Chapter 10: Old Friends

Haldir thrust his sodden cloak absently into Elrohir's arms, and ruffled the melting snow out of his forelocks, spattering those nearest with a flurry of icy droplets. "Who's on cooking duty? Heavens, save us, Doronil, not you. Taereth, take that filth off before I hang you out there with the rest of our guests and string your ears round my neck. The rest of you, what are you doing? Look to your gear. I pray you're swifter with your tasks than your arrows."

The very air changed in his encompassing presence. At the snap in his voice, they scattered like rabbits before the hawk, the lounging, anxious tension of a moment before dispersing in the face of occupation and military efficiency.

Rammas planted herself in his path towards the brazier like a boulder parting the flow of a river. "Some of us were looking to rescue you. Though it seems you had no need of it. That was a reckless venture. I thought you more careful."

"The field does grow rather grim for officers. I ought to have put in for their pay before I left."

"You know perfectly well what I mean." She hooked two fingers behind his collar and gave it a tug as one might rebuke a favored but misbehaving hound. "A man who commands others does not have the luxury of a footloose rough."

Linwen made an approving noise, but catching her captain's eye, hastily busied herself at the brazier's stack of kindling.

Few and far between were those who could address Haldir with such temerity and escape unscathed, yet the small, dry smile remained on his lips. "Had I known you awaited me, I would have tarried the longer. At least the Mangler had the good grace to try to kill a fellow cleanly rather than crush him underfoot and cast him off a ladder. Lest the memory grow dim, this footloose rough, so unjustly maligned, served you well at Sarn Gebir. And took a sword thrust for his pains."

"Shoulder wasn't it?"

"Flank."

Their jocular chafing put Elrohir in mind of two dogs of the same litter nipping at each other's throats for sheer delight. He ought have guessed their acquaintance: all that questioning that first night in the lodge. Who is your captain? He must be a fellow worth knowing.

Mustering the Galadhil's air of studied indifference, Elrohir draped the cloak over a branch to dry, tugged and straightened the folds. There was a jagged slit in the cloak, torn right through the hem. The damned fool might have killed himself for the sake of his theatrics. And you are still squiring for him, even now. Annoyed with himself for falling into old habits of nerves as much as anything, he let go just as Rammas moved aside with the air of a conjurer summoning something out of nothing.

"This time you will not cheat me of my gains. I told you he would come."

Years and distance had rendered Haldir's expression unfathomable. "Well. Damn my eyes. Look what the East Wind blew in."

"Sir."

Centuries of being his own master had not dulled the instinctive response of a soldier to his Captain's attention. Odd, how the old courtesies and rituals remained beyond anything else. Or, perhaps, Elrohir reflected, politesse was merely a last picket line in a long retreat.

When the silence stretched, he added, "You are back in fighting trim, I see."

Privately, he thought Haldir rather battle-worn though there was no trace of the limp he'd affected across the snowfield. His greys were faded from stream-washing, fingernails crusted with crescent moons of filth. His lower lip was bloodied. He had that pared-down, used-up look of a man after calamity or at war, a man with too much to do and not enough food or sleep to spare. There was a hint, too, of translucency about him—as if the veil between flesh and fëa had worn down in places. But behind his haggard eyes, a pale light still burned.

That light unraveled Elrohir and held him whole as it had since the earliest days of his training. It had been his beacon on the shore when the ravages of adolescence and the indemmar's first stirrings coupled with the pressures as his father's firstborn son and heir set him all at sea. Even if Haldir's valor on the Dagorlad—his praises sung by the likes of Glorfindel and Amroth no less—had not all but hallowed him in Elrohir's eyes, his raffish charm, fair counsel, and keen wit would have smitten the would-be knight no less. Haldir was no stranger either to mercurial shifts of mood and sudden withdrawals from crowded rooms into solitude. Though Elrohir did not at the time recognize such for the disguise it was, he was enthralled and grudgingly conceded his mother's wisdom in her choice of teacher.

Even after the shine wore off his regard under the eye and hand of a hard taskmaster, he drilled his legs watery, his arms to reeds, sculpted body and mind with the sole purpose of molding himself into the perfect knight for the one he esteemed above all others and whose approval he sought with nigh desperation. The potency and shape of his longing embarrassed him now. A youth's infatuation, shorn of maturity's common sense and self-preservation.

Even so, the proudest moment of his life remained the eve of his knighting: Haldir fastening the sacred arsigil and megil about his waist. Dear as those hard-won blades were to him, dearer still was the uncharacteristic glitter in Haldir's eyes (dismissed as a surfeit of wine), a hand with the same calluses as his own pressing his shoulder, his cheek. The epithet that sparked the air between them, saluting and confirming his mastery:

Gwador.

He was worthy. Part of a fierce and formidable tribe whose ranks did not lightly break. With the swearing of his oath, before Eru, and passing of his vigil, he dedicated himself to a life of purpose, bound to duty for his people and their realms.

Even after the Darkness rose once more, and their paths had converged less and less, Elrohir's heart remained fond towards the idol of his youth, his allegiance unquestioning. Let the vale's gossips bandy their lurid tales as they would.

Until the Redhorn. Until the scales fell from his eyes and revealed his hero's feet of clay.

There were no heroes.

Only pretenders who shrouded their cowardice in fair-seeming guise and skulked away into dusk and silence. Who had proved their mettle where sword and strength availed them but failed the truest test on the only field that mattered.

The passing of centuries had not gentled the sting of betrayal or the ache of abandonment. Elrohir's tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, rendered inert as stone by the spell of memory and ancient pain.

Haldir sucked his broken lip thoughtfully. With the eagerness of a crow snatching a glass bead, his hand shot out and captured Elrohir's jaw, his thumb rasping up and down the bristles there. His hand was brisk as iron.

"What's this moss on your face, roquen?"

He never had been one for pleasantries.

Elrohir disentangled himself, rubbing his cheek. "The blood of our Númenorean kin runs strong—as you well know—and a razor more luxury than need in the Wild. I was unaware I would have to adhere to the old standard to gain an audience. Though these days it seems even those not under your command are subject to it."

Haldir frowned, but Rammas thrust a hand under his nose, freeing Elrohir from further scrutiny or need for explanation before all and sundry.

"A silver piece was our wager, I believe?"

"Let it never be said I reneged on my word to a beautiful woman." Producing a coin between his fingers, Haldir extended it past her expectant hand, past the outer layer of her garments, and dropped it down the well of her open collar as a man might wish on a fountain. "Of course, if you have a mind for something warmer than silver for recompense—"

"Knave. Your hands are colder than your coin." She flicked his hand away, but her own lingered in the air between them, came to rest against his lip. "The Mangler, you said?"

"He won't tell tales on us now."

Elrohir squirmed and averted his eyes from their intimacy. Officers were a breed apart, to be avoided, worshipped, or feared in turns. A feat made more difficult when they evinced attributes of lesser men. Such private lives as they had were to be walled off, well away from enlisted's observance. The world tilted off its axis otherwise.

At the brazier Haldir flexed the cold out of his fingers as Linwen set a cup of small ale and a washbowl before him. "You've climbed a long way for a bit of silver. Rocheryn's on the take again. Or have you soured so on errantry a messenger's wages prove more appealing than—?"

"Rocheryn is dead. Dol Guldur has taken the dale. The borders are shut." Angren, hands furled into fists on his knees, broke in from the other side of the fire with the air of one who had been restraining himself past bearing. "It's past time to set glorymongering aside and return where you are needed."

The effect of his words, though softly spoken, rippled across the lodge like a pebble dropped in still water. The murmurs fell off. Those on the verge of sleep lifted their lids. Linwen, running a brush over her boots, twisted her face away from the firelight as if stung by an ember.

Even in the weighted silence, Elrohir felt the patrol's unity. Differences of life or manner or experience ceased to matter amid shared grief and peril.

Haldir set his cup aside. "'Glorymongering' is it?"

Elrohir stepped out of the circle of argument.

Angren was the better envoy to relay such news as they had brought. But he couldn't bear to stand there and listen to him do so, what careful words he might couch Rocheryn's death with, to blunt the force of its horror. It was growing harder to stand still, the desire to act colliding with the acknowledgement that men new to grief need time and allowance for the knowledge to settle in. Push them too hard, too fast, without giving them time to catch their breath, and they'd balk on you.

Besides, inserting himself and, by extension, his rank, in any capacity, would hardly endear him to Angren, much less Haldir, who, like as not, would take the bit in his teeth for his erstwhile squire's effrontery. Better to wait them out.

Against the back wall under the eave someone had set a pair of warden's boots. They stood upright with laces knotted, the leather still stiff. An unstrung bow was propped up between the heels. On a frame above hung a warden's cloak the hood pulled up and fastened at the throat with a silver brooch: for all the world, a sentry at his post, awaiting orders. Save that everything had been cleaned and polished within an inch of its life even the floorboards.

A marble likeness of Lemnë—as the boots, cloak, and bow were called—stood on the hilltop of Cerin Amroth, raised by Amroth himself alongside its twin circles of trees in memory of his father and the fallen they had left behind on the Dagorlad. Though it had come to stand for other fallen as well.

A stub of candle had half-pooled beside it.

Though Elrohir did not consider himself a man with much use for ritual, he drew out his tinderbox and sparked the wick. A pale yellow flame quickened and brightened.

Belegorn. Alagos. Rusgion, Emlin. Feredir. Nimdal.

Rocheryn.

A draft across his shoulders drew him back in time to catch Haldir angling out into the night. No glance turned Elrohir's way, but he sensed an unspoken summons or as much of one as he would get.

Linwen appeared at his shoulder.

"If you would have your word in private, roquen, now is the time for it. Though it is a cold night to tread the deck."

Elrohir's heart sank under her persistent formality. "I am accustomed to the chill."

She stepped into his path. Like Huan upon the bridge of Tol Sirion at the advance of the Wolf. "Before you do so, I would have mine first. Whatever this errand of yours, do not let me earn oak leaves over it. I have only ever worked for my living. Understood?"

"This soldier understands the macildur." He paused on the threshold. "If it reassures you, I didn't come to do battle."

Linwen did not flinch when he wrenched the battered door open and the chill poured through the gap. "He missed you, Elrohir. He said little enough after your parting, but I know he did. And don't let him tell you otherwise."

Against chastening, even loathing, Elrohir had steeled himself. He had not expected reassurance. He wanted to offer up something, anything, to warm the air, but the cold swirling around and between them made further words impossible.

He went out.

Language Notes

fëa (Sindarin) - Spirit
Source: Unfinished Tales

Lemnë (Quenya) - "I remained."
Head-canon name for the Elves' version of the Battlefield Cross.

Source: Ardalambion

"Some verbs in -ya drop this ending in the past tense, which is then formed just as if we were dealing with a primary verb. Especially interesting in this regard is the verb ulya- "to pour", which Tolkien noted has a double past tense: "Poured" in the transitive tense, as in "the man poured water in a cup", is ulyanë with the normal past tense ending -në added to -ya: a perfectly "regular" form according to the rules set out above. However, the past tense "poured" in the intransitive sense, as in "the river poured into the gorge", is ullë. Notice how the ending -ya is suppressed and the past tense is formed directly from the stem UL. We do not have enough material to tell whether this suppression of -ya before the past tense ending -në is something that regularly occurs. It may be noted that the past tense of the verb farya- "to suffice" is given as farnë (not **faryanë); this form seems to support such a theory (LR:381 s.v. PHAR).