Bind Them (A Thranduil fan-fic) - Book 2 of Mirkwood Royals

by magicbunni

(In 7 Chapters.) A solemn purpose has separated Lusis Buckmaster from her friends and chosen home in the Halls of the Elvenking. And, soon, cries of wargs split the night air, silent strangers glide into Buckmaster Keep, and the famed Messenger-Men of the North come under attack - the results of an imbroglio between Men and elves, and a contrivance to lay low an inconvenient King.

5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

She started her morning in the upstairs hall, drinking hot cider and eating dates rolled in crushed nuts. They were something the elves took great interest in. Lusis wasn't familiar with them, but thought they tasted amazingly good, particularly dipped in honey. The elves cleaned up platters of them. Like Kasia, they often had these treats brought in during the winter. She glanced when Steed came up the stairs. The top floor of Kasia's Keep had a wall of thick glass windows that shone in on a wide promenade. She sat on the rug with her back to the wall directly underneath them.

Food had been set out on tables near the stairs. The low buzz of the elven section currently in from the weather filled the air with what Lusis felt was a reassuring noise. It was startling how well Steed fit with them. He was like someone's little cousin, drifting among them, and he spoke to a few of them in bursts of Sindarin, which put the cagey elves at greater ease.

An elf scooped tea into a goblet for Steed, and handed it over before he joined her. He sank down on his knees and sat on his heels, so hauntingly elf-like. He handed her the tea. "Is the floor enough for you, Chief?"

"Elves," she sipped gratefully, and clarified, "no chairs."

He nodded, "I know." He laughed and the human sound drew the attention of elves through the entire upstairs space, but Steed didn't mind it. "They're different, and we respect it, and they will respect us the same. You need to learn to ask for a chair."

She grinned guiltily. "I do."

The elves began to go back to their own conversations. Lusis sobered. Her voice became quiet as she questioned him, "Where was he last night?"

"You were right. He did go out."

Lusis inhaled and looked down the long hall toward Dorondir. He had just emerged from the room closest to the staircase. His hair was unbound, wet, and not even braided. He glanced her way and inclined his head in respectful greeting.

Steed looked from her to Dorondir and his eyes narrowed minutely. "Ah. Well. I thought I should warn you that he ranged well into the city. I've only been back since shortly before dawn."

"Why so long? We've been back for six or seven hours."

At that point, Steed glanced at the chamber of the King. His eyes came back to her as he noted, "We passed you twice."

"The section head said as much." She pushed her damp hair back behind her shoulders and sipped tea. "Could it be he doesn't believe the sections in the area would be aware of his movements?"

"I doubt it," Steed shook his head. "I believe he thinks we watch and follow him all the time."

"Accurate," she felt her brows rise. "The King made him my responsibility."

"Your responsibility went to the foothills of Erebor last night, and pondered the Lonely Mountain. He has asked about it. He is curious. Apparently, some news of it came to him from the elves heading to the West. When he came too close, the Dwarven guards turned him back with a volley of spears."

She blinked at Steed for a moment. She set her cup aside. Lusis got to her feet and hurried down into the main hall. There were smaller rooms on the bottom floor, little more than cells in a narrow and windowless passageway. The elves who slept here needed to adjust to the lack of space, and many were peopled by section elves who, for whatever reason, needed to be in from the wild. At the moment all the doors stood open. She knew how the open doors worked far better than she ever had before and passed quickly and quietly through, to lean on the frame of the door at the very end of the row. It was dark. The beds in these places were of a particular human design – long and narrow slabs. Many elves opted for cots or even soft nests they made on the floor. Osp did not. He lay on his belly with his ink-black hair fanned out over his pale skin. His shining cloak covered much of him, and she was grateful for that. His loveliness was distracting enough as it was.

She stepped in, looked at the floor, and simply waited. Which is how elves did things, she'd discovered. She'd seen Ewon go to the King this way. This was because elves didn't truly sleep. Rather, they were lost in reverie, a lucidity of dreams. They could easily feel the presence of others around them, given time.

Sure enough, the elf's long eyes opened in the half-light and he pushed away from the bed. She backed up a step and exhaled, for, at the base of his throat, a tremendous light glowed. It was neither inferno, nor the starlight pillar as could be seen of the King or Lady Galadriel. He'd swallowed the moon. It glowed from inside of him, a round, steady blinding blue.

"What… what is it?" he pulled the cloak around him, and where the fabric slithered over his chest, the strange threads began to awaken. It was as if his light could activate something in the cloak. Its patterns shifted, and, for a moment, she saw stars and night clouds fly across it. It calmed to a sudden perfusion of thorns and blue roses.

Lusis smiled at him, "That cloak is beautiful."

He cringed from her a little. "Is it?" It was very possible he'd never been seen in a state of undress by anything but an elven eye. He certainly seemed unable to determine what to do about her, and what her intentions might be.

"Osp," she let her head drift a little right and forward and watched his muscles relax. The goodwill in the motion made him feel safe. "I'm your friend. Remember?"

He inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. Then he said, "Here… there are no friends."

"That's not true," she glanced up from the pitiless moonlight of him. "You saved my life."

"You have me followed," he told her quietly, "wherever I go."

She'd endured the same in her visit to her father's Keep, just weeks ago. Now Lusis felt so badly for him that her voice went soft. "Do you have any idea how unsafe this place is if you don't know how to fight? If you can't use a sword, friend-Osp. If you have no skill with a weapon?"

His head moved. It bowed.

The motion was one of such defeat and loneliness that Lusis almost relented.

But she would not fail to press for the safety of the Lord and King. "You went to the mountain last night. They threw spears at you. Are you hurt?"

His head rose a little. The cloak shifted. His broad, pale shoulder appeared, and, at the side of it she saw a plaster had been fixed in place under some kind of gauzy material. It seemed affixed to him. Her nerves jumped. Her fingertips landed on the bandaging, delicately. "Osp is the wound deep?"

"No." He shook his bowed head and his copper eyes took her in slowly.

He was wounded, but the real wound wasn't one of the flesh.

"I… I'd been warned about dwarves. Small. Fierce. Pitiless."

Lusis' lips pressed into a line. "No. They're not all like that. I haven't met many, but in the same way that not all elves are the same, not all dwarves are, either." She smoothed his ink-dark hair. It was an extraordinary amount of touching for an elf, but he was so much like an injured and frightened child. "Can I take off this honey plaster? Can I look at it?"

She spent the next ten minutes checking his injury. Steed, who had followed her here, brought supplies – fresh honey, fresh bandaging, and hot water.

"I didn't realize he was hurt." Steed shrank back outside the room to wait.

Lusis shook her head at her Ranger, too angry, yet, to talk to him. She couldn't imagine not noticing that the Western elf had taken a four inch gash to his shoulder. She kept cleaning it, reapplied honey to the wound, and then wrapped it.

Having smelled blood, the Silvan section elves were up and about. They didn't have much to do with the Western elf. But now a young warrior stepped in and took Osp's shirt. He returned it cleaned of blood, and stitched. Osp's head cocked at it – his otherworldly shimmering textile, now stitched with the sturdy green cloth of a Mirkwood Scout. His fingertips smoothed it, and he smiled.

"Poor bee," Lusis said to him. "Is that your only injury?"

His shoulders bunched. "I am not a child."

"Poor bee," she exhaled again. Lusis set her hand on her hips and looked at the bowl of water, red with blood, beside her. It was an eye-opener. He might be different in his dress, speech, bearing and appearance, but he bled no differently. "Please be more careful."

"I want to see things," he said quietly.

"Then work with us, Osp." She told him and looked up at his eyes. "May I call you friend?"

He flinched, taken aback, and she wondered what pellucid line she'd stomped across. She scarcely knew how to keep herself out of trouble with the elves of Middle-Earth. It was highly likely she'd violated his Western-elf mores.

But he sat up and pulled on his shirt. "If… if you would like." He touched his cheek lightly.

"I'm going to ask you, friend-Osp, to work with us, now the worst has happened and you've been attacked and injured going about this on your own." Her lips pressed into a line. "It's about time we started to build trust here. What were you doing at the mountain?"

His head tipped slowly. "I feel things from it. Sickness. Isolation. Longing that cannot be quenched. I feel something lambent in it, something deep." His fingers came to rest over the circular light at the base of his throat and she smiled then, because she knew his eyes couldn't see it. Unlike hers. She laid a hand over the starpoint at the base of her neck. "Let's go tell the King about it."

"Do… do you mean the boy, Thranduil?"

Boy? She gave her head a little shake. "I mean the Elvenking."

He sucked a deep breath, held it, and then released it slowly. "Do you understand… that for a being such as myself – an Emissary of the West – to call him a King, is to assign to him a kind of power… that I am not certain he deserves? In fact, given the quality of leaders in Valar, I am relatively certain that he manifestly does not deserve-"

A sharp hiss sounded from across the hall, and Osp fell silent. He glanced up at Lusis, who knew that a sudden explosion of emotion like that one was akin to cursing among the Silvan.

She hadn't looked away from him or varied a thing in her patiently pleasant expression. Hands on her hips, she let her chin sink in affirmation. She told him. "You are wrong."

He stared up at her, and then said, "I cannot call him King."

"We'll cross the rough water as we reach it." She glanced at his shape under the cloak. He was slender and eternally youthful. Lovely. And not her King. "We should tell him what you feel in the Mountain."

"Why would we do that?" Osp asked her quietly. "His sense of this place, his claimed land, is potent. He knows." Now he glanced back at her with his coppery eyes. "Does he tell you nothing?"

Lusis looked at him for a few heartbeats. She turned from him and left by the door. "Steed, call a healer to him. He is an elf, and he must be treated as one."

"I'll see to him," Steed sighed and then bowed to her. "I failed you and he was hurt. I'm sorry."

She mussed his dark hair before she left for the upstairs.

Surely the King was up by now.

He was abroad. In point of fact, the entire upstairs gallery – that broad hall of windows and open doors – which had buzzed with the unobtrusive activity of elves, was all but empty now. At the far end, the King of Mirkwood stood within a cloud of elves. Amathon stood in genial tranquility facing the stairs as Lusis came up. When she turned the corner, she immediately found Nimpeth at the ready, knives in hand, and there was no cordiality on her face. Her narrow chin dipped, she lowered her fighting knives, and flattened to the wall again. This was not an uncommon sentry configuration for elves inside a structure. In fact, there was a saying based upon it: Beware the sunny one, and dread the elf you do not see.

Lusis passed between them, looked back, and bowed fractionally.

Elites were terrifying.

The King. He was wearing a pale and scintillating silver. The tall collar on his throat flashed red as hands touched it to rights. Winter clothes were layered for elves, the lighter undercoat was a glorious ruby red. With the light she could see in him, he closely resembled a star. She stood and watched the elves around him bring bright pauldrons and strap them to place. They had the most glorious frost-whorl patterns and were white, as it they had been comprised of hoarfrost. They lifted his colourless hair and one of them curled it gently so that it could be laid into the hood of a cloak that had arrived via Jan Kasia. The Master of Boats stood back and admired the cloak they laid upon the King – long, with a deep hood, and covered in white fur.

He walked to join Lusis as the elves fussed with it. He jabbed a thumb at the window. "It snowed in the predawn, and it's too cold, these short hours of the day, to melt." He spoke quietly, and grinned, "All the elves who lay out his things went into a paroxysm."

"Elves usually don't wear furs," she noted of the quiet King.

"The Furriers are a rising power north of Erebor, bidding to headquarter their business in the downtown area of the piers. Their Mistress is a woman of the Mark – Kells Srus – and she sent it along with a missive for the Council and a very grand scroll made out to the King. She's offering to come to see him." He added, "You'd like her, Lusis. She's a tall woman. Sharp-minded. Carries a sword."

"You misunderstand me." Lusis told him. "I'll consider liking her if she carries the sword for me. For us." She nodded at him and included, in a quick round motion of her hand, Lake Township.

His expression revealed that he strongly approved of this. "Such fur cloaks are gifts fit for the King of Gondor himself, so I convinced them to have him wear one. To reject them would worry the Furriers, and behind them, the pelt-makers, and the trappers – these people pay to use the Forest for shipping, too. I don't expect him to gobble-up any of the meat of the animals that were trapped, but he has to have an open mind on some matters." Kasia said as he looked in the King's direction. "He's a King of Men now… not just elves."

Lusis watched the King shut his eyes and wait. He gathered his scant patience, as an elf tapped his long white-blond hair into place against the front of his pauldrons. Perhaps Osp would bring them some of his rulers to measure his symmetries with – he had these most puzzling 'slide-rules' whose functions she didn't fully understand. She'd seen him use the things when making notes on the all too human construction of Kasia's Keep. "Lusis-sell," the King's voice whispered down the hall as if a disconnected thing, and Lusis realized with a jolt, that the words had been spoken inside her head.

She stepped up from Kasia, "Elfking?"

His head turned slowly. "Prepare for the world."

Of course, he meant for her to go get a thick travel cloak, but she felt herself grin, anyway, as she headed for the tall supply chest. "Maybe they should prepare for me." She only just glimpsed his brows rising as she opened the doors and found the folded elven cloaks within.

She slid into a cloak sized for an elf woman, and shut the door. The soundless King was just feet away from her, on the other side. She jolted. That economy of motion that made them soundless. She could never quite get accustomed to it. As a result, most elves assumed something was amiss when she jumped. However, the King was used to this quality in her. He stood waiting.

She pressed the tall wardrobe shut, "Do you realize I still have the necklace? The one of silver and pearl that your friend gave to you? I've had it all these months?"

His body went still. He scarcely seemed to do more than breathe the words, "Lusis-sell…?"

Lusis gripped the handles for the wardrobe in her fingers and felt like a foolish child. For what was six months to one such as him? Why would he notice?

But he was certainly noticing now. Elves cleared away from him. They fell into clusters apart from the Istari and the King whose silver eyes watched her so closely. After a moment of near silence, he said, "Lusis Buckmaster, what has changed? Have… associations somehow… come undone between us? You are in my charge and custody, and I am, likewise, in your care." His unblinking eyes studied her. Concern touched his careful expression.

She turned around and flattened to the closed doors of the wardrobe like they might pop open and disgorge a drunken goblin. Her voice was quiet. "It was an observation. No more. I meant you no insult." Her face burned. "I would not do you insult."

Almost utter silence had fallen in the hall.

Finally, his petal lips inhaled. His voice went quiet, "Are we not beyond these confusions?"

She never felt further from him then when she admitted, "I don't understand." She reached into her pocket and touched the chain she kept with her at all times. "Don't you want it? Your dear friend gave it to you."

The Elfking's graceful hand moved fractionally, downwards. "Do we trust one another?"

"Of course, we do." She had to press the heat out of her cheeks at this misstep. "But it's yours."

"If I am your King… you are also mine," he told her patiently. "Another… place wherein I may safely choose to leave such things." He shut his eyes and a tumble of elvish came next. Once in a very long while, she hit on a nerve so close to the core of what it meant to be an elf, to understand oneself as an edhel, that elves couldn't explain in anything but elvish.

The King's eyes opened slowly. He took another step in her direction and opened his arms so that the cloak fell away from him, and he caught it. "We… we must speak, privately."

"You have something to do – somewhere to go. I won't delay you." She bowed to him.

He considered her for some time, and the elves behind him lifted the cloak back into position after he had so magnificently displaced it. His face read acceptance, and… something she couldn't properly discern. In the end, his head rose and he said, "Come with me, Lusis Buckmaster, and no matter who interferes, do not part from me today."

She followed on his soundless silver heels. The staff stood along the lower railings.

As he passed them, they bowed, which he studiously ignored.

Many elves followed, Elites among their number, which told her that the matter of the Men of the Peaks was being taken very seriously. Nimpeth and Telfeth, the young ingénue archer, fell in beside Lusis. They stayed beside her as she passed by quarters where Steed guarded, and Osp healed. Elves opened the doors to winter and stepped aside.

Lusis came out into the snowy cold with a soft exhalation. She was a creature of the high North. The cold here, which made Jan Kasia cringe beside the horse that Ranger Argus Samas held, didn't give her pause. The King and elves looked as if they couldn't feel it in the slightest.

Lusis glanced aside at the snow-coloured King of Mirkwood. The overcast sky attempted to paint him grey. Instead, his skin took on a crisp white glow, touched by the softest hint of peach and rose. To her eyes, he was glowing from the inside. The light of lamps on long staves added warmth to his skin and hair. This was not lost on the many Men standing in the still, cold air of morning. They were dockworkers, coopers, fishermen, warehouse workers, and so many others that Lusis' eyes lost track of them all. The Forces stood facing these Men of Long Lake.

The Rangers – her troop among them – watched the crowd and progress of the King, in turns. One man wrung his woolen hat in his hands and stared at the tall Sinda as if he was watching a star roll along the world. He laid a hand over his heart and tried to bow, but he, like many, seemed powerless to take his eyes off the silver King.

Could they see it somehow? Did they? Or did they simply know his fire. Feel it.

For his part, Elfking Thranduil raised a graceful hand, its moonstone blinking in the light of tall lamps, and a sudden banditry of chickadees soared around it. They winged off over the wall and banked for the Silver Beech.

Lusis watched this affectionately. She prized how the natural world loved him and how their simple amity brought him peace. In these moments she thought he was glorious.

Jan Kasia mustered his daily bow. "Please forgive the crowd, my King."

The Elfking's head rose. "For what failing?"

"There was word of an attack on your person on the pier yesterday," Jan Kasia noted. "These people feel safe through the actions of the Council, and the intervention of their King. Many of them write to me of your splendor and wholesomeness, saying that it is a blessing to the land."

The Elfking's long eyes closed as he said, "I am not so precious, and am unhurt." His silver gaze fixed on the white stone cobbles that led from the yard to town.

Jan Kasia had his own dash of pride, and may have agreed with this assessment, but he didn't dare say so aloud. Instead, he observed, "They are very eager to see that you remain that way, Elfking."

But Lusis understood the fullness of this, and the King's hardship in understanding, and looked up to his gently waving hair. "They're here to back you, my King. They're here to show you support."

The armed and girded elves ahead turned, as one, and stepped aside. The bull-elk cantered in onto the cobbles. The red of his rein shone against the white of his coat and, momentarily, the King brightened. "Hello, little one." He swung up to the saddle and turned the elk in a circle. "A horse for Lusis Buckmaster, Master of Boats."

He turned the bull-elk at once. He simply expected obedience.

The elk loped toward the crushed stone that ran along the water. Lusis' brows drew down in dismay, "Hurry, yes?" she told the men bringing her a young mare, but they weren't quite fast enough, and so she jogged after the King and forced them into pursuit.

Nimpeth met her with a horse – the white horse of Glorfindel, in fact – and Lusis hooked her hand over the low horn and hopped astride. The King's great white elk stood at the cobbled lane to Lake Township, proper, and waited. Jan Kasia joined them on the right, and they stared out at a street filled with people. The Elfking's face was unreadable.

They stood back from Ewon's and Amathon's tall grey horses. Both elves were fixed on scanning the crowd. Nimpeth spoke from beside Lusis, "We can take you by another route, my-"

The Elfking's elk glided forward.

In the street, Men peeled back and crowded along the sides of the road. The elk went down the middle, Ewon and Amathon at either side, neither of them holding rein. Their hands were occupied with the bows and arrows they had knocked.

The crowds bent before the passage of the elk and, in many places, red flower petals had been sprinkled over the snow. Lusis followed behind the burning pillar of Kingship, and marveled that Men, whose eyes couldn't see the brightness of any elf, could yet detect the purity and majesty in him.

The elk broke into a long gallop. The King's hair floated behind his coasting body like the tail on a shooting star. What tied him to the earth, she didn't know, but the crowds of Men who stretched along the lip of the lake as far as she could see, Lusis knew they – standing in the cracking cold of the North wind for leagues – were willing to try.

They went through town toward a slow rolling rise, and there, through trees and tall houses, a great circle of hillock stood with a large, beautiful wooden house nestled behind snowy oaks on its crest. It was an older construction that had been refurbished by the citizens of Lake Township. It was a rich wooden brown, but now sported wood trim stained to a golden glimmer, and a door of the same golden red that appeared in the Elfking's lozenge. They were trying to make it satisfying for him.

Men and elves, Lusis' suppressed a smile. Elves and Men. Assembling.

"This is the mansion of the last Master of Lake Township." Jan Kasia said quietly. "As promised." He bowed in the saddle and he nudged his horse across the lawn and onto the clay path to the large house. Lusis fell in beside the King.

"How is the Lord?"

"Resting," the King said quietly and added. "He has exhausted three healers." His elk slowed, "Lusis Buckmaster… he is waning. Soon, you may be needed." He laid a hand on his chest. His fingers shivered lightly.

She pulled a deep breath and exhaled mist. "I'll be ready," Lusis glanced up from his fingers at his paleness. "Elfking, this won't be our only opportunity to uncover our foes."

In a tumble of white-golden hair, his head turned away, perhaps unhappy at the prospect of releasing the small advantage he had like a bird on the wind. But Lusis didn't think what weakened them was also of significant benefit. "Better to have him healthy and able to wield a sword and bow."

They were met at the door by trio of young men in red and gold. They came to take the horses. Lusis got down and handed her reins over. The King glided off his bull-elk. He stepped forward and whispered to the creature in elvish. Its white ears flicked and it snuffled his chest. "Go," said the King, and the great deer loped off into the pasture before the wood building to look for lichens among the trees. His white coat matched the landscape well.

When the King did turn, the three young men stared, full of unhelpful awe. This caused the Elfking to glance at Kasia and wait. When the Master of Boats started them for the house, Lusis heard the stable-boys whispering about how the elves left no footprints in the snow. She looked down at where Nimpeth glided, beside her, and her eyes widened because this was no rumour. It was true.

She did.

But of course she did.

Then it was the King, his closest Elites, young Telfeth, and Lusis on their way into the property of the Master of Lake Township. There were three levels. Each storey had a front balcony. The effect created a tall and sheltered walkway along the front of the house to the entrance, cobbled with stone flags and lined with tree-trunk pillars. The large red double doors opened. A delicious wall of heat rolled out at them, and Lusis inhaled it into her cold lungs.

Before the King had claimed Lake Township, the criminal element in the area had seen to it that this house had been empty as often as possible. After they'd murdered a few of the Masters, the position had become permanently vacant. The force of men protecting the city had come under steady assault. The Council of Lake Township had realized they were under siege and gambled on the King next door, which was how the elves of Mirkwood had come to be here.

The red-wood house was airy, spacious, and full of light. It was not of the design of most large human habitations – not a Keep. That was to say they did not enter and find themselves in a huge hall. They stepped in a square wood foyer with scrolling stairs to each side. The space was full of bustle. Men and women cleaned and polished, they stacked and crated. A tall man called out orders and took inventory with a team of people making notes. This was the same person who made decisions where items were to be collected and, ultimately, stored.

The King stepped into firelight and the work inside stuttered and stopped under the weight of his unblinking silver gaze. The man holding the sheaf of papers turned and then fell silent. The King was still, radiant, with his slightly ovoid pupils slowly shrinking in firelight. His graceful hands, joined before him, moved up and outward marginally.

Lusis knew this gesture. "Please, return to your work. The Elfking has come to tour the house and view the paperwork here. He does not wish to delay you." She'd been briefed on the purpose of his visit by a highly uncomfortable young elf from beyond a screen, while she'd been napping in her bath. She remembered some of it.

No one moved.

Jan Kasia pulled a face. He took a few steps toward the workers and waved his hands at the crates. "Work on. What condition do we Men of Long Lake want the manor to be in as he takes possession of it?" Still there was no motion. No one looked away from the Elfking. Kasia's voice rose. "Come, you lot. The Elvenking is not sculpted of Mithril and gemstones, back to it!"

Lusis derided under her breath even as she touched his forelock of hair to place. "As if ores or gems could be as precious as this light." The King's chin dropped and he seemed to sneak a look at her off to his left. She missed the quick glance, seeing as she was involved in settling his fur cloak over the white fire inside of his silver long-coat.

But that last tactic prodded the workers to motion again. They headed down a passage wide enough for a cart to drive through. People stepped aside and sketched bows at the King. He carefully ignored them. As they toured the downstairs, a woman darted out of a room before him, carrying a hunk of graphite in a pan – her hands were black with polishing a massive fire grill. She froze, horrified, and was dragged out of the King's path by a matronly woman. This great-breasted woman stammered, "It, oh-my, it, my King, will look much, much better when we're done," she hesitated to watch his unreadable face, gave up, and bowed.

The King glanced from her at the sunny room beyond. "Tell me… what is that way?"

Her eyes bulged with surprise that he'd spoken to her. "Music room, great King."

The King's arms opened and he made his way on toward it with Ewon just beside him. Lusis thanked the woman and girl and noted, "I know how hard it is to clean such a contraption. It's likely to be renovated, should the King take this place." She glanced at the girl's red knuckles, and the angry colour around her fingernails, "The elves… they do these things differently."

While the girl looked relieved, Lusis remembered doing this work herself.

She followed along to the music room. Inside, it was spotted with sunlight. Chairs and benches lined the walls, but most of the space was open. Kasia thought a moment, back-tracked, and opened both of the double doors to the room. The elves inside the music room relaxed visibly. It was the first time, in this new place, any of them had seemed somewhat at ease.

The King circled a harpsichord on the rug with some curiosity. "It is suitable, Master of Boats, for the purpose I have in mind…. For the most part." He stopped beside a full-sized harp, reached a hand, and one-handed, plucked strings with quick and beautiful precision. Lusis felt her eyes open wide. She glanced at Ewon, beside her, and he was so pleased he looked at the floor. The King went on, "I should like an easel added into this room. Is there a library?"

"Second floor." Kasia noted distractedly – he was by no means immune to the ringing beauty the King's intricate fingertips made against harp strings. He stared as if transfixed, "Off the map-room."

"Good," said the King as he stepped away from the harp. "Show me."

He regretted that the elven tune had come to an end. Out in the halls, the workers hurried back to business, pretending they hadn't been standing still, just as spellbound. Lusis knew the feeling. There was nothing human about the way his fingers moved across strings. Their motion blurred and what emerged was a cloud of divine sound utterly unfamiliar to Man.

She nudged the King as Kasia led them toward the map-room, and winced a little. What was a gentle and friendly gesture among humans had no context to the King. She nodded tightly. "Forgive me. I forgot myself." She wondered if she was losing her sense.

His silver eyes, like the gaze of twin moons, glided away from her, and his lids drew halfway down over them. He looked grave. She wondered at that.

The Library and map room were separated by a very elven arch. There was no attempt at a barrier or door. The elves stopped inside the room and looked at it. Amathon turned away to huff with a suppressed laugh that gained him such a sharp look from Ewon that he turned to the King and bowed so low his hands pressed his knees.

The King made a gentle upward motion with his fingers, "Amathon. Explain."

He fell back into line. "It is just… I am glad." He ignored the sharp glance from Nimpeth and the curious one from young Telfeth. "So very glad that Men can make a passageway. It is… handsome. Handsome passageway." He patted the wood of it with one hand.

The Elfking swiftly looked at the floor and he glided across to the map-room with far too much dimple showing. Nimpeth shot a withering glance at her husband, but it couldn't quite conceal her amusement. It made sense to Lusis that the King would find his closest Elites agreeable, even in their humour. She clapped the wood of the passage as she stepped through it. "Nice."

Behind her, Nimpeth couldn't repress her chuckle.

So it was they filtered into an antique wooden jewel-box that was the map room. Kasia stood staring up at the King. The King's great silver eyes coasted along the shelves and tapestries, across the wood maps, and the paper and vellum on the tables. He stepped up to one wooden production mounted on a stand, and his fingertips touched a very inexact map of Mirkwood. His head tipped, lovingly. Kasia saw this and straightened, pleased. His relationship to the King was unorthodox – Men having no experience with being subject to elves, and having less skill living with them than even Lusis had. Kasia didn't like to bow to a King. Except he was truly coming to admire one.

"When we came down the river after losing the barges," Kasia said quietly. "We weren't sure where to find you. We knew there had been a bridge across the river once, now gone. If it hadn't been for the great stone doors one of the women spotted... we would have passed your Halls."

His brows rose. "I know." His fingertips traced the river out as far as the Greylin, and across from there he found Tatharion house. Now his hand glided upward to Buckmaster Spur. "Our new guests," his hand raced along Ered Mithrim, "are from the borderlands of Angmar. Some of the toughest Men in the North, the Men of the Peaks."

"Did you know them?" Lusis asked curiously.

His head tipped sidewise so as to take her in with those great silver eyes. "Long ago, when I was little more than a grown child, I knew elf-blooded men who stood along that border."

"I have a hard time picturing you as a child," Lusis smothered a grin.

"Clearly you haven't been in the Hall of Figures," his brows rose in surrender.

She smiled at the map and told him, "I will be. You can be sure of that."

His fingertips drummed the wood map for an instant. Then his long hand pressed down over the Mirkwood. He murmured a few soft words in Elvish before he turned to the table covered in all manner of papers and renderings of atlases. But Lusis spared a glance over the forest and, for an instant, she saw a tracery, like lace across the surface of the pine. It was like drawings of constellations across the woodlands. The effect faded at once.

She turned to the mound of paper and vellum that distracted the King and saw that there was a large map of the city. It had onion-skin thin paper over the top, and layers of graphite drawings. The sum was that the whole affair recorded the changes of the past year. It was a plan. And all of it was expertly, painstakingly recorded.

Ewon came forward and laid a carefully folded sheaf of papers on the table. Lusis recognized these at once. She'd been involved in drawing them up.

The Elfking tapped the thick paper of a map. "I see this is recent." He approved.

"Some of the watercolour maps hung around were wet yesterday," Kasia told him. "This large one is most complete. The cartographer updates it over there," he directed the King's attention to an angled table with clamps at the corners, "and laid out here for inspection. Likewise, the wet paintings are dried on lines overnight."

The King gave a nod and gestured at the papers that Lusis knew she had helped to collect.

"What is that?" Kasia asked curiously.

"A list, Master of Boats. These are your missing people," Lusis lifted up the small stack and opened it out. She laid out nine drawings, but most of the paper was given over to her handwriting in Westron – a list of names. "Some of these are pictures of the missing. But it took me, or my troop, time to gather a list from communities around the lake. Well… those that didn't shutter their shacks on sight of us. Or hide. Or attack us." She'd been working on the margins of, and among the communities of criminals springing up like weeds in the acreage around here.

Kasia's eyes narrowed. "If these are criminals, then they're hardly reliable. They may have slain one another over gambling. Who knows?"

"Argus Samas knows," the King was studying the city map closely. His downy deep voice was unfocused, "He has been collecting and keeping crime numbers. It is a natural habit of keepers of order, enforcers of laws, and leaders. Your Master of Forces, Gurn Drivenn, has been preserving these records since his arrival. Directly or indirectly, numbers tell us where problems lie."

"There are too many," Lusis had been scanning the paperwork that Argus kept in the Forces' records. "I mean… I'm not sure, but it looks as if-"

The King turned the pages on the table toward himself and glanced over them quickly. His silver gaze found her. "Yes, there are too many missing. Reports are up 9 percent."

She cocked her head at the numbers. "Okay. And that's significant?"

"Yes, against our sample," the King's distracted voice was back. "Do they not teach you calculations in the mountains, Lusis Buckmaster?"

"I've been cutting the heads off orcs. I'm a bit rusty with arithmetic." She told him.

He glanced up at her and gave a little puff of amusement. "I slew six dragons."

"Fine," she crossed her arms on her ribs, "I'll brush up. What are the numbers telling you, oh busy-head?"

He stared at her a moment and as he looked down at the map again, his eyelids gave a brief flicker. So strange to see him blink. "The criminal element does not report missing persons to the Forces. In turn, it is difficult for even your troop of Rangers to prize this information from them."

"You need to talk to their women and children, if they have any." Lusis noted. "They will talk."

Kasia's brows drew down. "They have families?"

He was roundly ignored by the Elfking, so Lusis followed suit. But, in her experience, spouses and children of a lawbreaker could possess the same love as could be seen in any law-abiding family. They mistrusted the Forces more, but Rangers had a sketchy reputation and she'd appealed to them in a way the badge carriers did not. Many would have done anything in their power for the chance of finding their loved ones again.

Now the King exhaled. "This would argue many more may be missing than have been reported."

"Orc food," Ewon made a soft hiss. "Fodder for wolves, my King." It was on all of their minds.

"That is a sad fate." The King said quietly. He nipped his lip, which was something he only did when so deep in thought that he'd begun to forget himself in favour of information, details, and data.

The wind outside picked up, and the fire behind the grate in the corner made a gruff gust that stirred Kasia from this rather depressing line of reasoning. "Elf… Elfking, is this map-room to your liking? Shall we leave it as it is?"

"Do not touch a thing." The King murmured, and, for the first time, audible in his voice was an effect she'd only noticed among the Western Elves of the Council – there, under his words, was a soft, deep purr not unlike the wingbeats of a moth on glass, or against the cup of one's hands. It reminded her of how it was often possible to hear sparks snap under Osp's voice. She hoped the big Western elf was all right.

They toured the remainder of the wooden dwelling and stepped out onto the highest balcony at the back. The King shone as a crystal might, under the slow sugaring of snow. Ewon bounced up to the railing with an arrow knocked and made himself unobtrusive, or tried. Nimpeth echoed his position, but more out of sight, through the slatted wood of the balcony, which, notably, disguised its arrow loops as decoration. Admirable.

Lusis looked at her King, "Are you going to take it?"

His head turned a fraction, so that his silver eye could fix on her. "What do you think of it?"

"Beautiful. Spacious." She thought for a moment longer and frowned. "I would prefer stone for you. More defensible. Less susceptible to arson."

A dimple flickered beside his mouth. "I see we think alike. But… it is not my intention to remain here. I am… content closer to the tree – the Silver Beech."

"Yes," she exhaled. "The closest structure is still Kasia's. It will remain so unless they break earth in the Flowers of the Forest – the field-"

"I would not hear of it." The King said. "Kasia will have to suffer me, yet." The Master of Boats was somewhere behind him in the upstairs salon, where he spoke to a member of the staff. It was a beautiful room, replete with masterful Third Age paintings and illustrated manuscripts under the most amazingly clear glass.

Lusis stepped closer, used to obfuscation when it came to her King. "Why are you here?"

"I am here for you and yours." He told her quietly. "I am here according to plan."

She didn't follow this.

He turned to her, snowflakes slowly arching around him, and his exhalation causing silvery puffs in air to remind all that he was yet of flesh and breath. His angled eyes narrowed. "If you wish to contest the stewardship of Buckmaster Spur, Istari, best do it from a position of strength. We will declare this Buckmaster Hall on Long Lake, and let it be known. Let those who would adhere to you send word, and those who cannot survive Kirstman Buckmaster's harassment seek refuge here. There are elves aplenty in this land – though they go unseen. But elves are not Men. We are loath to interfere in the business of Mankind. You see, at heart, we poorly understand our cousins. That means this embattled Northern town, which stands before the lesion of the Lonely Mountain and must endure the bleeding of it, can but benefit from an influx of Rangers."

"You're going to give this place… to me?"

"Yes, you, and into the care of your brothers, that they may work on our behalves and build a safer Lake Township," he turned to her fully, like the face of the moon after eclipse. But he sounded more mourning dove than moth wings now. "And that you may have a residence, Istari… in this place you have called home."

She stared at him, wordlessly. Of course, inside there was a tidal bore of things to say warring at the base of her throat. But outwardly, where it counted, she was mute.

The King turned and went inside. He made his way to Kasia to speak with him, and left Lusis staring at the slow flit of snow. Ewon looked at her as he glided down to the deck again, and then he followed his King. Nimpeth didn't budge, and was soon joined, on Ewon's side, by Telfeth.

"He means to give me this." She said.

Telfeth wasn't sure what to do. She risked a glance at Nimpeth whose eyes narrowed – nothing said 'Don't do it' like the narrowing of elven eyes, Lusis had found.

It was Nimpeth who eventually answered. "My Lady, you have to trust to the plans of the King."

Lusis exhaled and saw her way through the logic. If Elsenord took over this place in the name of the Buckmasters, then resistance would have a 'home-base'. This was an advantage to anyone doing as she'd done – flying Buckmaster Spur, and Kirstman's obnoxious attitudes. But it also gave the King a stalking horse. This growing city of Men was more easily found than the Halls. Pains had been taken to hide that place: the great bridge had been removed; the huge doors were hard to spot from the river until one was upon them, and the span could be hidden by stands of trees, overnight. The elves were clever and cryptic when they needed to be. And Kirstman couldn't come down the Forest River in secret to begin with. He could charge along the top of the Mirkwood, turn right at the gap between the forest and the plain of Erebor, and ride down on Lake Township. But they'd be seen for miles. The better plan was to circle the Lonely Mountain and go past the dragon-cursed ruins of Esragoth. The rolling land there would offer a means of quiet attack.

Not that it wasn't madness that she was thinking about this. About infighting among her people. But she'd had a taste of Kirstman's gist of rule, and it had left her with bad premonitions.

And, of course, this little citadel was on the side of town one would encounter first, plus there was room in the front and on the flanks for the bivouac of many troops. There was a thin screen of housing between here and the long arch of open farmland at the top of the lake. She wondered if a wall could be built to hold the vulnerable croplands – one that could be patrolled by Men.

The King returned to her side. He looked out into the snow with a silvery sigh.

"Are you all right, my King?"

"Nothing I do pleases the Istari. It is ever a joust for her company." He breathed.

"Nonsense. I've told you before that I love your people." She frowned at him.

Then he gave a soft hmm. "You will love them enough when you say 'our' instead of 'your'."

This shocked Lusis. She looked across at Nimpeth, and then at Telfeth, to the left. They were so powerful. She hadn't noticed her own tendency to think of their welfare as something other than her problem. They weren't her responsibility. She saw Telfeth sneak a hopeful glance in her direction. Silence fell over her – a hush of snow. But if the King was to depart the shores, if he was to be forced to the West and made an example, who would protect the tender Kings of Mirkwood?

She felt a stinging in her throat. "You don't mean for me to go with you. West."

There was a long silence during which the King turned his head enough to watch her face. "I do not mean to go, myself, Lusis-sell, but if I must… I would suffer any death before I would see my sons stranded in this cold and changeable world… undefended." He stepped in and leaned over her. His pale warmth pressed to her hair. His voice was a whisper on the edge of her half-shut eye. "Lend them your power, great one. I have given all I can. These Silvan hearts of mine… I will make them yours."

Pine-needles and lightheadedness. Lusis shut her eyes and thought she told his mind I will not let them take you. But he gave no sign of hearing as much as he straightened away from her. She caught her breath and balance against the railing, and decided she was glad the moment had passed with him unaware of that lapse in her personal resolve – that she loved him.

No. He was quite distracted. His white-blond head tilted and he turned the direction of the angle. "Master of Boats," his deep voice passed between the conversing staff and Kasia like a furred animal, "What is that place downhill and near the edge of town? That cluster of tall red houses on the edge of the Lake?"

"That…" Kasia stepped up to the doorway. "Oh, you would have no interest in that, Elfking."

Thranduil's teeth flashed, "I have already asked." He said sharply, but quickly harnessed his temper as he looked down at the man beside him.

"That you have," Kasia rubbed his stubble with one hand. "So you have. But don't say I didn't warn you, Elfking. That – that red castle there – is the abode of Nema Aragennya. Nema, the Madam. That is her home and place of business… and no place for an elf."

"I see her," he turned back in the direction of the towering red buildings.

Kasia laughed at this and then sobered quickly, "You what?"

"I see her pacing along the windows… on the uppermost floor." He turned to Kasia. "In a state of agitation. What has befallen your fellow Council member?"

"No idea," Kasia rolled his shoulders. "I'm sure it's not important."

The King released a soft hiss of breath as he made his way back through the salon in the upstairs, tall, beautiful, and vexed. The staff shot out of his path and he sliced through all confusion like an axe through balsa.

His long body was so very tall that archways were being reworked. He passed through them on the way down to the ground floor. Lusis grinned and broke into a lope behind him. "Uh, pardon me for saying, Elvenking, but you shouldn't run in there without Kasia and myself. You probably shouldn't go into that place at all." She wished she had her Ranger troop with her.

Ewon tossed his fleet body over the staircase and landed with birdlike ease. "My King. We should attend the Yellow Istari."

The King pressed words out between his gritted teeth, his fire flaring. "She is with me, is she not?" He drew Lyglim and the silvery blade fluttered through air with an expert hand. At his advanced age, he did not like to be treated as if there were elements to the natural congress of beings that might utterly overwhelm him. He rested the blade along his back.

Kasia hurried down the stairs, stumbled, and was kept from a headlong fall by Amathon's quick catch. The big Elite's brows rose. "Oh, we do not doubt you, Master of Boats. No need to fall upon his sword." He almost smiled before he darted over the railing and landed, easily, in the downstairs. His wife met him outside, having leapt from the balcony with Telfeth behind her.

The bull-elk trotted along the path of the King and he caught hold of the ruff of the creature and was aloft in one mercurial motion. He rode with graceful side-saddle ease, and the deer swung around the house in an arc before the King turned him downhill. Only the elves could keep up with him. Lusis sighed and told Kasia. "If they don't hurry, we'll have to run."

The Master of Boats grumbled, "The man is exhausting." He gestured to where the stable boys rushed along with horses and turned his handsome face her way. "Does the elf understand what the flesh trade is about? Or does he think Nema runs a guild of butchers?"

Lusis stepped up into the white horse's saddle and guided Glorfindel's tall mare forward. She spared only a glance for Kasia. "She does."

"What?" Kasia asked as he mounted.

"She does run a guild of butchers." Lusis told him as she nudged the elf-horse into a canter. "None of you ask her what it is she's butchering."

He laughed at this, "Oh, come now. Why would she ever rise to Madam feeling that way?"

But Lusis knew. She, too, had been exposed to life-altering violence as a child. She'd spoken to prostitutes before. Nema had been abandoned on the bloody block of her trade the same as the rest of those children, and had survived as split parts of a woman. A living marketplace. All those parts left had been forced to believe in fate, to believe in, and accept, the normalcy of misery. The routine of it. And now she must have believed she was, at least, better than the alternative. But he couldn't know this. Kasia didn't think of the people inside of those houses as anything other than people fulfilling a function. It never passed his mind that families were sending their children to Nema, and that their lives would forever be imprinted by the casual abuses of their new existence.

"Faster, pretty girl," she told the mare's flickering ears. "Hurry to the Elfking." She knew none of this complexity would escape him. She didn't want him to be hurt.

The bull-elk stood chewing on lichens at the base of a tree. It shook off snow as Lusis' white horse pulled into a wide, round cobbled yard. She dismounted and handed her horse over to a tall and powerful man. He wore red livery and nodded in greeting. "Welcome to the Leisure Houses, Miss. If your business here is joining the Flower World, the Sorrow Trade, we can take you around the back."

"Fires no."

"I didn't think so, so clean, and with a horse like this." He told her and glanced aside at the elves gathering in the yard. "Are… those the elves of Long Lake, Miss?"

"Yes," she nodded at him.

He sucked a deep breath, "They are beautiful."

"Yes," she felt her lips compress.

Other huge men, also in livery, gathered around and appeared astonished. One of the older men managed the words, "Miss, is that him?" He made a small gesture at the vision in silver, tall, gleaming, tendrils of sheer white-blond hair flagging in the breeze. "He… must be. Who else?"

"Yes," she replied, "That is him. And he is – they are – unspoiled. Please help me take them into the house by a route that won't expose them," she looked away and struggled for words, "to the things we do."

The eldest of the men pushed a hand through his greying hair at the doors exhaling mist, "You would protect them."

"Yes."

"I was born in there, you know." He said heavily. His voice sounded tired and grey. "I worked in there. There… is our world and our survival. And a fire that turns souls to ashes. And you would protect the elves?" He glared at her.

"I know it is unfair," she looked him in the eye. "But the King is well capable of shutting this place and locking up every soul involved, within an hour. He is a King, and he will neither care what happens to the city because of this action, nor hesitate. He will not pity. Believe me in this. His power is absolute. The influence to improve conditions in this place will be granted Nema only if the King doesn't come to fully understand what it does."

They glanced at one another and at the house, their only world. They employed a small town of workers, this street of Leisure Houses. "We shall see to it, Miss. Give us a few minutes." Then two of the men hurried to a side entrance.

One of the younger guards at the front of the red house broke the silence. "Do you mean it?"

"Do I mean?" Lusis waited.

"That conditions will improve for us, now that he-" the young man inclined his head at the magical being that was the King even here, "-he has come?"

She gave a short laugh, shocked that it had been such a long time since she'd allowed herself to laugh at all – an unforeseen side-effect of living among the elves. Then she told him, "One can never underestimate an elf's longing for peace, serenity, and order."

She checked.

The Elfking stood with Ewon speaking to him. The Elite seemed to have some premonition of what the Leisure Houses were for, but then, he was a vastly different class of elf than his King. Ewon stole a look at Lusis and his eyes widened emphatically for a moment: Fix this. She actually heard this in her skull. She glanced at Amathon and Nimpeth. They wordlessly faced the comings and goings of Men in and out of the front door. Their beautiful faces were as still as their motionless bodies, but their long, cruel blades were at ready.

Young Telfeth stood behind her with both her fighting knives out, and her fox-face taciturn.

The King glanced aside to Kasia and was, quite honestly, a pitiless pillar of light in the yard of the red house. Lusis exhaled slowly and watched the side-door. It opened and the older man stepped outside and bowed to her.

She turned and said, "We're ready, Elfking."

The young men followed in the King's wake as if pulled along by the static of him. He spoke in elvish to Ewon until the point where he arrived at the staircase flanking the house. There the greying man opened both doors and stepped aside for his passage. Sweet-scented air flooded out, along with trickles of laughter and the sounds of singing and the Elfking paused.

Kasia went up into this without hesitation, but the King's head tipped back and he glanced across the side of the red house, and into its cream interior. The grey man bowed low. "Wel… welcome, King." He stammered.

Inside, Jan Kasia awaited the King.

"Abide and do not fear me," the Elfking said as he glided up the stairs and passed the man by. His wake cut through the syrupiness with a waft of healthy woodlands and tall trees.

Kasia led him.

This way and that went the staff carrying food and wine to the front.

The smell of meat cooking made Telfeth hiss through her teeth. Elves almost always found that smell somewhat objectionable.

The pale hall before them was broad. Members of the staff flattened to the walls and sideboards, with eyes wide open in disbelief.

Kasia was grinning as he glanced from the staircase. "This way, Elfking."

A girl on the back stairs dropped to her knees and bent her head in the landing as he passed her by, an action he was keenly aware of, in the most indifferent of appearances. In the upper hallway, the wintery sunlight came through a pair of windows set side-by-side and recessed in the wall. Along a polished wood floor covered in fur rugs, Nema appeared.

She was fetching in pale yellow, her too-thin waist shockingly narrow as she turned to ease the door shut. Her eyes were ruddy with tears shed, Lusis suspected, earlier. The King stopped as he came off the stair and rounded the post. "Greetings to you, Nema of the Council of Lake Township."

"My King," she said throatily. "You… you have come to visit me. To visit me here." This seemed to move her so deeply that it became necessary for her to steady her breathing. "Hello, my King, you are radiant today."

He took a slow step forward. "I have toured many businesses in my new land, and almost everything in the Council circle, in particular… except for this place."

"Well, I will gladly take you around the house," she clasped a hand at the Mithril tear on her cleavage. "But… we are in no condition to receive a King today. Let us, at least, show you our best face."

His head tipped, inquisitively, "My heart hears such a furor from these walls – merrymaking and despair. Tell me, is there such a face, Nema?"

She smiled at him, brilliantly, through tears. "Oh, my King, there is such joy in your arrival. It, alone should wash away all despair."

He assured her, "It does not." Now the Elfking took another step, and he stopped in a shaft of wintery sunlight that lit him up. "Why do you weep?"

It was easy to forget that the King could sound gentle. Lusis stepped closer to him, drawn there by the aura of his mildness. He didn't consider the Council friends of his, she knew. The King, in fact, had very few friends. But he needed their steadiness and wellbeing on his behalf, particularly when planning things that might shift the landscape of Lake Township under Men's feet.

He'd come to attend to that.

"My King," she wrung her hands and walked almost into him. "I… there are things I would say to you, if you would hear them." Her dark eyes looked up into his silver. She turned and led the way through the door at the end of the hall.

None of the elves liked it. Lusis suddenly understood why. They hadn't been able to look in and assure themselves of his safety. There was no good vantage with a single door that was shut. She stepped before him and followed Nema, a throwing knife from her hip in hand.

But the inside was a mundane sitting room. It faced the Master's house far up on the hill. It was soft red and cream, and thick with furnishings. A harp and pedestal stood, neglected, the King went to it almost by force of habit. His fingers stroked the strings gently, and the sound that touch produced was as delicate as morning dew on cobwebs.

A girl looked up, sharply, from a scroll-fronted, wooden writing desk in the corner of the room. She was young, pale, wore her hair in long black loops, and stared at him from dark brown eyes. Lusis froze, caught in the sudden wondering of whether this young woman could be Nema's daughter.

Nema paid the girl no mind. She stood in between her fainting couch and the larger couch she kept for company, and smiled at him with muted care. She had been practicing. "My King, please make yourself at home here. Please be comfortable." She gestured at the couch.

"He is. When given a choice, elves will either move about or stand," Lusis told the Madam.

Nema's glance in her direction wasn't mild and pleasant, wasn't a matter of rehearsal, it was cutting and resentful. She smoothed this quickly, "I see you've brought your vassal with you, great one."

"One should speak more leniently of the Master of Boats," the King misunderstood, even though Lusis did not. "He is your equal, and you are his." He plucked a harp string with one fingertip and somehow slowed the vibration along the back of his curled fingers.

'Vassal' Kasia shot a disbelieving glance at Lusis. He was unable to accept that the Elfking couldn't see the bitter jealousy Nema felt, and so he chuckled and shook his bowed head. And perhaps the King did see. But he did not draw attention to the discord.

He turned from the white harp with a sigh.

"Do… you like it?" Nema's soft smile was genuine now, and it was possible to see how she must have looked as a girl in her eyes. "I play a little, but, if you like this harp, or any other thing in my power to grant, I would happily give it to you."

"It is sadly out of tune," the King's head turned slowly to the harp.

"Do you play?"

"Not since childhood," he told her, or the harp. It was unclear.

She hadn't known that, and Lusis couldn't help smiling at him, though she said nothing for fear Nema would suffer another outburst.

"What has driven you to distraction?" the King faced her again. "You are not common among the Council members of late. Are we in some discord that, being edhellen, I do not appreciate?"

"No-no," Nema's perfumed hand fluttered up to her cleavage again. "We could not be. I couldn't feel such things where you are concerned."

Lusis actually felt herself do the quick wing-beat of eyelashes so uncommon of the elves, but its impetus had no relationship to anything that would cause such a reaction in an elf, something she could discern from the fact all the Silvan in the room glanced at her. They were lost, but used to it. For Lusis' part, she pressed her lips together and waited for the surge of testiness to pass.

"I'm not angry with you," Nema walked up to the King and stared up at his impassive silver eyes, "That is impossible for me."

The King didn't stir. "I need you… to be steady." He said unequivocally. "Return to my company. Do not avoid these meetings of Council. Let us have at whatever troubles you now."

She looked down at the broadness of his chest and sighed softly. "You are changing this town, my beloved King. There are those who told me that elves did not possess the power to create change. They are old, timeless beings, these people assured me. They are about tradition alone."

"In some things it is so," he told her quietly. "But, no. Elves are catalysts of great change. Or I have ever been."

"I know. I have read the histories and looked for you in everything," she said softly. "And there you are. Named and unnamed. Again and again. Eternal." She reached up a hand and set it on the soft, smooth fabric over the King's heart. She rubbed there gently, like his solidity was the neck of a horse. His silver eyelids sank.

Lusis felt her chin flick to the left, but stopped herself from looking to Ewon. If the King allowed it, why should she impel the Elites to-.

The soft ring of metal came from Nimpeth drawing her fighting knife. "Baw, Nema-dis."

Across the room, the girl at the desk stood up and exclaimed, "What are you doing?"

It was as if the Elfking woke, suddenly. He glided back and glanced around him before he made a lenient gesture at the weapons in the room. "Peace." The ruffling among the elves died away, but not before Nimpeth made a casual glance in Lusis' direction with her lovely brows lifted high. Lusis looked at the patterning in the rug a moment.

The King shut his pale eyes, pressed, as he was, against his limits in toleration. Her human peculiarity pushed at him. When his silver gaze came back into the world, he told her, "I must depend upon you, on your equilibrium in this place. It is what I need most of you. Can you give me that much?"

"I will," she told him. "That and more, if you'd allow. But, for now, I must say to you… the rate of change of which a King is capable may be too much for the forbearance of Men."

"How can that be possible?" the King asked her quietly. "You are here and gone in an instant."

"But the institutions do not change as quickly. Perhaps with elves the constancy is your eternal nature," she suggested, "but for us, it must be in the world."

The King joined his hands. His eyelashes flickered. "What have I done?"

She inhaled. "Nothing intentional, my King… but did you know that I cannot read? Very few in this house can – it is not a luxury of the poor."

His eyes widened a fraction.

"It is true." She told him and motioned to the girl with looping black hair. She had collapsed back into the seat by the writing desk. "It is why I rely upon young women like Eboa here. She is my secretary, rather than one of the common youths working in the downstairs."

The King glanced in the young woman's direction and she bowed to him.

"But it is not possible to lead them, my King, if I maintain such a disadvantage, and so… shall we be left behind in this revolution? The topic is not one that the Master of Forces, or the Master of Textiles find palatable to debate upon. And no one has been sent to speak to my children about an education."

Jan Kasia's head cocked, and it was clear that he'd never considered it needful. "Why would a prostitute have to know how to read?"

Nema's expression hardened in an instant. She spoke to him coldly. "Because we are not livestock. Because we grow old. Because we are also alive."

The starkness of the words so impacted the heart of the King that he was forced to pull deep breaths in order to remain steady. He looked at the woman, for the first time that Lusis could remember, with full compassion. "Yes…. Your staff may learn to read, and you shall be among them. It is a matter of birthright – child of Eru. If you and yours have been overlooked, Councilwoman, I assure you that is not by my intent, but rather, by the careless execution of others."

Tears beaded in her black lashes. "I thought this was another boon not meant for us. Another blessing… whose light would never reach down… into the low people and places…." She bent her head.

The King remained cold. "Nema Aragennya, these barriers shall be removed."

She wordlessly nodded, not looking up. Tears and weeping disturbed elves and she cared for him. Nema was often sharp and hard, like obsidian. But she had always loved the virtue of the King.

"But stand with me in this place, as you have sworn to me you would." he instructed her quietly. This did not return her to reason as he had hoped, but her effort to shield him was real. In fact, there was something in it that reminded him of a young elf, for the King's head tipped right and his voice mollified, "Child, do not anguish."

She set her hand on his arm and no one stopped her this time.

Lusis backed away a few steps and left the room.

Telfeth had gone to the landing. Nema's emotion was too much for her. She saw Lusis and continued on to the floor downstairs. She passed through the hall like a wisp of light. Lusis' eyes widened. "Telfeth, wait!" She hurried, and nearly chased the elf girl.

She found the young elf woman standing outside in sluggish snowfall. She stood at the corner of the house, breathing evenly, eyes shuttered as she composed herself. A man passed her by from the front of the house and clapped his hand against her hip. She stepped out, sank down to interrupt his stride, rose to take his weight, and straightened to throw him out on his back in the snow. It happened so quickly that he blinked in shocked dismay.

Likewise, Telfeth backed away and drew a fighting knife that glinted in the autumn sun.

The man's friends made wide berth around her, and scooped up their burden. They dragged him away, so that the man's heels left drills in the snow.

It was over in an instant. Lusis stepped up beside the young elf whose life she'd once saved, and the elf girl put her sword away and looked at the snow on the cobbles before her. She tried to be… uneventful, which was how misbehaving elves often acted, if spirited Legolas had been any kind of example. By all accounts – by even the Elfking's account to her – the Silvan elf, Telfeth, was an especially gifted warrior.

But now it seemed that she had a refreshingly human way of dealing with her emotions. "Feel better?" Lusis asked brightly.

After a moment, Telfeth admitted, "Yes."

Pity she couldn't take this one back to her troop with her. Lusis peeked across at the deadly and beautiful elf-girl. Aric might kiss her feet.

Telfeth would not stray from her. Elite Nimpeth was usually just out of sight. Lusis went with the King to fulfil his obligations to the life and economy of Lake Township.

She was less guardian, she began to see, than guarded. In the company of the Elfking, the figure most safeguarded by elven Elites, she was secure. Being along with him for the stuff of ruling was odd. He did the business of monarchy without her – she had only the narrowest view into this world. Perhaps he was readying her for eventual coup at Buckmaster Keep. She might be called on to run the Spur. But this sort of rule… it didn't suit her. However, she was in good company. It didn't really suit him, either, at least not insofar as ruling in a world of Men was concerned.

The Master of Forces poured himself a cup of cider and exhaled. "Elves have such odd notions," he smiled at the goblet he topped off and leaned back in his chair to consider the King. "The matter with Nema Aragennya, for example. Why would you think I had anything to do with her curtailing her visits to Lake Township Council?"

"She mentioned you." The Elfking said. "I would like this to be settled. She knows the common people better than most."

"Being one of them," Gurn's brows rose. "And very common herself."

"I need her with us."

"My Lord, there is a growing guild of laborers in town. You should seek a Council member from among them. I know a good man for the job. Quite seriously," He glanced across at Lusis, "You do not want to be known as an associate of that woman's. She is very low."

Lusis blinked at this. Aragennya and her kind were reviled, and the trade was always booming. It was one of the things she found most confounding about the world of Men from which she hailed.

"When the time comes Kasia shall surely entertain a member from the Guild of Laborers. Nema Aragennya holds the part of Lake Township closest to the rolling foothills of Erebor. I am assured that she is the only human power the Men there respect, for many miles. They do not fear the Council. They know and obey me only through her command. I caution you that that stretch in which she holds sway is a notorious bed of disruption to the rest of the population during times of strife." The King's head tilted a fraction in annoyance.

He didn't understand wealth distribution in this city terribly well, though a chart had been drawn up in Council. Or perhaps it was more appropriate to say he didn't understand the reason why certain parts of a human city were more impoverished than others, but he'd made an immediate tie between hardship and a lack of satisfaction with Lake Township. It was that dynamic he sought to influence. He believed that losing Nema from Council would be more than counterproductive to his goals, but that it could spell disaster and dissidence among one of the largest stretches of the Township.

"I will need you to bend in amity and build peace with her." The King directed. "Begin today."

Drivenn made a little moue of amusement and rearranged items on his desk. His voice was patient, "To your second and more important concern. I agree, it does matter. If the criminal element would vanish, and leave us to policing those who deserve protection, that would be excellent."

The King was still in shafts of sunlight, white as a star. Lusis stood on the side of the room, between windows, where she could get between the King and Drivenn if needed. So far, the conversation was touch-and-go.

"They are going somewhere in numbers."

"Are we to look a gift horse in the mouth?"

The King, by now, knew this human saying. He replied. "Once it is your horse, yes. One must know one's means and management. In survival, ignorance is peril. Information is fortification." His long hands folded, one on top of the other, before him, gracefully. "If they go North-"

"Elfking, we don't fuss about with North. That way is Erebor, the cursed-mountain."

"The mountain of the Sounding Forge."

Drivenn's forehead wrinkled, "Whatever that may mean. All I know is that its gates are now peopled with Dwarves from the Iron Hills."

"The mountain is vast and deep. Some small contingent of dwarves could not know all its chambers." Said the Elfking.

"Pity the elves washed their hands of it then," Gurn huffed a laugh. "They cannot set foot inside without fomenting war." He looked up. "The dwarves hate you. Not even just elves. You, specifically. They call you Woodland Sprite and… other things."

"And I do not care," the King said lightly. "Your Forces can venture inside. You are Men. Men are not barred entry."

"I advised the Council that Lake Township sign the non-interference treaty brought forth by the dwarves. They see us as your people, and want nothing of you or your ways. We must start negotiations to go inside – standard processes. It should take only seven or fourteen days."

The King's head swiveled down and left. "Did you advise them to sign such a thing?"

"For the friendship of the dwarves. They are powerful. I wouldn't want them coming into the Township with their displeasure."

The Elfking bared his teeth, but said only, "You are a Captain of Forces, not a maker of policy. That is the province of your King. Do you understand?"

"You weren't here," he sketched an incline of his head.

"Never again be so presumptuous." The Elfking's hands slid to close behind his back, "It will take negotiations to undo what you have done."

"I'm sorry, Elfking," Drivenn's brows went up. "For this trouble." He lifted his cup and sipped the cider inside, unconcerned. Lusis glanced up from him at his guards by the doorway. Very soon, she was going to take offence. She wondered how Drivenn's men could endure Ewon's glittering stare.

The Elfking ignored this. "I can think of certain reasons for the disappearance of those criminal men. Can you?" He paused and added, "I am interested in your explanation."

The man rubbed his face and grinned. "The Forces have been doing raids on their hovels in earnest." He opened his knitted fingers. "Really, Elfking, I've spoken to one of your adjuncts about security in the region. Why are you here? Is it the horsemen in the Flowers of the Forest? Can so few men stir a King?"

Lusis made a guffaw, "These are Men of the Peaks. Ten men wouldn't take one of them. There are twenty of them. It's a force-" She pulled herself under wraps and glanced across at the waiting King.

"Are you unconcerned about these newcomers, Gurn Drivenn?" the Elvenking asked sedately.

Drivenn pulled a small bowl of walnuts across his desk. That they hailed from Mirkwood, was easily spotted, in their generous golden shells and the mild, pale nutmeat they produced. He cracked one in his powerful hands.

The King's expression grew glassine – absolutely congenial. He looked so beautiful in the sun, and no-less-so because the shadows of winter chickadees cascaded around him through the windows. The weather was changeable this late into autumn. But the silence drew out. The guards cringed. One answered a King.

Beyond them, Kasia stared into the room from the promenade of deer heads on placards. He put a hand over his mouth and turned to pace the rug there, uncertain what was happening to his Council, of a sudden.

"Ah," the man nodded at the bowl of nuts. "I see. I see."

Lusis was betting he didn't see.

Drivenn's voice was rueful. "The elves are truly few now," he paused to crunch the nut in his teeth and said, "but we are keeping an eye on them, Elfking. My men are afoot, everywhere. There are more than five thousand in the Lake Township area now... a supplement to your own elf men, who number...?"

The King didn't bite.

"Whose numbers are perennially uncounted to Man," finished the Master of Forces. "But know that you are being protected by the Lake Township Forces."

"That is gratifying," the King told him. "But you have collected numbers on the missing, I am told, and yet this has never caused you to question-"

Another nut shattered in his fist. "Bah. It's late in the year. Why are you pursuing this? You are a great elf, and golden… a sight to behold. You should not worry yourself over such things."

"As my land and my people?"

"These are Men and not elves."

"They are mine."

"They cannot help but be," the Master of Forces gestured. "Look at you. Fully half the citizenry would believe it if I told them you floated off the earth to light the sky at night, and the other half would double-check." The big man sighed. "Elves are good and beautiful creatures. And ethereal. Ah, if you could but see the Queen in Gondor, you would understand why I say this."

"I know the child." The King noted.

He chortled, "Oh, child… I see. Well, she is not a thing of this earth, she is so lovely. But she will not endure. She will raise what half-Men she gets, and go to the West when the King is done. You see, she is stranded. She has come to know this. She is hung up, a jewel of a ladybird pinned in a box – a star on display in white halls. Do you know… she wears that lovely doll-like face of yours," the man indicated the King, "because Men are not like elves, you understand. She loves the King and is utterly alone."

For a moment, Lusis could see the extraordinary beauty of a young elf girl with blowing dark hair. Then her tresses were gathered in and bound up by a golden net, in unfamiliar human style, and instead of elven layers of film, she wore furs and thick human brocade. In the times between her husband's comings and goings, she longed for the sound of elves, for singing, the sound of a heartbeat like her own, and her father's laugh. She missed him like a nut missed its tree, its earth. Her dark blue eyes became dazed and uninhabited. Lusis was stricken because of the sentiment. She looked, suddenly, up at the King.

Whose silver stare beheld her and his lips parted enough to sigh a breath, "Undomiel. Arwen. Elrond's only daughter."

Their gazes held. Lusis wasn't sure what they were resolving to do.

Gurn Drivenn opened his hands. "She is the perfect example. She, all elves, have concerns elsewhere, and belong on other shores. To hold her here, even for love, is cruel captivity. Sadly, the great King of Gondor thought only of his future, his love. Why should we interfere with your business? Likewise," and he tapped the desk with his index finger, "this is the Age of Men. Why should you worry about these lands? You must step aside and allow us to do the work of our Age. You must prepare to leave, like the rest."

Lusis couldn't have hoped to stop the King. He was far too fast.

To her eyes, it was like great energy had shot the Master of Forces straight out of his seat and across the desk so lightly that the cup of cider and shells of nuts were never disturbed. The guards moved for him, and Lusis pulled out her sword and ran at them. She caught one across the knee with her heel, and threw him down in the corner. This was kinder than Nimpeth's overhand throw of the other man down the hallway of stuffed deer heads. Kasia dodged the flying Forces guard with a bleat of dismay. The man landed in a sprawl on the rug.

More came running, but it hardly mattered. The Elfking had already passed the threshold, dragging Gurn Drivenn with him. He tossed the man out into the lawn as if he was no more than a snowball. It took no effort.

"Surround the King!" Lusis barked and pointed upward as she vaulted off the porch after the Elfking. "Upper balconies are-" She drew her sword and struck aside a flying arrow. She didn't need to say more. A section of elves materialized from the rooftop, and poured onto the balconies. One Forces man was thrown off the second floor into a bank of snow.

The King's voice stopped all motion. It cracked through the clearing like the snapping of a great tree-trunk, "You are very fortunate, Man of Gondor, that we are both Children of Eru!" Lusis backed away from the flare of light inside of the King. The snow around him began to steam. "Do not so lightly speak of Gondor's young Queen. She has sacrificed more than you know. She, too, opposed the Enemy and is a hero of the Ring War – your freedom is, in part, owed her. In my lands, you will pay her your respect."

Drivenn scrambled up from the snow, but didn't draw the knife he touched. "Be calm, elf!" He looked up at the balcony above and said, "Calm, all of you!"

Thranduil slapped the man, languidly, so as not to truly damage him.

This shocked Drivenn. He went to one knee afresh, and nearly fell over. His eyes bulged in disbelief. Likewise, Lusis had to restrain Kasia as the Master of Boats came racing down the steps. She caught him with one hand and threw her weight back. He was tall and strong, but untrained in how to use all that power to overcome a skilled opponent.

He stopped and clawed air. "Lusis!"

She pulled him back and shoved him at Amathon.

At the feet of the King, snow melted. He opened his long arms and tapered hands and his voice ricocheted off the groves of fir, larch, and cedar in the yard. "Do not presume to tell me my business, little one. It is my Kingdom in which you dwell, and it is within my power to remove you."

"What would you have me do? Waste manpower on finding missing criminals? Perhaps we can have a festival for their safe return, next?" Drivenn snapped.

"When I tell you to guard, you guard." the King's white teeth flashed. Wood shook. "When I tell you to think, you think."

"Let them be gone! There is nothing to think about!" Drivenn barked.

The Elfking drew back a hand for another blow. But Lusis cried, "Thranduil, no!" She really didn't think ringing the Master of Forces' bell a second time was going to produce the desired outcome.

He didn't slap the man again. Instead, he stepped back. The King's voice was low, throbbing, "This is my land. My own."

Behind him, men glanced around themselves in stark disbelief. The snow had given way to shoots of new grass and mounds of white hepatica. Vines that were cold on the stone wall flushed a brighter green. Arrowheads of narrow leaves sprouted and unfolded out into ivy. As far as could be seen, lawn pushed through snowmelt, and a sudden perfusion of flowers, dewberry, snowdrop, and wagging daffodils, sprang into life along the walk. Roses climbed a low tree to sit in the branches with cherry blossoms.

"This is my land, Gurn Drivenn. You are just in it," the King stood straight. "For now." He glanced across at Kasia. "Tell me, Master of Boats, why might criminals go missing?"

"Death, jailing, reform," Kasia blinked and thought, "uh, imprisonment – we've been doing quite a bit of imprisonment for repeat offenders who will not repair their ways. And…" he flinched and looked at the King. Slowly he said, "And bad business, Elfking."

All at once, the King's fury banked. In fact, he inclined his head in assent at the Master of Boats. "Indeed." He stepped across the green lawn and several small songbirds flitted to chirp and dart to and fro behind him. He extended a hand to Lusis and his long, capable fingers enclosed her sword-hand. "Peace. We have things to see to, little Istari."

She inhaled deeply and capitulated her fit of temper to his will.

Kasia glared at Gurn Drivenn as the King went back up the steps to the Forces headquarters. Behind them, Lusis could hear two things: Kasia liberally chewing Drivenn out, was one, and the shush of Ewon lifting and deftly dropping the King's platinum hair into place was the other.

She glanced at the King.

His silver eyes shut, "I know."

"What do you know?"

Now he shifted just enough to take her in, "What you will say to me. Of my temper."

"Never even crossed my mind, my King," she only just managed not to smirk as she turned away from him, but then sobered. "But I think we should speak to Chief Argus Samas of the local Troop, and to Dorondir."

"Why is that?" He asked softly.

"They've been spying," she glanced up at him, "on the local crime businesses."

His pale, beautiful face dimpled with satisfaction, he was nearly unable to contain. "My clever friend-Lusis, what have you done?"

She shrugged, something that didn't exist among the elves, and so she had to explain, "Uh, it means 'I don't know'."

He actually smiled this time, but at the rugs as they joined the section head in the front hall. "Ah. I see. It is good to know, thank you. Bard of Dale did that a lot, in fact. Generally, whenever I asked him a question, and shortly before he came up with a proper answer. He was… unassuming."

Lusis' brows rose. She wondered whether the King was aware, as she was, that there was a descendent of Bard the Bowman in the High North – Bard was his name, son of Brand. Men said he could rally a Kingdom. But she had enough trouble with Northern men at the moment. Not that her luck with elf men was any better, she realized with a muffled grin, "We should make time, today, to meet with the local Chief about this."

He laid a hand over his burning heart and looked aside at a section elf. "See to it."

"My King, and Lady Istari," the young elf bowed before he turned and vanished out of the front of the wood house. Forces men looked at him – at all the elves – with new eyes, it seemed. Perhaps they had thought that Lake Township was run by Men for Men. But it was a very different reality they'd woken up to. The Elvenking bowed for no one.

Nor, she thought, should he.

Hours afterward, Argus Samas, three of his Rangers, and most of Lusis' troop huddled in the upper floors of the Master of Boat's main building, with rumours of the King's altercation swirling through the floors below them. Lusis went through the congested corridors to pick up a platter of roasted meat with Icar and Aric, who had come to carry up the drinks.

She overheard a bargeman cluck his tongue, "Why would a King get so bent out of shape over a bunch of prostitutes? What odds what they do once they're paid? No one cares if I can read, and I make my money off the sweat of my body, same as them."

The bargemen around him, and the man collecting tithes, laughed at that, because, of course, it wasn't at all the same thing. Lusis looked away.

"Mind your mouth," Aric barked at them.

"That's the King's guard and his woman," said the same bargeman. "She doesn't look elf."

Lusis hooked a hand around either Awnson before they had an opportunity to turn and address any of this. She motioned at the young women setting out platters of food onto sideboards.

"Anything green?" Icar poked through and found a clay bowl of roasted vegetables. He smiled, winked at the girl who'd set it down, and carried it upstairs. It was two more trips before there was enough to feed a band of Rangers. Lusis settled in at the long table upon which someone thoughtful had set a thick tan cloth.

Argus poured wine from a tall, ceramic vessel and settled at the head of the table. With him were Elow Anadol, Arbor Corbury, and Sergus Heath. Of these, Lusis was on very good terms with Elow, who was one of the men who secured the Counting Room. She knew little of Sergus and Arbor, except that they had direct communication with the Rangers who had infiltrated the underworld. She nodded in greeting to them all and Elow grinned at her. He was no longer in the tattered hand-me-downs of his troop, being youngest. But he still kept the gloves she'd once given him.

"Starved," Arbor got to his feet. He was a huge man, and blond. Nearly as tall as the Elfking, in fact, which made him a giant among Men. He went to the platters and began to lift off the lids. "Don't mind if I do."

"I do," Sergus chuckled. "I don't see why you should have the best cuts. What with two Chiefs here and me being your elder."

"'Elder' only counts in inheriting land," Arbor scoffed and ate a chicken heart, "you waste your time pulling that over a platter full of chickens."

"What about the part where he mentioned your Chiefs?" Lusis asked.

Arbor glanced aside at his friend and said, "Fires, man. Why did you have to draw her attention?" He looked at her a long moment. "She looks thin too… and Buckmasters can put away a lot of meat, I hear."

It was the right time for Elsenord and Remee to arrive.

"Gods," said Sergus, "there's more of them."

Arbor wiped his hand in the cloth of one of the place-settings and smiled. "May I say… it is a great honour to have Buckmasters among us! Long have your people charged across the Wastes and scaled the mountains for the good of us all – bringing supplies, reinforcements, and escape with you."

"Once one of you spared me a bottle of milk," said Sergus, and he added, "and a jar of honey."

Lusis grinned at this. Funny as it sounded, there was very little milk and honey in the High North. And she'd heard grateful stories for years from men who had been won over by as little as bags of oranges, or a package of candied cherries, given away out of kindness.

Arbor came around the table, bowed to the Chief – Argus had let them know it was Lusis – and then clasped hands with Remee and Elsenord in turn. Sergus nodded at her. "Chief Buckmaster, there has been some news of your Keep. Do you know it?"

She hardened herself. "Nevrmen Buckmaster, my father, is no more, and his eldest son, Kirstman, is proving a poor replacement."

"Thank the Stars," Sergus put a hand over his heart and offered it to her in relief. "I didn't want to be the one to tell you so."

"She had that lesson the hard way," Aric said bluntly. "But even that isn't enough to stop Lusis Buckmaster. This is the true heir of Nevrmen, she is so alike to him."

Redd nodded from beside the doorway. "Her skills in battle, and in organizing men for such red engagements, are becoming legend. They say the only things sharper than her skills are her wits, so Kirstman fears her. He knew she had to be driven from the Spur."

Lusis, who could take no more of this worrisome conversation, shook her head at them, "Enough. There's food to be eaten." She looked at the Rangers around her like they'd taken leave of their senses. "Food."

Under the sinking of the wan sun, that was exactly what they did, and they did it with reckless human abandon. The door was shut. Utensils were not in evidence. Lusis sat on the table, and so did Icar and Elow. Argus threw still-steaming bread to whomever asked. They talked while they chewed, and, since most of their talk consisted of making good-natured jeers at one another, they laughed and smiled when they felt like it.

Lusis leaned back to avoid a flying roll.

Icar caught it, deftly, "You throw like an archer."

"My mother thanks you," Sergus told him in reply. "Took her years to get me to fighting fit."

Lusis brightened, "Your mother?"

"My father had died, in battle. She wasn't about to let us rot on the vine." Sergus said to her. He looked at her a long moment, grimly, and in a measuring way. Then he raised his cup of wine. "Long live the maids of the North. The unsung heroes. The ones without.

"When the walls are breached, and the Men are dead, they are the final line in the snow. I have seen it. As a child, I lived through the orc-sack of Edrain Peak."

Lusis' troop stopped chewing, and she stared at him. "Argus Samas… my condolences, friend."

"Yes," he nodded at her, suddenly lost in long memory. "There were 350 of us. Not a man walked away. My mother lost husband and all my older brothers. She and her sisters slew close to twelve orcs carrying me out of there that night. That's what they did. The women carried the children and climbed down the mountain."

Redd made a soft sound. Doubtless he had a book on this. But when he looked up, he was far more affected than Lusis had anticipated. "The Northern Hoard was three days' travel."

"Yes, I know," Argus said in reply. "Your father and uncles took us in, Redd Ayesir.

"The oldest boys were fourteen and ten – all others were women and children – and when the Edrain refugees came into the Hall of Knowing, some of the women laid down and died." He nodded at his cup of mead after that. It was something he'd seen in his lifetime and it was burnt into his memory.

Silence fell around the table.

Icar reached across and clapped a hand over Redd's shoulder.

"I used to think of the rout of Edrain as a moment of utter failure. A collapse of Man under the great wheel of evil," said the Ranger Chief. "In these last months, though… I've come to realize that it could not be. At great cost, we lived. I have seen songs written to our brave fathers lost in that battle. But we lived by the blood, hardship, and spent lives of our mothers – of many brave women. That is the invisible truth. So," Argus exhaled and raised a cup, "we should do this now. By all news, it will come to sides. A vote was taken. Sides were heard. The Lake Township Rangers stand with Lusis Buckmaster. She is, by vote of our law, rightful heiress to Buckmaster Keep."

This was unexpected. Lusis glanced across at Redd, who nodded his agreement.

Elsenord spoke into the quiet, "What about the Forces, hereabouts?"

"Under Gurn Drivenn," Argus pulled a face. "He may be a fine hand for the Sea of Rhun, and fair enough in Gondor, but he's walking on bird's eggs here, friends."

Remee spat out a bone onto his plate, his expression utterly flat, "How do you mean?"

"I mean, he came in town, hired on by Cardoc Wence in Council, declared himself for the betterment of Lake Township, and the King," Argus sipped his goblet of wine and set it down empty. "And by King, I mean the King of Gondor, Elessar."

"Oh," Aric winced, "bad plan. Very bad plan."

"I'll say," Elow exhaled and poked at the roasted pork before him. He'd accidentally gotten a bit of yam, and, being Northern, didn't know quite what it was, or what to do with it. He glanced up, "Way he talks about the elves, sometimes, it'll take a miracle to keep someone from the Local Troops from cracking off his boot in that man's-"

"The King slapped him today," Lusis interjected to confirm the rumour that there had been an altercation. "I was there."

Elow beamed and knitted his fingers together, delightedly. "Oh, what kind of a slap?"

"A flat-handed one. Laid him out in the snow."

"Wonder he didn't cave the man's head in," Argus' eyebrows rose.

"He was being gentle," Lusis sipped her wine. "I take it Drivenn won't allow the Forces to weigh in on anything that had a whit to do with the Elfking?"

Argus pointed at her, goblet in hand, "Even so."

"Can you describe the slap," Elow asked her. "Slowly?"

Aric scoffed, "Do you want to write a song about it?"

Long practice with elves kept Lusis from bursting with laughter. Elow was not a fan.

"But, mind you, the only reason the Gents of the Peaks are camping next to your house, Lusis, is because Drivenn is letting them. He's trying to gain them as a cavalry for Lake Township."

"He's a fool."

Argus told her. "In that he poorly understands the Men of the North, he quite is. But he does appreciate that if Bregoln does marry you, it will also increase the chances that he will gain a cavalry. There is no reason to think you will quit your service to the King… or none that I can see."

She nodded in assent. "I will not leave him."

Redd sighed and chewed on this. "Don't let anyone ever tell you that Kingdoms are not held in a woman's hand, Argus Samas. And this is just a mild example."

"I'm not mild," Lusis heard herself say. "Tea is mild."

The door opened. Weapons were drawn.

In the doorway, Dorondir appeared for an instant, and was gone.

A bright green eye peeked around the jam and narrowed. Weapons eased down again. He sidled into the room and said an admonishing, "Ai. Another reason we do not close doors."

"You all right, spy-master?" Argus chuckled.

"If I'd been the King, you'd all be bloodied." Dorondir pressed a pale hand over his heart.

"If you'd been the King, you would have knocked," Argus grinned.

"No, that would have been Ewon's job," Lusis smiled at her fellow Chief.

Now Dorondir came, turned a chair sideways, and folded down into it. He sat on his heels and said, "Forgive me. Edhel spies are called on to do a great many things, almost none of which involve announcing we are on the way."

"You see? Spies don't knock," Argus told Lusis, proudly.

She scoffed, "And, to his point, neither do Kings."

Dorondir spared a glance in her direction. "Why, thank you, Istari." His tone was cordial.

"Of course, friend-Dorondir." She resisted the urge to smile at this green-eyed elf. But it was difficult. She glanced up to see Steed approaching down the hall. With Osp.

"Fires." She whispered. "Dorondir, I think Osp might be your Western counterpart, and he's on his way in here."

"Yes, I know," Dorondir's green eyes caught hers, his oblong pupils opened out as he did so. "There have been… developments, Lady. Have no fear." His voice was hushed as he turned and stepped off the chair to go to the door. "Greetings Inilfain and Osp."

"Le suilannad, Dorondir," Steed said flawlessly. Hanging around the elves was doing a lot for his broken Sindarin. He was pulling the bits together very quickly.

Osp's head tipped to the right and he looked in at Lusis. "Hello, Istari."

She got up from the table – terrible manners among the elves – and Icar scrambled after her. Odd how no one had minded when it was Dorondir. His green eyes glanced back at her and she realized it was part of his skill as a spy.

"Are you feeling any better, Osp?"

He inclined his head in agreement and then went further in a small bow. "Again you rescue me. Le athae. Thank you, you are kind."

Argus looked up at the copper-eyed elf as he came into the room, bent, and studied the tongue-in-groove construction of the table. "What did she rescue you from?"

"Curiosity," he said distractedly. He brightened and sparks shot under his voice, "Oh, this is lovely. What a good piece of primitive construction." He got up and patted the table.

"Primitive?" Argus asked the tall, black-haired elf.

Aric added, "He can't fight, either."

"I can see where you'd need to be protected against yourself," Arbor exhaled and stood up, as they all did, to welcome the elves and son of Tatharion House.

Steed stepped in and pulled the platter of pork in his direction. He picked up a slice and wolfed it down, before pulling Aric's half-drained cup his way. Aric hurried to fill it again. These two were best friends, after all.

Osp watched this with amusement. "Keeping an eye on me must be hungry work." He drifted over to Lusis and inspected a wooden chair.

Dorondir spoke to him in a form of elvish unfamiliar to Lusis and Osp set the chair sideways and folded down into it. He leaned against the back of the chair, now to his left, as if to test its strength.

"Elves have chairs like this." Argus scowled. "The Elfking has a white chair at Jan Kasia's place, none are permitted to sit in when he is away."

"Thand," said Osp, which was the word for 'True'. "But I am six feet and eight inches in height, and Dorondir is six feet and three. I applaud the big one," he motioned at Redd, "for his courage in lounging on such iffy construction."

Redd glanced up, suddenly uncomfortable in the chair.

Dorondir put his head down and huffed with amusement. "Peace, Redd Ayesir." He glanced up and fixed the huge man – even taller than Osp – with a warm expression. "Are you going to let this spoiled elf of Valinor encamp inside that bony head of yours?"

Redd's chair squeaked, and he hopped up and turned it sideways before he folded into it again. All around the table, humans roared with laughter that made both Osp and Dorondir avert their gazes.

"Okay, well, yes then," Lusis rubbed her eyes. She reached a hand and clapped Osp on the shoulder, seeing as he had settled beside where she'd stood to greet him. "No worries, young Bee, there's no harm done. You can't help what you are."

"And what I am not, is young." He looked up at her with extraordinarily innocent eyes. "You simply refuse to believe me."

She smiled at him, in the elven fashion this time. "Take no insult from us, Osp of Valinor. We will protect you. Have we not demonstrated as much?"

His brows rose, "Indeed… and who will protect you? Istari maid. This place is terribly backward."

Argus bristled. "How do you mean?"

"There is a man in the field beside the… the little Master of Boats' keep, and he believes he can take Lusis Buckmaster away with him, even though she does not want that. He believes it."

She blinked, "Osp, how do you know that?"

His copper eyes averted to the right, "I am sorry for bringing this travesty to your table, friend-Lusis. All the sections are talking about it. There is… rage."

Silence at the table, apart from Dorondir whose placid face turned to Lusis. "You are friends?"

The Ranger Chief thrust that question aside, "Rage? There is rage about this?"

Argus sat forward to double-check, "Among elves?" He glanced at Dorondir's serene expression.

"Oh yes," Osp glanced at Dorondir as well. "Fierce, cold, and bright, is the fury of elves. Believe me in this, friend-Lusis, for they will not tell you. But if you care at all, or have ever cared for the brute, you must send him away. Arrows train on him, night and day. Hot eyes watch him for every point of weakness. Ageless blood burns at the mention of his name. They miss nothing."

Dorondir, across the table, popped a slice of roasted sweet-potato into his mouth and ignored the conversation. He looked the picture of conviviality as he licked his fingertip. "Peace. The King has it in hand. He knows the temperament of his people," he didn't look at Lusis, "and he knows that their love for you is deep, friend-Lusis."

"Does he know they'll put an arrow in that man's eye from the opposite shore, for looking at friend-Lusis askance? They have one who can do this thing. Telfeth Damiell?" Osp looked around the table, "He has no friends here, yes, but… he is still alive. Not all problems should be laid low with a weapon. Not all, surely."

Lusis inhaled deeply and saw what she had to do. She glanced at Osp. Her fear had led them to this place, and it had taken this earnest bee of an elf to remind her of what she knew was right. "None may harm Bregoln. I don't love him, it is true. But he is an old friend."

"And better as an ally," Redd said over a stack of pig.

For a moment, Dorondir's teeth flashed in disdain, but his head gave a quick flick and he ate a square of roasted pepper. Apparently, Dorondir had come down on the side of attacking the Men of the Peaks. He glanced at Lusis. "If he should bother you, friend, or act inappropriately, but tell me."

Aric chuckled, "That's the spirit, Dorondir. I'll help-"

"I won't need help." The elf said bluntly, and there was a terrible force of temper behind it, as he carefully selected a slice of orange bell pepper imported from elf holdings in Southern Mirkwood. "Ma. Let us talk about the criminals. The sudden quiet in the North and North East of Long Lake. Sergus Heath and Arbor Corbury, what do your men tell you of that?"

"Whole communities have emptied," Arbor exhaled. "I have been further to the North-West than most, excusing yourself, Lord Dorondir-"

"I am not a Lord. Carry on."

Sergus put in "Well, we can't very well call you Mister. You're an elf."

They made the elf blink. "I am Dorondir Hastion. What is amiss with Dorondir?"

Aric found this funny, and added, "Yes. His parents liked it."

"Like it," corrected Dorondir, nimbly.

"It's your first name," Sergus pointed out. He frowned deeply, and reddened along the cheeks, above his thick stubble, "It… my dear elf, it is not polite to call you by your first name when one does not know you very well."

Osp's lips made an 'o'. Slowly, he leaned over the table to look up at the Rangers, as if amazed they found something rude. And, for his part, Dorondir's apple-green eyes slid to take in Lusis. "Is it so… among Men?" He seemed very worried about this.

"It's complicated, friend-Dorondir." She fought not to have her face slide into the genial expression that elves generally used with one another. "It will help if you tell Men what to call you, if you're going to have dealings with them again."

"You may call me Lord Osp," and Osp sounded somewhat astonished.

Lusis looked at him, sharply, "Are you a Lord?"

He nodded up at her.

She smiled in reply, "Oh, well done, Bee."

"You know my name means smoke and not bee." His head tipped a little.

Lusis consoled, "I'm sorry, friend. Your name has nothing to do with it."

His eyelids made staccato, but he accepted that was who he was to her. Nui. Bee. This made him touch the filmy filigree of golden clasp on his cloak, as if the golden bee had become part of him.

"In any case," Dorondir made his way through sweet-potato. "We cannot assume these men made short-work of themselves. No one here is that lucky in life."

"As you say," Arbor exhaled. "I hear wolves to the North and East. There is no way their attacks could be so calculated. They are dumb animals. They would tear some of these shacks to bits. They do not show signs of being mistreated."

"Winter is coming," Argus put in. "If ever a man is going to pick up and leave, it would be in winter. The cold, here, is crushing."

"That is where many have gone, indeed," said Sergus. "I have men further in – closer to the shores of the Lake, and three in the vicinity of the ruins of Esragoth. Camp Haste is located there, you may not know, Miss Buckmaster."

The elves looked at her. She didn't react to the word 'Miss'.

Sergus noted, "Rich fishing… but there is still a high degree of dragon sickness in that region. Three weeks ago, the population began to fall off. My men were in two weeks ago. Two of them reported that large numbers were closing up their shacks and taking supplies to the South. One followed them along the lake far enough to determine that they mean to walk down to the Old Forest Road ahead of the snow and maybe even a bit further. They have in mind where the river broadens and deepens, and is more like a chain of lakes. That way is better climes in winter. Better forage too. My sources say they'll settle on the edge of the Mirkwood and fish the River. To hunt the forest without permission of the King is a risk. Though it is worth noting… they are remaining in a group for the most part, these people. A kind of community. And that there was talk of petitioning the King for the right to take grouse and boar at the forest's edge."

"Interesting," said Dorondir. "They begin to recognize the power of the Elfking."

"Yes," Sergus noted. "They begin to. I was told a gathering was held in the center of Camp Haste where it was decided that, should a petition be made to 'the great, and fearsome Elfking', none would include any beast wearing antlers or the females or offspring thereof, because they believe you elves of the forest worship deer and elk."

Dorondir actually clapped a hand over his mouth. His green eyes widened.

Osp put his head down and chuckled. "Humans."

"We do not," Dorondir was easily as shocked as Lusis had ever seen an elf. "We do not worship animals in the forest."

Sergus grinned, "Forgive them the confusion, good elf. You do not eat meat, and your King gallops around on that terrifying seven foot elk-creature."

"A great elk," said Dorondir, "there are many in the forest, and they love the King's Light. That is why they serve him. We do not worship them." He shook himself. "But… let us be glad of an explanation for the King at least. We elves… we do not suffer from biting cold or weather, nor hard stone or great heat."

Lusis kept a neutral face: They didn't?

"This justification may never have occurred to us. So… my thanks."

"You are very welcome," Sergus inclined his head, "Dorondir."

The elf glanced at the wine, and Icar poured him a cup that he refused in exchange for a cup of water. He glanced at the door. "He comes."

"He?" Argus asked curiously.

The door tapped and opened to Ewon.

The King stepped in behind, and frowned at the meat.

Lusis felt herself straighten and then, blindly, bow. In fact, Dorondir and her troop had risen to do the same, and, quickly enough, Argus' troop followed suit. She straightened and glanced down at Osp, who hadn't even risen from his seat, and looked on this as if a spectator at a play. She also checked across the table at Arbor, Elow, and Sergus. They were very seldom in the company of the King, if ever at all, and their eyes were wide with disbelief that he'd just wandered in.

His long-coat was the same spotless white as he paced across the room. "Lusis-Istari," he said quietly to her.

"You slapped Gurn Drivenn," Elow blurted before the King could say more. The young Ranger went immediately pale on the end of this.

The Elfking's brows rose. "Do you have an opinion, little one?"

"Not unless his opinion is 'thank you'." Aric pointed out.

The Elfking's silver gaze held Elow a moment longer, as he stepped deeper into the room, then they darted at Lusis again. "My friend."

"Yes?"

He closed his hands before him. Amathon and Ewon took away his white-fur cloak. Nimpeth touched his hair to perfect order and they backed to positions beside the open door. The King opened his hands, gracefully, "Have I missed much?"

"The men of Camp Haste are heading South to warmer climes, my King. The winter is harsh on the bodies of humans. They are afraid of you, but must make petition for enough meat for winter."

"Ah. Do they have families? Children?"

"Yes, Elvenking," Sergus stammered out, and bowed. He looked up, "Yes, glorious one."

"Ah. If they are fearful, and do not petition, I will have sections leave supplies for them." He glanced over the table. "The hungering of children is… unthinkable, if there is some means by which we can intervene."

Silently, Dorondir's head inclined in elven accord.

"Where have you been, Elvenking?" Lusis asked.

The King's head tipped, "The business of a Kingdom."

"Because I've heard that there is some conflict among the elves over Bregoln." Lusis began to bite her lip out of a growing sense of paranoia, but then stopped herself. She had no idea how elves would read that.

The King's eyes shut. His head rose, and he looked across at Osp. "Lusis-sell, do you somehow believe that I do not control the actions of my sections and my patrols? My people?"

"No, I have perfect faith in that," she told him, "but I didn't come here to trouble the elves of Mirkwood, or the Elfking I chose to follow. Knowing they will not act on their anger doesn't mean I don't worry for them, or what could happen if one of them loses their temper." She might have glared at him a little then. When he'd come to live among the Silvan he'd adopted their culture, and they were known for being quick with weapons. That tendency had gone to bed with his even quicker temper. He should have known why she worried.

"Peace, little Istari," his hand stroked air, delicate and powerful in one gesture. "Argus Samas, is there more I should know?"

Arbor's head rose a fraction.

"Yes?" said the King.

"I… one of my men, positioned at the end of the lake and facing old Dale," Arbor rubbed his thick stubble of beard. "He reported a gathering of men going North at night."

"That does not hold with your theory, Lusis-sell. The weather to the North is harsher still, in every other place," his eyes slowly rose to the windows that, even now, painted the tall, pristine canvas of his body with the colours of sunset, "but Erebor."

Silence fell among them.

Finally, the King asked, "And did you tell to her, Argus, the decision of the Local Troops?"

"She knows," Argus nodded and then looked in Lusis' direction. "But she should have known without being told. Where would we be, Lusis Buckmaster, without your intervention?"

She imagined some of them wouldn't have lasted the winter, they'd been so thin and threadbare. Lusis gave a sober nod at him. "Thank you, Argus."

"Any time, Lusis."

The King drifted through the room and began to pull details from the spymasters. Likewise, Dorondir went to Argus' end of the table. He was eager to assist, and, like Lusis' troop, found his King's questions incisive and thought-provoking. They gathered in his light to hear him and learn the news in detail. Lusis turned and set her hand on Osp's shoulder, and he winced even though she was being very gentle. "Steed?"

Steed Roanhead, as he called himself, glanced in her direction, and walked to join her. He bent over Osp, glanced at the elf, and reached in to press his fingers against the great elf's neck. "Osp, you need a new plaster. And a healing."

His wound was fresh yet.

Lusis walked him from Kasia's business and into the main house. She and Steed, who had gone for a healer, settled him onto the cot at the end of the narrow hall. She had learned these were former storerooms that had been made over to familiarize the elves with their human citizens. Lusis stood by as the young healer arrived and peeled back Osp's shirt from his shoulder. The cut had been weeping into the plaster. The issue smelled sharp and bloody.

After a cleaning, a paste went onto it. The wound was topped with crumbled, chalky medicine and a plaster of the same, all before the healer began to push her bright white energy down into the injury. Lusis exhaled softly. "Will he scar?"

"Yes, my Lady," said the small Silvan. Her voice was so high and light that she seemed like a mere girl. "He will scar."

"Please take care of him." Lusis went as far as to clasp Osp's hand and give it to the young healer. "He is far from his friends and his home here. We are all he has."

Osp blinked thickly, having been fed a draught to help him withstand the pain.

The Silvan healer set aside the Western elf's long hand and peered at him. She pushed his black hair with a careful touch, and tucked it behind one of his long ears. "My Lady, I will do as you say. Please believe me." She turned earnest eyes to the Yellow Istari.

Lusis went to the kitchen and paced, waiting for the busy staff, for several minutes.

Shortly after, she departed for the field on the other side of the house.

The Men of the Peaks had a bright bivouac.

Their round tents were off colours. Red-violet. Yellow-orange. Blue-green. It was a harmony of colour in the field. She could see it all because of the bronze fire-sticks – long staves driven into the ground and topped with enclosed bronze fire-braziers. Peaksmen walked their horses, cleaned them, and combed and braided their manes, or tended fires and boiling pots of rabbit stew with root vegetables. She'd come with a bag of salt, berries for Rowan tisane, and a type of peppery spice that grew in the South of Mirkwood. Peace offerings.

Silence fell as she walked among the tents of her tall Northern brothers.

She looked for the white tent that would be Bregoln Fall's.

He was outside, as it turned out, at a game of axes, which was common in the North. It was a simple matter of throwing hand-axes in such a way that they needed to fit through hanging loops of branches that had been shaped so that only specific throws would allow them to pass.

As she waited, Lusis watched Bregoln throw the axe he held. It rose, sank, tipped to the right, passed through the nearly horizontal loop of interwoven twigs, and slammed into the wood backing with a thock. By the third throw, she was suitably impressed.

"Buckmaster," said one of the Men of the Peaks. He nudged her with a sheathed trio of throwing axes, "You can take my turn." He was a towering man, thick-shouldered and intimidating as an over-orc – one of the high ranking ones. But he smiled excitedly, like a ten-year-old.

She accepted the axes and the sudden whoosh of air as she stepped up to the X that marked where the contestant should stand. The muttering died away to nothing. She laid down the bags of spices by her ankle and looked at the three wood loops.

The first was a vertical slat. She pulled out the first steel axe and shifted the weight around. It was too heavy for her hand and arm. She shifted it until she could pinch the blade, and then adjusted that hold. Now the handle pointed upward.

"She's going to hurt herself," someone jeered.

"You'll take your toes off!"

"Quiet," Bregoln said, and then more loudly. "Quiet, now. Let her concentrate!" He nodded at her, suddenly the boy she remembered. His voice dropped low, "Lusis, come now. This game is for grown men, so surely you can do it." He smiled at her.

Lusis did focus. She felt the muscles in her arms and shoulders complain, and first popped the axe in air and caught it to loosen her tendons. On the third catch, she snapped her arm out straight. The steel axe spun through air and slammed into the backboard so fast that it wasn't possible to tell if it had passed through the loop. It was rocking softly. That was the only change.

A cry went up. The Men of the Peaks had long heard rumours about the Buckmaster girl, and were excited to see her handiwork in person.

The second loop was circular. She took a while to line this up. When she threw, the blade made a deep gash in the wood at the top of the ring before it smashed into the backboard.

"Too much power, little Buckmaster," called one of the men at the backboard. "You'll cut the loops and split the board."

The man on the other side laughed, "Shut up, Saltis. She's faster than a tongue of fire, this one!"

The last throw was the nearly horizontal, lower loop. She had one advantage here – her smaller height made the drop at which she would have to throw less extreme. It was very hard to throw an axe so that it sank. One had to get it to turn and drop with proper technique. She wasn't accustomed to worrying about technique over final effect. This took the longest to line up. The crowd of men had doubled. Suggestions came in from all around her.

"Lift your arm up! Keep your elbow straight!"

Muscle fatigue set in.

Bregoln's quiet voice was closer, and she heard him say quiet clearly. "Forget the loop, Lusis. A warg. A warg running at a Keep. Something you need to hamstring."

Her arm changed position and lashed like the head of a viper. She knew exactly how to do what he was saying. She'd done it with throwing knives so many times in the past. The throw cut the loop in half, hit the board, passed through, and the Peaksman named Saltis let out a high-pitched cry and had to leap in air to keep from losing a toe.

"My starlit Mother's teats, woman!" he reeled away and checked his toes. "Fires. Doom."

Laughter belted out of the Men of the Peaks. Bregoln wasn't able to hide his merriment. "Saltis, man, this is an axe-toss, not a dance."

Lusis bent and picked up the salt, Rowan berries, and pepper-grain. She offered all to Bregoln with a smile. "Here, old friend. Since we got off on the wrong foot after so long."

"At least she didn't take your foot off," Saltis panted and showed them the toe of his boot. This renewed howls of laughter, because the leathery toe had a long scratch on it.

Far from finding her clumsiness comical, Lusis winced and apologized for the damage.

Bregoln glanced into the bags and his eyes slid up to look at her. "Lusis… thank you." He nodded in her direction and then turned to a young man who stood nearby. "Take this to the cook. We've had a windfall of kindness from the Buckmasters, it seems, even in this faraway place."

He saw the salt and smiled up at Lusis. "Beautiful-miss, thank you."

The bags were whisked away, which left only Lusis, Bregoln, and a hoard of Peaksmen to deal with. She inhaled deeply. "We need to talk about this situation, friend of mine."

"We should," he agreed with her and looked around him. "You lot, scatter. The miss wants to have words." He couldn't quite call her 'the missus' yet.

As the men cleared away, Lusis sighed and glanced up into Bregoln's warm, dark eyes.

"You are here…" he predicted, "to tell me No."

"Yes," she said quietly. "I am. I don't think you understand my position, Breg. I don't know you. Not anymore. Believe it or not, you do not know me, and these things do matter."

He paced beside her. "Time? If I gave it time and we were to… keep in contact?"

She shook her head, "I don't know the future, Bregoln. Just now."

"Ah," his lips pressed into a line. "It's the elves-"

"No, it's me," she told him immediately. "Do you understand? Me."

"I… don't know if I can accept this," he swallowed hard. "I had built such a world for us… inside of my thoughts, Lusis Buckmaster. I have such a life planned."

She nodded in response. "Me too. For myself." She thought of the summer wind rising from the South, scudding for miles through treetops, carrying the scent of Southern groves, and mingling seeds as it fell down the deep divot of valley carved by Forest River. In her head she felt the shafts of light through the Great Gallery, and ran through the trees with sections of elves, all of them free, all of them racing along with the King's Tour of the Great Greenwood kingdom. Her chosen life. "I have such plans."

He had stopped to watch her eyes. Now he pushed back the flap of the white tent. "Will you come in, Lusis?"

"No, I will not," she shook her head. "I can't risk the rumours, and neither can you, Bregoln. You must leave this place as I ask you to, and be careful."

"Why?" he withdrew into the tent. "I can handle myself, Lusis. You must know that."

"You can't handle the armies of Mirkwood," she muttered and then called out to him. "Stars, how can it be all these years later, and you still cannot listen."

He laughed and came back to the flap of the tent. "You're sure you won't come in for tea? Now that you've brought the Rowan yourself? We can try to remember one another…."

She averted her gaze, an action that was becoming innate to her among the elves. It was the most polite means that her body know of saying No.

"Lusis-sell," came a voice from the darkness between tents. She heard the soft creak of a bow from another direction and glanced around. Then she noticed that Bregoln did not. Her name had been spoken into her mind. He hadn't heard it.

"I need to leave," she told him. "You need to leave as well. Point your horses' heads away from this place, my old, dear friend. Think of me no more." She started to turn away, but he caught her by the hand as she did so and she turned and stepped to him, more to shield him from arrows than anything else. There was a flicker of motion in the tent behind him. Elves. Elves had gotten into his tent.

They were fatally close.

"Bregoln, my friend, on pain of death, let me go."

He pressed something into her hand. "Take this. Think for a while, but take this, Lusis Buckmaster, and realize that this union you push away so fearfully… it is blest by the first man ever to earn your respect. Think…."

A cloaked shape loomed out of the darkness, elf-steel in hand, close behind him.

She stepped back and looked into her hand at a chain and a single ring. She didn't recognize it at first, but then turned it over so the stag signet faced her – white antlers cut in silver and laid into gold. A single blue star sapphire between them. Lusis felt her forehead crumple with a rush of sudden emotion. She hadn't seen this on her father's hand since she'd been a child.

"Think it through, little Buckmaster," Bregoln called after her as she walked out of the circle of tents. Lusis squeezed her fist around the only thing of her father's that she now possessed in the world. She fought emotion, aware she was silently surrounded by a section of Mirkwood elves. At the top of the field, before the gates of the King's Beech, she stole a look at the ring again, and her eyes filled with tears in spite of herself. They ran down her black eyelashes and leapt into space as if they had a life of their own, and were beyond her control.

The hand that closed of the back of her bowed head was elven.

"You weep."

The compassion in the voice felt like the warm fog of a hot bath. It made her quake.

"Lusis-sell, my star, what has happened?"

For a moment, she honestly couldn't answer him. Though the will was there, the mechanisms would not permit it. Her throat didn't even try. Finally, she opened her hand and pushed it out into the moonlight. "My father gave this to Bregoln Fell… when I was a girl. He gave it back to me just now."

"Your father," Dorondir's long hand closed around hers. The Kingdom had been told that Lusis Buckmaster's father had, just weeks ago, taken his last breath of the High Northern wind. Now the elf spy's hand shifted to cup beneath the Istari's, as she was shaking and he wanted to be mindful, in case the ring happened to dislodge. He could catch it.

She continued to quake and his forehead bent to touch her right temple. "I am so sorry… but the King summons you, little one. Can you go to him?"

For a moment, it honestly felt impossible to stir a step from the gates of the Silver Beech. Lusis curled a hand around the barred steel gates, cold as the doors to the Spur, and held tight. It felt as close to her King as she had the power to venture. After some moments, she leaned against the spy and said, "Maybe in a minute."

She made no attempt to move.

Dorondir did not care. He stood by with thought to what might be right for a human, what might be comforting and yet not indiscreet. He rubbed her bent back as one might an elf child. But then simply curled that arm around her and set his chin on top of her gold-threaded head.

He sighed deeply at the warmth of her, and shut his green eyes.

It could wait, he decided. It, and all, could wait.

Full darkness fell.

The moon and stars were out. They lit a way across the snow as kindly as could be managed. This was good, because she could bear no further shocks, tonight. Her father's ring bounced against her chest as she came up the stairs.

Between her ears there was only the white noise of a distant mountain, and a distant childhood.

At the door to the Keep, Ewon waylaid the spy who walked beside her. This bothered Lusis, in a distant way, because Dorondir had been so kind. The inside of her mind was sore, like a deep stone bruise, and she felt she needed careful handling. He was a tender being.

She went into Kasia's keep, well and truly exhausted.

Steed came out to greet her and froze in his tracks. "Is… is someone dead, Lusis?"

"Not tonight," she said dully. "How is my Bee?"

"Sleeping." Steed bowed to her, "I advise you try a full night of the same, Chief."

"I will. And you should too," she told him on her way up the stairs to her cot.

She began to feel slightly more alive, more in the present, as she went up the stairs to where Amathon watched her.

"Istari, are you injured?" he asked.

He said it so kindly, but she was too tired for the complexities of elven politesse. She simply shook her head and left him to find a resource who might know what that meant. Was it Yes? Or was it No? The elves had no equivalent.

Nimpeth and Telfeth inclined their heads as she went by.

Merilin was in the hall, beside the King's open door, and he bowed to her.

Inside the room, moonlight flooded near darkness and the Elvenking of Mirkwood paced pitiless circles into the boards. In fact, the furnishings had been moved into the middle of the rug – the bed, the end tables, hemmed by the two wardrobes at angles, like the whole affair made the shape of an arrow pointing at the back wall. All so that the Elfking had unobstructed room to pace. Around and around he went.

She stood in the doorway and waited for him to notice her. She felt numb for whole minutes, until curiosity got the better of her. He didn't.

He didn't notice her.

She had no idea what to make of this.

Lusis leaned back in the doorway and looked to Amathon. "Should I leave?" she whispered. What did one do when the elf in the open room did not acknowledge one's presence?

Amathon had no idea. He gave up and bowed to her.

Well.

That was unhelpful, and, with a kick of concern for her King, Lusis went into the room. On his next circuit along the margins of the rug, he was forced to pull to a stop because she was there, directly in his path. His silvery eyes looked down at his right. His lovely face was still. The light in his chest roared from inside the base of his throat, and lit his eyes from the inside so that, even averted, she could see the glittering through his eyelids and lips.

It was as if she was a dropped arrow, now reset. Everything fell away from her but the immediate and urgent need to care for this elf. She sucked a steadying breath. "What's wrong?"

He said nothing.

And when he said nothing, she speculated. Panic stabbed at her, "Gods, is it Lord Elrond?"

"No, he is recovering. He… he may be up and around again by morning," the Elfking glanced at the doorway, and the human servant there. "Wine. Something particularly delicious. For us both."

"I'm on duty," Lusis told the King.

"Fires," he snapped, "Are you ever not?" He strode around her and resumed pacing. It was very irritating to him when she stepped into his path again.

"I am always on duty where your safety is concerned."

"I am your place of work," he said sharply, and threw off his circlet in disgust. It bounced across the bed and Lusis scrambled to catch it before it could crash into the headboard. It was so beautifully made. She didn't want it to take damage, or for the sheerest aquamarine stone it bore to dislodge.

Her sure hand snapped it up and she turned to him. The King had tugged his white-blond hair over one shoulder and into his fist. He twisted it absently. She'd never seen him do it violence like this unless he stood ringing water out of it.

She glanced back down at the scintillating parchment the circlet had bounced across on the bed and she froze. She didn't read elvish by any stretch of the imagination… but she did notice the name of her father. On the bottom line, the name Nevrmen Buckmaster had been signed. The seal of the King was impressed beside it, alike to the lozenges of the Elvenking that occurred widely in Lake Township now. The parchment was so beautifully illuminated. The first elven letter at the top right of the page was so beautiful that it looked like embroidery, and it shimmered like a butterfly wing.

She didn't realize what this document was until she saw her name, Lusis Buckmaster, rendered in expert elven hand, and then, beside it, her name in elvish, she presumed, seeing as the name of Thranduil Oropherion was written in both Westron and elvish.

"Uh… my King?"

He ignored her.

"Is this the contract you had drawn up by… by Eithahawn?" She pored over it, not understanding the elvish, realizing that Remee or Elsenord had signed her father's name to it quite recently, and that there were no other names on it but her own and the King's.

A wave of dizzying cold passed through her veins. "Oh."

She looked up at him, full of pity. "Maybe Eithahawn misunderstood?"

"No," said the King, quietly. "He will be here shortly to explain. I have sent for him. But there is only this contract, Lusis. Jan Kasia's men carried it alone on a barge to here. They knew its contents were important. It was hand-delivered by Argus Samas to Jan Kasia in the morning. Kasia, in turn, delivered it unopened to Ewon. Likewise, Ewon carried it, sealed, to Remee and Elsenord Buckmaster. They signed it at the desk in their room, dried it, rolled it, and Ewon sealed it with wax and my signet, as instructed. It was set upon my mail tray and has endured there until I opened it in the Hall below. And so I did, with Jan Kasia and Cardoc Wence on the hide couch, both of them tirelessly regaling me about proper methods with which I should have censured a Master in Lake Township."

She actually felt a nerve-twitch of smile, "Are they upset you slapped the Master of Forces in his blow-hard mouth?" Lusis sat on the bed and considered the document and the circlet she held. She pressed a hand over the ring on the chain Bregoln had given her and thought how they were alike. The ring had come down from Nevrmen, and the circlet from Oropher.

The King undid the catches at the throat of his long-coat with a graceful flick of his wrist. "Oh, they have endless advice about it. Subtle. Veiled. Implied. Direct. I thank the stars I didn't cut off the man's head." His hands made a gently emphatic elven gesture.

One of the human staff stumbled on his way, but the King ignored this.

The great coat came off in the next few paces, and it tumbled to the floor in a silver perfusion of gleaming fabric. Normally, the light shirt would be underneath – the one that showed off his shoulders like a breastplate would – but this was winter. He had a red silk shirt, expertly tailored to his figure. She looked at the floor. He was exquisite. Best not to dwell on that.

"So," Lusis cleared her throat. "This is a ploy, as you recall. This was simply a means to protect me against Bregoln Fell. Which is good. Because he is disinclined to give up and go away. Even at my request to him." Her fingers played with the ring she wore on the chain. "Nothing has changed."

He shook his head and his hands drew up to curl one above the other, over his sternum. In the same way that Men crossed their arms on their chests, and it was a form of defensiveness, that more subtle motion of joining hands above the sternum was the same of elves.

"Something… has changed," she realized. Lusis glanced down at the contract and thought aloud, "Because… because you meant for me to contract with Eithahawn or Legolas…." Her eyes widened. "This contract, you meant for it to be honoured."

Lusis shot to her feet and the King looked away from her as he paced.

"Oh, so I'm no longer traded away to Bregoln by my father, I'm now traded away to the sons of Thranduilion by a King." She growled at him. "And what odds which son, so long as you can maintain control of me, right? What odds as long as you could tie me to the Mirkwood, seeing as, for some reason, my word alone is not enough." She was shouting at him by the end.

He swept over to her, and his teeth flashed inches from her face. "You said this was your home. This place." He indicated the Keep, but meant Lake Township. "And have I not given you a place to live, Lusis Buckmaster? Can you not dwell there and be free of any responsibility to me, and all that is mine? Do not act as if I've trapped your very soul. These are but words on paper. Paper is nothing before the fire of an Istari."

"Then why are you pacing your way through the rug, Elvenking," she snapped up at him.

"Because this is a cruel joke of my son's. I am beside myself. I already have a wife, and she-" he bit and then fell back from her. He backed away. His shoulder struck the post of the bed with a painful crack he didn't seem to feel.

Lusis got up, tugged her shirt into place, and turned toward her King. His head was down. Carefully, she advanced on him. She kept her voice low and soothing, and ignored Ewon's presence just outside. He stood with a pair of other seasoned Elites she could remember from Thranduil's bloody coronation. She pushed them out of her mind, and mentally shut the door to the room.

It was important that her voice be soothing, "I'm sorry. You're right. I understand." She saw him meet the wall and rest his palms against it. He still didn't look up at her, "It's all right. It will be all right."

"I want," he pulled a steadying breath, "so very much," his white-blond hair bounced down from his shoulders, "to trust you."

Having come to a stop before him, she simply reached out and stroked his bowed head. His hair had a ridiculous smoothness. It was soft in the way of ermine or down. And his sharp little ear-tip was shell-coloured and warm under her palm. It put a sudden smile on her face. She brushed his long hair behind it, but its volume slid over in a shining cascade. "Don't you agree, given how short a time we've known each other, that trust may be asking a lot?"

"No," he said dryly. "You do trust me, Istari. You… in perfect faith, gave yourself to the royals of Mirkwood in contract. You did not suspect me." He added onto the end of this, "I am sorry, Lusis Buckmaster. I am a King these many Ages, and a King looks upon his people and he seizes every advantage."

"All I can do… is try to understand," she raised her opposite hand to his hair because it was jealous of her right. Each stroke was cool and calming. Each strand seemed lit with fire. "But you need to start sharing these things with me. As surprises go, some of them are inexcusable. Do you follow?"

His head rose a little.

She stopped stroking his hair.

He made a soft grumble at this.

Lusis blinked and started up again. Maybe she wasn't the only one who found it comforting.

Eventually, the King sank down the wall, and she rolled her shoulders and sat down beside him. It was remarkable, looking at him, how very long his legs were. His silver eyes slowly closed. She half-turned to hook a hand over his shoulder and rest against him. The scent of his forest skin was a line written somewhere in the cataloguing of peace. She shut her eyes and rose and fell to his breathing.

At some point later, she felt him stir to say, "Softly. She is sleeping."

The muffled clack was a tray settling down beside them. The voice was very quiet, as directed, but very genuine and full of curbed emotion. "My beloved King."

"Go, my Ewon. Take the wine away," said the Elfking. "And… I do not wish to be disturbed."

The Elite gently refused. "Baw, I shall not, my King. You should both be in celebration." There was a quiet shuffling to order, and then the warmth of his words. "My congratulations."

"Ai. Alas, felicitations are not in order." The King murmured. "For she has not decided herself."

"Has she not?"

There was silence for a moment. Long enough for Lusis to drift.

Then, cautiously, the Elite asked his lonely mountain of a King, "Are… are you at peace with it?"

There was a pause before the King said, very faintly, "I must trust. I must trust to her and to her decision." She felt him stir as if to glance her way, "Ewon… be aware… Ithileth… my wife, my world… it is not over." There was a tight, airless moment during which she could taste his bitter pain, and his next murmur was full of hurts and suffering, "Ah, but can she have meant for me to face all of this… alone?"

Ewon's voice was soft as snowfall. "Oh, my beloved King, she could not watch you suffer. She could not wish you a moment's hardship. You, alone these Ages. I cannot imagine her dread."

The King's breathing ticked up, "Fires. What do I do?" Lusis started to surge toward awareness because her King had begun to move.

But Ewon must have stilled him. "No, young King. Stay your flight. If only for the company of her caring heart, I pray you maintain this contract with the Istari."

She drifted again, while there were no words, and the King's breathing began to even itself. Then the King whispered, "It is for her to say. To stay… or not to. And so will go my will."

"Rest," said Ewon's distant voice. "Rest and heal. Rest-"

And Lusis had had a very long day. So when she heard those words, she slipped into a dim and fire lit hall at the top of the world. The grotesque of shadows on the ceilings, they were old friends. Her father threw them off, so close to the fire. He stepped awkwardly back and forth with a spindly and sleepless girl standing on his insteps and staring up at him. He was singing, with his gruff voice, an old song in elvish. Her Istari ears understood the words now: Oh, my little fingertip, my little slip of girl / oh, Eru's tiny melody, you are your father's world. 'It will be all right, you will sleep safe tonight,' he added onto the end of that.

She didn't know what to do about the King.

Maybe Lord Elrond was right in these things.

Maybe there was nothing that could be done.

When it came to Thranduil Oropherion.