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Chapter Two: Ghosts in the Woods
Sometimes when there is grief, one cannot be stopped in their motion for anything less than the Doom of the world. Other times, it is all one can do to move at all. This day, the grief was the former, though it careened ever more wildly toward the latter for one Legolas son of Thranduil; beloved of Ithildim; heart-brother of Gimli; and accidental Elvenlord of Northern Ithilien. He sat beneath the eaves of the cottage he had been lent by the townsfolk and watched the rain pound down around him. The air was heavy but he leaned against the wall of the porch to avoid the spray of droplets as they hit the railing, for he was busy writing letters.
He had written so many that his fingers cramped but he found he could not stop. Even after he had engaged a messenger to take the urgent ones, he found himself hungry for activity, and so he invented more, and more, and more—people to follow up with that he missed, memories for those he had not seen in centuries, even one to Gimli inquiring after Arod.
He wrote in that foreign place until the sun set, and then he picked up his pile of papers with shaking hands and shouldered open the door to the room he was to stay in until an escort arrived for he and his companion. He locked and barred the door and pressed a chair in front, and then slid to the floor and stared at the cot in the far corner.
His friend and lifelong patrol-mate lay there, wrapped in sheets and shrouded in linen, and Legolas could not approach. It had been a terrible death, dealt by the hands of a child, and there was nothing he could do to fix it.
The boy burst from the woods and hurtled into the village at wood's edge, spattered with mud and heaving. He dropped hands to his knees and breathed before taking off again, shouting for his father as he ran, headed for the elder's house.
The rain fell around him and pattered about his feet in the slick clay like drops of cranberry paint. In moments he was pounding on the leader's door and his father was at his shoulder, hand dropping to his collarbone to grasp it as the door swung in.
"I have found Eleka!" the boy cried. "I have found her!"
The leader gaped and tugged them into his cottage, and they both stood dripping on the deerskin-covered entry.
"Where is she, son?" his father asked emphatically, grabbing him at the shoulders and bending his knees to look him in the face.
The boy wiped a hand across his face and smeared mud and sweat-specked blood across him. "She is in a hut just north of here, beneath the trees."
"In a hut—" the leader interrupted. "What do you mean, Ilion?"
"Two men took her in there, and she was crying."
The men exchanged looks and sent the boy for his bow, and called for their few guardsmen to meet them in the square near the baking ovens. The rain battered down around them as the child knelt in front of the shed, sheltered from the storm, and drew a map on the ground and then—standing—pointed North.
.o.
Legolas stared at the child as she quaked in her brother's arms, and the boy sobbed into her hair. They cried but the world was silent about him and he pressed and pressed and the blood did not stop even though he had not pulled out the arrow, and even though Gloreg blinked at him hard and tried to focus and even as Legolas spat at him in angry prayer, as he sobbed and as he begged.
There was nothing he could do here, so he demanded they take him to their village, but it was so long a walk with an elf as injured as Gloreg—so long—and time was working against them: each heartbeat tugged Gloreg farther away, closer to that distant horizon Legolas could not reach—each heart beat like one thousand years.
So they sat there in the mud outside their lean-to, and Legolas sheltered him from the chilling breeze. He stopped praying and he stopped begging and he only spoke softly to him, and low, and he held Gloreg tightly as he leaned over him—close and warm—as the breaths became faint as the sound of a sparrow's distant flight winging the far horizon, a rhythm of farewell as it pinpricked into the distance: going, going: silent.
Legolas sat for a long minute with head bowed and waited, and then took Gloreg into his arms and stood. He looked at the folk stood about him expectantly, and they dropped their eyes in shame, packed up the few things within the elves' shelter, and led him back to their town.
.o.
The children's father was desperate to explain as their mother swooped upon them with concern and stirred the other families—hidden within their own small cottages, bundled away from the worsening storm—into the square. She feared retribution, though Legolas had given no indication of it, and the father plead his case though Legolas did not speak, for he had just lain Gloreg on the ground and arranged his hair subconsciously, had stood and begun to massage his shoulders until his hands could feel again, but they talked on and on and on—
"You must understand it was an accident! The stories we have heard."
"Daro!" Legolas had cried, as he fumbled from the tent in such terror that it quivered and collapsed over the body of the sleeping child, lost and cold in the mid-morning light. He had heard Gloreg's surprised and pained cry and moved without thinking.
"The stories this boy has heard. You are like a sprite in the wo0d, something incorporeal and fae—"
"Stop! Please!" But the arrow had gone from the hands of that panicked child. Legolas had seen it happen in a moment and Gloreg already staggered, slow and careful, unwilling to charge an innocent to save himself—thwack.
"—and when you move, it is like the wind!"
"I have letters from the King!" Legolas had cried, and he pulled a bundle from his pocket and waved them. "Permissions and a map showing our route. Please—stop, look. You must!" he finally cried.
"And with the fear with which we have lived all these long years…"
The father had wrenched the bow from the boy, and thrown it to the ground. Shoved the boy forward to look for his sister. Legolas ran to Gloreg with hands raised to show he was no threat and dropped to the ground beside him. He tossed the bundle of paper toward the man and set to work trying to save him, but already his chest was wet and bubbling. (A lucky shot in the hands of a boy who would never be the same.)
"We are not on this map!" the man had said, rifling through the documents and staring at Legolas as he marveled. "We are not here! This is an x where we are, as if we were struck and forgotten… As if no one thought to look… When we have survived all the raids—every one of us! We have survived!"
"Stop," Legolas said then, cutting through his own memories and the continued and incomprehensible reasoning of the children's father. He held up a hand, gestured wordlessly for something—anything—to clean off his hands.
Silence fell heavy and thick and the villagers stepped back, all but the boy who sat still with his sister and Legolas cleaned himself, and then Gloreg.
"I will require some time alone to prepare him," Legolas said without meeting their eyes, though the elder rocked on his feet at the edge of the arc they had unintentionally made around him. "And a place for us to stay where we will not be disturbed."
He glanced up and there was nodding, and the child in the boy's arms cried.
"Parchment, if you will," he said, and began to list. "Ink, water, some type of meat or hearty food."
A man scurried off and began to collect the first half of the supplies as he continued.
"A change of clothes." He looked pointedly at the ground and not at his own blood-soaked garments. "A blanket, a sheet…"
He trailed off.
"And access to a messenger, if you will. Your fastest and most reliable. One who can get over mountains or go long over plains." He paused and thought for a moment, considered their strike from the map and rephrased. "Or find one who knows someone who may do, and send whomever to me."
There was murmuring and acquiescence but no one moved. Legolas ran the cloth once more over his slick but stickying hands and said firmly, but without bite, as he glanced up and meaningfully away:
"I will require some time alone to prepare him. If you would give us that and send a rider to Emyn Arnen, and then things I have requested to a room…"
There was a flurry of movement and they were gone—even the small child disappeared into the rain-blurred village about them.
All disappeared but the boy, who stood stock still a few feet away, head bowed and hands clasped before him.
"May I help you?"
Legolas stared at him for a long minute until the child looked up and, when he did, he nodded.
"Yes, child," he said. "You may help me."
Dear Father,
I expect you will receive my official correspondence on this matter before this one. Here, you should find a letter enclosed and sealed with the temporary crest of the Elves of Ithilien. If you could send it over sea with the next of our folk to leave for the Havens, I would be most appreciative. It is an explanation for Gloreg's parents who have awaited him so long, and a plea for forgiveness for his soul that they might present to whichever Vala is concerned with wood-elves oversea (if even there is one). Gloreg labored for so long and while a rest in the Halls of Mandos might do him well, it is his family he deserves.
We did take care, Father, I promise you. But even after war there are things one cannot predict. And for it to be neither orc nor enemy nor friendly fire that felled us, but the steady hand of a scared child, moved to action for love of his sister? My heart burned for him, but it cries for Gloreg.
The sun rises now and there are horsebeats on the wet horizon. Saida arriving, I imagine, with an escort to bring us home. The light here is grey in the aftermath of the storm, nothing like the light on the leaves you described in your last letter.
I was pleased to hear the beech is well, that it yet strives and grows, and the place still bursts forth defiantly green.
The acorn you sent smelled like the autumn. I remembered cool mornings in the practice field, watching Felavel shoot, how you would send me on 'missions' to keep me quiet and occupied. How I counted acorns and pinecones one winter morning and could not be brought in for lunch.
Your patience with me is a gift.
You are daily in my thoughts.
Give Lumornon my love, and Lostariel (and Orodiel, too, if you see her).
Legolas
P.S. Do not fret. Faramir is sending his rangers to survey the rest of Ithilien's borders. I shall, once more, be deep in the woods or else working on the gardens in Emyn Arnen. It will do my heart good, I think. Despite this most recent horror, the place simply blooms.