II
The Kingdom at the Heart of the Forest
When Legolas woke on the morrow, the storm was over.
He slipped out from under the bear fur and pushed open the painted shutters. A grey, dripping dawn was growing out of the dark; a faint wind pulled at the remnants of storm clouds, and Greenwood greeted the morning, shaking leaves and stretching roots and branches. Foxes and badgers crawled out their dens, does and stags shook water from their fur and the owls returned to their trees.
It would be some time still before the sun was up, and the Mountain would be asleep a while longer. Legolas dressed hastily in loose deerskin trousers and a woollen tunic, tucked a dagger in his belt, but did not bother to take any shoes; they'd only get wet. He left the room quietly. The hallway was dark, but from the parlour came a faint light. Father sat in the chair by the window with his arms folded on the desk, and his head resting on his arms. The candle beside him had almost burnt down.
Legolas hesitated.
It was not the first time father fell asleep like that. He often worked until far into the night, or went up early because he could not sleep. Sometimes he stood by the southern window and looked out with his hands clasped behind his back, and it was not Greenwood he saw; it could not be, for it did not make him happy.
Sometimes Legolas wondered if he should hug him. They were all sad but it seemed to him that no one ever comforted the Elvenking.
But he had never dared to yet, and he did not dare to this time either.
The halls of the wood-elves deep in the mountain were still asleep, dark and quiet and very still. At some places there were arrow-slits where dawn peered in; at others Legolas had to feel his way with a hand to the wall. He pretended he was an adventurer, looking for treasures deep in a cave. He kept on hand on the belt knife (it was a sword) and thought of how he would fight the dragon, when he found it. The dragon could be anywhere. Once he heard the clicking of claws against the stone floor and quickly hid in a crossing tunnel, thinking for a second it truly was a dragon, but it was only Merilin's fox returning from a nightly hunt in the cellars.
"Good morning to you", Legolas whispered and reached down to scratch the fox beneath the furry chin. "I see you've had luck tonight."
The fox smiled contently and nuzzled his hand with the dead rat dangling from her gap. Even with her blind left eye she was an excellent rat hunter, as swift and precise as Merilin herself. It was Merilin who found her injured and took her in, and now the fox followed her like a lapdog.
They went their own way, fox and elf. Legolas went quietly down the narrow stair and through the broad tunnel with its painted roof that led to the Hall of Trees.
Even here there was no one. In the evenings, and far into the night, the Hall of Trees was full of elves, sitting on the long rough-hewn oak benches around the center hearth, talking and laughing and telling stories. Now that autumn was here the elves that lived in the forest came to the palace for shelter (expect those living by the Forest Road; they refused to move) and the Hall of Trees was the place to catch up with old friends. The elves sat their fletching arrows and greasing boots while they shared stories about the days' hunt or battles of old.
But now there was only the dogs sleeping on the straw, and a cat half awake on the still warm hearth-stones, watching with one eye a sparrow picking for bread crumbs between the rough boards of the table. Legolas looked up as he walked between the broad pillars, all shaped into trees, but it was too dark too make out the mighty stone branches that held up the roof above his head.
He pushed the heavy oak wood doors open and light fell on the doorstep. In came dawn, cold-fingered and frost-haired, pulling at his clothes; and Legolas laughed and leapt down the steps to the courtyard, jumping over the puddle at their feet without thinking - the courtyard sloped down to that point, and the puddle had been there since the end of september. The wind caught his hair and made leaves whirl down the mountainside.
While the doors to the Hall of Trees were closed to ward off cold winds, the magic stone doors in the cliff that surrounded the courtyard, the very entrance to the wood-elves' halls, were always open. The bridge guards greeted him merrily as he walked between them, beneath the intimidating arch of the Doors.
"I should've known it was you I heard laughing", Hethulin said and leaned casually on her spear. "My prince is up early."
"I was awake", Legolas said, "so why should I stay inside?"
She smiled. "True enough."
Legolas climbed down the steep bank at the side of the bridge, knelt on a slanting rock by the water and cupped his hands to drink. It was so cold it hurt to swallow, and he made a face and shuddered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he laughed a little and looked up at Greenwood, dark and full of shadows in the twilight. Upstreams the water-wheel creaked and splashed in the stillness.
Hethulin lent him a hand when he climbed back onto the bridge again.
"Well", she said, "you're not escaping any lessons, are you? I won't lie to your brother again, if he asks."
"I'm not", Legolas said, not bothering to try to remember if he was.
"Good. And Legolas..." Hethulin laid a hand on his arm and suddenly looked very grave. "Do you have your belt-knife?"
"Well, yes, but - "
"Don't go too far, especially not south."
Confused and a little bit uneasy, Legolas nodded. Hethulin smiled like he would think no further of it and let him go. Legolas shook the queasiness off. In Greenwood he would never be afraid.
"See you later then", he said, and the guards nodded and smiled. Then he hurried over the stone bridge across the little stream, light feet making barely a sound.
Thranduil cracked one eye open and looked after his son as he left. He had wanted to say something, but not known what.
There was something he must say, but how would he break such news, and to a child he barely knew? Gwiwileth could do it, he thought, but it did not feel right. Legolas could not hear it only from his mother. Thranduil had to be there. He had to be a father.
He left the chair to blow life in the embers on the hearth. His neck was aching, and his back, and sleeping with his head resting on his arm had left faint red lines of embroidery imprinted on his cheek. The flames woke unwillingly. Thranduil could not blame them. Autumn seeped in through every crack and fissure and made the Mountain as hazy as the forest; no one woke easily on such a day.
Expect for Legolas. The child woke early every day (unless he had morning lessons, and on bathing days) and Thranduil could only admire his his spirit. Had he been as energic when he was young? It was so long ago.
And he had never been much like Legolas in anything but looks. Gwiwileth said that he was - you have the same spirit, she said, only in Legolas it is quieter - but if so Thranduil had never come close enough to the child to see it. They hardly ever spoke, and when they did, Thranduil did not know what to say.
With the other two it had been so much simpler. Tinuhen would talk whether one listened or not, and though Thranduil could not agree with his love for noldor, there were some points on politics and culture they could both discuss with passion. Merilin was easy to talk to; sweet and gentle, always listening, always knowing how to keep a conversation light-hearted and interesting; a true lady she was, though she had a little of her mother's silvaness in her too.
But Legolas? Thranduil never knew how to approach him, and he did not have the patience of old to try.
"Thranduil, my love! Have you not slept at all?"
Thranduil turned, conciously smoothing down his robe. "I have, actually, though I regret it now. That chair is horribly uncomfortable to sleep in."
"It is not mean to be slept in", the Elvenqueen replied and slipped into his arms. She was still in her night-gown, that old one with pearls that CelebrÃan had made her long ago. It had lost most of its original green, yet Gwiwileth would not part from it.
"I was trying to write that letter", Thranduil said. "I couldn't quite figure out how to begin."
"And have you now?"
"I have written my dear lady."
"Not bad for a night's work." Gwiwileth walked over to the table by the window, gathering her hair into a loose braid it while she looked down on the heaps of letter that Thranduil had started, given up and thrown aside. She raised an eyebrow (delicately arched but messy; the Queen's eyebrows had a will of their own and refused to be tamed) and turned back to him."You have been wasting parchment, my dear - and the expensive sort too."
"I cannot write a letter to lady Galadriel on -"
"By the cloak of Elu Thingol - Merilin! Merilin! Your darned fox is - let go of that you beast!"
"Oh no", Gwiwileth sighed as Tinuhen burst through his door. His hair was unbraided, his night-shirt open, and Merilin's fox dangled from his hand by the scruff of her neck; a torn piece of parchment hung between her teeth, written full of beautiful letters in black and blue ink.
And now Merilin threw her own door open, yelled at Tinuhen for yelling at her, tore the fox from him and pressed it lovingly to her chest. Knowing her, Thranduil did not think it unlikely.
"May the Valar have mercy", he said, as Merilin took the parchment from her fox and tossed it aside. "The day has hardly begun and you are already fighting. Look, Tinuhen, it's almost whole..."
Tinuhen was boiling. "Almost whole? Almost whole, father? It's not in the book! The book will never be whole! Merilin, I've told you a thousand times to keep that fox on a leash - "
"And I've told you a thousand times not to have your window open!"
"I was enjoying the sound of the rain!" Tinuhen sputtered. There was a ledge between his and Merilin's windows, and sometimes the fox slipped into Tinuhen's room to look for interesting toys. "Perhaps you were too busy to braid your hair to notice, but it had a particularly fair sound this night - a poet's rain, as Daeron would have put it - and I am currently working on an essay about the different sounds of rain - "
"Will you shut up about your essays! You're just afraid you'll miss it when some maiden plays her lute beneath your window at night but Yavanna'll walk these woods before that happens!"
"Oh you insolent, unsophisticated - "
"Orc-spawn!"
"Here now!" Gwiwileth snapped. "The way you two quarrell one might think you were dwarves! Tinuhen, if you want your window open, put something up so the fox cannot enter. And Merilin, I don't ever want to hear you use such language again." She looked from sister to brother sternly, until they lowered their gazes to the floor. "I suggest you go back to your rooms until you can act like civilized people. Breakfast is not due yet."
The children muttered their apoligies and returned to their rooms, Tinuhen with the parchement and Merilin with the fox clutched tightly to her chest. Thranduil rubbed his temples. There had been a time when his eldest were as close as twins, and hardly an angry word was spoke between them.
"They will miss each other", Gwiwileth said. "A few weeks when they cannot trample on each other's nerves, and they may remember their good sides better than their bad."
"Unless Merilin spends those weeks seething over injustice", Thranduil said. He looked out the window, where light was spreading slowly behind the clouds, and suddenly yearned to be outside. "I think it is time Legolas learns. I fear he will not come off lightly if his brother and sister start fighting about this."
Legolas liked the Mountain Road because it felt like the forest, soft and earthy to bare feet (or wet and muddy, like now), but the elves rarely used it. It was for wagons and horses, and perhaps for noldor - they couldn't walk in a forest, for they'd stumble over their own importance, or so the wood-elves said. So when Legolas had come only a little distance from the forest-edge, he left it to follow his own paths, all secret and invisible.
The forest closed around him in a damp, moss-scented embrace. It grew so dense he could see nothing more than bearded branches and wrinkled hems, dark green and grey dappled with the red of autumn. The branches formed a green roof that the faint morning light could not penetrate, and so the forest was still filled with night, but it had a sort of light of its own - a dim green shimmer that always seemed to come from somewhere just out of your sight.
A hundred wind-breathed tree-voices followed him as the paths led up into the trees and down again; down shadowed glens with streams at the bottom, over clearings where misty spider-webs shimmered on the heather, and past dark forest pools where leaves floated on the surface and where, if you looked into them, you saw nothing of the bottom; only yourself, and the swaying trees above your head. Some of the trees had stood since the beginning of this Age, and some even longer than that. Their roots went deep into the dark earth, and their branches wove knotty and mossy towards the sky. Some boughs hung so low that even though Legolas was short for his age they stroke his cheeks with cold wet leaves and left silvery pearls in his hair.
Good morning, young one, old-oak-below-the-hill said when he passed.
"Good morning", Legolas said, for you should always be polite to oaks; they have long memories and mighty roots. "How did you fare the storm?"
A little north-wind cannot break a single twig from me, old-oak said.
It was very still. The only sounds were the water dripping softly into moss, and the fluttering of birds between the branches. Legolas followed a stream until he came to a narrow board bridge pushed deep in the mud. On the other side was the clearing where his family lived in the summers. Legolas crossed the bridge to look at it.
When he was little, the telain and the bridges connecting them had been his whole world; between them he had run and leapt as safe as a squirrell in the trees. They were nothing but wooden platforms, weather-worn and simple, and yet they were home. The world down on the ground he must have known, for in the tree-hall where he was born they had lived mostly on the ground, but he remembered nothing of it. After all, he had been very small when they left the tree-hall; small enough to have forgotten why they left. But he remembered the other places, the other telain from which they had moved, and moved, and moved again; and he remembered when they had come here, and that he had thought they were finally safe and would stay for ever. He remembered learning about the Mountain that the dwarves were digging out. One winter they had moved into it, a new world of stone and tunnels, and walls and closed doors. Now they only lived here in high summer.
Legolas looked up. All the telain had survived the storm, and looked strong and sturdy and welcoming still, even with their ladders rolled up and secured and no way up but through the branches. But there should be elves on them, and a fire on the ground. Merilin and mother should be there. The past summer both Tinuhen and father had often been in the Mountain, but mother and Merilin had always been there.
He went back to the stream and followed it a little further west. Deep down at the bottom of a hollow, shadowed by the trees on either side, the stream ran swift and dark. At one place it came tumbling down a cliff and splashed into a pool, blank as a mirror between great boulders. Willow-by-the-water stood guard there. She was ancient and crooked, her roots wriggling pale as worms over the stones, and Legolas sank down beside her to drink.
You are far from the mountain, little one, willow said, her voice the softest whisper. I am glad to see you again.
"I wanted to see if everything was all right. With you. And thetelain."
And was it?
"It was."
Legolas sat down on the wet stone and wrapped his arms around his knees. He wanted to tell willow about what he had heard that night, but he was not sure she would understand.
"Do you know how far away Rivendell is?" he asked instead.
The elves from there have different voices, she replied uncertainly. They feel different when they walk.
"It's across the mountains."
Willow smiled; Legolas could feel it through the soil beneath his feet. Maybe she did not know what mountains were. It was hard to tell with trees.
"Tinuhen says that if the Rivendell elves were swans, I'd be a sparrow, because I am stupid and unsophisticated."
But you are not stupid.
"Unsophisticated then?
Willow shifted her branches. What is that?
"I don't know. Tinuhen says it. About me."
Perhaps it means unbearable, as in playing too many pranks on others?
Legolas grinned. "That would be true."
Or, willow said, it means that someone is looking for you; for that, I believe, would also be true. Look up, little one!
Legolas looked up, confused - and there stood his father on the opposite bank, straight and tall in a long silk robe. Legolas jumped and almost fell backwards, but he caught himself on his hands in the last minute. He could have sworn father had not been there a second ago!
But there he was, calm and proud as always, with his hands clasped at his back, and the silver embroidery of his robe imprinted on his cheek. He wore his crown, the heavy silver piece his father had brought from Doriath. It glinted faintly under the the cloud-veiled sun.
Legolas hastily climbed to his feet.
"Good morning, father."
"Good morning, Legolas", father said. He walked down the brink as if it was a neatly trimmed lawn (Legolas had never seen a neatly trimmed lawn, but he imagined it was the kind of thing his father would have liked to walk down) and crossed the stream easily with his long legs, as if the stepping stones were a smooth stone floor. Legolas bowed his head and did not know what to do with his hands. Father came to stand before him, some feet down the slope, so that their eyes were almost at level.
"The trees told me where to find you", father said and smiled a little. "Stealthy as a hunting fox, aren't you? I thought I would never catch up. Have you had breakfast?"
"I'm not hungry." It was not quite true, but Legolas was too busy thinking about stealthy as a fox to think about that.
"Well then." Father smiled, then as usual he seemed unsure of how to go on. He reached for Legolas hand. "Come, sit here with me. There is something I need to talk to you about."
They sat down on the bank, Legolas absently digging his toes into the damp earth, his father carefully smooting out his robe. Thin metal threads had been woven into the fabric in intricate patterns, like the veins of a leaf. Father followed a vein with his long, slender fingers.
"Mith... Gandalf will ride away soon", father said after a while. "He has many errands to attend out in the world. He came here to tell your mother and I something very important. As you know, Legolas, Greenwood... Greenwood is not like it used to."
Legolas shuddered. "At some places, you mean."
"Yes, at some places. And your mother and I, and Radagast and Gandalf, have used all our knowledge and wisdom to try and do something about it, but everything we have tried so far has failed. This... sickness, this Shadow. It is very strong."
"Yes."
"Have you felt that?"
"It's... sometimes it is like it's watching. Like it's laughing."
Father nodded, and his gaze became distant as if it was no longer the trees on the riverbank he saw. "You are very much a wood-elf, like your mother. Greenwood is mourning, she says, and it is angry. We think that which is behind the Shadow... what is causing it... it is something not only tied to Greenwood. One might say there is a net over all of Middle Earth, and at its core, in the Shadow, is the spider that weaves the net."
Legolas looked up at him. Father's eyes were very dark, like forest pools. "In Dol Guldur?"
Father plucked with the pearls sewn onto his sleeve. "Yes. In Dol Guldur. There is a sorcerer i in that dark place, a great magician, and he... well, he..."
Legolas pulled his knees up to his chest. Willow whispered sadly over their heads.
"Gandlaf fears this sorcerer", father said. "As do I, in a way that Gandalf do not understand. He thinks that... well... there are some mighty and important people who should be told about the sorcerer, and there is a meeting of sorts where he wants your mother and I to tell them about this. You heard us talk about it, I think. That meeting is in Rivendell."
Legolas watched him, waiting for an explanation.
Father tilted his head to the side. "Gwiwileth and I have no desire to travel to Rivendell, but your brother has. He has been there when he was young, to learn the ways of the Rivendell elves. They are very learned, those elves, arrogant as they may seem, and it was good for Tinuhen to be taught in manners and formalities and the politics of Middle Earth, such things that the noldor knows very well. Merilin went there too, when she was in your age." Faher hesitated, then went on: "Princes and princesses must know a lot of things. They must know the ways of other people than those they represent; it is their responsibility to understand the world outside their homes."
There was something strange in his voice and Legolas was certain he did not want to hear anything more.
"So, Legolas... since you are not a small child anymore, and the Misty Mountains are now safer than they have been for many years, your mother and I have decided that you will accompany Tinuhen to Rivendell."
Legolas stared at him. "I don't want to."
"There is nothing to be afraid of, you will - "
"I don't want to!" Legolas said and stood up. "I don't want to leave Greenwood! I know nothing of Rivendell, expect that the noldor are snobbish and arrogant and nobody likes them but Tinuhen and I don't want to be like Tinuhen!"
"Here, now", father said and tried to get Legolas to sit down again, "listen to me first. No one wants you to become like the noldor, or to be honest, like Tinuhen. But you need to learn more about the world. Goodness, Legolas, your mother and I have completely neglected to teach you how to be a prince, and..."
"But I can learn to be a prince. I can just do what Tinuhen and Merilin do. Look, I don't have to be unsophi.. unsophisticate. Sophisticated."
Father smiled a bit nervously. "Are you not excited at all to leave Greenwood? To see Anduin, the Misty Mountains? It will be a real adventure, Legolas, I promise."
"I don't like adventures."
"Now that's not true."
Legolas bit his lip. "I've never been further than Lake-town. I don't want to go away. I don't know anything about anything else than Greenwood.
"Child", father said and took Legolas' hands in his. When he sat down, and Legolas stood up, he was still only a head taller. "I know that you must feel frightened. You love Greenwood, and you understand it; it speaks to you like the world outside never will. You are just like your mother - silvan to your finger-tips. Are you not?"
"I don't know."
"I think you are." Father smiled. "All but your looks you got from Gwiwileth, and if you're unlucky you'll even have her height. Yet you have sindar blood in your veins. My blood, my father's blood, the blood of Doriath. You have heard of the wonders of Doriath. They were a very magnificient people."
Legolas watched him uncertainly, wondering what that long-lost kingdom had to do with anything.
"The elves of Doriath were learned", father said. "I remember the libraries, known all over Beleriand, and the songs and tales passed down mouth to ear for thousands of years. They had so much knowledge that was then lost. They knew all about history and the lands of Middle Earth, but also about book-binding and parchment-making and cloth-dying and leather-making; they were learned in all sort of things, you see, but what about the silvan elves? What do they know?" He looked at Legolas. "What do the silvan elves know?"
The answer was simple. "They know the forest."
"And they know it well, roots to tree-tops - and so do you, or you will, when you are a little older. But you are a prince. You must know more."
"I can learn it here", Legolas said. "We've got books, and I can read."
"Not as many books as one might wish. And Legolas - do you know why the Doriath elves knew so much?"
"Because they had more books than us?"
Father laughed, a small kingly chuckle that was hastily stifled, but it was a laugh all the same. "Partly that", he said, "but you cannot learn all things from reading. Words read are only words, after all. The elves of Doriath travelled, Legolas, far and wide. That it why they knew so much."
Legolas looked at his bare feet in the soil, surrounded by tendrils of water, then at father in his splendid silk robe. Truly he would be a sparrow among swans, and though he liked sparrows, he did not want to be one.
"I'm a prince of Greenwood, not of the whole Middle-Earth."
"So you are", father said patiently, "but wish as we may, Greenwood is not alone in the world. We get wares from Lake-town..."
"But I've been to Lake-town already!"
"The silk", father said, "and the wine and the spices, have travelled to Lake-town from the end of the world. The goblin bands that come into the forest come with plunder from the west; and the rangers of the north sometimes use our roads. I once fought side by side with noldor and Men of the south. Greenwood is in Middle-earth, and Middle-eath will be in Greenwood wether we want it or not. We need to know it, if we are to know Greenwood. But I would not let my youngest son travel to Gondor, so Rivendell will have to do."
"How far is Gondor?"
"Further than you will ever go, if I have any say in the matter. The road there is harsch and unforgiving. The road back..." He shuddered, and suddenly fell silent. Father had went to the south to fight in the War once, long before Legolas was born, and only a few of the elves who left had come back with him home.
Legolas bit his lip again.
"So", he said, "I have to go to Rivendell."
"Your mother and I have decided that you will."
"When?"
Father's smile became apologizing, in a way. "The reason Gandalf came so unexpectedly was that he was in a hurry to deliver his message. The meeting Tinuhen will attend would have been in spring, but the date has been changed, and the message that Gandalf sent to tell us about that never arrived. The meeting will be this winter, and to cross the Misty Mountains before the snow shuts the passes you must leave as soon as possible. A few days of preparation is all we can afford."
Princes don't cry, Legolas told himself. Princes aren't scared.
"But", father said, "perhaps you shall find that Middle-earth is not so bad, once you are there."
"There will never be a place I'd rather be than Greenwood."
"Says the bear cub, before it's left the lair and seen the sun." Father smiled, then stood up. "You need to eat a proper breakfast, if you ever want to grow taller than a dwarf. Come walk home with me, if you can stand to stay on the ground - I am not dressed for climbing trees."
They walked back in silence, but father took Legolas' hand in his, and he did not let go until they saw the bridge behind the opening of the trees.
There are two changes of canon in this chapter. Firstly I've added a courtyard behind the magical doors, because I figured the elves need somewhere to keep horses, livestock and a smithy. The courtyard is surrounded by the mountain on all sides but is open to the sky, in case that was not clear enough in the text, and behind this is the cave itself. Secondly, Thranduil has a crown made of silver instead of the leaf-crown he wears in The Hobbit. I have a feeling someone might want to point this out, so before you do: I'm aware of the changes and they're there for a reason :)
Thank you all for reading and commenting!