Author's Note: Hello, all! Welcome back! I've missed you this past month, but NaNoWriMo was kind to me. I accomplished a lot even if there remains much yet to do. Thanks for your patience in the meanwhile!
Chapter 19: Outcast
Angren and Taereth lowered Calen's litter near the unfallen side of the well. Since resuming their eastward march, the former, in particular, had seen to their wounded's every comfort, no matter how small: ensuring they kept the litter level when clearing stairs; propping a shoulder under him when he needed, less and less frequently, to make water, or—as now—patiently unpicking the lacings binding him to the litter's frame, so he could take a little air.
Despite such devotion, Calen lay like one borne away from battle on his shield, drawn and silent. Both water and their supply of spirits had drained away with frightening rapidity even with their guide's reluctant assistance.
Zuraz sat well back from the well, licking his wrist where the manacle chafed. He, alone of them, had found his situation much improved over the last two days and had kept up a stream of vile chatter until Elrohir threatened to gag him.
"Stop that," Elrohir scolded him. "It needs to be cleaned properly."
Zuraz ignored him. There had been a little unpleasantness earlier when Haldir had made to remove the red stone the Orc kept under his jerkin—nothing more perilous than a bit of cabochon, unpolished and rough, strung on a strip of leather. In the end, Elrohir had let him retain it rather than squander their limited capacities depriving him of his talisman.
At no time did they leave him without a guard or with hands and feet loosed.
At Elrohir's approach Zuraz tensed, greenish lips peeling back from filed incisors in a mute snarl.
"Let it fester another day," said Haldir, newly relieved of guard duty. "Then you can lop it off at the joint, and the rest of him will still be decent enough to eat."
Zuraz's gaze locked on Haldir's back, tracking him across the chamber the way a snake does a pine marten. The hand with the amputated fingers curled into a fist until the knuckles blenched a sickly shade.
Elrohir knelt at eye-level. "You know him of old."
"We go back a ways, Merlin and me," Zuraz said. "One day we'll settle things up between us. One or the other's for the Night Road."
Carefully, attending his work more than the mutterings of his savage patient, Elrohir pushed the manacle further up the wiry arm and dabbed at the newest cuts with a damp cloth. "The road east to the Gate is the only one of interest to us."
Zuraz flexed the hand resting loose on Elrohir's knee, the sinews in his forearm going taut, but he stilled. "And then what?"
What, indeed.
He might still do them a mischief if they released him too near his fellows—whatever disagreements lay between Orcs, they could always be counted on to hate Elves more. Nor could they take him to Lórien: it was a long journey with a bound prisoner, and the wardens would suffer no Orc living past their borders.
"We must not look too far ahead. How far are we from the Gate now?"
Zuraz rolled a shoulder. "All roads are watched. That means taking the long way round. Of course, we'd make shift faster without the dead weight."
"That is not our way." Elrohir smeared an unguent of honey and animal grease on the wounds. The Orc's limbs were a river of scars, the fresh ones mere tributaries of the old. The ones that started at his hands and ran up his forearms, especially, bore strips of raised tissue where the flesh had blurred and smeared as if wax. Old burns.
"Oy, gently," Zuraz protested. "What's he done anyway? This tark you're looking for? Kill somebody? Stole? Thief's worse than a murderer in some parts."
"Of course, you would think only in terms of wrong and vengeance. There are other reasons. Love. Loyalty."
Zuraz made a rude noise with his lips. "Doesn't get you very far that lot. Better a bit of luck." He touched the talisman at his throat.
There was a rune carved into the surface of the stone—an inward curling claw, the same sigil that had marred the great Stone in Dimrill Dale. The light from the Fëanorian lamp had a strange way of catching its facets in glints of red flame and dark cloud as if a storm had been caged within the jewel. It swirled round and round in a chaotic, changeful dance until Elrohir's head swam with shadowy movement, his mouth full of ice and iron. Silvery shadows pressed in at the edges of his vision. The indemmar had not let him be since the night of Calen's injury though none had showed themselves the way Belegorn had. Their cold current fluttered and tugged at him, insistent. Hungry.
"What are you looking at?"
"What?" Elrohir recalled himself with a jerk, shaking off the odd pall. Between nursing Calen and watching their prisoner, he had slept too little these last few days.
"You do that. Look round at things nobody sees."
Taken aback that, of all people, the enemy had noticed his preoccupation, Elrohir shook his head. "I was merely looking at your token. I have seen that mark before. What does it mean? Is that your tribe?"
Zuraz tucked the talisman out of sight beneath his jerkin. "Don't have a tribe. Not anymore."
Disconcerted but sensing he'd questioned their guide as far as might be for both their sakes, Elrohir wrapped a length of linen—their last—about the gnarled wrist and snugged it down. "Are you hungry?"
The Orc scowled at him in reply. Though a simple enough question—one Elrohir would have asked of any under his care—that much civility from an Elf proved more than the Orc's meagre resources could entertain, and he regarded all such approaches with nothing short of hostile suspicion. Having asked this question before and gotten a similar response, Elrohir fished into his pack. He had to reach further into it this time.
Not much remained of their provisions. They had not anticipated a prolonged journey, much less a hard march bearing a wounded comrade. Only a few strips of salted venison and the lembas, crumbling in their leaf wrappings, remained. Had not the Orc turned his nose up at everything but the former, they would have run short even of those. He set a strip of meat beside the Orc and left him to it. It would vanish in due course if Elrohir let him alone. He did not expect thanks and received none.
Straightening with a wince, he eased out into the corridor, eager for a moment alone. Only one doorway led out of the chamber, so he didn't feel too guilty neglecting the watch. There was nowhere for the Orc to go.
Beyond their antechamber an arch opened into three passages: the right-most climbing, the middle way straight and level even if the litter would barely squeeze through, the left-most plunging into soft and airy darkness. He leaned his head back against the cool stone and shut his eyes, weariness falling over him like a heavy drape.
"I'm not intruding, am I?"
Elrohir cracked his lids. He had been on the verge of dozing off on his feet.
Rammas hefted the bucket in her hands. It was brimming. "The winch worked all right. I thought you might like a chance to slake your thirst. Are your wounds troubling you?"
He accepted the dipper she passed him with a nod of thanks. The water was cool and tasted of stone. "My discomfort is nothing to what Calen is enduring."
Rammas set the bucket down beside him. She'd loosened her collar in the heat, and it hung away from her throat. In its shadow, a swirl of deeper darkness emerged against the pale skin beneath her sternum: a pattern of faded black ink branching into eight points in a spiraling star. A very familiar tribe, indeed.
Of all his motley companions, she remained an enigma. Unlike the others, spurred by duty or ambition or a captain's commands, she claimed no ties to this expedition save a vagary of affiliation. She had defended his choice to take on Zuraz even when Haldir had countermanded it. She had proven a help in nearly every way. And yet…
"Is it true? What Angren said of you?"
Only when she cast him a veiled look from under her lids did it occur to him he might have couched his question with a more graceful preamble.
"I live a wanderer's life," she answered. "Rare is the luxury of taking one's ease among friends with no need for watch or weapon. I admit I am not of that chaste feather to refuse other comforts generously proffered on such occasions. And your Captain is my most generous friend."
He choked on a swallow of water, heat tickling across his cheeks.
The up-curving corner of her mouth suggested deliberate misdirection rather than misunderstanding. Easy to see how this bold and roving woman would appeal to Haldir's rebellious spirit, which resisted at every turn the usual way of things.
"I am reproved for my prying, mistress." He cleared his throat. "All talk of his 'generosity' aside, I surmised some time ago there was more between you than mere fellowship. You two are too familiar not to have…been familiar."
"He blushes! Such modesty in an errant knight." She sobered. "Yes. It is true what Angren said. I am hecilë. Kinslayer. Oathbreaker. So they called us after Doriath. Though it was a life and a lifetime ago."
"You were at Doriath."
He scarcely credited such a claim even when the evidence lay in what his own eyes beheld. He knew the tale, of course: his own grandmother, his father's mother, had been the only survivor of the royal family to escape the sack. Thingol's heir, his queen, and their two little sons had all perished at the hands of the Fëanorians, who balked not at spilling the blood of kin to reclaim their prize jewel.
That this woman, who had welcomed him in Lórien, who had guided him with counsel and lamp, who had tended his wounds, might have been party to such atrocity beggared belief. And he said as much.
"I was young then. To fight under the banner of Fëanor's sons was to serve glory itself." That sense of her, as of something bright and repressed, glimmered through, her gaze casting far away from their bivouac. "Had Dior not been so proud and withheld the only remembrance those sons had of their father, perhaps matters might have gone otherwise. What tale do they tell of us in Imladris?"
"'Cruel,' they call you," he admitted. "Child-slayers."
"A mother's love is fiercer than dragonfire, especially in defense of her children." She fingered the thin, brown seam tracing its crooked line down her throat beneath her collar. "But we would not set our swords to those too small to lift one against us. Nor were we so heartless to leave them in the halls where they might come to harm or witness what they should not. For not all Caranthir's men harkened to their better natures after he fell. The little princes took my hands as if I were their nurse. New-woken, rubbing sleep from their eyes, full of questions. We could, by now, make out the din as it drew near. I took them to keep them safe.
"But when we reached the woods, Elúred and Elúrin grew cold and frightened. They wanted their mother, who could no longer comfort them, and their hands slipped mine. I never found them though I sought through every den, every fern-clouded hollow where two small ones could lie up like fawns. I lashed the Esgalduin's banks and clawed through thickets of briar until my face and hands and clothes were torn to ribbons. But I never found them. The forest spirited them into itself and never gave them back."
She brushed a hand across her eyes. "I forsook my oath after that. I left my comrades, everything, behind, save my steel. Eventually I crossed paths with Inglorion who gave me a place in his wandering company. A new and better purpose. When I saw you and your brother that night in the woods, I thought my punishment, long evaded, had come round at last…"
"I am told my brother and I resemble our foremother's brothers as they might have been," Elrohir said, remembering the intensity of her gaze that first night. "So, once you were assured we were not the Houseless re-housed, why did you come?"
"Haldir and Gildor cared nothing for my past misdeeds, or at least, were willing to take current ones into account. But others, like Angren, are not so gracious. If I tire of a wanderer's life I would like to dwell beneath trees that remember Arda in the first sweetness of its youth. But to stand before Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol, and sue for pardon and right of abode, I would need to come bearing all the gifts I may. What better proof of my heart's change than to aid his kinsman at need?"
"Ah, so your assistance on my behalf is mere expedience," he teased.
"Your relation does no harm," she said, returning his cautious smile, "but it is not all. As I said Haldir has long been accounted a dear friend. I have few enough of those. You put me in mind of him more than a little. Acorns off the same oak."
He flicked an eyebrow at that. "Oh? How so?"
"He will forgive anyone their past misdeeds—anyone but servants of the Enemy. And himself."
In the chamber behind them Haldir had availed himself of a niche formerly occupied by a stone warrior whose remnants lay broken below. He sat with legs drawn up, surveying all from his eyrie with a watchful eye. It had taken Elrohir a season or two in Lórien to discern this peculiarity of seeking the highest vantage was his alone and not one common to all Galadhrim.
A change had fallen over their Captain these last days.
He still attended all the duties of a company commander, but he did so brusquely, without teasing. Even the obliging Taereth had caught the biting edge of his tongue for some half-imagined infraction. When he spoke, it was to levy an order in as few words as would suffice or fewer. Whether he drew the short straw or no, he held vigil, unsleeping, with his longblade unsheathed across his knees. On the march, while Elrohir, by necessity, took the vanguard with Zuraz's leash, Haldir walked in the rear. In the dark. Even Rammas' attempts to draw him out had been met only with terse acknowledgment or silence.
Yanking the chain of command as Elrohir had, even sanctioned (barely) by authority as his grandfather's proxy, had done no wonders for their strained relations. A cornered and spear-stung boar would have been easier to placate than Haldir's pride once provoked, and Elrohir had provoked it sorely and deliberately.
"I could not have made any other choice than I did," he said. "Even if he revile me for it."
"He would never," Rammas said at once and with surprising vehemence. "After the Dagorlad he was in near ruins. Your family returned him to himself, gave him a place of honor. A purpose. Even now, it is the knights of the House of Eärendil whose praises he honors in song and whose deeds he recounts round the solstice fire. Not his own laurels. Not even the victory he snatched from the Enemy's jaws when we were caught in ambuscade between the Towers of the Teeth. In spite of the troubles between you, he would rather lay down his own life than see you come to harm. You are all that is left of—" she checked, biting back an incautious word. "All that to say: he may mislike with your choice, Elrohir, but I know you do him proud. Though the words to say so stick in his throat."
That she was privy to the full nature of those 'troubles' between them—and not merely the matter of gossip or their guide—Elrohir had no doubt. But exhaustion had bled him of the desire for argument. "You know him better than I. I am sorry to drag you into our disagreement."
"Oh, he'll soften, given time," she said, that sly grin returning. "And if not, I am told I have a knack for knocking sense into the infernally stubborn."
"You do at that," he admitted. Getting to his feet, he proffered his hand formally. "Well, for my part, I would leave your past behind you. I consider you a friend."
She took it. "As your friend, then, might I give you some small counsel? A wound left to fester only gets worse, never better. And even lives as long as ours do not offer endless opportunity to make amends."
"I fear a contrite word from me will not close that wound." A wound he had not opened to begin with, for that matter.
"Perhaps not, but considering the choice you made and the manner in which you made it, I think you ought clear the air on your part. Besides, it goes ill for the troops when their captains quarrel."
Elrohir laughed ruefully despite himself. "He holds his loves too lightly if occasional comfort is all he offers you, wise lady. I doubt it will do much, but I will try. "
Canon Quote
I've paraphrased this line from Tolkien. The company has, in fact, paused in the exact same place Gandalf would run into such trouble midway through the Fellowship's journey some thirty years from now.
Source: The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, "A Journey in the Dark."
"Before him stood a wide dark arch opening into three passages, all led in the same general direction, eastwards, bug the left-hand passage plunged down while the right hand climbed up and the middle way seemed to run on smooth and level but very narrow."
Language Note
hecilë (Quenya) - "Outcast, one who is forsaken or lost"
Source: Part Edhellen
