19 / 3 /16 ~ In which Eleanor and company contend with a posse of angry horse lords, and a pile of burned corpses.

Disclaimer: "The Lord of the Rings" is the property of J. R. R. Tolkien. I only claim ownership over Eleanor Dace, Rávamë (aka "Tink"), and the subsequent plot of their story.

A/N: Well this chapter was a loooooooong time coming, over an entire month! So sorry for that sinfully long wait y'all, you've been so patient with me and it's so appreciated you, have no idea.

The delay (as some of you may have noticed) is because I've started another little urban fantasy project on the side — and the usual dramas that come with looking for a new job. Go check out my profile page if you're interested, though for those of you who are firmly fixed in this fandom, fear not, CM remains my top priority.

As always, bountiful thanks to: Whimsical Acumen, tyrantOFathens, Arenas, silverwolfwarrior13, zazanga, MintBonBon, Shiningheart of ThunderClan, animagirl, Imamc, Jimmy10.0, second breakfast, WickedGreene13, Yaulewen, katnor, Yui's Sweet Dream, Luckygirl1013, K.Y.1234, Sharn-sharn, Lady British, Gammily, Nevermore186, ConstantlyMunchinOnApples, aqua-empress, LightOverDarkness, InOcEnT-schoolgirl, c-hanting, Lacrea Moonlight, KeeperMusicNight, and guests for all the fantastic feedback. Some of those reviews were so thoughtful and well considered I genuinely found myself reading some of them (along with your awesome theories) to my mother. Love all of you guys and your beautiful brains. Thank you.

Now, onward with the update, I hope you enjoy it. :)

Part I : Chapter 3

- Running Uphill -

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception." ― Groucho Marx

By the time the last of the setting sun's light had vanished over the horizon, we were running.

I say running — Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and to an extent even Boromir were all running.

What I was doing could probably be generously described as stumbling, or possibly loping. After four more loaves of lambas two more skins of water, half a hare, and two partridges all to myself a few hours before — though I couldn't quite work out where Aragorn had kept them all until now — I'd managed to scrape up enough energy to manage a slow but steady jog.

My legs worked, but were still terribly weak and unsteady compared to their usual strength and speed. I paced behind Aragorn and Legolas, who were taking turns leading the way, and I was so focused on keeping sight of them in the dark that I'd lost count of the times I tripped or snagged my foot on a stray stone. There were already some lovely scrapes on my knees and hands from where I hadn't managed to catch myself in time. It was almost pitch black, the crescent moon and stars overhead providing the only light source, and even with my snazzy elf eyesight, I was struggling to see where my feet were going.

Behind me, Gimli and Boromir brought up the rear of our convoy. I could hear their heavy footfalls on the ground, as well as the occasional grunts and Khuzdul curses whenever Gimli tripped or stumbled over obstructions the rest of us were tall enough to avoid.

Boromir, on the other hand, barely made a sound at all, save for the laboured breaths plaguing us all from running for seemingly endless miles cross country in the dark.

He still hadn't spoken to me once since I'd woken, but from the look I'd caught of him while we all ate and got ready to leave, I'd got the impression that he wasn't nearly as weak as me anymore — though he was still nowhere near peak strength. I knew he was more than capable of overtaking me as we ran through the night, but he never did, not once. He deliberately kept pace behind me in the gloom the whole time, his footfalls never getting closer than a few feet behind me. Whenever I sped up a little, he stayed back just far enough to keep me in sight. When I began to tire and started to slow down, so did he, remaining at a constant distance in my wake, like a watchful shadow.

I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck the entire time, and if I hadn't been so focused on just keeping my legs moving, it might have given me the chills.

Lost in thought, I almost ran straight into the back of Legolas as Aragorn ahead of him suddenly came to a stop. I toppled sideways, but Legolas caught my hand in the dark and tugged me upright again with barely any effort.

"Thanks," I puffed out between deep breaths. I couldn't really see his face — it was far too gloomy even with the moon and stars — but I felt his small smile at me. His warm hand gave mine a gentle squeeze before reluctantly letting go, and I tried to ignore the urge I suddenly had to reach out and take it back again.

"Aragorn?" Legolas asked quietly to the man, who had stooped to kneel and genuinely press his ear to the ground.

"Why are we slowing?"

I very nearly jumped at the sound of Boromir's quiet voice coming from several steps behind me in the darkness. An overreaction to hearing one of my companions speak, perhaps, but it was the first time I'd heard him utter a word since I'd woken — and he most definitely did not sound like the man I remembered. His voice was the same, if a little croaky and breathless, but it had also gone flat, hardened, with an unsettlingly cold edge that made my skin crawl. I'd always remembered him as having a strong voice, and it still was despite his obvious exhaustion. Now, however, it sounded as if some crucial part that made it his was missing, hidden away behind a stony barrier that had gone up the second he'd seen me look at him hours before.

I felt a slow, cold sensation rise inside me, and forced myself not to try and look over at him in the dark, no matter how hard it was to resist. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to see the expression that went with that voice, or if it was aimed at me. No one else had seemed to take much heed, or else they had already grown uneasily used to it by now. Only Legolas seemed to grow tense whenever he was close, though I couldn't guess at why that would have been.

Aragorn's hand lifted in the dim light, a gesture for silence, and we all held as still as possible as he pressed his head closer to the ground still, listening to the vibrations of our quarry running through the earth.

"Their pace has quickened," he murmured, suddenly back up to his feet and already moving again, with barely any time to let the rest of us catch up. "They must have caught our scent! Come!"

Gimli and I both groaned at the prospect of more running, but we both knew there was no choice.

"I'm wasted on cross country! We dwarves are natural sprinters!" Gimli insisted loudly, charging ahead after Aragorn, as if to prove a point. Under normal circumstances, I would have been running right along with him, but my lungs and legs were still aching with the prolonged effort and limited energy, forcing me to pull in a few deep breaths first.

"Can you still run?" Legolas asked me quietly, and I felt him deliberately lean his head down close to mine so no one else would hear my reply — bless him. I nodded, still forcing myself to take in a few extra breaths before starting again.

"Yes, I'm alright," I replied just as quietly, tilting my head just a little towards his. "Let's go."

With that, we were running again, downhill and straight back into the dark. Clouds had begun to roll over the moon as we continued behind Aragorn, and it was suddenly all but impossible to see more than a few feet in front. I didn't dare slow down, though. I could hear Legolas' and Gimli's footfalls just a few feet ahead, and I didn't relish the idea of loosing them in the dark. Or falling back to where I'd be on my own with only Boromir's hard, untrusting gaze on the back of my still vulnerable neck…

I shoved that thought away to the very back of my mind as the ground levelled out beneath our feet, refusing to even acknowledge it. I could worry about why Boromir was behaving this way later. Right now, we all had a bigger issue.

Something big and solid suddenly caught on my foot, and before I knew what was happening, my balance went out from under me, and I'd sprawled face first into the dirt. An embarrassingly high pitched squeak followed by a loud grunt of pain escaped me as I hit the ground, all my aches and bruises suddenly turned to stabbing pangs all up my left side.

I tried immediately to get up and keep going, but something had stuck in the leather of my boot, and I twisted with an awkward groan to see what it was.

The clouds picked that precise moment to roll back from the face of the moon, and the sudden light gave me an up-close and personal view of a very dead Uruk lying at my feet.

Another embarrassingly girly noise escaped me without my permission as I instantly jerked away.

It had been lying so flat against the ground that I would never have seen it in the dark, even with my sharpened eyesight, had I not just tripped straight over it. Now it was lying face up, maw hanging open and eyes rolled back in its head, and there was a generous amount of black blood covering its dented armour from a tear in its neck that looked disturbingly like it had been made by teeth. It was still ugly as sin, but is was also very notably shorter than the kind I'd seen at Amon Hen — squatter, and without that horrifying, predatory look that the monsters who'd attacked us had. One of the jagged spikes on its pauldrons was still caught on my boot.

"Guys, stop! Look!" I called out into the dark just as I heard rather than saw Boromir's silhouette grind to a halt a few feet from me.

I tried to shake my foot loose, but all I accomplished as the others appeared out of the dark was to drag the dead creature's corpse across the grass. Gimli appeared at my side, and between the two of us we managed to get the spiked pauldron unstuck from my foot and he helped me back up to my feet.

Only then did I realise, looking around as the moonlight lit up the ground around me, that there wasn't just one dead creature lying in the grass. There were many, well over a dozen — and all of them very dead. Terrifyingly so.

"What is this?" Gimli rasped, still a bit out of breath from the cross country running, kicking one of the other cadavers that had been stuck with a spear into its back. Its head rolled away from its mangled shoulders, and I felt my face twist in revulsion at the sight and smell of the blackened blood smeared across the ground.

"A hunting party," Aragorn answered in a grim tone, hunching down just close enough to observe one in the gloom. "Are any of them still alive?"

"No," Legolas answered immediately from where he'd appeared out of the dark, clearly from inspecting the rest of the bodies. "Sixteen of them, all dead."

Curbing my sudden urge to throw up in my mouth from the smell of blood and body odour, I hunched down on my sore legs to get a closer look at one. It had the same white paint hand print of Saruman the Uruk-hai had had on the chest plate of his armour, though it was a lot smaller and less conspicuous. Lower ranked maybe.

"Is it just me or are they a little on the short side compared to what we saw at Amon Hen?" I asked, not really expecting an answer, though I got one regardless.

"These are Orcs, not Uruk-hai," Aragorn informed me, coming to stand beside me and peering down at one of the slightly less mutilated ones. "Likely one of the many that have been tracking us since before Moria."

I nodded, took a breath, held it, and reluctantly rolled a less bloody Orc's head to the side so I could press the back of my hand to its neck. I was a little scared the thing would spontaneously spring back to life and try to rip my face off if I got too close.

"They're still warm. They can't have been dead for more than a couple of hours at most," I said, quickly retracing my hand and wiping it on the side of my leg. "What are they even doing out here?"

"They must have encountered the party that took Merry and Pippin, then turned on each other during the night," Legolas spoke quietly as if he was thinking aloud, eyeing the Orc with the torn throat with much the same expression I'd had. "An in-fight such as this would have slowed them down some."

"It is almost dawn now," Aragorn said with grim determination. "Once the sun rises, we may be close enough to track them by sight."

I was about to stand up when something small lying in the grass caught my eye, reflecting the silver moonlight far too clearly to be any part of the dead Orc's blackened armour. I nudged the corpse's arm aside and picked it up, rubbing the dirt and dried blood off with the remains of my shredded sleeve. A small, silver brooch sat in the palm of my hand, the finely wrought metal formed by skilled hands to resemble the shape of a leaf.

My heart leaped as I recognised it instantly — I had one identical to it clasping the neck of my cloak closed. Each of us had.

I whirled abruptly to find Aragorn and Legolas both looking over my shoulder in interest.

"It's one of theirs," I said excitedly, holding it up. "They don't come undone easily. Merry or Pip must have dropped it on purpose."

Something very much like triumphant hope flickered behind Aragorn's eyes, and even in the dark it was easy to see.

"Not idly do the leaves of Lórien fall."

"They're leaving us a trail, cunning little masters," Gimli put hope-filled word to what we were all thinking, and Aragorn nodded in solemn agreement.

"Then we still have hope of finding them before they reach Isengard," I heard Boromir's voice sound quietly from off to my left, and despite the fact that I'd already heard him speak, the familiar yet alien sound of it still left me with a cold feeling in my chest.

"There is," Aragorn answered almost as quietly, pressing my hand closed over the leaf brooch of Lothlórien and then turning, taking off into a run again. "Hurry, all of you. We cannot slow now."

Legolas glanced at me as I tucked the little trinket into one of the empty pouches on my belt, then took off ahead as soon as he was sure I was still able to keep up. I hadn't missed the cautious look he'd thrown over my shoulder at Boromir as we moved off into the dark again, but I didn't let myself dwell on it. My mind was too fixated on Merry and Pippin, and despite the hope I now had flooding through me at the fact they were still able to deliberately leave us tracking clues, I couldn't push away the worry for them.

They were still the Uruk-hai's prisoners; the same monsters that had come close to killing both Boromir and I. I didn't want to think about what we would need to face in order to free them when we did finally catch up to them — but I wanted to think about what would happen to the two hobbits if we didn't catch them even less.

So, instead, I made myself focus on running, just keeping my legs moving forward even as they began to burn and plead for rest.

Dawn came only an hour later, but despite my growing exhaustion I was relieved to finally have the first rays of the morning sun lighting my path again instead of the moon. We'd fallen back into our original convoy pattern with Legolas and Aragorn jointly leading the way, while Gimli, Boromir and myself brought up the rear respectively. I realised that I must have been slowing down more and more the further we'd gone, because Gimli suddenly drew up next to me, huffing and puffing like a hairy, red, steam engine, despite his heavy war axe weighing him down.

I was kind of impressed he'd managed to keep up this far without collapsing — I wasn't carrying half the weight as him, and I could feel myself tiring to the point of my legs shaking whenever we slowed to catch our breaths.

Boromir however, still remained a good few feet behind us, and I couldn't help but notice it more and more the further we ran.

"Legolas, what can you see?" Aragorn called to where the other elf had taken the lead and I raised my head from the ground to see him standing high up on the crest of a rocky hill up ahead, eyes scanning the horizon.

"They are almost within sight!" he answered back, gaze still fixed on the miles of grassland that was suddenly stretching out ahead of us. "Their path has turned northeast, straight towards Isengard."

Aragorn, Gimli and Boromir all slowed to a stop on the ledge just below him, but I urged my tired muscles to carry me further up the hill to his side, intent on seeing what he'd found myself. I had to push my legs to not collapse out from under me as I came to a stop beside him. The über-fit elven showoff didn't seem tired in the slightest anymore. He wasn't even breathing hard.

I peered out into the distance in roughly the same direction as him, trying to focus all my attention on sharpening my eyesight like he'd shown me back in Lothlórien, rather than the tiredness now pulsing through my whole body.

Just about managing it, I scanned the horizon littered with stone outcrops and miles of grasslands bathed in watery morning sunlight.

"I don't see anything out there," I said quietly from beside him.

"You have your sight focused?" he asked, his tone part curious and part surprised. I pursed my lips at that, feeling his surprised gaze on me, but nodded.

"You did teach me how, didn't you?"

With no shame whatsoever, he put his hand flat on the top of my head and turned my face a few degrees to the left, pointing ahead of me.

"Look there. Keep your eyes fixed on one point and look hard."

I did as he instructed, fixing my eyes on the point he'd indicated, and tried determinedly to ignore the irritatingly pleasant feeling of his fingers in my hair.

At first I couldn't understand what he was trying to make me see — there was nothing before us but miles and miles of open, rolling planes stretching out towards what looked like the edges of a forest, far off on the horizon. My eyes narrowed as I forced them to try and look harder. Then finally I saw it, just beyond a distant shelf of rocks — flattened grass and torn earth where the Uruk-hai had very recently crushed the ground underfoot. And just beyond that, almost too far into the distance for even an elf's eyes to see, a tall plume of smoke rose from somewhere just on the edge of a line of thick trees.

My eyes widened, along with my smile, drifting in wonder at the sight I'd been able to conjure up from so far away — but the smile vanished as my gaze suddenly found something else that we hadn't been looking for. Specifically, a lot of somethings, all of them big, armoured, and most of them carrying very sharp-looking spears, their razor tips glinting in the watery daylight.

"Um, guys," I started, a nervous tremor creeping into my voice as I tried to count them all, and lost count at thirty. "There's a group of really angry-looking men on horseback headed straight towards us."

Legolas shifted suddenly next to me, his arm brushing my shoulder as he urgently tried to follow my gaze.

"Where?"

Without looking away, I reached up, pinched his chin between my forefinger and thumb, and turned his face to look in the same direction as I. I felt a very slight shiver run through him from my fingertips, before the rest of his body tensed with sudden alertness the second he saw what I was seeing. That did exactly nothing to lessen my sense of impending danger. I had no idea who they were, or what they wanted, but if they were enough to put Legolas on the defensive, I was fairly sure I would have done well to turn and run like a rabbit in the other direction.

"Who are they?" Aragorn demanded from below as the riders moved close enough for us to see them more clearly.

"Rohan riders — an entire battalion," Legolas told him clearly, his voice gone hard with defensive caution.

"And they really don't look happy to see us," I added, suppressing the urge to bolt at the sight of the man who was leading the horde. He was armoured from head to toe like a tank, carried a sword at his hip, and wielded a spear that could have skewered a bantha. Even from a miles away he looked like he knocked people out with his forehead and buried them in shallow graves for a living.

"Under what banner?" Boromir's voice cut in, and though they were close enough for us both to see by now, Legolas answered before I could even open my mouth.

"Green, with a white horse under a golden sun."

"Theoden's men," Aragorn muttered, and the name rang a bell of recognition in the back of my head. I didn't get the chance to contemplate it further before I was jarred out of my binocular-vision by Legolas' gentle but firm hand on my upper arm. The horde was still headed straight for us, and they were almost close enough to see us, but instead of turning to hide or run away, Aragorn led us away from the outcrop of rock into plain sight.

"What are you doing? Shouldn't we hide?" I asked a little frantically, coming to stand close.

He shook his head, but didn't show any overt signs of worry or concern for the riders cresting the hill. He did lean his head down almost imperceptibly though, and whispered to me: "Keep silent, and stay close. Do nothing to deliberately antagonise them."

I gulped, but nodded once.

"Alrighty, captain," I whispered back just as quietly, heeding his advice and slipping further behind him and Legolas as the riders charged head-on towards us.

For a moment, I honestly though they were going to run us down, the thundering of hooves barely slowing as they broke over the top of the hill and around us like water over a rock, circling behind us on all sides. Aragorn didn't so much a twitch as the riders and their mounts roiled around us, but Gimli, Legolas and Boromir shifted noticeably so that their backs were to Aragorn's, blocking me from direct view or reach of the riders surrounding us. The back of Boromir's hand brushed my arm as Legolas gently pushed me behind them, and I felt more than saw him jerk away from me — as if the contact with my skin had burned him.

He needn't have worried about harm coming from me, because the riders chose that moment to display their precise intentions by lowering their spears to aim at the five of us, the tips barely a foot from slicing into skin. I tensed automatically, my body and expression going taught and utterly still, eyes fixed on the javelin tip one of the riders currently had aimed at the middle of a very calm Aragorn's throat.

My fingers itched to reach into my dagger pouch where my throwing knives were sleeping, but he suddenly raised both his hands in a gesture of peace — and I was fairly sure that putting a blade through one of their necks wouldn't have helped.

'Keep it cool, boss. We can save the homicidal heroics for when we aren't at spear-point,' Tink whispered through my head, and while it wasn't exactly enough to make me relax, the sound of her voice of reason did help quell the twitching in my throwing fingers.

I settled for a hard glare at the one holding the spear to my companion's face instead, hoping the expression hid my nerves.

The armoured riders — all who I now saw were scowling back ferociously under their horsehair-plumed helmets — made a small gap in their ranks as the rider I recognised as their scary-looking leader stepped forward on his massive, chestnut stallion. I'd thought he was big and imposing from almost a mile away. Up close, and towering over all five of us, the effect was tripled, and I was suddenly glad that my mere 5'3 was more than small enough to be mostly invisible behind Legolas and Boromir's 6-foot-somethings.

The leader glared down at us with an expression I would have normally associated with rotten fish or raw sewage, and when he spoke it was anything but friendly.

"What business do two men, two elves, and a dwarf have in the Riddermark?" he demanded in a basso rumble made all the harder by the obvious anger in it. "Speak quickly!"

Aragorn had barely opened his mouth to respond when Gimli, leaning both hands casually on his axe as if it were a gentleman's walking stick, beat him to it.

"Give me your name, horse master, and I shall give you mine," he said, though his polite tone belied the challenging gleam in his eyes. Clearly Gimli didn't care for being threatened so rudely at blade point — after running all night with no rest, no less — any more than the rest of us.

I could respect that.

Granted, I could have respected it a hell of a lot more if he hadn't just said it out loud to a bunch of angry men who all looked ambivalent to the idea of turning us into shish kababs — but that was just me.

The human man blinked once at the dwarf, handed his own spear to another rider, and dismounted his horse in one smooth swing — a move that a man so weighed down with armour and bulk shouldn't have been capable of. He moved forward, all but towering over Gimli like an angry bear, but confrontationally speaking, Gimli was armoured like a battleship. He didn't look impressed, but he didn't take his hand off where it rested faux-casually atop his axe, either.

"I would cut off your head, dwarf," the huge man growled, sounding by all rights more like an animal than a man. "If only it stood a little higher from the ground.

Legolas reacted so fast and so suddenly, then, I don't think any of us actually saw it happen. His arm moved, and the next thing anyone of us knew, there was a barbed arrow aimed straight at the horse lord's left eye.

"You would be dead before you sword left its sheath," he said in an utterly flat, deadly voice, far more frightening and cold than a snarl could have ever been, his eyes gone arctic down the shaft of the arrow.

All of us froze in shock, even the advancing man, stopping dead in his tracks though he didn't otherwise react. His dark eyes locked on Legolas' unsettlingly calm gaze, and I saw carefully controlled anger stir behind them.

The look the man directed at my friend scared me, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself putting a hand gently on Legolas' bow-arm, holding steady at the man's face. It was a careful touch, barely there at all, really. I was scared I might accidentally jar him into loosing the arrow and actually shoot the scary git, and then we'd really be in for it.

He barely reacted visibly, but for a split second I felt his shoulders tense under my hand — and while he didn't look away, my unspoken plea was obviously heard anyway. Reluctantly, his whole form relaxed, slowly lowering the arrow once he was sure the horse lord wasn't going to try and take another step towards us, though he didn't take his hard, blue-grey eyes off his target's face.

I heaved an internal sigh of relief, stealing a glance at the faces of the other men. I don't think any of us, the other riders included, looked half as surprised as Gimli at what had just happened. I thought for a moment that his eyebrows were going to retreat up under his helm as he stared at the elf. Then, Aragorn pointedly stepped in front of us all, blocking the dither beam still passing between Legolas and the scary-eyed horse lord.

"I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn," he said with an amiable sort of politeness I felt the other man hadn't really earned.

"This is Gimli, son of Gloin; Boromir, son of Denethor; Legolas, of the Woodland Realm; and Eleanor, of Imladris," he continued, gesturing to each of us in turn. The man glanced at each of us as he did, his hard gaze lingering for a fraction longer on Legolas, and to my immense discomfort, softening slightly on me. "We are friends of Rohan, and of Theoden, your king."

The leader drew his uncomfortably intense but now curious gaze from me, his hardened expression flickering with the shadow of long-held anguish. It looked alien on him somehow — a huge man who seemed more suited to violent battles and probably equally violent drinking contests than that kind of sadness.

"Theoden no longer recognises friend from foe. Not even his own blood, let alone five strangers claiming to be allies," he told Aragorn, his tone still hard, but less of it aimed at us. He reached up and pulled the helm with its horsehair adornment from his head, revealing a handsome if world-worn face, with a sharp, square jaw, dark brown eyes, and a messy mane of blond hair.

He took another glance at us all, his dark eyes once again lingering curiously on me, and Legolas shifted subtly, but very deliberately so that his shoulder half shielded me from view again. The man met the other elf's gaze instead, frowned, then gave a negligent wave with one hand, and the riders surrounding us all simultaneously raised their spears and weapons away from us.

You could all but hear the exhale of relief, and maybe even a touch of disappointment. No fighting; not today anyway.

"I recognise your face," Boromir spoke up unexpectedly from behind Aragorn, his eyes focused at the blond man's face as we turned to look at him. Both Aragorn and the blond man looked equally surprised by the statement, but the rider recovered first, his surprise sinking back into weary suspicion.

"I am Éomer, son of Eomund, the Third Marshall of the Riddermark. These here are my company," he answered, jerking his square chin at the men on horseback still surrounding us in a perfect circle.

As per usually, the name rang a bell of recognition at the back of my head, but I had little to no idea of its significance. Thankfully, Aragorn cleared up that confusion by saying with undisguised surprise: "You are King Theoden's nephew, and one of the key leaders of the Rohirrim."

The blond man's — Éomer's — eyes narrowed at him, but he nodded, and Aragorn went on, accompanied by a small gesture towards the way we'd heading before being surrounded. "I have never known the riders of the Rohirrim to come this far north in such numbers."

Éomer's jaw visibly tightened in frustrated anger, but for once, it wasn't directed at any of us. He glanced out towards the South with a dark look on his face before returning it to us.

"We are no longer welcome in the Riddermark we are sworn to defend. Saruman has poisoned the mind of the King and claimed lordship over these lands. My company and I are those that remain loyal to Rohan, and for that we have been banished." Dark brown eyes met grey as he fixed Aragorn with another hard stare, filled with blunt distrust rather than anger this time — though it had about as much effect on Aragorn as a strong breeze did on an ancient oak.

"The White Wizard is cunning. He walks here and there they say, disguised as a frail old man, hooded and cloaked," Éomer told us quietly, eyes shifting between each of us again, before coming to a stop once again on an unimpressed looking Legolas. "And everywhere, his seemingly innocent spies slip past our nets."

Scary looking as the man was, and bad as it would be to upset him any more than he already was — the more he used that accusatory glare at the others, the more my fear was eclipsed by rapidly growing annoyance at the entire, long-winded display of male ego.

Still obedient to Aragorn, I didn't say anything, and true to my word, I did keep close. Instead, I took a very purposeful step forward and to my left, so the horse lord was forced to meet my gaze instead of my companion's. He looked down at me in mild surprise at the sudden movement — I was over a foot shorter than them both even at my full height — and while I didn't glare, I did give him a thoroughly disapproving elf-like stare down my nose, lifting my chin in unspoken challenge like I'd seen Glorfindel do so many times.

It must have worked better than I'd hoped — despite my still bruised and battered appearance — since Éomer blinked at me in true astonishment, and I felt Legolas' posture go tense with shock behind me.

"We are no spies," Aragorn told Éomer earnestly, stepping in and putting enough emphasis into the words to draw the horse lord's attention away from me again. "We track a band of Uruk-hai westward across the planes. They have two of our companions captive."

Éomer's face drew into a frown, the suspicion vanishing instantly.

"The Uruks are destroyed. We ambushed and slaughtered them during the night."

I felt my eyes widen at those words, my blood running abruptly cold.

"There were two hobbits. Did you see two hobbits with them?" Boromir's previously monotonous voice took on a suddenly desperate note from behind me. Éomer looked baffled by the word, eyes narrowed again and shaking his head. I came forward again and held up a hand to just above my solar plexus.

"They're about this tall, curly hair, both wearing cloaks like ours. One has a yellow waistcoat, the other a green scarf."

Éomer looked at me again in mild surprise — honestly, you'd have thought the man had never heard a woman speak before. Aragorn, however, gave me a sideways look, not out of anger, but of quiet warning. He knew this man was dangerous just as much as I did, but if there was any hope of finding out what had happened to Merry and Pippin, we couldn't afford to lose it for propriety.

"They would appear no bigger than children to your eyes," Legolas added seriously, his previous anger gone.

Éomer's expression shifted into something still cautious, but tinged with something like dismay, and my stomach sank.

"We found none as you described but… we left none alive," he told us very quietly, turning and pointing to the plume of smoke Legolas and I had seen on the horizon earlier. "We piled the carcasses and burned them."

I felt every fibre of my body go suddenly weak with shock, then tighten with painful dread as I stared — we all stared — in horror at the pillar of smoke still rising like a tower into the air in the distance.

'Oh, Valar, no…' Tink sounded as if someone had just slid a knife between her ribs.

That made two of us.

"Dead?" Gimli rasped out, his rough voice choked, and Legolas immediately reached over and clasped a hand to the dwarf's shoulder, his own expression gone blank, but his eyes grieved.

Sudden, scolding hot, violent rage flared without warning inside me, and for a moment, just a moment, I irrationally wanted to pull out one of my hidden knives and drive it into the horse lord's throat for what he and his men had just done. My eyes burned with it, my muscles all but screaming with it, the sound of my suddenly racing heartbeat a deafening drumbeat pulsing through my head.

Yet, the second I saw the look on his face, the burst of rage died instantly, replaced with a sick, cold feeling low in my gut. The agony and rage must have shown on my face, because when I turned back to round on Éomer again, he looked genuinely and deeply stricken, making no show of trying to hide it.

"I am sorry, truly," he said, addressing us all, but fixing me with a look of honest regret. I felt my sudden anger wither and slip away, replaced with only a near-arctic feeling in the pit of my stomach. I clenched my teeth, and didn't speak. He turned away suddenly, gave a single sharp whistle, gesturing to the sea of horses and their riders around us.

"Hasufel, Arod, Nymue!" he called.

Two stallions, one chestnut and the other white with a grey mane, and one stormy silver mare — all three still saddled, though rider-less — broke away form the horde and approached him, their heads held high.

"May these horses bear you to better fortunes than their former masters," Éomer said, taking their reins, and passing them to a still tight-faced Aragorn with an apologetic incline of the head. "I truly do hope you find friends. But do not weigh your plans upon hope; it has long since forsaken these lands."

Aragorn, expression still drawn with shock and dread, still returned the nod as Éomer slipped his helmet back onto his head and swung back onto his own horse.

"Farewell," he said one last time, glancing over each of us again before turning to his company and calling out. "We ride north!"

The thundering of hooves as the Rohirrim company took off once again hardly registered with me, the horses and their riders charging past us like wildebeest to follow Éomer towards the hills. My eyes had instinctively turned back to the smoke rising in the distance, the sickening feeling of dread growing in my guts with every passing second.

This wasn't right. My memories of the original story were getting hazier ever day and couldn't be relied on as fact anymore — not that they'd been all that reliable to begin with — but I also knew in my bones that this was wrong.

Merry and Pippin weren't supposed to be dead. They couldn't be. They were supposed to have escaped earlier in the journey, or outwitted their captors, or something — anything!

I was abruptly torn between wanting to go to search for any sign of them, and not taking another step towards the source of that smoke. Merry and Pippin might not be there, and that glimmer of hope still shone through all the cold dread swirling inside me — but my whole body went icy at even the mere thought that maybe, just maybe, they were on that pile of burning bodies.

The possibility that we might find the charged remains of the two hobbits who had made me smile, and laugh, and feel welcome for the first time in so long, and the reason we hadn't made it in time to save them was all because I'd—

I felt my gaze drift to Boromir without my consent.

If I'd thought he looked haunted before, he looked as if he was staring into the very gates of hell now. His face had gone bloodless, and his blue eyes were wide and hardened with fear as he stared out at the smoke alongside us.

'We might not be too late, boss,' Tink's voice was very small, echoing quietly, distantly, from with my mind as she read where my train of thought was going. 'It isn't your fault if… if they…'

She didn't finish.

If she had gone and put that unspoken fear of mine into words, I think I would have doubled over and been sick into the grass.

"Eleanor," Aragorn's voice came suddenly from behind me, sounding as if he'd repeated it several times already. I turned slowly to find him looking at me with an authoritative, but very gentle expression. He had carefully schooled the rest of his features into neutrality again, but I saw the worry still lingering in his steely grey eyes. He held out the reigns of the white stallion and the stormy grey mare to Legolas and Boromir respectively, keeping the chestnut — Hasufel, I think — for himself. "They may yet be alive. Come."

He held out a hand to me, and I forced myself to breathe again. Slowly in, count to three, and slowly out again.

Then I nodded, and took his hand.

He hefted me up easily onto the saddle, then swung himself up swiftly to sit in front of me, while Legolas helped Gimli onto the back of the white stallion — Arod. Boromir had already pulled himself onto the back of the mare — Nymue — and by the time Legolas had practically jumped onto Arod's back ahead of Gimli — without aid of his hands, I might add — we were already moving.

I clung onto Aragorn tightly, my arms locked around his waist as he nudged Hasufel from a steady canter into a gallop down the slopes, heading towards the source of the smoke. The others followed close behind us as we came upon the edge of the expansive plane just before the edge of the wood. Though I couldn't remember the name of it, I remembered seeing it on a map back in Lord Elrond's study and remarking on how big it was — stretching from the east of Rohan all the way to the foot of the Misty Mountains in the West.

It was a hell of a lot bigger than that in person, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other as we got close. However, all that paled at the sight of what was coming up directly ahead of us.

Éomer had been kidding when he'd said they piled all the corpses to be burned.

The mound was almost taller than I was, and twice my height across. The flames and thick smoke had cleared enough for us to get close without choking, but the smell of burning flesh, clothes and hair was still worse than a punch to the nose. I breathed through my mouth to keep the bile down and made myself to focus instead on anything that could give a clue to Merry and Pippin's escape from the entire, horrifying scene.

The grass and ground had been shredded under heavy footfalls and horse hooves, broken only by the occasional discarded spear or piece of armour — one of which had the severed head of an Uruk-hai skewered atop it like a hood ornament.

There was no immediate sign of the hobbits, and despite the horror and the smell, I allowed the glimmer of hope that they'd somehow made it to grow.

None of us spoke as we dismounted, leaving the horses to stand and wait as we approached the site of the slaughter and grisly bonfire, Aragorn already picking his way through the debris. Gimli and Boromir, with far stronger stomaches than I, went over to the smoking pile of bodies, using a few discarded spears to search through. I looked away — praying with everything in me that they wouldn't find anything there — in favour of searching the ground around us with Aragorn and Legolas.

We couldn't have been at it for more than two minutes when Legolas suddenly stooped and picked something dark and metallic up out of the mangled grass.

"What is it?" I asked uneasily, as he stood but didn't immediately turn around. When he finally did, he held the small object out to me, his face utterly blank again. My insides writhed with dread at that non-expression, taking it, and wiping off the soot with my torn sleeve as best I could to see exactly what he had handed me.

My entire body went numb as I realised I was cradling a small, painfully familiar little belt with a knife sheath on it, and an elegantly wrought gold buckle in the shape of tiny flowers.

That little spark of hope I'd allowed to grow in my chest sputtered and died.

"It's one of their wee knife belts…" Gimli's roughened voice was far weaker than I remembered it ever being and seemed far away, from somewhere to my left. He was right, though — it was one of the same ones Galadriel had given both of them before leaving Lothlórien.

There was no way either Merry or Pippin would have parted with those gifts willingly. Not unless-

A sudden, furious clang and a howl that was equal parts fury and frustrated pain came from just a foot to my left, and I looked up numbly to find Aragorn's calm facade had cracked right down the middle.

Without any kind of warning, his cool mask had fallen away to reveal all the anger and concealed fear that I'd known had to have been plaguing him, for a split second only, but completely unrestrained. Even for just the brief second I saw it, it was almost enough to frighten the numbness out of me, knowing that that rage was at least partially my fault.

He whirled from us, screaming out in fury again, and — I kid you not — unleashed his wrath in the form of a sledgehammer kick to one of the severed Uruk-hai heads lying in the grass, still wearing its crude iron helmet. He hit it hard enough to send it shooting straight past a shellshocked Legolas — who barely blinked at the outburst, unlike the rest of us — and flew straight into the trees like a football, crashing noisily through the branches over thirty feet away.

In any other situation, any at all, I might have smiled, even laughed; instead, I couldn't feel anything other than numb shock, still clutching the soot-covered belt hard enough for my fingers to ache.

"We failed them."

Boromir's lifeless voice was like hearing a nail being hammered into a coffin, and while I wanted so badly to shout that it couldn't be this way, scream that we couldn't just give up — that there might still be a chance — I couldn't make myself do it. I could barely breathe, let alone open my mouth and speak. My eyes were stinging and refusing to blink or focus properly, only seeing just enough to recognise that Aragorn had sunk to his knees in the dirt, Legolas beside him with a hand resting on his shoulder.

I just watched him there in disbelief and numb shock, my mouth opening to say something, but nothing coming out. I had never seen him like this, and I wasn't sure what scared me more, the burst of rage I'd just witnessed, or the numb defeat I felt and could see mirrored in him now.

"Aragorn," Legolas said almost silently. He didn't respond. He was staring at the ground, and didn't move when Legolas gave his shoulder a tentative shake, as if trying to wake him from a bad dream. "Aragorn?"

For maybe the first time ever, he completely ignored the elf, as if he wasn't there. Instead, leaning down a little closer to the earth, his eyes abruptly narrowed.

"A hobbit lay here… Both of them. They crawled, their hands bound…" he mumbled quietly, almost too quietly for even me or Legolas to hear, and at first I had no idea what he was looking at. Then I saw it — that same instinctive gleam he'd worn when he'd first found me in Trollshaws three years ago, and he'd found game within the woods to hunt.

He'd found and was following their tracks.

That little spark of hope in my chest that had sputtered out flared back to life as we all watched him get to his feet once more, and walk five paces away from the mound of smoking bodies, scanning the ground. Then suddenly he stopped, leaned down and grabbed something out of the dirt — a long length of thick rope, its ends cut with something blunt enough to fray them.

"Their bonds were cut…" he murmured, still quiet, but getting a little louder with every step, all four of us following right behind him as he strode faster across the shredded ground. "They ran, their tracks lead away from the battle. They were followed, but carried on, straight into…" Aragorn trailed off, coming to a stop and finally raising his head to see where Merry and Pippin's tracks and lead to.

We had come to a stop at the very edge of the sprawling forest that I'd seen stretch off across the horizon, its huge, thick, twisting trees rising up like the walls of an ancient fortress before us.

"Straight into Fangorn Forest," Boromir finished for Aragorn, that same, fragile flicker of hope I had kindling in my own chest creeping into his voice, bringing it back to life again. "They did escape!"

"Escaped, maybe," Gimli said beside us, with equal relief to Boromir's and mine, but mixed with a distrustful look up at the dark, towering trees that seemed to loom over us like watchtowers. "But what kind of madness drove them in there?"

Aragorn had his back to us, but I could both see and hear the adamant determination return to his shoulders and voice with a vengeance when he answered.

"The same madness that is going to drive us after them," he said with renewed stone and steel, before marching straight into the line of haunting trees ahead of us without hesitating.

A/N: Not an awful lot of banter or laughs in this chapter I'm afraid, but not all the important stuff that will come back to bite you later can be fun and giggles. Do let me know your thoughts, and hopefully the next chapter as the troupe venture further into Fangorn won't be quite such a long wait. Drop me a PM if you feel like throwing any questions at me! I'm always happy to chat.

Much love as always, and see you next time,

~Rella x