GIFT HORSE
Middle-earth and Haldir created by JRR Tolkein: Lupa is one of my own.
This little piece is really an epilogue to my other LOTR tale "Necklace", but it should be self-explanatory enough to be read as a stand-alone. This really came about thanks to PuterPatty - who suggested in a review that she'd like to see more with Lupa (and maybe Haldir). *smiles* well…here you go! It's a harmless piece of fluff, a little farcical in places, but I hope you like it anyway.
The bright metal pieces on the little bay's harness jingled cheerfully as the pony jogged along the woodland trail, picking up his hooves delicately and huffing in a pleased manner through his nostrils. A few paces ahead and to one side, the pale grey stallion, tall and stately, trotted with dignity, his long arched neck raised into the breeze and his muscles flicking at the impertinent flies. He wore no harness: for he was a horse raised in elven stables, and he bore an elven rider.
Lupa of Mirkwood chewed on a green hedgestick and hummed a few lines of a popular goblin-song under her breath. Her pony, sensing she was not paying the greatest of attention to him, took the opportunity to tear swathes of greenery out of the undergrowth.
Haldir of Lorien took a brief glance over his shoulder and almost winced (although his propriety stopped him in time). He was not exactly regretting his offer to ride with the girl as far as the Golden Wood, but she was certainly giving his fine sensibilities cause for concern.
Far away on the path to Isengard, the Fellowship of the Ring were heading for darkness with every step they took - but here, on the road to Lothlorien, Middle-earth was still good and green, the forest full of life and bearing no trace of the evil that had fallen over Helm's Deep over a week ago. Haldir and his company had come to the aid of the Fellowship, at heavy cost to the warriors who fought and fell - and Lupa had come, at Haldir's own summons, to draw Legolas back from the Shadow he was close to losing himself in.
Lupa of Mirkwood was one of the last of her kind. A skin-changer of Beorn's kin, only wolf not giant bear. She and her sister had lived in Mirkwood, close to Thranduil's court, and had been some-time sparring partner and friend to the elf-king's son - only now she was considering leaving her old homelands for ever.
But the day was too brilliant to be dwelling on sad things. Lupa spat out her stick and let the reins go slack, reaching up to loosen the clasp on her elven-cloak. The pony crunched happily, letting a long string of bramble trail from his mouth to his knees. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and dappled the trail with gold, and Lupa sang a few lines of another song, one she had learnt long ago in Beorn's halls. An old song…but not as old as elves.
Haldir's eyes narrowed slightly as he watched her over his shoulder. She was an odd creature, he thought, with none of the usual grace and fey light in her eyes that elf-friends tended to develop over the years. And she seemed to have no sense of respect for his rank.
"Haldir!"
He frowned at the peremptory summons and deliberately ignored it.
"Haldir!" came Lupa's repeated call, and Haldir shook his blond head in irritation.
"Lupa of Mirkwood, do your kind not keep civil tongues in their heads?"
"I beg your pardon, Captain of Lothlorien, the Lady's finest - "
Haldir took a deep breath, mollified.
" - but your horse is going lame and I felt it was more prudent to attract your attention as soon as possible to the fact rather than dwelling on the intricacies of protocol."
Haldir instantly dropped from horseback in immense annoyance, feeling Lupa's amused gaze on his back as he bent to check the stallion's near fore. The horse obligingly held up his leg in readiness.
There was something in the vulnerable soft centre of the hoof, and Haldir murmured soothing words to the horse as he picked out moss and mud with his long fingers. It was a lump of dark stone, rough and glittering with quartz.
The horse breathed thankfully down Haldir's collar as the elf removed the stone and held it up to the light, looking at it.
"Is it bad?"
Lupa's heels hit the trail, and she walked up behind him to peer at the obstruction. "Is he going to favour it? Will you be able to ride him?"
"He will be fine," said Haldir, heavily. "However, I may well be unable to continue to ride him with my ears ringing from your incessant questions."
Lupa put her hands on her hips and laughed at him.
"You don't like me, do you?" she said, not sounding in the least bit concerned.
"I shall like you even less if you persist in mocking me," said Haldir, more brusquely than he had intended, and immediately regretted it as Lupa chuckled again. The stallion nudged him in the shoulder with an impatient hhuh noise, and he used the excuse of re-mounting to turn his back on the wolf-girl.
Lupa's little bay pony jogged to keep pace with the big elf-horse, and Lupa bounced in her saddle, watching the froth of the river on her left side and listening to the sounds of the water.
"How much further until we cross?"
I am already cross, thought Haldir, ignoring her as best he could. Belatedly, he realised he was still tightly clutching the stone his horse had picked up, and he flung it away from him with a sharp swing of his arm.
Lupa would later insist that he had aimed to hit her: Haldir would dryly correct her by saying that if he had truly meant to strike her, he would certainly not have missed an eye, for example. Whatever the reality of the affair, the effect was the same: Lupa took the stone in a glancing blow to the side of the face, and fell from her saddle in shocked surprise. The little bay pony reared in protest at this unseemly behaviour from his normally competent rider, and Haldir's stallion whickered as the bay's hooves boxed too close to his pale haunches.
The elf wheeled his horse with a word and came to Lupa's aid. The girl lay on her side in the leaf litter of last autumn, a graze on her cheek and her copper-coloured hair spread like a halo about her head. But the graze was quickly fading, becoming obscured as silver fur rippled across her pale skin. She looked up at him, and blinked, and her eyes flared yellow like dragon-gold.
Haldir reached out to try the wound for severity, and the fur that he touched was sticky with a few drops of blood. Under his probing fingers, Lupa was taking her old shape, the ability that had been the downfall of her sister. Her clothes and the elven-cloak lay spilt about her four-legged form, as if she was a snake and had sloughed them away.
The wolf looked up at Haldir, and made to bite his hand.
Clumsy elf! Foolish, throwing stones around like a dwarf-child in a temper!
The voice in his mind was clear in its disapproval, but Haldir did not withdraw his fingers. Instead he stroked along the long muzzle, marvelling at the softness of the fur, the sharp bristle of whiskers.
The wolf stared at him with canny amber eyes, and said, you don't hate me so much now. I can tell.
Now I don't look so human…you don't dislike me as much…
The hand withdrew, abruptly.
Do you really dislike humans to that extent? asked Lupa.
"No," he replied, and his voice was cold.
Are you sure?
She got to her feet, and with him kneeling on the trail she was eye-to-eye with him. Haldir was silent for a long moment, and then said, very quietly, "No."
The wolf snuffled about in the leaf litter for a while, picked something up gently in its long jaws, and then approached the elf again, circling him as he knelt in the dirt with his head bowed slightly and that glorious pale-ash hair caught up by the breeze.
Don't you recall that old tale of Elessar's? "All that is gold does not glitter…"
She huddled in close to him, furry shoulder pressed against his chest.
It is an understandable weakness on your part, Haldir. The Men of this world have caused much harm, but sometimes…
Her ears laid flat as she rudely shoved her big wolf's head into his neck to lift his head. And as she shoved, she was changing, so that when Haldir looked up it was into Lupa's human face, the eyes sparkling with half-amusement and half-wonder. A streak of blood had dried redly across her cheek.
"What Aragorn's little ditty means," she whispered, "is that you shouldn't trust in even an ancient prejudice, captain of Lothlorien. Things are not always what they seem."
She leaned in again, slowly, and to his surprise brushed her face and lips over the line of his jaw, moving up until her lips covered his -
He drew away abruptly with a gasp, choking and coughing. Lupa laughed. Haldir spluttered furiously and managed to spit into his hand what she had insinuated into his mouth while he was off-guard.
The little quartz-veined stone winked at him cheerily from his wet palm, and the elf looked up furiously at Lupa, anger flashing in his eyes.
Lupa swirled her cloak around her body and grinned, showing him a set of white, perfect teeth.
"But a woman is always a woman, Haldir," she teased. "And as you can see, we're not to be trusted…"
She mounted her bay and jingled off along the trail, not bothering to wait for him. Haldir turned the stone over in his hand again, and a look to it, a facet or so, caught his eye.
Perhaps the joke is on her after all…this stone could be cut as pretty as a diamond…
He smiled, for the first time that day, and, pocketing the stone, mounted the grey and followed the sound of Lupa's harness on the trail.