Chapter 6: Tidings on an Eastern Wind
"You look rather worse for wear."
No censure or judgement accompanied Aragorn's observation—though as a 'good morning' it left much to be desired—only a brow rucked in curiosity.
"Thank you." The throaty burr in Elrohir's voice confirmed what little his face belied. When all the old remedies failed, he'd taken his bedroll outside the lodge, not wishing to trouble his comrades. Not since the Redhorn had he been so plagued. "I don't suppose a restful night on your part has changed your mind?"
"Keep watch will you?" Drawing a pair of slender, silver instruments from his cloak, Aragorn sprang up the talan steps.
Ascending after him, Elrohir dutifully scanned the deserted parade ground below. Haldir's talan offered a high vantage, the highest save Cerin Amroth. "This is not wise. If Angren catches us out, the guardhouse will be the most generous punishment to hope for."
"Angren would send us to Rhûn before he would permit this. Besides, his adjutant let slip he would be on the other side of the river this morn."
"Intelligence gleaned, no doubt, from lurking at keyholes."
Aragorn hummed an affirmative as he slipped his picks into the brass lock of the captain's door.
"A questionnable skill," Elrohir continued. "Not unlike the breaking of locks which I do not recall instructing you in."
"You are not unlearned in such, if memory serves." Aragorn's mouth contorted in a grimace. "You were Haldir's pupil too, once."
"And he himself would tell you I was a disappointing one, at best."
Aragorn paused in his lock-breaking. "What is your quarrel with him?"
"Who says we're quarreling?" Elrohir stalked to the edge of the platform, away from Aragorn's perspicacious stare. "It was long ago."
"If it was so long ago, why not set the matter, whatever it is, aside?"
Last night's fog had dispelled. Far below and to the west, the skin of the Silverlode rippled between the trees. A golden morning lay over Egladil's vale, all the shadows hidden away under leaves, in deep hollows.
"There speaks a Man. 'Long ago' means little to those whose memory of their foreshortened years are but foggy dreams."
Aragorn laughed. "There speaks an Elf, who believes endless ages are better spent stewing on ancient slights."
"I do not stew," Elrohir retorted. "If you were as attentive to your burgling as you are to chastising me, we would have gained entry by now. I still don't understand what you hope to find."
Something within the keyhole clunked. Aragorn's grimace eased as he nudged the door opened, and Elrohir squinted into dimness.
A musty odor of damp and old tea pervaded the air like a little-visited attic. Elrohir had seldom called here—Haldir was not a man much enamored of the prosaic aspects of his duty—and only when a door was required. The character of the barracks was in it still despite Haldir's long-abiding there. Less ascetic than self-effacing. The realm of a man well-schooled in concealing all traces of himself. Elrohir halted on a rug woad-dyed the shade of Belfalas' coasts (one of the only personal touches). Its fibers were trodden down to the boards.
An itch ran over the surface of Elrohir's skin. He had never been in this room before without its occupant's invitation.
Aragorn went at once to the desk, which commanded the lion's share of space beneath a shuttered window, and sifted through the ledgers and muster rolls piled on its candle-singed, dagger-pricked surface. "The Redhorn Pass has an evil name among travelers, as I need not tell you, and my recollections of last venturing that way are rather dim. My foggy, Mannish memory being what it is. Weather shifts at will. Snow buries markers. Paths appear and disappear. Haldir's resources may enlighten us. It would not do to reach the Stair only to lose our way."
"He will not be best pleased you rummaging his things," Elrohir remarked more to direct Aragorn's mind from thoughts of the Stair than over-concern for the privacy of a man who had pried often enough into the lives and affairs of others to warrant some in recompense.
"Better to endure his displeasure at my intrusion than my sorrow at his death." Aragorn did not even lift his head.
"All this fuss, based on one, overdue messenger."
Standing behind Haldir's chair, Aragorn traced a curve of the exquisitely rendered line of the Anduin on a wood-burned hanging but lifted his forefinger ere he reached the Narrows. "Our business in Mirkwood was unfinished. Even 'one, overdue messenger' may be the single stone that looses the avalanche. If he is in peril, the least a friend may do is try to find out what has become of him."
"You have certainly picked up his habit of saying rather less than you mean. He has been venturing into perils longer than you have walked this earth, my boy. Or I, for that matter." He struck a reasonable tone. "Haldir is more than capable of handling himself."
Relenting under Aragorn's eloquent silence, Elrohir maneuvered into an alcove formed by an overhanging bough, settled himself on the eiderdown of the bed and tipped open the trunk at its foot. Inside were spare cloaks and uniforms, neatly folded, along with a beautiful set of regimentals unworn apparently since Elrohir's and Elladan's knighting. They were still brightly dyed and fragrant from the cedar sachets tucked into their pockets. A pair of boots, holes worn through both soles, lay on the floor beside the trunk. With the tips of his fingers Elrohir extracted a bottle from the upright one, uncorked it, and winced at the eye-watering smoke of green spirits.
On a shelf at eye level sat a chest of burnished wood: the kind for tools or treasures. Elrohir sorted through it gingerly, feeling like he was going through the possessions of one fallen on the field of honor. Coins of vanished realms met his fingertips. Medallions from campaigns long-lost or won. A raven feather with a rumpled, iridescent sheen. The barb of an arrow crusted with old blood (that one he did not handle). Other sundries whose provenance and meaning escaped him. He had nearly scraped the bottom when his hand lit on a square of velvet, the only soft thing the chest contained.
Elrohir drew out the strange, silken glimmer shining between its folds. It was a coil of hair. Plaited into a circlet no wider than the circumference of a woman's finger, it gave back even the most hesitant brushes of light in glints of gold and silver brilliance unrivaled by any trove of Elves, Dwarves, or Men.
Rather out of fashion, these days, though once tradition and custom held such in high esteem, and many an elf-maid or woman bestowed a lock on her champion to reward his valor at the lists or in battle or before a long journey. But most of the Noldorin youth of Imladris were too vain to endure an uneven profile lest passion cool and so sentimental a token be consigned to a drawer.
The Tawarwaith though and those who followed the old ways held the notion that hair, like blood, lent the bearer strength beyond mere sentimentality. So, they strung their bows with golden flax. They dappled tree roots with their blood. They did not weep for some tokens were too dear.
Of the two he knew who possessed hair of such a color, one had never been prevailed upon to part with a single strand. While the other…
The light always caught it when she leaned over her ledgers. She gathered it in a thick tail when she worked in her garden, its sweat-darkened gloss like aged bronze. As a boy, he had loved to watch her brush it, grasping with his small hands at the play of its glints on the walls of her chamber as if trying to gather fireflies. Neither he nor Elladan nor even Arwen had inherited her coloring, and the house and family parlor darkened after her departure.
Something deep in Elrohir's chest ached like an old and unhealed bruise.
"What do you make of this?" Aragorn asked.
The chest's lid clapped shut, veiling the gold and silver lights.
Clearing a space on the desk, Aragorn eased down a sheet of vellum so weathered and broken in, a breeze might have rended it to rags. Countless foldings and unfoldings had creased the calfskin so deep, it was in danger of unraveling like a seam in no fewer than a half dozen places. It breathed char and stale spirits.
"This type of mapmaking I have only ever laid eyes on in my father's archives. This is a Dwarf map. Or a decent copy of one. Those are Angerthas Moria." Leaning over, Elrohir indicated a string of runes along the outer margins of the skin. "'Here are surveyed the sovereign realm and boundaries of Náin, the first of his name, descendant of Dúrin the Father and Lord of Khazad-dûm.'"
Aragorn hesitated over a jagged peak. "So, this must be…"
"Caradhras."
Strange to see it laid out like that, rendered toothless, in skin and iron salts and those hues of cinnabar only Dwarven cartographers mastered. But Elrohir knew better than to believe it harmless simply because it could be captured and drawn.
"There is the outpost at the head of the Stair." Aragorn tapped a certh marked out in an ink of oak-galls.
Midway between the outpost and the head of the northwestern trail down into Eregion was another, peculiar scratch-mark, some sort of shorthand. "What is that? A door?"
Aragorn was staring at it intently. Something shifted in his eyes. "I did not think there were doors, save the Gates East and West. And those are thought impassable."
There was that careful phrasing again.
Since the Dwarves' abandonment and the Sorrows, all ingresses into the mines below the Redhorn had been lost to time, shut beyond hope of opening, or guarded from trespass by menace and rumor of the Enemy. Every now and again some treasure-seeker or explorer of stout heart and little wit might put forth the existence of a forgotten adit or sunken, secret place of entrance and declaim they would unearth the Dwarves' ancient troves…or other stolen treasures. But if they had found anything of note, none had ever returned to tell of it.
"Was he searching for something?" Elrohir asked. Too sharp. There was only one reason Haldir would be seeking entry beneath the Redhorn. But it wasn't possible. Everything had been lost that night. Everything.
Aragorn's face shut. "He wouldn't—"
"Those are the captain's private quarters." The rebuke made them both start.
On the threshold stood Calen. Gone was the cheeky youth of the sparring ring. A flinty and forbidding soldier stood in his place, a vambrace half-fastened about his left wrist. Their intrusion had apparently waylaid him on his way to the range.
"Calen." Elrohir extended a hand toward him in appeal even as he angled himself to conceal Aragorn furtively shifting a ledger over the map. "I hope no blame fell on you for my conduct the other day. I—"
"You owe me neither explanation nor apology, Laimegil." Calen's expression remained bland though a faint line creased between his brows. "If you would but wait here a moment, Angren will be pleased to attend you and any purpose you have here."
Elrohir could not imagine any circumstance in which Angren would be pleased by his appearance…or anything else, for that matter. "I've run afoul of Angren one time too many in the last two days. I'd be obliged to you if you refrained from mentioning our presence."
"That's insubordination. I could be cashiered."
"Calen, is it?" Aragorn edged around Elrohir towards the young guardsman. "We were only seeking news of our friend, your captain. This darksome business on the Stair has us worried."
His words found their mark. Calen tightened the vambrace about his forearm then craned out into the corridor. He slipped into the room a step or two and half-shut the door behind him. "I was to take the dispatches to the Stair. I begged off to see my sister wed, and Rocheryn took my part on the roster. I fear some mischance may have found him and the patrol. They are long overdue. Have you heard anything?"
"Surely, Angren will send scouts," Elrohir said.
Calen's usually gracious countenance tightened. "The silgol has ordered all but a picket of watchmen to withdraw across the rivers, the footbridges broken down."
"What? Why?" Elrohir demanded. Such a thing had not occurred since the Sorrows when the king's abdication had left the realm reeling and leaderless.
"Such is not my province. Mine is to obey. By this time tomorrow, the borders will be shut. No one will be permitted in or out without special dispensation from the Lord or Lady." Calen slipped back out into the corridor. "I should make haste if I were you."
A troubling spark kindled in Aragorn's eyes as they left Haldir's quarters. Like his forebears, Aragorn possessed, deep in himself, those most infernal of mortal traits: a tenacious will and an impatience born of numbered years.
"Then make haste is what I shall do," he said, in a low voice as if to himself. "I will depart for the Stair as soon as I can make provision."
At the head of the steps Elrohir laid a hand on his arm as if touch alone might impart more restraint. "Estel, that is madness. What do you hope to do, one man alone?"
"One man's courage may do much. You told me that."
"That you remember. Have you not ventured far enough into peril of late?"
"I am no longer your charge, Elrohir. You are not responsible for me."
The face upturned to his was only so because Aragorn had preceded him down the stairs. Gone was the youth he had taught to hawk and ride and fight. The one who, on his virgin ranging, told Elrohir he hoped to be worthy of those who loved him. In his place stood a Man in full measure with a man's will and a man's pride. Word had reached Elrohir over the years—of Thorongil, of Strider. Whatever name or banner he bore, Aragorn had proved his mettle again and again.
Everyone else saw the man, but Elrohir saw the boy still. Too bright and fragile, this flame, too eager to burn and burn.
"You will always be my charge. And you will not go alone."
Before dawn the following morning Elrohir eased the lodge door closed on his sleeping comrades and hefted his bags over his shoulder. The muster would not sound for some hours more. By then, they would be well away past the outliers of the forest with none the wiser...
"You are bestirring early." Elladan was sitting on the edge of the flet near the ladder, one leg drawn up to his chest, the other dangling over the lip. "Even for you."
"I might say the same of you." Elrohir checked, pack in hand. "Your change of habit far outstrips mine. Under most circumstances, you would not rise at this hour if the lodge were afire. I didn't know you'd returned."
"I had a strange dream. In my dream, you were walking down a tunnel, far underground, into a darkness so thick no light dispelled it."
"Heavens forfend, you should be plagued by such dreams!"
Over the finishing touches of their packing, Aragorn had, in an undertone, broached the subject of Elladan. What would they tell him? He would wonder and worry when their bunks stood empty for days on end. Elladan had been in the city yet, and none had taken note of the cabal in their midst—none, save Rammas, who had glanced their way, her face thoughtful.
Too often of late had Elladan set aside his own council. Too often had he supplanted his own needs for Elrohir's—to save him from himself. His brother's stalwart heart would not refuse to accompany them should he learn of their imminent departure.
Elladan, at least, had earned his rest.
"Aragorn had a mind to venture down to the meadows this morn," Elrohir mouthed the words he had practiced. "For pheasant."
Elladan drew his other leg up onto the platform. "It's early yet I would think."
"Not so terribly." A facility for dissembling was not a skill Haldir had ever been able to impart.
"It's an uncertain business… hunting pheasant." Elladan rose and faced him. The dawnlight washed across his face, the shadows of leaves veiling his mouth like a woman's lace. "They tend not to be found unless they wish to be."
"We shall see."
Elladan embraced him with more than his usual effusiveness. "Good hunting, brother mine. Have a care, for my sake. Please." His voice sounded oddly muffled against Elrohir's neck.
Elrohir gripped his brother tight in reply. He had no need of more words.
Elladan had always known his heart.
The skeletal remains of the footbridge creaked treacherously as he crossed back into the world. He had to wade the last few feet, his ankles sinking deep into the mud, the Celebrant's current tugging and swirling about his knees. As he ascended the bank, he felt anew the sharp tug of time running on, a new urgency and need for haste.
On the hither shore Aragorn materialized from the shadows of an oak, an unlit pipe in his hands. He had changed out his greys for old hunting leathers Truly, one of the Dúnedain, now, save for the cloak furling from his shoulders. It was much weather-stained, and there was a crooked seam in the left shoulder as if it had been slit with bandage scissors and clumsily mended.
Rummaging in his pack, Aragorn extracted another which he passed over wordlessly. A strange garment, the shade of leaf, root, bark, fog or all of them at once. With some misgiving, Elrohir flung the warden's cloak on. It was heavier than he remembered and scented, faintly, with cedar.
"I trust the fellow you liberated this from will not mind the loss."
"We need it more." Aragorn tugged the hood over his head. "We must make haste. Our departure will not likely go unnoticed for long."
At the Nimrodel, he whistled softly and received a low reply.
A figure crouched amid the tangle of boughs overhanging the river. Calen half-lifted his fingers in salute.
Elrohir returned the gesture then he and Aragorn struck off west, side by side, through the misty woods, passing like wind in the leaves.
Language Notes
Tawarwaith (Sindarin) - the name the Silvan folk give themselves, meaning "Forest People."
Source: Parf Edhellen: an elvish dictionary, .com
certh (Sindarin) - a rune used in Eldarin form of writing
Source: Lord of the Rings (3 volume version), Appendix E, II: Writing
Author's Notes
Comments, emojis, critiques, analyses, questions, and keyboard smashes are all very welcome and encouraged, and thank you to those who have both reviewed and read! I can't tell you how much it makes my day.