A/N: I don't own any of Tolkien's characters, storylines, or ideas. The
only stuff in here that's mine is what you won't recognize from any of his
work. If you've read Tolkien, you'll know which is which. If you haven't,
you should. Also, I'm not profiting from this in any way, except that I'm
having a lot of fun with it.
***
Chapter Two: The Mystery Deepens
Ëarendia opened her eyes to find the tall blond man and the much shorter, bushy-haired and bearded man staring at her. Legolas and Gimli, she thought, dazedly. The tall blond man—the Elf—is Legolas, and the...the Dwarf...is Gimli. She wanted to close her eyes again, sure that she was dreaming, but there was no denying the reality of the moss beneath her cheek and the rock near her ear.
She cast Legolas a dirty look, sure that if he was really an Elf, he could have caught her before her head hit the rock. He looked back impassively, obviously weighing her and finding her wanting. She couldn't remember ever being sorry to be in the company of a beautiful man before. Of course, she couldn't remember ever being in a situation like this before. She supposed that it was going to be a day of firsts.
"Are you still light-headed?" Gimli asked, with enough honest concern that Ëarendia immediately felt better, though her head didn't hurt any less. Still, she caught the smirk that Legolas couldn't quite control, and knew that he'd caught his friend's unintentional pun. She scowled at him and sat up.
"I no longer feel dizzy," she said, with stiff dignity, and stood up a bit shakily. "Thank you," she added, and Gimli smiled at her. "I'll just be on my way, then," she said with a sigh.
"You can't wander these woods alone," Gimli protested, sounding appalled. "It's not safe for a young lady alone. And you're hurt."
"Truly, I feel fine now," she lied, and concentrated on standing without swaying. Gimli's expression told her clearly that he didn't believe a word of it. Legolas simply watched her for a moment, as though trying to predict whether her stubbornness would outlast the unsteadiness in her legs. When she didn't fall, he seemed to sigh—if an Elf could be said to sigh—and spoke for the first time since she had awoken on the forest floor.
"You can't wander these woods at all," he said calmly, but with finality. "We do not know who you are, or where you came from, or who your people are. You do not appear to be ready to part with that information. Nor, strange as it seems for an Elf, do you appear to be able to fend for yourself." This time he truly did sigh, and loudly. "Which can mean only one thing." Legolas and Gimli shared a meaningful look, then both shrugged. "We have to take you to Gondor. And we have to do it now, before Gandalf and the others take leave of Minas Tirith."
"Gandalf? Gandalf the Grey?" Ëarendia asked without thinking.
Legolas' dark eyes narrowed on her. "Some call him by that name," he said slowly. Ëarendia had no idea what had suddenly made his eyes go cold and suspicious, but she didn't like the shivery feeling his stare was giving her. She desperately wished that he would look somewhere, anywhere else.
Gimli's eyes had lost what warmth they had held. "We'd better go now," he told Legolas. Ëarendia might as well have disappeared through a hole in the floor, for all the notice he gave her.
They seemed to be having some silent conversation between them, Ëarendia noticed, but could not tell what it was about. They seemed to be trying to avoid her, as though she might have some contagious disease, or might be about to jump on them. Or attack them. She was definitely ruining some sort of vacation, she realized, and tried hard to remember what she'd read in her father's books.
Legolas and Gimli had been friends, she remembered as she watched them having their silent conversation. They had been very good friends. And after the War of the Ring they had... She sighed in frustration, wishing she had read the books more recently. She looked around, and it came to her. They had gone to Fangorn, and then they had gone to the Glittering Caves, or something like that. In any event, she thought, they had certainly not planned on having a girl along, or detouring back to Minas Tirith.
"I'll just go alone," she said, breaking the silence. "If you can just get me to the edge of the Forest, and point me in the right direction, I'll get myself to Gondor."
This, if anything, seemed to alarm them more. She heard Gimli mutter something that sounded like 'inflict her on Éomer', and Legolas made a sound that bore a suspicious resemblance to a snort. She waited for a few moments, and, when they made no attempt to suggest any other idea, she simply started walking away. It was, she thought, too bad that she was still in her Renaissance Fair dress; her boots and jeans would have been a lot more useful in the moss and undergrowth obscuring the path.
Legolas and Gimli were still having their silent conversation, and hadn't yet realized that she was gone.
"I'm telling you, that's got to be the explanation," Gimli said. "She dropped out of nowhere. We were sitting there, having lunch, and she simply appeared there. There's no other possible reason."
"We should take care of this ourselves," Legolas said. "She will only drive everyone in Minas Tirith to distraction. All that long blond hair and those silvery eyes. You know how they are. You know why we left."
Gimli considered this soberly and sighed. "You are right, of course, my friend. But keeping her here would do no more good. It would end in our own madness, and the others would have no warning of what was to come."
After a long, long moment, Legolas nodded. "There is no point to self- sacrifice if through it our friends must perish," he agreed. They both turned to look at the stranger, and found that she was gone.
Legolas sighed again. "She is the strangest Elf, and the strangest one of her kind I have ever encountered," he observed after a moment. "Her woodcraft is so poor that she walks deeper into the Forest rather than toward its edge, she leaves a trail clear enough for a blind man to follow, and she walks away from us and leaves on her own. Walks away from us," he repeated, sounding mildly offended.
"It's hardly to be borne," Gimli grumbled, sounding very definitely offended. Sharing an eloquent, long-suffering look, he and Legolas set out after the strange Elf who called herself Ëarendia.
***
They found her sitting on the moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree, looking predictably pretty, shafts of murky green light managing to make her hair glow as, bent over, she readjusted the strap on her sandal. She looked somewhat the worse for wear, as though she had taken a few falls in the process of very nearly getting herself lost in the Forest. Legolas looked at Gimli. Gimli looked at Legolas. They both sighed.
She did not hear their approach, and was so shocked that she very nearly fell backward over the tree trunk. This act, so completely and totally graceless, shocked Legolas and Gimli far more than their appearance had shocked her, and they exchanged a startled look. Ëarendia, trying to right herself, did not notice this.
"Could we be wrong?" Gimli asked, his eyes wide as he looked at Legolas.
"If we are," Legolas said softly, "we shall be dealing with one very angry Elf."
Gimli agreed, not looking as though he found the prospect particularly attractive.
"Wh-wh-where did you come from?" Ëarendia gasped. She had never imagined that it would be possible to sneak up on someone through the underbrush clogging the path through the Forest. Legolas and Gimli, appearing so suddenly and soundlessly not ten steps away from her, had shocked her so badly that her heart was still in her throat.
"From where we met you," Legolas said, without so much as a trace of humor. Truly, he was too busy trying to figure this stranger out to be able to see the humor in her question.
Gimli had no such problems. His problem, in fact, was in trying to keep himself from laughing out loud at such a ridiculous question. But even as he struggled against laughter, he thought again that they might have been wrong about this strange Elf with the blond hair and silver eyes who had appeared as if out of nowhere. Perhaps she had been hurt, and that was why she did not seem to know who or where she was. He had seen such injuries in battle. Yet she was just too perfect, reminiscent in her own foreign way of both Galadriel and Arwen. Of course, she could never compare to either of them. That would, in Gimli's opinion, have been impossible. Yet she was good-looking enough to stand out in even a group of Elves. That, Gimli thought, was certainly noteworthy. He knew that Legolas had noticed; he knew his friend well enough after all this time to be fully aware of the reason behind Legolas' antipathy.
"Why are you following me? You should be...doing whatever it is you were doing when I arrived," Ëarendia told them both, finally managing to get herself situated on the tree trunk again. "Clearly, you did not want to tell me the way to Gondor. I will manage to find my way."
"You are headed in the wrong direction already," Legolas pointed out, refusing to call her by that ridiculous name.
She looked taken aback, then embarrassed. "Well, I'm certain that I would have figured that out before long. At any rate, both of you are wasting time. Go ahead on your way. I'll be fine, even more so now that I know which direction to aim for."
Legolas sighed. "You will be hopelessly lost before nightfall."
Gimli nodded. "Come with us. You'll be safer that way, and we'll all get to Gondor much more quickly."
Ëarendia, after some thought, sighed. From their expressions, 'no' was not an answer they were willing to consider. She stood up, managed to cross over the fallen tree trunk without too much loss of dignity, and silently followed them through the Forest.
***
Legolas and Gimli sat around the fire they had made with branches already fallen from the trees at the edge of Fangorn. They knew, from their first encounter with the Forest, that cutting any live branches would bring retribution neither was eager to incur. Had they been certain of the stranger, they might have encouraged her to gather some live branches, as it would have made their task simpler. Still, they had too much respect for the Forest and its denizens to treat even the most minor injury to one of Fangorn's trees so lightly.
And, as Legolas had reminded Gimli earlier, all that gleamed in the moonlight was not silver.
So they sat around the fire, and the still-unknown Elf slept off to the side, looking shivery and decidedly uncomfortable.
"You should have given her your cloak," Gimli told his friend grumpily. "If she takes a chill and becomes ill, it will only delay us. And neither of us is particularly skilled in healing."
"If she is truly an Elf, a few nights out in the open will not harm her. Much," Legolas said with a shrug that appeared more callous than it truly was. They discussed the stranger, both of them glancing over at her from time to time. Before a half-hour had passed, Legolas could no longer stand the sight of her shivering. He tossed his cloak over her and went back to the fire, clearly disgruntled.
"It's only a cloak. You can take it back come morning," Gimli pointed out.
"It isn't the cloak. It's her. Her appearance here makes no sense. Why come to Fangorn at all? Beautiful though it is, the Forest is still dark, and it is nothing like a safe place for anyone with such paltry woodland skills as she has.
"Also, I can hardly believe in a coincidence so great that it had her appearing out of nowhere, right next to us. You know what that means, Gimli. What it's always meant."
"You're right," Gimli acknowledged, feeding another dead branch to the flames. "Still, none of what we have seen thus far adds up. Beautiful, but not perfect. Awkward. Easily embarrassed. Walked away from us," he added, clearly finding this the strangest factor of all. "Away from us," he repeated, sounding rather disgusted.
"It's the only reason she hasn't been taken care of already," Legolas pointed out. "The fact that it doesn't all add up. We did come prepared for all manner of evil."
"We've got no choice, these days," Gimli replied with a frown. "The War is over and won, but there are still skirmishes to be fought."
Legolas cast another dark glance over at the sleeping stranger. His silent agreement was answer enough.
***
Chapter Two: The Mystery Deepens
Ëarendia opened her eyes to find the tall blond man and the much shorter, bushy-haired and bearded man staring at her. Legolas and Gimli, she thought, dazedly. The tall blond man—the Elf—is Legolas, and the...the Dwarf...is Gimli. She wanted to close her eyes again, sure that she was dreaming, but there was no denying the reality of the moss beneath her cheek and the rock near her ear.
She cast Legolas a dirty look, sure that if he was really an Elf, he could have caught her before her head hit the rock. He looked back impassively, obviously weighing her and finding her wanting. She couldn't remember ever being sorry to be in the company of a beautiful man before. Of course, she couldn't remember ever being in a situation like this before. She supposed that it was going to be a day of firsts.
"Are you still light-headed?" Gimli asked, with enough honest concern that Ëarendia immediately felt better, though her head didn't hurt any less. Still, she caught the smirk that Legolas couldn't quite control, and knew that he'd caught his friend's unintentional pun. She scowled at him and sat up.
"I no longer feel dizzy," she said, with stiff dignity, and stood up a bit shakily. "Thank you," she added, and Gimli smiled at her. "I'll just be on my way, then," she said with a sigh.
"You can't wander these woods alone," Gimli protested, sounding appalled. "It's not safe for a young lady alone. And you're hurt."
"Truly, I feel fine now," she lied, and concentrated on standing without swaying. Gimli's expression told her clearly that he didn't believe a word of it. Legolas simply watched her for a moment, as though trying to predict whether her stubbornness would outlast the unsteadiness in her legs. When she didn't fall, he seemed to sigh—if an Elf could be said to sigh—and spoke for the first time since she had awoken on the forest floor.
"You can't wander these woods at all," he said calmly, but with finality. "We do not know who you are, or where you came from, or who your people are. You do not appear to be ready to part with that information. Nor, strange as it seems for an Elf, do you appear to be able to fend for yourself." This time he truly did sigh, and loudly. "Which can mean only one thing." Legolas and Gimli shared a meaningful look, then both shrugged. "We have to take you to Gondor. And we have to do it now, before Gandalf and the others take leave of Minas Tirith."
"Gandalf? Gandalf the Grey?" Ëarendia asked without thinking.
Legolas' dark eyes narrowed on her. "Some call him by that name," he said slowly. Ëarendia had no idea what had suddenly made his eyes go cold and suspicious, but she didn't like the shivery feeling his stare was giving her. She desperately wished that he would look somewhere, anywhere else.
Gimli's eyes had lost what warmth they had held. "We'd better go now," he told Legolas. Ëarendia might as well have disappeared through a hole in the floor, for all the notice he gave her.
They seemed to be having some silent conversation between them, Ëarendia noticed, but could not tell what it was about. They seemed to be trying to avoid her, as though she might have some contagious disease, or might be about to jump on them. Or attack them. She was definitely ruining some sort of vacation, she realized, and tried hard to remember what she'd read in her father's books.
Legolas and Gimli had been friends, she remembered as she watched them having their silent conversation. They had been very good friends. And after the War of the Ring they had... She sighed in frustration, wishing she had read the books more recently. She looked around, and it came to her. They had gone to Fangorn, and then they had gone to the Glittering Caves, or something like that. In any event, she thought, they had certainly not planned on having a girl along, or detouring back to Minas Tirith.
"I'll just go alone," she said, breaking the silence. "If you can just get me to the edge of the Forest, and point me in the right direction, I'll get myself to Gondor."
This, if anything, seemed to alarm them more. She heard Gimli mutter something that sounded like 'inflict her on Éomer', and Legolas made a sound that bore a suspicious resemblance to a snort. She waited for a few moments, and, when they made no attempt to suggest any other idea, she simply started walking away. It was, she thought, too bad that she was still in her Renaissance Fair dress; her boots and jeans would have been a lot more useful in the moss and undergrowth obscuring the path.
Legolas and Gimli were still having their silent conversation, and hadn't yet realized that she was gone.
"I'm telling you, that's got to be the explanation," Gimli said. "She dropped out of nowhere. We were sitting there, having lunch, and she simply appeared there. There's no other possible reason."
"We should take care of this ourselves," Legolas said. "She will only drive everyone in Minas Tirith to distraction. All that long blond hair and those silvery eyes. You know how they are. You know why we left."
Gimli considered this soberly and sighed. "You are right, of course, my friend. But keeping her here would do no more good. It would end in our own madness, and the others would have no warning of what was to come."
After a long, long moment, Legolas nodded. "There is no point to self- sacrifice if through it our friends must perish," he agreed. They both turned to look at the stranger, and found that she was gone.
Legolas sighed again. "She is the strangest Elf, and the strangest one of her kind I have ever encountered," he observed after a moment. "Her woodcraft is so poor that she walks deeper into the Forest rather than toward its edge, she leaves a trail clear enough for a blind man to follow, and she walks away from us and leaves on her own. Walks away from us," he repeated, sounding mildly offended.
"It's hardly to be borne," Gimli grumbled, sounding very definitely offended. Sharing an eloquent, long-suffering look, he and Legolas set out after the strange Elf who called herself Ëarendia.
***
They found her sitting on the moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree, looking predictably pretty, shafts of murky green light managing to make her hair glow as, bent over, she readjusted the strap on her sandal. She looked somewhat the worse for wear, as though she had taken a few falls in the process of very nearly getting herself lost in the Forest. Legolas looked at Gimli. Gimli looked at Legolas. They both sighed.
She did not hear their approach, and was so shocked that she very nearly fell backward over the tree trunk. This act, so completely and totally graceless, shocked Legolas and Gimli far more than their appearance had shocked her, and they exchanged a startled look. Ëarendia, trying to right herself, did not notice this.
"Could we be wrong?" Gimli asked, his eyes wide as he looked at Legolas.
"If we are," Legolas said softly, "we shall be dealing with one very angry Elf."
Gimli agreed, not looking as though he found the prospect particularly attractive.
"Wh-wh-where did you come from?" Ëarendia gasped. She had never imagined that it would be possible to sneak up on someone through the underbrush clogging the path through the Forest. Legolas and Gimli, appearing so suddenly and soundlessly not ten steps away from her, had shocked her so badly that her heart was still in her throat.
"From where we met you," Legolas said, without so much as a trace of humor. Truly, he was too busy trying to figure this stranger out to be able to see the humor in her question.
Gimli had no such problems. His problem, in fact, was in trying to keep himself from laughing out loud at such a ridiculous question. But even as he struggled against laughter, he thought again that they might have been wrong about this strange Elf with the blond hair and silver eyes who had appeared as if out of nowhere. Perhaps she had been hurt, and that was why she did not seem to know who or where she was. He had seen such injuries in battle. Yet she was just too perfect, reminiscent in her own foreign way of both Galadriel and Arwen. Of course, she could never compare to either of them. That would, in Gimli's opinion, have been impossible. Yet she was good-looking enough to stand out in even a group of Elves. That, Gimli thought, was certainly noteworthy. He knew that Legolas had noticed; he knew his friend well enough after all this time to be fully aware of the reason behind Legolas' antipathy.
"Why are you following me? You should be...doing whatever it is you were doing when I arrived," Ëarendia told them both, finally managing to get herself situated on the tree trunk again. "Clearly, you did not want to tell me the way to Gondor. I will manage to find my way."
"You are headed in the wrong direction already," Legolas pointed out, refusing to call her by that ridiculous name.
She looked taken aback, then embarrassed. "Well, I'm certain that I would have figured that out before long. At any rate, both of you are wasting time. Go ahead on your way. I'll be fine, even more so now that I know which direction to aim for."
Legolas sighed. "You will be hopelessly lost before nightfall."
Gimli nodded. "Come with us. You'll be safer that way, and we'll all get to Gondor much more quickly."
Ëarendia, after some thought, sighed. From their expressions, 'no' was not an answer they were willing to consider. She stood up, managed to cross over the fallen tree trunk without too much loss of dignity, and silently followed them through the Forest.
***
Legolas and Gimli sat around the fire they had made with branches already fallen from the trees at the edge of Fangorn. They knew, from their first encounter with the Forest, that cutting any live branches would bring retribution neither was eager to incur. Had they been certain of the stranger, they might have encouraged her to gather some live branches, as it would have made their task simpler. Still, they had too much respect for the Forest and its denizens to treat even the most minor injury to one of Fangorn's trees so lightly.
And, as Legolas had reminded Gimli earlier, all that gleamed in the moonlight was not silver.
So they sat around the fire, and the still-unknown Elf slept off to the side, looking shivery and decidedly uncomfortable.
"You should have given her your cloak," Gimli told his friend grumpily. "If she takes a chill and becomes ill, it will only delay us. And neither of us is particularly skilled in healing."
"If she is truly an Elf, a few nights out in the open will not harm her. Much," Legolas said with a shrug that appeared more callous than it truly was. They discussed the stranger, both of them glancing over at her from time to time. Before a half-hour had passed, Legolas could no longer stand the sight of her shivering. He tossed his cloak over her and went back to the fire, clearly disgruntled.
"It's only a cloak. You can take it back come morning," Gimli pointed out.
"It isn't the cloak. It's her. Her appearance here makes no sense. Why come to Fangorn at all? Beautiful though it is, the Forest is still dark, and it is nothing like a safe place for anyone with such paltry woodland skills as she has.
"Also, I can hardly believe in a coincidence so great that it had her appearing out of nowhere, right next to us. You know what that means, Gimli. What it's always meant."
"You're right," Gimli acknowledged, feeding another dead branch to the flames. "Still, none of what we have seen thus far adds up. Beautiful, but not perfect. Awkward. Easily embarrassed. Walked away from us," he added, clearly finding this the strangest factor of all. "Away from us," he repeated, sounding rather disgusted.
"It's the only reason she hasn't been taken care of already," Legolas pointed out. "The fact that it doesn't all add up. We did come prepared for all manner of evil."
"We've got no choice, these days," Gimli replied with a frown. "The War is over and won, but there are still skirmishes to be fought."
Legolas cast another dark glance over at the sleeping stranger. His silent agreement was answer enough.
