They rode east under the stars till they came to the banks of the Entwash.
"Would the ford be about two leagues down?" he asked her.
"I believe so," she said uncertainly. It was night. The open plains offered her no landmark.
He looked at her. "We shall stop here for the night." She was swaying from exhaustion. He lifted her down from Asfaloth's back.
After they dismounted, he said, "Forgive me. You are half-dead with weariness and grief, and I should have noted it earlier. And I forgot your need to eat." And he presented her with a wafer wrapped in a leaf, and went to fill his waterskin from the river. When he returned, he added two drops from a small glass vial into the waterskin. "To purify it for drinking," he said, and passed it to her. "Was the wafer to your taste?" For she had finished it.
She nodded, feeling much strengthened. "My thanks." And she drank deeply of the sweet clean water from the skin. "What of yourself?" she asked, fearing she had eaten all he had.
He smiled. "Elves need not eat as men do. I have enough to last us both a long while, and I can easily forego food for the next week at least." He looked out over the windswept plains. "Sleep now, child. I will keep watch." He sat down on the grass, his swords set by his side.
She lay down on the grass not far from him, her bundle pillowing her head. "Why do you call me child? I am seventeen and a woman full grown soon, and you a youth surely no older than my brother who is but twenty-one."
She saw his blue eyes dance and shine bright as the stars above them, and he burst into a peal of musical laughter. "Ah, daughter of the Rohirrim! Is that how old you think me? Nay. Assay another guess, I pray you." He rose and took out a cloak from Asfaloth's panniers and covered her, for the night wind was cold and she looked chilled. She was astonished by the cloak's warmth despite its thinness
Her grey eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Twenty-five?"
"I am of the elvenfolk, who age not nor pass from the circles this world. I have died once, and live again, and in this form I have dwelt now for. . ." His voice trailed off teasingly, inviting her to guess. He stretched his long legs before him, one knee bent, and leaned back upon an elbow, smiling enigmatically.
"A hundred years?" she ventured, uncertainly.
He laughed again, a joyous sound. "Nay, young one." He shook his head slowly. He gazed into her grey eyes, and suddenly, in the depths of his star-bright blue ones, she saw a swift passage of ages, a vision of ages of history sweeping over the vast lands of Middle Earth, of wars and heroes, dragons and demons, generations of men, lands reshaped and swallowed beneath the seas. She broke away from the hold of his eyes with a sharp intake of breath, and saw his boyish face suddenly agelessly ancient, weighted with the wisdom and memory of millennia.
"I have seen six thousand years in this second body, and two thousand in my first," he said, his starlit eyes solemn though a smile still played on his lips.
Her eyes were wide, unable to comprehend so long a time, and indeed still struggling to grasp all he had disclosed of himself.
"I knew the world before sun and moon were made," he said, looking up at the star-filled sky. "I wandered this valley when it was younger, and fought alongside your forebears when they dwelt still in the Rhovanion. I rode with Eorl the Young, when he first came to the Wold. I must say that you have a great look of your ancestor, daughter of the Éothéod."
She gazed at him in silent awe.
"Go to sleep, child." And as he reclined on the grass, he began to sing a gentle song in his own tongue. She drifted off to sleep on the notes of that lulling, lilting song and dreamt of a fair white city surrounded by snow-capped peaks taller than the Misty Mountains.
(Note: my thanks to the reader who reminded me that Tolkien calculated distances in leagues rather than miles. The change has been made!)