Chapter 9: Little Fox
Calemír waited until the three Lord Commanders bowed formally and took their leave.
"You are worried, my prince."
Motioning for Calemír to stay seated, Legolas rose and drifted to an open window. He stared blankly at the slowing rain, fiddling absently with the dangling tail of the bandages that coiled around his wrist.
"Have you been watching the winds, Calemír?"
"Every day."
Interweaving branches threaded through the open air they looked out upon; raindrops dripped from five-needled clusters of pine. Legolas reached out, cupping his hands. "You chose this location well, General, by the banks of the Lissë. We must not stray far from any river."
Calemír dipped his head, his green eyes flickering, the surface of a pond broken by a leaping fish. "The mountain ash and horse chestnut you bid us plant have grown tall in the centuries since. We have taken precautions, my prince, as best we could."
Legolas brought his little handful of rainwater to his lips, breathing in the cool, sweet scent.
"Would that it continue raining," he said quietly.
"Teleglos, choose twenty light-footed elves," Legolas called as he stepped out from the war room. He hopped into a neighbouring beech. "I want to see the swamps."
"And I want the healer to take another look at that arm of yours," Teleglos said in a furious undertone, leaping up to Legolas' branch. "I don't know why everyone says I'm the reckless one—"
"Alright then, I will see you at my talan in twenty minutes."
"—what kind of fool uses their own blood as a political ploy? Wait. What?"
Legolas blinked innocently. "You wanted me to see a healer? Get the elves ready. Twenty minutes."
With that, he sprung up, vanishing into the shifting leaves overhead.
For the sake of efficiency, the elves of Greenwood the Great had long ago refined the art of establishing war camps. As a result, the layout of each war camp was more or less familiar to him, partially due to experience, partially because Legolas had been among the elves involved in devising said layout.
The trees hummed beneath his feet as he hurried towards the North Quarter. Their song was still muffled, like voices underwater, and once its dullness would have irked him. Now, he clung tight to each whisper.
Trees spoke through the lightning-crackle in the air before a storm, and the smell of summer rain; through the faint tip-tapping of little bird-feet, and the tickle of worms between sprawling roots. As he stopped above the Ñoldorin talan, he reluctantly pulled away from a ponderous conversation between a grove of ash trees and a single birch about who had more right to a shaft of sunlight.
"Hello," he called, waited a second or two, and stepped down.
Holding his spear in the way of warriors, loose and alert, the sentry at the entrance bowed. "Your Highness."
"Your Highness!" Ninael's dismayed cry was trailed by the crisp ring of breaking porcelain.
"Your Highness," Tasser said firmly, having risen to his feet to greet him. "You should have sent word that you were coming! Please, will you join us for a cup of tea?"
"No, but that is very kind, Tasser," Legolas said, poking his head into the doorway. "I wanted to see how well you were all settling in."
As he exchanged pleasantries with the Ñoldor, Legolas peered into the talan—someone had carefully swept the floorboards, and sturdy hammocks swayed in the space between the trunk and the walls. It was tidy and clean, and Legolas drew back, satisfied. It was likely a little austere by the standards of Imladris, but none could say that the elves of the Woodland Realm were parsimonious.
"I must be on my way now," he told them, with a smile to soften his words. "Lord Elrohir will likely arrive within the next few days, but until then, you might join our patrols—Lord Calemír will be sending along a messenger shortly. We are grateful for any aid you might render us."
"Let us not speak of gratefulness here, Your Highness," Tasser said. "This is what we left Imladris to do."
After he bade them farewell, Legolas doubled back towards the center of the camp, swiftly winding his way through the trees. Absentmindedly, he pushed open the flap to his talan and stopped short, a bemused smile tugging at his lips.
His bedchambers in the King's Halls had always been rather empty-looking, not because he had a penchant for ascetic living, but because he was so rarely home that he just never really bothered. The only pronounced change in decor over the last nine centuries was a steady increase in the population of plants, which he was deeply indebted to the palace staff for keeping alive. And because Thranduil's tastes inclined towards the more lavish and classically kingly, Legolas always did manage to acquire some odd tinkly bits of crystal and mithril every year, the most recent of which he hadn't quite figured out the purpose for.
There were only six or so pieces of furniture in the talan, but likely because the responsibility of furnishing Legolas' talan had once again gone to Teleglos' head, he had somehow managed to make the airy space appear only half as big.
A bright yellow carpet, the exact shade of overstimulated sunflowers, accompanied a sleeping pallet, where a little straw-woven fox eyeballed him from the pillow. Having thoughtfully considered that Legolas might like to write with more than one hand, and perhaps wth his feet as well, Teleglos had arranged nine quills by the inkwell on the desk. He had also packed some books. The Thirty-Six Stratagems, Legolas appreciated, although what need he had for the Collected Poems of Makalaurë Kanafinwë, he could not say.
And in the corner—sheaves upon sheaves of arrows. An exposed broadhead glinted, its serrated teeth catching the light.
Still silently admiring his small armoury, Legolas selected one of his many quills and began penning a letter on a little scroll no wider than his thumb.
"Cidin," he said, sealing two letters.
A head appeared outside his window. Dangling upside-down from the branch above, so precariously balanced that even Legolas wondered at this wisdom, Cidin managed a salute and grinned. "Yes, my prince?"
Legolas passed the notes to him. "Galion and Lord Elrohir, respectively."
"Right away, sir," Cidin said happily, and his head disappeared upwards in a swirl of oak leaves.
Legolas was sitting cross-legged on the floor, counting the number of sheaves of arrows in a satchel, when Teleglos appeared with healer in tow.
"Twenty-five, and yes, there he is," Teleglos said, jabbing an accusing finger at Legolas. "Tell me what's wrong with him."
"Apologies, Your Highness," the healer murmured, resting two light fingers on his wrist.
"Well?" Teleglos said anxiously.
"Your hands are very cold to the touch, Your Highness," the healer said, perplexed.
Before Teleglos could whirl around to glare at him triumphantly, Legolas was nodding. "I was just catching raindrops, Doron. You must indulge me in my bit of childish fun."
"Hmm," the healer said, with an air of great rumination. Carefully, he began to inspect Legolas' bandaged left arm.
Legolas suspected that what the healer wanted to say was that technically he didn't seem unwell—just not very well, either—but the way Teleglos hovered, like an oversized and dangerously armed fruit-fly, was good incentive to reconsider one's words.
"Your spirit is not as hearty as I would like it to be, Your Highness," the healer said finally. "But that is to be expected given the strain of recent events. I would prescribe rest, Lord Teleglos, but otherwise the prince's pulse is fairly strong."
"Thank you, Doron," Legolas said mildly. Understanding the tacit dismissal, Doron bowed and backed away.
"How can that be?" Teleglos exploded, stomping over his sunflower-yellow carpet.
"I am glad to see you so reassured by my good health," Legolas said, surveying him over the three sheaves of arrows he was currently cuddling. "Hopefully, Doron will make sure that the rest of the army is too. Let's go."
Teleglos' eye twitched. "I knew there had to be a reason why you very maturely and very abruptly overcame your dislike of healers."
Legolas' answering grin was sunflower-bright.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" Teleglos thought to ask, as he hurried out on his prince's heels.
"There's a lot to do before tonight."
"What's tonight?"
Legolas shuddered. "A potential diplomatic crisis."
Ducking under a thick loop of vine, Teleglos slapped aggressively at yet another mosquito and nearly jabbed himself in the eye.
His concentration had wavered but for a second, and already he was sinking. Muttering intermingled curses and prayers to Yavanna, he collected his thoughts, found a more familiar strain of Ilúvatar's song, and bodily plucked himself an inch higher out of the bog.
Taking in a lightning-split ash, an empty hornets nest, and a lopsided tuft of razor grass in a glancing sweep of his silver gaze, Teleglos nodded to himself and hastened off deeper into the swamp. The faint footprints he left behind were quickly swallowed by the soft, marshy ground.
"Done?" Legolas said, a little breathlessly, springing out of the reeds and onto the little spar of granite marked the first solid ground for miles.
A streak of mud ran across his temple, and the exertion had raised a little color in his cheeks, but his eyes glittered. Under the faint shafts of sunlight, the mark of cinnabar-red gleamed like a third eye.
"Yes, Your Highness!" his archers chorused.
Teleglos rushed off the moment they returned to camp, strapping leather vambraces around his wrists and calling archers to him as he went. They melted out of the trees, forming ranks with military efficiency, and within five minutes, they were gone.
Teleglos had not even bothered to change out of his mud-splattered cloak.
For a few heartbeats, Legolas quietly gazed after the gap in the branches where they had disappeared.
The slender silhouette of an elleth detached itself from the shadows that clung tight to branch and bough.
"My prince," she said. "The scribes you summoned are waiting outside your talan."
"Thank you, Lithui," Legolas said, turning from the trees. His cool, grey gaze flickered over her.
Stiffening, Lithui bowed lower, but all her prince said was, "Cidin is not with you? Tell him to stop raiding every hive he comes across. With his fixation on honey, we'll soon be out of bees."
Elves were not a farming people.
Even so, every time they were towed back into war, Legolas found himself wistfully contemplating setting up grain fields at the feet of the Grey Mountains. Because his brain had developed an aversion to actual productive thought, an image of Elladan in a straw hat, wading after oxen with his long, dignified robes knotted around his waist, popped promptly into his head. His mind-Elladan glared, and shook his hoe up at him.
Lips twitching, Legolas bent over to study his scroll more intently. The scribes who were currently sitting on his floor, hunched over thick sheaves of parchment, shot puzzled looks at one another, shrugged, and went back to tallying their numbers.
For a time, there was only the scratching of quills and the rapid clicking of abacus beads.
"Your Highness," a senior scribe presented him with a scroll. "The estimated daily rations for each warrior."
Anyone who claimed that elves didn't need to eat much had never seen how many bread rolls Elrohir could scarf down after a long day's riding. Impassively, Legolas scanned the numbers, silently giving thanks for Haldir's habit of bragging. The summer after listening to him wax lyrical about Lothlórien's lembas for a good two hours, Thranduil had built two hundred ovens down in the caverns of the King's Halls.
The men of Esgaroth never fully understood why the biggest purchasers of their stocks of eastern grain were the elves of Greenwood the Great. For ghosts who lived by the land, hunting and fishing and foraging, the elves spent an awful lot of gold on grain that they didn't even seem likely to eat. But like clockwork, every autumn, Legolas sent emissaries to purchase the winter barley and the spring oats that flowed upriver from Dorwinion, by the shores of the Sea of Rhûn.
In some ways the men were right—the grain went straight to the cool darkness of vast underground cellars, as the previous years' grain was moved out and baked into thin wafers of lembas. While Smaug hoarded gold and silver, Thranduil sat on a veritable mountain of wheat berries.
That being said, the armies of the Greenwood tried not to rely overmuch on the realm's stores, and largely hunted for their food. Over the years, they had struck a careful balance, having successfully avoided both taking too much from the forest and bankrupting themselves on Dorwinion grain. But with three converging armies and too many enemies, this balance had more or less been flipped into the fires of Mount Doom.
"How goes the progress of the construction of the relay stations?" Legolas asked.
"Four additional supply relay stations have been completed along the banks of the River Lissë, and twenty more palisades are being built as well."
"The River Lissë passes within five miles of the easternmost flanks of Emyn-nu-Fuin. Warn the elves to pay greater heed to those mountains. The campaign Lord Riros led last summer was fairly successful, but spiders are nothing but not tenacious. The supply line cannot break."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"We need more grain," Legolas said, flicking the end of his quill against his nose. "Have the regency council select a delegation and send them down the River Running to Dorwinion. We are looking into purchasing all of their forthcoming millet harvest."
"Millet, Your Highness?" the scribe said, puzzled. "And in early spring?"
"Spring millet, Cuin. We do not often see them in the markets of Esgaroth, as most of the demand for it comes from the east. But I have read that some varieties can be harvested thirty days after they are planted, so quickly do they grow. Our stockpiles will hold until then, but they must be buffered further. The Ñoldorin will not be carrying enough supplies for a drawn-out campaign."
Legolas picked up another report. The last of the southern villages had been cleared, and Galion and the regency council were seeing to the displaced elves. In fact, Galion was in the process of organising them into efficient little squadrons, some in charge of hunting, some of weaving, and still others of manning the ovens that were churning out thousands of squares of lembas a day.
"The bolts of elven cloth we have in the storeroom should be enough to pay for the grain, but if not, tell Galion to give the Lord Chancellor the mithril circlet that the King gifted me two years ago. The one with the twelve sapphires and ornate filigree," Legolas said mildly. "And then the Lord Chancellor might invite the other elven lords and ladies to follow their prince's good example."
"And if that isn't enough either?" the scribe said, furiously scribbling.
The prince smiled at him, a flash of white teeth that made his spine tingle. "Then we'll just have to rob Smaug, won't we?"
Teleglos had returned by the time Legolas' patrol was due to leave. Now he sat on Legolas' windowsill, clutching a pinecone, silver eyes dark with foreboding.
"You mangled your arm," he pointed out. "What exactly are you going to shoot at with a mangled arm? The trees?"
"Of course not," Legolas said, sweeping arrows into his quiver with practiced ease. "I think at branches, at the very least."
Teleglos tossed a pine nut into his mouth and simmered, crunching angrily.
Legolas took pity on him. "It's not nearly as bad as it looks, Teleglos. The cuts aren't very deep."
"Yes," Teleglos agreed. "There's just a lot of them. Why couldn't Calemír have sent you on a patrol closer to camp? That way you could expect not to have to shoot at all."
"And then he would have been accused of favouring the cowardly little regent, and we would be where we began," Legolas said, a glint in his eye. "Would you have me cut my other arm open too?"
For a heartbeat, Teleglos seriously debated whether it was worth committing treason, if it meant he could toss the Legolas out of the window. He settled for throwing his pinecone at the prince.
The smell of rot and decay draped itself over the lowest branches.
As dusk drew a hazy veil over the forest, bullfrogs began to croak. Their nightly serenade came to a rather abrupt end as heavy feet trampled through the undergrowth. A scouting party, wandered a little too far from the bulk of the army.
At bright, burbling trill of a robin, Ninael knocked his bow. He could almost feel his fingers pulse with each heartbeat. Giant spiders were considerably more intimidating than their lesser cousins, but in the end they had eight legs and all the intelligence of a blowfly. Orcs, on the other hand, he truly hated looking at, because in their faces Ninael always feared seeing someone he recognised.
The rancid smell grew stronger.
The first creature passed before Ninael's tree, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air. His teeth were so mismatched his jaw didn't close properly, and a thick rope of drool trailed from his lips.
They let twenty more orcs emerge from the bush behind, and then a falcon's scream split the thunder of their footsteps.
Arrows fell like rain.
They sought the orc archers first. Some had the breath to utter a choked scream of pain; others froze, pinned to trunks by the arrows that had suddenly sprouted from their chests. Ninael saw a few orcs continue to rush forwards after the first wave of arrows, brandishing their axes and roaring, before abruptly dropping dead.
As they had on the High Pass, the arrows that had felled these orcs had simply passed straight through their bodies, so swiftly it seemed as if they had not struck at all. Reaching for another arrow, Ninael tried to remember the way Legolas Thranduilion had released each shaft. As his bow sang, his movements had been almost languid.
Ninael's arrow sank into an orc-eye.
Indiscriminately, the orcs began shooting at the treetops, unsure of where the elves were, hidden beneath a shifting cloak of night. Some orcs flung themselves at trees and tried to heave themselves upwards, seized by some misplaced confidence in their natural bulk. But the unwilling trees, coupled with keen-eyed archers, meant that they fell practically the instant they set their sights on tree-climbing.
A second falcon whistle sounded—immediately the elven arrows ceased. In the same breath, riders swept out from between the trees, long spears gleaming silver under the emerging moon.
While the orcs' arrows were directed upwards, they darted past, shearing down the orcs that had the misfortune to be lurking near the fringes of the group, and ringing the trees in a tight circle of glittering steel.
A precise arrow punctured the throat of the last orc-archer, and with savage suddenness the ring closed. Abandoning their long, sweeping arcs, the riders thrust their spears inward in short, powerful stabs.
When the last body hit the ancient carpet of pine needles with a muffled thump, the riders melted back into the woods. In their wake, a bullfrog gave a tentative, questing riiiiiibbit.
But the prince did not give the order to pull back, and so the elves continued to wait in silence. Retrieving one of the three sheaves of arrows he had brought with him, Ninael refilled his quiver and resisted the urge to sneeze as a moth fluttered past his nose.
Soon, at the edges of his hearing, he heard a low bellow.
"Trolls!" a fair voice raised in warning. "Three!"
This time, the falcon's cry came as soon as the trolls were in range. Again, the air bristled with arrows, but trolls had skin like granite, and some arrows glanced straight off, spiralling into the darkness like toothpicks.
As the trolls barrelled towards them, the archers concentrated their arrows into a single, fluid stream. The leading troll, sabotaged by his own enthusiasm, toppled over with a sound like a falling mountain, more than thirty arrows sticking out from the general region of his mutilated face.
The riders flashed past the trolls, darting in to jab at their sides before dancing away, leaving small red blossoms of blood across stone-grey hide.
The last of Ninael's arrows missed a troll's eye, skittering off its broad nose.
With an offended roar, it squinted its piggish eyes in his general direction. Then, with unerring precision, it thundered towards him, seized the trunk of his tree between two fleshy hands, and began shaking it like a matchstick.
Refusing to look down, Ninael balanced on the balls of his feet, dancing from one branch to another. Every time he tried to gather himself to spring to safety, his tree would jerk sharply to the side like a boat caught in a storm. Desperate, Ninael flung himself out in a messy leap.
It was two feet too short. As he fell, he snatched at branches, cutting his hand open on rough bark, and barely managed to seize a handhold. The thin branch bowed under his weight, and then Ninael was dangling above the troll's flailing arms.
Ninael gagged on the hot plumes of the troll's breath and tried to inch higher, but the tree didn't have a helpful abundance of dense limbs and it would be more accurate to describe the branch he was holding to as a twig. His sister was going to have to charbroil Lord Elladan in the fires of Mount Doom after all.
And then Legolas Thranduilion dropped out of the branches directly overhead.
His foot sank deep into the troll's eye as he landed. As the troll grunted and tried to swat him off, Legolas dove low, threading a coil of elven rope around the troll's almost non-existent neck, nested in folds of fat. He vaulted over the troll's second attempt to smack him away, and yanked back fiercely on the rope, jerking the troll's head back as one might an unruly horse.
The troll tripped from the tree, and out of the corner of his eye, Legolas caught sight of Ninael still hanging there from his twig, eyes wide with stupefaction.
"Climb, you idiot!" he commanded, pivoting to stay upright as the troll crashed against another tree. "Cidin, Lithui, behind me!"
Warm liquid ran down his arm, and Legolas snarled as his hold on the rope slipped a couple inches, quite possibly sloughing off a layer of skin. By this point, the troll had regained some of its limited supply of wits, and the arm it swung towards Legolas had more direction and purpose than previous attempts. There wasn't enough surface area on a troll's head for him to avoid three blows in a row, but grimly clinging onto the rope, Legolas wove backwards all the same.
The troll's fingers caught him across the temple, and as his head snapped sideways in a burst of golden sparks, he heard Lithui cry, "Your Highness!"
Legolas tossed the ends of the rope at her in what was possibly the most drunken throw of his life, wondering whether vomiting atop a troll's head could be considered an appropriate battle strategy.
For a second time, the troll lurched backwards as elven mounts reared. Lithui coiled an end of the rope around her waist, and at her urging, her mare lunged for the shadows. The other end was clamped firmly in the strong white teeth of a riderless white stallion, who took long, steady strides forward, the tremor in his muscles betraying the effort it cost him.
Now too absorbed in trying to avoid decapitation to decapitate Legolas, the troll wedged thick fingers beneath the coils of rope tightening around his neck, stumbling.
Gritting his teeth, Legolas unsheathed his white knives. They fell like twin stars, and as the troll's putrid blood gushed hot over his hands, Legolas tumbled from the troll's head.
Someone caught him, gave a shocked little gasp, and then promptly dropped him.
The troll might not have killed him, but the fall almost had. Clutching a hand to his head in a vain attempt to hold it together, Legolas peered up at the elf who had come close to assassinating him.
Ninael stared back at him. It seemed as if his eyes might never return to their original size. Two more heads entered his frame of vision. Lithui and Cidin, looking doubly concerned now the source of their employment was somewhat damaged.
"The last troll?" Legolas asked, with a laudable amount of dignity for someone sprawled on his back.
"A spear through the mouth, my prince," Lithui said.
"Is anybody dead or in danger of dying?"
"You?" Cidin chewed the inside of his lip. "Your Highness," he added hastily.
"You might be too, Cidin," Legolas sat up slowly, trying not to tip over the world he had very carefully rebalanced. "Come. We must return."
"Are you certain, my prince?" Lithui asked. "Perhaps we should see to your head wound first—"
"No," Legolas sighed, pushing himself to his feet. "I must be on hand to receive Elrohir."
Cidin looked confused. "I thought Lord Elrohir said in his letters that he would be arriving tomorrow?"
"Indeed," Legolas said, already stomping in the direction of the war camp.
"Caught up at last?" he said to no one in particular.
At his low whistle, a white stallion drifted out of the woods. Faensul shook his mane, looking inordinately proud of himself.
While he had been away, his talan had acquired a particularly moody shadow. Legolas paused in the doorway, suddenly realising that he had made a grave tactical error.
On light cat-feet he backed away, hoping to escape unnoticed, but the shadows moved faster than his foggy head could register, and then long fingers wrapped firmly around his wrist, towing him forwards into the candlelight.
For a long while, Elrohir regarded him in silence, taking in the red stains that mottled his robes and the deepening purple bruise that streaked one temple.
"Calemír tells me you have been back just one day."
Lifting Legolas' captured wrist, Elrohir unfastened a vambrace. The long sleeve fell back.
Legolas followed the direction of his gaze to the colourful array of bandages he sported. At some point they had been white. They were now the color of swamp-mirk and troll-blood and quite possibly his own vomit.
It had not been a smooth ride back.
Hastily, Legolas plastered a smile onto his face. "I have been productive."
"I can see that," Elrohir said. His answering smile was about as friendly as a striking snake.
Carefully, Legolas tried to extract his arm, and immediately gave up when Elrohir's claws tightened like the jaws of a snare.
"You didn't kill them, did you?" Legolas ventured, with some trepidation.
"Lûg?" Elrohir said, testing the name with his teeth. "Nielinye?"
He leaned in closer. "Or Calemír?"
"Preferably all three," Legolas said soothingly. "Although if you must, you can have Lûg, I suppose. But not Calemír. I need him."
"If you hadn't blundered into that clearing, yelling about your own guilt, I doubt anyone would have dared even suggest such a thing," Elrohir squinted at him, slow and dangerous, "let alone take a whip to the regent of Greenwood the Great. Care to explain?"
"Would you like some tea," Legolas said, steering Elrohir towards his desk.
"No."
"Good," Legolas said, pressing Elrohir firmly down into his chair. "Teleglos brought some Dorwinion green tea, the kind with the silvery leaves you like so much."
As puttered around, digging first a kettle and then a jar of tea from the chest of unceasing oddities that Teleglos had packed, a light finger brushed along the bruising on his face.
He froze.
"Have you gotten this seen to?" Elrohir said quietly.
No, I came here to stop you from claiming the honour of becoming the first kinslayer since the First Age, Legolas thought, but he said, "You know how concussions are. Is there really any particular treatment for them?"
Now Elrohir looked even more horrified. "You have a concussion?"
"Of course not," Legolas said, backtracking. "I mean. It's possible. It's always possible to have a concussion. Maybe you have a concussion."
Nodding firmly, as if reassured by the strength of his own argument, Legolas knelt and struck a match. As he carefully prompted a flame to life in the little sand pit in the center of the room, Elrohir took the kettle from him.
"Enough," Elrohir said rubbing a hand over his face. He went to the window. "Cidin, Lithui!"
As Cidin's head emerged upside-down from the branches above, and Lithui gave him a more conventional upright salute, he said. "Fetch a healer, some warm water, and a bathing tub, please."
"My prince?" Lithui said, still bowing.
"Do as he says," Legolas said quietly. As Lithui herded Cidin away, he lowered himself to the floor, hugging his knees.
Elrohir settled down beside him.
"Are you sad?" he asked simply.
As he warmed his hands before the fire, Legolas quietly studied the flecks of blackened vermilion that still dotted his knuckles. "It was my choice."
"Maybe so, but you are not a Vala, Legolas."
"And if I let myself resent them, I will be doing this for nothing," Legolas said, leaning his chin on one knee. There was blood in his hair, and a few strands floated around his face, having struggled free of his archer's braids.
He tipped his head to the side, a scruffy little cat. "Then where will the last nine hundred years have gone?"
"I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead," Ninael whimpered, drawing his blankets up to his chin.
Tasser, Alachon, and the rest of the off-duty Ñoldorin warriors were puddled around his hammock, surveying him with varying degrees of disbelief.
"Repeat that," Tasser said, very slowly. "You what?"
"I—," Ninael gulped.
"The regent of Greenwood the Great saved you from a troll," Alachon said, wonderingly. "And you dropped him on his head?"
Ninael winced. "Maybe… maybe not on his head…"
"Ah, that makes it better," Alachon agreed. "Ninael, we're going to have to pack you on the next ship out of the Grey Havens."
Tasser glowered at him disapprovingly over Ninael's squeak of despair.
"The House of Oropher," he murmured, shaking his head.
Author's Note:
Thanks all for reading - I treasure each and every review.
Hoping all of you are safe and well.
Translations:
Emyn-nu-fuin: Forested hills that run through Mirkwood. Known as the Mountains of Mirkwood, in Sindarin literally: "hills under shadow"