A/N: Many thanks to Levade for the continual creative spurring, the beta reading, and the faithful friendship.
"In the city men shake hands and call each other 'friend', but it is the lonesome places that tie their hearts together and hearts do not forget."
-C.M. Russell
I
He will put the captain's wife and the harlot's baby on Lord Glorfindel's horse. He feels a vague unease at this, as if he is being irreparably insolent, but he knows not what else to do. She will not stop wailing, and the babe is shivering with cold.
The woodsman's girl and the other youngsters will have to walk. Walking is the only solution he has for them. The Wild sprawls before them in a great broken waste and a black storm greases the distant spine of the Hithaeglir and three children and one weeping lady look to him and only then does the fear go quiet in their eyes.
He is seventeen. He has a knife with the top third broken off, a firesteel, a waterskin frozen solid, and a hunk of flesh gouged from his thigh. For the first time in his life, he is wholly and desperately lost.
The grey horse stands in its lovely rune-etched livery while he legs Handor's lady into the saddle. Next he lifts the baby. The lady pulls her hands up and away as if he has presented her with something dead and gangrenous.
"I can't, I will not carry it! Do not ask it of me!"
He stands there with the whimpering infant lifted high in the air until he starts to feel silly. The babe begins to cry in earnest. He lowers it but holds it away from his body and wishes someone would come and take it from him.
The woodsman's girl does, finally. She comes to his side, ducking out of her cloak. It is a ratted thing with a hole at the hem. She ties it into a bulky loop and slides back into it. Relieves him of the baby and tucks it into the makeshift sling.
She has a very long neck and very sharp collarbones. Perhaps a few years younger than he. He has not yet thought to ask her name.
"Do you know where we are?" she asks in a low voice. The other two huddle a short distance away, hoarding one another's warmth.
He hesitates. Wishes for a moment he was able to lie.
"No."
She draws a breath and shifts the baby in the sling, draws it nearer to her. "Do you know where the others are?"
"I know where they were going." He glances up at the blackening eastern sky. Looks away to the south, where somewhere over long leagues lies the East Road, and beyond it, the Angle and its fertile black soil, to where the starving and uprooted Dúnedain had been fleeing when they had been set upon by brigands. Hunted for days now through the hills.
Handor's lady is still sniveling. To her he says, "If you will not carry the wean, the youngsters will ride."
She gathers up the bell-strung reins with a soft and lovely jangle. Holds them to her belly, as if she might wheel the stallion and flee if he tries to impel her down out of the saddle.
"I cannot walk," she says, and drags her broidered sleeve across her snot-slick upper lip.
His tolerance is raveling; he steps toward her.
"I will carry him," says the girl. The babe has already nestled and quieted in her tattered sling. "Put Tinu up behind her first, the boy can ride in turn."
"We will not have to travel far," says Handor's lady. "The others, surely they are just beyond the ridge."
Beyond the ridge lies another, and another beyond that, granite-hewn and glowering, limned in skimming mist. The smell of snow is on the air. The wind slides chanting through the rocks but beneath it lies the white and smothering sound of empty wilderness.
Let's hope so, thinks Halbarad, and pulls his own cloak close around his shoulders.