that have occurred in our own House."
Istor winced. The shadow of Celebrian loomed large over anyone from Imladris. When Lord Elrond's lovely wife was rescued from the hands of the orc, her mind and heart were left imprisoned. They never truly got her back. The consequences of her torture centuries ago were ones they all still lived with now – in the loneliness of their House lord, and the constant absence of Celebrian's twin sons who were perennially engaged in hunts. Bloodshed of their enemies have become, beyond revenge, the salve to their torments for their lost mother.
"What would Elrohir and Elladan have done, if we tried to stop them?" Glorfindel asked.
"What've they already done you mean," Istor conceded begrudgingly. Elrond's twins have escaped kindly intervention many a time, to mixed results. "Still – they probably wouldn't have poisoned a whole village. Probably."
"Maybe Legolas' theory is wrong," said Glorfindel. "We will find out soon enough."
"What do you think?"
Glorfindel gave no voice to it. He just shook his head in sadness, and tried to at least do what was asked of him by Legolas.
# # #
Silon was wrong about two things.
First, not everyone was asleep. One person in the entirety of the northernmost outpost was awake.
"Ernil-nin!" she exclaimed from one of the telain, so loudly and desperately that Glorfindel heard it from the commanding officer's flet. "Ernil-nin, thank the gods you are here!"
Glorfindel and Istor looked at each other briefly, before they started running. They did not go far, following the way Legolas left earlier. The exclamation had come from a neighboring flet, connected to the officer's by a narrow, natural bridge of vines and branches.
Following it, the two Imladris warriors emerged at the entrance to a talan with an unparalleled view of the Grey Mountains. This was the lookout itself, the literal point of the northernmost point of Thranduil's Woodland kingdom, from where wood-elf soldiers perched and watched in vigilant guard of their home from northern threats.
But they found no soldiers there, at that moment. They only found a frail-looking, distraught elleth, bowed on her hands and knees at Legolas' feet, weeping. Beside him, Tauriel stood with her knives out, ready to defend her prince if the slight woman presented a threat. Her jaws clenched in displeasure when instead of stepping away, Legolas crouched before the woman and put his hands on her shoulders. The posture opened his chest for an attack, but instead of taking advantage of Legolas' vulnerability, the woman lifted her head up to her prince and focused on what she needed to say.
"I did not know what else to do," she said. "Everyone was asleep when I woke. I think they gave me a smaller dose of that foul potion, fearing for my health. I did not know what to do, hir-nin, I did not know what to do. I would have gone for help but I did not think the outpost should be left unwatched."
Beyond her, Glorfindel could see traces of her attempts at keeping a lone watch. She had a bow and two full quivers of arrows. She had a bucket of rocks for dropping and tossing to any enemies who might come below. She had a water skin and some lembas, and a small packet of leaves that Glorfindel suspected to be some form of stimulant, based on her wide-eyed shaking. She even had a chamber pot on hand. This slight elleth had tried her best to be the outpost's lone watchman.
"Who gave you that foul potion, Agarwen?" Legolas asked tightly, and In his voice Glorfindel knew he already knew the answer.
"My sons," she said brokenly, beginning to weep in earnest again. "My sons, hir-nin. They served it to everyone."
This was the lost soldier Rochanar's wife, and their devastating suspicions were proven true.
# # #
The second thing Silon was wrong about, was that not everyone was alive.
Whatever means the sons of Rochanar had spread their sleeping draught around – sweets for the children perhaps, or ale for the soldiers, or food for the rest – someone had partaken of more than their share, and consequently slept too deeply for it, drifting into death.
The soldier was long gone by the time Rossenith got to him, cold and stiff.
Rochanar's sons had unintentionally caused – murder.
# # #
"Who are you, beyond being your father's son?"
Glorfindel remembered asking it of the youngest Rochanarion weeks ago, when the ellon approached him with questions about death and sacrifice after his father was taken alive by orcs.
"I am nobody."
It was a conversation that had terrified Glorfindel, for he felt how much the young elf seemed to be drowning in a desperate, impotent anger.
"What would you do for those you love?" Rochanarion asked him questions right back. "Was death a salvation?"
But all of Glorfindel's answers were found wanting, and now here they all were. Reaping the poison fruits of Rochanar's sons' desperation.
"I cannot bear it my lord, the thought of him in the clutches of our enemies. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I cannot think of anything else."
# # #
"You need to come after them, my lord."
As Rochanar's wife, and now the mother to three grief-mad fugitives who had committed unintentional murder on top of treasonous actions that left their kingdom vulnerable to attack – it was Agarwen who was left with all the burdens of their familial desperation.
A burden she was now passing onto her prince.
Silon had joined them at the lookout as they considered their options. In the grounds below, Rossenith was given the assistance of Garavon and his apprentices and the protection of Renior while she tended the sleeping elves.
"He needs to do nothing of the sort," Silon snapped. "Your foolish sons, in their imaginary noble cause, has killed a soldier and left our northern territory hideously exposed. That we were not attacked with the outpost quietly fallen was but a stroke of luck and you know it. If it is to Dol Guldur they are headed, no one need follow and their doom is all their own making."
As certain as he sounded though, he still looked to Legolas for the final call. Even Tauriel, who technically had command of their traveling party, did so. She understood that she was their tactical leader, but this was something else entirely. This was a decision of justice, something a prince worth his birthright would not forego.
Legolas did not shy from it.
"All elves bound for Dol Guldur," he said sternly, "Whether they are irredeemably taken by force as Rochanar was, or unstoppably go by their own will as his sons are doing, are considered lost. When the only outcome is death, the only appropriate option is less death-"
Agarwen wailed cutting him off, and wept. "But my lord... My lord...! They are ill, you see? Ill in the mind and in the heart. As surely bodies can break, so can minds, couldn't they? And as surely as you would not leave an injured soldier to perish on the ground – you would not leave my sons to fates they chose without their proper faculties, would you? You wouldn't penalize a maimed soldier for not walking, why would you blame my broken sons for not thinking –"
"I am not finished," Legolas snapped for he was angry too, and had just cause to be. Silon, who had looked relieved when it first seemed as if Legolas was willing to stand down, stiffened. Glorfindel found his whole body becoming cold and tight too.
He was always a champion for attempting rescues, but why did he feel as if a weight was lifted when it initially seemed like Legolas was going to leave the foolish sons of Rochanar to their own devices? And why did a paralyzing dread land on him now that it seemed Legolas was going to come after them?
"I said – unstoppably," Legolas said. "If your sons can still be stopped, they will be. They have to be stopped from destroying themselves not only for their own good, but so that they can be made accountable for their crimes. They need to face justice before the king, and justice before the family of the soldier whose life they ended."
Silon exhaled a heavy sigh in disappointment. Tauriel inhaled in anticipation of the work they now had to do. They were strange bookends to Legolas' affections... while Glorfindel just held his breath waiting for what all of this might mean for all of them.
TO BE CONTONUED...
Thanks for reading and 'til the next post!