Chapter 7: Greenwood the Great
On the eastern flank of the Misty Mountains, shrouds of grey cloud parted briefly to reveal the imperious gaze of the lofty peaks of Caradhras, Celebdil, and Fanuidhol. Under the cold, aloof eye of the mountains, a small company of warriors stepped onto the Old Forest Road at last.
Ninael shivered. He had been east of the Hithaeglir only once before, courtesy of an overprotective older sister who had looked ready to charbroil Lord Elladan in the fires of Mount Doom the night he had been summoned for battle. As a consequence, this land was as unfamiliar to him as it had been that first day five years ago.
Imladris slumbered the centuries away, its ivy-quilted walls as unchanging as its people, standing upon earth long mellowed by a perpetual immersion in the spray of waterfalls. But here, the east wind ran rampant, shaping the mountains and rivers with a wilful, mercurial hand. Even now, poised on the brink of spring, it seemed as though winter had only begun in earnest not so long ago. On the wind, he heard the shrieks of eagles.
Raising his eyes carefully from the pricked ears of his bay mare, Ninael snuck a glance at the woodland prince. He needn't have bothered, for no one paid him any heed. The prince had been amiable and perfectly polite but rather lost in thought for much of the journey. Relaxing, Ninael lapsed into a vacant, dreamy stare.
Over the past winter, the Ñoldor of Imladris had largely arrived at the tacit conclusion that Legolas Thranduilion, in addition to having Sindarin heritage and thus being forgivably flighty, was quite possibly committing himself to a life of hermitry. This was on account of the fact that aside from having joined few patrols at the beginning of the season, the prince had rather neatly vanished from the public eye.
The Ñoldor were tall and grim, but also remarkably gossipy, and nothing tended to kindle speculation so much as a strange, beautiful warrior-prince who had apparently decided to trade sunlight for the shadows. There were some who had had some particularly nasty things to say about him, but Ninael had a hard time believing that the greatest archer in Arda since Beleg Cúthalion was anything less than a hero.
With a mix of fascination and undimmed awe, Ninael gazed stupidly after the prince. He was so thin it seemed as if a particularly strong breeze could snap him in half—his rescue of the man-child must have cost him a great deal—but his particular brand of fierceness, one that the Ñoldor had found so odd, Ninael now saw reflected in the hills and trees and brooks around him.
Ninael thought of goblins and the High Pass, of a great longbow at full draw and arrows that clove mist and bone.
When the king is well again, perhaps I might ask the prince for some instruction, Ninael thought hopefully, his fingers tightening around his own bow. But first, he needed find enough courage to do so much as sneeze in the prince's presence.
Distracted though Legolas was, even a cave troll would eventually notice someone staring a hole through their back, and so as the roaring waters of the Anduin grew louder, Legolas Thranduilion looked back curiously. Immediately Ninael bobbed his head, doing his best to hide his face in his mare's dark mane, a chastened little duck.
His mare rolled one big brown eye at him.
"I know, I know," Ninael mumbled.
The Greenwood the Great rose before them, a dark smudge of ink across pale, cloud-lined parchment, running north to the Grey Mountains and disappearing south to the Brown Lands. So vast and so foreign, and as the Ñoldor eyed it sombrely, her prince touched a hand to his lips, murmuring something that was snatched away by the eager wind.
They crossed the Anduin at the Old Ford, the crisp mountain waters churning restlessly about the horses' bellies. On the opposite shore, at the prince's soft whisper, Faensul stepped neatly off the compacted, well-worn earth of the Old Forest Path and into the tall grasses beyond.
"Your Highness!" Alachon, a fellow warrior, called out in surprise. "Do we not make for the Halls of the Woodland King?"
"The fighting is in the south," Legolas Thranduilion said. "Not at my father's halls."
"But the king is so unwell—!" Alachon argued, and Ninael winced, hearing the budding accusation in his voice that he wasn't sure Alachon himself noticed.
"I am no healer," the prince answered calmly.
"You are his son!" Alachon protested, and then his eyes widened, as if shocked by his own audacity. Fearfully, Ninael peeked at the prince, and promptly decided that he was a crazy person.
Legolas Thranduilion was smiling.
"I am," the prince said agreeably. "And if I lose the southern border just so I can weep at my father's bedside, His Majesty will cast me out himself when we meet next in Mandos' Halls."
Alachon's uneasiness slid straight into abashed silence. "Your Highness," he muttered.
"Peace, Alachon, your concerns are valid." Incredibly, there was even a touch of warmth in the prince's voice. He patted Faensul's shoulder, and with no more pomp than if they were discussing their dinner menu, said, "We ride south."
Ninael was the first to urge his mare onwards, plunging into the tall grass after the prince.
Gradually, the forest rose up all around them, the limbs of its great trees like the teeth of a cage. Ninael had never met an elf who didn't like nature, but already he was beginning to revise his opinion of trees. Beneath their severe, haughty stare, he felt like a child again.
They were walking a Silvan path, which was to say, no path at all, as far as Ninael's untrained Ñoldorin eye could tell.
These woods were overgrown and irreverent. Cobwebs and ropes of vines slung themselves brazenly across the branches, the sunlight that managed to seep through its dense crown was tinted green, and rainwater trickled sluggishly down tree trunks, like dark sap, dripping slowly into the thick carpet of pine needles underfoot. He heard the calls of a thousand birds and the murmur of a thousand insects, and beyond that lay still more, a muddle that spurned understanding.
But sometimes, he caught glimpses of beauty less foreign—a pair of rabbits hopping through a foggy glade, or a little stream whose cheerful burbling pared back the heavy quiet. Occasionally, they came upon giant spiders, but this far north, they were fairly few and far in between.
They travelled hard and swift, stopping only to let the horses rest, for elves did not need much in the way of sleep. The prince led them over the last hundred miles that lay between them and the battlefield like a returning swallow, called back by the spring.
They had stopped for camp one night, and Ninael was brushing down the sweat-darkened coat of his mare when he noticed a curious doe studying them from beyond their thin ring of firelight. In those liquid dark eyes, Ninael saw something not entirely unfamiliar, and in that instant he felt curiously at peace.
The wind shifted, the firewood popped, and then she was gone.
"Do you wonder perhaps whether they are what we love about this forest?" Legolas Thranduilion asked.
Ninael jumped, for a moment utterly convinced his heart would run away from him. At his side, Faensul appeared out of the gloom like a pale ghost, snorting a white ring of mist into the chilly air.
"Not so," the prince said quietly, resting a hand on the craggly, lichen-covered trunk of the beech that towered over them both. An ant ran busily over his long fingers, dragging along a dead moth. "It is this all."
The firelight capered over his high cheekbones and the sharp contours of his face. Sun-prince, Ninael had heard people call him, and yet in that instant he reminded Ninael of nothing so much as the fell, lonely way of the wolves that drifted through these northern forests.
On his brow the mark of cinnabar-red glittered, beguilingly bright.
As they drew further south, Eryn Galen began to give way to Taur-e-Ndaedelos—the forest of great fear—a name muttered darkly in taverns and inns across the rest of Middle Earth, and which none of them had the heart to utter before the prince. The shadows began to linger overlong in the spaces between the trees, and close in on the slivers of sky overhead.
Ninael became intimately acquainted with the thoroughly disagreeable sight of a spider's furry jaws closing over his head, and a pair of twins in the Ñoldorin company received matching gouging wounds from a spider's pincers. For his part, Alachon managed to acquire a deep gash that ran from shoulder to elbow. He would carry it for much of the rest of his long life.
That he had acquired it by positioning himself between a particularly angry spider and a particularly preoccupied prince was, of course, mere coincidence.
One day, the shadows spoke.
"My prince."
Ninael barely managed to keep himself from yelping, but his mare had no such compunctions. Rearing, she pawed at the air in displeased alarm, and ears burning red as the ripest persimmon, Ninael whispered pleadingly for her to calm. By the time he dared to look up again, there was a Sindarin lord with silver eyes and silver hair standing atop a mossy boulder amidst the trees ahead, surveying them with a mithril-bright gaze.
Neatly, he fell to one knee. Sweeping a hand to his heart, the Sindarin lord spoke in a clear, carrying voice that reminded Ninael of the bell-like songs of the forest birds.
"Hail to His Highness Legolas Thranduilion, the crown prince of Greenwood the Great. This humble subject welcomes the regent's return to the realm."
"Rise, Teleglos Feldilion," the prince said. Breath hitching, Ninael realised that he had vastly underestimated the prince's comeliness. He looked much nicer when he smiled.
A nonsensical thought, given that Legolas Thranduilion smiled almost as frequently as Lord Elrond liked to raise his bushy eyebrows, and Ninael seriously pondered over whether his time in the Greenwood had driven him as mad as its prince.
"Rise, all of you," the prince said again, this time addressing the treetops. Only then did Ninael finally see the slight ripple of movement as a company of wood-elves, perched high on the swaying branches above them, straightened gracefully.
A thrill of misplaced exhilaration and belated fear coursed through his fingertips, and Ninael shifted his weight, trying to settle his mind in the space of the courtly pleasantries that were sure to follow.
But to his great surprise, the prince stepped back to present them with a gracious sweep of his arm.
Alachon, Rína, Satar, Ninael… Legolas Thranduilion named them all.
"These are my friends from Imladris," the prince said simply, and in that one breadth elevated them far beyond their station, "and they have come a long way."
The redwood pierced the canopy of trees, rising above cloistered shadows and the heavy air of the Mirkwood south to revel in the sunlight. A hundred feet above the forest floor, the incessant thrumming of copse and thicket gave way to the rushing of wind. On it lingered the chilly bite of the Misty Mountains to the west, and to the east the proud, lonely spire of Erebor straddled the horizon.
On one of the tree's broad boughs, Legolas sat cross-legged, stretching a hand out to the hundreds of black butterflies that cavorted above the rippling sea of leaves. Behind him, Teleglos stood sharply at attention.
"… in the process of evacuating the southernmost villages, Your Highness," Teleglos was saying. The butterflies tugged happily at the strands of his silver hair, stirring in the breeze.
Legolas nodded. By his knee, a hardy dandelion clung to the redwood, having invested considerable effort and luck and persistence in taking root there. With absentminded swiftness Legolas plucked it from its perch, and asked, "He is better?"
Teleglos slid a sideways glance at Legolas. Back straight, gaze impassive, his prince was the very picture of quiet self-possession. He was also meticulously shredding the unfortunate dandelion flower into precise, quarter-inch slivers.
"Better," Teleglos affirmed, and saw Legolas freeze in his flower-dismantling. Knowing that Legolas' distaste for vague reports rivalled his loathing for Gondorrim archery, he hastened on. "The lesions have stopped weeping pus, and the heat in the king's blood has subsided. Lord Elrond says that His Majesty's wounds are still inflamed, and the neighbouring tissues intumescent, but he is hopeful."
The relief that slammed into Legolas was a tangible thing. Lightheaded, he stared down at the disembowelled dandelion cupped in his hands. With a sudden peal of laughter, he tossed it into the air.
"Thank you, Captain," Legolas said, watching the petals scatter into the viridescent leaf-sea.
"Your Highness."
Teleglos bowed deeply. Then he rose with an easy smile, the rigid ties of rank and custom forgotten, and flopped down next to Legolas, one leg dangling airily over the edge of the bough.
"Don't go off for so long next time, alright?" Teleglos said. Stretching like a great jungle cat, he leaned back, his head a reassuring, companionable weight against Legolas' shoulder.
Why? Wariness swamped him like a swarm of hornets, thick and dark. Reflexively, Legolas tightened his hand around a fistful of his cloak.
"Why?" Legolas said when he had managed to relocate the dregs of his rationality, his tone valiantly even.
Teleglos regarded him with a solemn, ruminative squint. Then he said, "Got a spot there, have you?"
Legolas stared, his light eyes filling with equal parts dawning horror and thunderstruck admiration. On his brow, the cinnabar-red mark flashed with sullen indignation.
"You're too old for this," Teleglos complained, extending his talons towards Legolas' face, "I'll help you pop it."
Easily, Legolas caught his wrist. "Teleglos," he said seriously, "has pining after me possibly driven you insane?"
Teleglos' answering cackle made the butterflies around them scatter in fear. "Perhaps."
Calmly, Legolas prodded Teleglos' hand away, regarding him the same tender, compassionate way a mother regards a child who is not quite all there. In a manner that was neither here nor there, he said, "Do you blame me?"
Teleglos fixed him with a woebegone gaze—the persistence with which Legolas pursued subjects that he so carefully tried to steer them away from was truly remarkable—and ran a loving hand through his silver hair.
"For leaving me in charge of the archers and therefore being the direct cause of this new crop of white hair? Undoubtedly. For not being here? But I know you, Legolas," he said, and there was an unusual flash of gravity in his blithe tone, "and so for as long as you need me to, I will watch over the archers for you."
Before Legolas had time to be touched, Teleglos continued, "Just make sure you take them back afterwards. I'm too young and beautiful to being doing so much hard work."
With that, he yawned heartlessly and closed his eyes, deftly ignoring Legolas' wide-eyed astonishment. In the swaying embrace of the redwood, so high only butterflies kept them company, Teleglos unceremoniously appropriated the prince of the woodland realm for use as a pillow, and went to sleep.
They let the horses go, after that.
"They know the way," Legolas Thranduilion said, as the Ñoldor shifted uncomfortably. He was tickling Faensul behind the ears, "And will walk it far better without our burdening their backs."
The white stallion had been snuffling in delight like an oversized wolfhound, and he stopped just long enough to give the prince an affectionate and painful-looking butt on the head as a parting gift. Without ceremony, the stallion turned and disappeared into the trees at a graceful canter, his tail drifting out behind him like a wisp of cloud.
Ninael tried to resist the urge to wrap his arms tighter around his mare's neck. She patiently tolerated his hug for a few more heartbeats before giving him a prompting nicker. As he let her go, she glanced back at him mistrustfully, as if doubting the wisdom of leaving him here without her supervision.
Shouldering his bow and his pack, Ninael pointedly lifted his chin, and leapt into the branches after his prince.
On this last stretch of road, bird whistles winged over their heads, a shade more frequently than ever before. The night before they entered the war camp, for the first time since they had set foot in the woods, Legolas had tents erected. Because wood-elves are incapable of doing anything on the ground when it could be done in a tree, his swayed on a broad branch, a light little structure of carved wood and stretched hide.
Inside, as he had done every night since first receiving word of his father's wound, Legolas sat pondering a map by flickering candlelight. He had stared at this map for so often and so long that he felt like he was slowly becoming a piece of parchment himself, dry and yellowed and equally dumb.
"My prince?"
"Come in," Legolas called, still frowning down at the vellum. Maybe they should just set fire to the entire thing and go live with the Hobbits?
As Teleglos ducked into the tent, Legolas pushed the map away. He wrinkled his nose, resolving not to look at the slender lines that marked river and gorge. At the moment, they resembled angry black caterpillars far more than any rune.
"You have it?" Legolas said, peering up at his friend.
"You left in such a hurry last winter I'm surprised you remembered even the clothes on your back," Teleglos said, flourishing a bow. "Here, I kept it safe."
From inside the folds of his cloak he retrieved a gleaming box of dark oak. A single carven stag graced its cover, its head lifted to an absent wind. Falling to one knee, Teleglos presented it to Legolas in both hands.
For a moment, Legolas stared quietly at the box in his hands, as still as a deer who has caught sight of a wolf. Then the candle popped, and with sure, deft fingers, he reached out and undid the clasp, flipping it open.
On a bed of white satin lay a diadem of silver and green. Fine mithril threads outlined stone leaves of jasper and jadeite, from the palest of sage greens to the deepest colour of the sea.
Green leaf, green leaf, Thranduil sang out, twirling a bewildered little elfling before an open window that filled the study with slanting sunlight and early birdsong. A forest of green leaves, and I have the best one of all.
"Legolas, tomorrow—"
A slow blink, and the study and old sunlight faded.
"Why are you still kneeling?" Legolas shook his head gently. "You will be remembered by history, you will. For being the first elf with rheumatism."
Glaring, Teleglos carefully pushed the box into Legolas' hands and scrambled up, all attempt at decorum abandoned.
"Now, remind me, Captain," Legolas rested his chin on one hand. "Exactly how poorly does my army think of me?"
"Well," Teleglos said, after a moment of deep introspection. "I don't think they hate you. Nine centuries of devotion are not easily forgotten."
Legolas spun a quill round and round in his long fingers.
"But there is always too much darkness in winter, Legolas," Teleglos sighed, hugging his elbows. "And this spring brings no relief. Legolas, they hurt. They remember what it was to struggle against the creatures of shadow while their prince was safe and warm in Elrond's House. They recall that you have left them on winter's edge several times before."
When Legolas did not respond, Teleglos tipped his head sideways. "Legolas—" he said, in what was not an entirely successful attempt at disguising his worry, and nearly fell out of the tree when the prince laughed softly.
"That is good to hear," Legolas nodded sagaciously. "I was afraid Calemír would shoot me on sight."
Glancing over the edge of the branch he was currently balancing on, Ninael nibbled at his lembas and fought the urge to fertilise the forest floor with the contents of his stomach.
He was studying the long drop to the little creek below with a mixture of horror and perverse fascination when Legolas Thranduilion and his retinue swept past.
For the first time, the prince was clad in something roughly approximating Ninael's original notion of royal garb, and still it was a far cry from the understated grandeur of Imladris' courtly fashions. He wore the deep forest green of his grandfather's house, but the leaping stag embroidered on his sleeves in muted golden thread was not Oropher's sigil, but his own. The flowing lines of his robes were simple, but the fabric moved with a light, rippling elegance like sunlight on water, and the combined effect was that Ninael was so dazzled he barely even noticed the diadem of jewelled leaves resting on the prince's flaxen hair.
"Ninael," Legolas Thranduilion said, nodding briefly, and suddenly Ninael's stomach discovered it was capable of an even greater range of acrobatics.
Perhaps because of the interesting swirl of colors that Ninael's face was acquiring, perhaps because Ninael's ears were quickly becoming hot enough to cook eggs on, the prince paused. "Are you well?"
"I'm scared of heights," Ninael said before he fully understood what he was saying, and then immediately ducked his head, ears steaming.
Wonderfully done, Ninael's internal monologue was a high-pitched howl. It is almost as if you want to never set foot outside Imladris ever again!
Soft rustles like whispering rushes, and when he peeked up again, Lord Teleglos and the wood-elf warriors had vanished. Legolas Thranduilion stood lightly at the tip of the branch, alone, smiling faintly. The mithril silver of his vambraces flashed still at his slender wrists, the bone-white hilts of his long knives gleamed at his back.
"Afraid of heights but not of losing your life in a foreign land?" the prince said. "Ninael Amdirgirion, you are uncommonly brave."
And then he was gone. Long after the hunting horns summoned them back to the last leg of their journey, Ninael was still staring stupidly into thin air.
To the south, black fires burned.
Because Ninael was becoming less blind to Silvan ways, he actually saw the sentinels' posts this time, situated every three miles like the rings of a cedar, with the war camp at their heart.
"That fellow looks like he wields a mean sword," Alachon said appreciatively, pointing out a hardy Silvan warrior on a branch overhead that Ninael had not noticed. Arm raised in a salute to his prince, the warrior stood watchful and silent, his dark gold hair fading into the trees behind him like spotted sunlight.
Ninael blushed. Every mile and a half, then.
Telain began to dot the boughs. Though they must have been hastily-erected, they had the sturdy flexibility of all elven dwellings, as a part of the woods as if they were mere continuations of the trees' flowing trunks. Patrolling elves stopped in their paths to bow to the woodland prince, hands pressed to their hearts, and to his surprise, in their eyes Ninael read pain as well as hope.
Ahead, a Silvan company practiced with bow and arrow. Ninael had to watch them but for a second to know they were no ordinary warriors; these, they were the prince's own archers. An elleth let an arrow fly, and Ninael heard more than saw it thread through the dark shadows to spear a fluttering winter-brown leaf more than fifty paces away.
"Your Highness! Lord Teleglos!" they called out in an untidy jumble of melodious voices, warmed by good camaraderie. The lord Teleglos raised an arm in return. Legolas Thranduilion merely nodded, as he had to every elf they had passed, but was that a flicker of fondness in his grey eyes?
What presumptuousness, his sister would have scolded him, and with a groan Ninael flicked himself on the forehead.
A few more steps, and bright light suddenly washed over them. Ninael looked down, and tried to swallow despite his abruptly very dry mouth.
A massive clearing. Down below, warhorses galloped, surging in and out of formation like threads of river current, in time to the rhythm of one another's hoofbeats. A formation, though on first glance none of the Ñoldor would have called it that. His weapons' master would have scoffed at the jagged irregularity of their pattern, but after days in the old forest, Ninael thought he better understood their manoeuvres. Coalescing to entrap enemies, yet remaining loose enough to pierce through the undergrowth and dart around the vigilant trees.
They descended. At their head, Legolas Thranduilion dropped lightly from branch to branch, his robes fluttering like wings at his movement. Ninael tried to imitate his gracefulness, and the result was that he slipped on a wet leaf and had to be hauled back from the brink of a very humiliating death by Tasser, an exasperated Ñoldorin warrior with a lock of white winding through his black hair.
At the roots of a great oak, Calemír and the rest of the military leadership waited.
The General of the Army had eyes like chips of green ice. As the prince came before the group of elders, silver-haired Teleglos always three steps behind, Calemír pressed a hand to his heart.
"Your Highness," the old warrior said, his voice deep and rich as the heart of ancient beeches. "You honour us with your return."
"Your Highness." The voices of the wood-elves was like wind through the leaves. At the edge of their murmurs, Ninael heard the whisper, "Sun-prince."
The elf-prince stood before them, lithe and strong as a willow branch. Standing tall as a soldier, his gaze took in all of his people, those storm-grey eyes calm and grave.
Quietly, Legolas Thranduilion sank to his knees.
Author's Note:
The coronavirus has put my university on hold for a while - turns out that in the lull of completing a CS degree, I found time to write! If anyone's worried, this story is not a romantic one, and Ninael's adoration for our elf-prince, though very understandable, is very one-sided too.
Hoping that all of you are safe and well.
Translations:
Telain: The plural of talan, those pretty platforms nestled in the trees of Lothlórien.