Aiedale stared at her cards.
She could have made more on higher stakes tables at larger clubs, but she never sat at those tables. People were more likely to remember you if you sat with the big dealers and she preferred to ply her trade among the anonymity of dingy backroom gambling dens. It wasn't that she lacked the skills to play those tables or to move up the ladder. She'd grown up under the harsh and readily critical eyes of some of the Clave's best warriors. So she spoke five languages fluently and a number of Downworlder dialects and two demon tongues, could use just about anything for a weapon, could navigate her way through every major European and Middle Eastern city and had a solid understanding of both Downworlder and mundane politics.
But those weren't average or normal skills for any normal fifteen year old despite them being routine prerequisites for her life at the Institute. And big name tables with high stakes bets rarely translated themselves to successful demon hunters. So she had to rely on her natural penchant for pushing things to their utmost limit and come to places like this. For someone who had spent time wondering what was the most likely way they would end up dead, calculating the odds of a card game was easy.
And now she wondered if she should take advantage of this perfect opportunity to bow out. She'd played four hands at this table and she knew a person couldn't win too much, or if you did, you had to prepared to move on and quickly to. Besides her hand was weak and there was a gleam to her opponent across the table's demon eyes that boded ill for her.
But then this was fate, pure and simple: a ridiculous risk. It felt good. They always did, those blind risks. In a life which had alternated between death defying risk and dictated to every minute by her aunt, by the Clave, by the oaths she had sworn, Aiedale found there was something intensely freeing in simply closing one's eyes and stepping forward.
It was stupid to take the risk.
But she was that stupid it seemed because she stayed.
She stayed every time.
Wizards.
She had firmly placed them at the top of the most ridiculous…
Aiedale cut that train of thought off sharply as she stared at the beautiful, majestic white stallion who had appeared over the horizon at a whistle from the wizard. It was something out of a cheap romance novel: a whistle and poof a magical white stallion comes galloping over the horizon, mane flying majestically in the wind…
So this, said an inner voice snarkily, is the Middle Earth version of a taxi cab.
The horse tossed his head, his long white mane a gleaming curtain of shimmering strands. He reared up, the other three horses holding back, ears pricked and eyes focused on the white stallion. Legolas was staring at the horse with a face of wonder and even Aragorn looked mesmerized. The Shadowhunter folded her arms, feeling any trace of sympathy she might have had for the recently resurrected wizard fade away. While she had crawled her way out Moria battered, bruised, smelling of orc and dead dwarf...
"Shadowfax," said the wizard with a satisfied smile. "Chief of the Mearas, lords of horses, and not even Théoden, King of Rohan, has ever looked on a better. Does he not shine like silver, and run as smoothly as a swift stream? He has come for me: the horse of the White Rider. We are going to battle together."
Soon the other horses came up and stood quietly by, as if awaiting orders. "To Meduseld," said the wizard who sounded far too chipper about it all, "time presses. We will wait now only to drink."
The riders mounted. Aiedale rode behind Aragorn and Gimli with Legolas. Gandalf led on Shadowfax whose white mane and tale fanned out in the breeze which had picked up like a banner. Due south the white horse took them at a good pace, yet not beyond the measure of the other two horses.
Aiedale gripped Aragorn's sword belt and buried her face in the man's Lorthlorien cloak, part of her amazed that the fabric did not smell of orc blood and sweat. The grey fabric blocked out the world that moved around her, protected her face from the cool wind. She did not want to see the meads and riverlands. She did not want to see the rolling grass which was so high it reached above the knees of the riders and their steeds seemed to be swimming in a grey-green sea.
Aiedale could not entirely saw why she wanted to hide her face, wanted to pretend that she was not crossing the plains of Rohan in the company of a wizard, an elf, a dwarf and a mundane. For a little while, for a moment, she did not want to see the expansive space of the plains, the flat empty land, treeless and wide. It made her feel so small, cast adrift in an unfamiliar ocean when she was already feeling so lost…so very lost.
She had said yes.
Would she never learn when to say no?
Probably not, she thought with an inner sigh and tried to think of something else as they rode on. She had never said no, never backed away from the edge, the precipice upon which her life balanced. It had been both her greatest strength and her greatest flaw.
Breathing deeply, Aiedale let her body move with the rocking gait of the horse. The motion was familiar and comforting. Whenever she had been on a horse she had been in Alicante, revelling in the sense of freedom and safety.
But she could not help but think. Her mind kept returning to that sense she had had of a clock clicking down, a fuse burning out when she had first set eyes on the wizard. There was so much she could see, so much she did not know. The awareness like a storm front closing in, a whisper on the wind.
It was almost a threat but not quite. It was the uneasy feeling you got when you know someone was following you down a street but was too far away for you to see. The uneasy feeling grated on her, the questions she did not quite know to ask, the answers she needed but could not grasp yet, all there just out of reach. The sense that she was tumbling in free fall, hopelessly disorientated, blind but waiting for the inevitable slam of impact…
First the battle by the river where Frodo had broke the Fellowship and they had scattered. Then the meeting with the wizard back from the abyss…each had hit her hard and still, she thought, the hardest of all impacts was waiting for her.
The day slipped away. Finally they halted and dismounted as evening came upon them, the sun sinking toward the edge of the horizon. All was silent, and there was no sign or sound of any living thing as Legolas passed around some lembas and Gimli grumbled about why dwarves were not supposed to ride horses.
Aiedale was didn't say anything. Choosing a place on the edge of their small camp, she did her best to avoid the wizard who had chosen to stand facing the east, an intense frown on his at once familiar but also markedly different face. But she was not alone for long. Aragorn, his eyes shadowed with weariness, dropped down beside her.
"It is a pretty sunset," said Aiedale softly.
So different from the sunsets painted in city smog and blood. The sunsets that had signalled the beginning of the nightly hunts, the long patrols along deserted streets that ended with the flash of knives and the burn of iraztes.
"Yes," said the Ranger, "it is."
It wasn't that spectacular, in the man's opinion. A faint blush of rosy pink and a thin dark indigo line along the edge of the horizon. Relatively plain compared to some of the sunsets he had seen. He had seen the night sky painted with variations of gold, red, pink, blue, magenta and wondered how it was that so many colours could exist at once in the sky. Sunsets that seemed to revel in their own magnificence. But he didn't say that to her.
The sun slipped a little further. It was almost gone, only a thin sliver still remained above the distant horizon.
Aiedale glanced away and watched as the first stars appeared in the darkening hemisphere; beneath them she felt so small that it seemed impossible that she should even exist. Immensity pressed in on her, terrifying, threatening - and then, in a swift flash of movement like a dance, like the glint of a bright stone, came a flick of brightness in the darkening sky from a shooting star.
Aiedale closed her eyes for a moment.
It was silent out there on the open blank plain with it's rolling grass. She knew all sorts of silences and each one meant a different thing. There was the silence that came with the morning in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, and that was different from the silence of a forest at dawn. There was silence after and before a rainstorm, and those were not the same thing. There was the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There was the silence created by silence runes which made it possible for even a heavy booted Shadowhunter to walk noiselessly across crushed gravel. There was the silence that fell after the funeral prayers had been spoken and the silence as a warrior checked the edge of a blade.
But the silence that wrapped around her was of another kind.
A great hulking thing that had grown over time.
Her fingers closed spasmodically around her witchlight, gripping the small object tightly as if it would somehow ground her. Sometimes the silence came rushing in, it overwhelmed her in its deepness and intensity. It was like being cast out into a wind tossed ocean with no life line.
She forcibly released her witchlight, methodically undoing the braces on her arms, rolling up her sleeves and checking her runes, absorbing the sight of them. Doing something always helped. Her eyes traced the black lines that flowed up her arms and the thin scars that were left, reading the runes, remembering the stories which went with each graceful line and sweeping curl. There were two small glamour scars not yet faded that her eyes lingered on…
There was the world she had known; and then she would blink, and there was a place she had never had any inkling of, and it spread out across her eyescape. And then, most shocking of all: there is the realization that these two places are one and the same. It turns out, she used to think, that no one ever knew the world around one at all.
The Shadow world and the mundane world overlapping…constantly crossing over each other in unexpected and disconcerting ways until it was impossible to fully separate one from the other. It was impossible to separate one from the other. Like the Oaths that bound her soul, that knotted through her identity and crossed her skin in black lines. She was both dark and light, both shadow and flame, hidden and visible…
"What are you thinking about, Aiedale?"
She jerked upright, glancing at the Ranger, strangely grateful for his words. They distracted her from looking inward, from brooding even when she was trying to do something practical. She was too inward looking these days without the press of Shadowhunter duties to distract her.
"Runes."
"Why?"
She shrugged. She thought about them often, recalled their meanings as a way of distracting and reassuring herself.
He looked at her intently for a moment, "I remember when you used…a glamour? It was that night in Bree."
She winced at the memory of the crowded inn so long ago in that little mundane town on the edge of the forest. That had been before Imladris and before the Council of Elrond. It was long before Aiedale had any idea of the scope of the situation she had landed in. She had been running on strung out adrenalin the night she first met the Ranger, teetering on the edge of control, barely able to contain herself.
She had nearly killed the man beside her that night. The only reason she hadn't decided he was a liability that should not be left to wander about was because Frodo had intervened. Had one of Shadowhunter comrades been there? Would she have listened to the gentle hobbit then? No, she thought with a twinge of unease, she would not have let the Ranger go or given him much opportunity to explain himself and that would have resulted in…a great many complications none of which she even wanted to consider.
It was no wonder, she thought darkly, that the incident and the use of a glamour kept coming up.
She looked out at the slowly sinking sun, the darkness was surging in around them as night fell. They were silent for a moment and then she asked, eager to change the subject, "What were you thinking about?"
"Gondor," he admitted, "and Boromir…and what it is I must do," he told her, "at least according to some."
"Ah," said Aiedale. "King and country and all that."
"I am not King of Gondor."
She turned her old eyes on him, the dark shadows under them looking like bruises, "I thought we had covered this. I've known for a long time. No, you aren't King yet. But that doesn't mean you are no one."
"Aiedale-" he began.
"Hard to come so far without seeing you were fated to wear an uncomfortable piece of headwear and continue a legacy of some long dead royal house," said Aiedale levelly, almost jokingly. "That poem of Bilbo's that Frodo spoke of…that was written about you. One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to put it all together. And then Boromir…"
They both winced, looked away. A moment of shared, respectful silence falling between them as they thought back to the Captain of Gondor and the guilt that both felt over his death.
"Now what?" asked Aiedale, glancing at the man she had come, over time, to respect far more than she had ever respected a mundane before. "What will you do?"
"I need to go to Gondor, but I do not go there to claim the throne."
She heard the reluctance in his voice as if the words cost him a great deal to say and the self-doubt in his dark grey eyes was plain to see. But she thought of Boromir to and the light which had lit his dying eyes as he looked at Aragorn. What Boromir had seen in this grim faced, honourable to a fault man, Aiedale thought, was what Gondor needed to survive this coming storm. Not just survive, either, but thrive in the peace that followed that storm.
She had never been to Gondor and her knowledge of the problems which beset it - both of Sauron's making and of a long absence of clear leadership - was limited. But Boromir had known them, she thought. Boromir had struggled under the crushing weight of that knowledge and he had seen the solution, or at least some of the solution, in Aragorn.
Softly, her words almost inaudible, she asked, "And why is that?"
"Now is not…"
"I don't believe you," said Aiedale but there was no bite to her words, just a quiet air of lets-move-on and, for once, her eyes were soft and open. She was unyielding but she did not force, she was understanding but she would tolerate no evasions. "I've been in this world long enough not to believe that your excuses aren't valid - they have grown tiresome and trite. Regardless of any prophecy or destiny placed upon you, Aragorn, you have proved your own worth time and time again."
The Ranger frowned, "You don't know-"
"I know power," said Aiedale and her mouth twisted into a thin line, her eyes darkening. "I know how to get it, what it costs, and why one needs it - I know. I know that it is both necessary and awful. I know that it takes as much as it gives." She lifted her chin, "I was raised reading political treatises written by the best politicians and philosophers my world has ever known. And," her voice sharpened with its familiar cool edge, "the Clave ensured I had plenty of real world experience. So no," she continued with bull-dog like stubbornness, "I don't believe you."
"It is not as simple as going to Gondor and announcing myself as King."
"No," said the Shadowhunter, "but - in the end - that is basically what you have to do, Aragorn."
Not Ranger, she thought. I am not going to call you that anymore. You need to hear your name: Aragorn. As I say Darklighter again and again to myself so that I never forget who I am - what I am - so to must your hear your name: Aragorn son of Arathorn.
The Ranger snorted, "What would that do for the kingdom of Gondor? How could my arrival there possibly help protect Gondor from Mordor and the wrath of Sauron? I bring no army. I bring only the bitter memories of long ago."
"It might do a great deal," said Aiedale, "but you won't know unless you try." She tilted her head to the side, studying the profile of the man beside her with her intense green eyes, "I think you are just afraid. Afraid because you've know what you have to do for so long and now it is time to act. You've gone so long pretending to be the lowly Ranger you can't imagine not being him anymore…being who you always were meant to be. And taking the necessary steps," the faintest flicker of a smirk crossed her face, "implies some chance of failure."
The man grunted, shifting upon the hard ground. "Small chance? There is a high probability of failure."
"We all dance on the edge of disaster," said Aiedale dismissively. "We all court failure. Address it, mitigate when you can but do not let it dominate your decision making."
How to explain? She didn't have time for hesitation like the Ranger seemed to have. No Shadowhunter had time to wait. There was no guarantee of a tomorrow, no guarantee that there would be time enough to say something that should be said immediately or put off some task until another time. For Shadowhunters there was only today. There was only the moment one was living right then.
Her life up until arriving in Middle Earth had demanded that she work boldly, that she live with each moment calculated to achieve maximum effect. She could not step free of the habits of a life time simply because she was now forced to operate within the structures of this undeniably odd world.
"Nothing," she said, "of any worth was ever achieved without danger."
"There is risk," replied the Ranger, "and then there is acceptable risk, Aiedale. There is setting yourself a difficult task and then there is trying to achieve the impossible. Worse," he said, "is trying to achieve the impossible and destroying the lives of innocents caught in your blind folly."
She smirked, "Ah, Ranger, but all courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger, but in calculating the risk and acting decisively. As Machiavelli said: Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer."
For once, she thought with satisfaction, she had silenced him. So she took this moment and continued.
"Sometimes," said Aiedale quietly, "you have to seize an opportunity and hold on with everything you've got. You've got to drag everyone else along with you. Because it is the only way." She sighed, "I don't give a damn, Aragorn, about whether or not you are the heir of some kingdom or if you are just the best man, at the right moment, to do a job that needs doing. My kind never cared for kings. But we do care about finishing the job." They were both silent for a long moment and then Aiedale said, "And if you can do more good as a King of Gondor…if that is what finishing the job is for you," she looked out at slowly darkening sky, "then you had better find a way. Or make one."
"Is that what you do? Make a way? No matter the cost?"
She glanced briefly at him and then turned her gaze back to her hands, uncomfortable. The tables had turned and she should have expected it. Aragorn was all too good at this sort of thing. He would provide insight into his own troubles and insecurities and then neatly use it as a way of turning it back on her, putting her in something of an uncomfortable situation where refusing to talk would signal that his questions had hit home even as answering was just as…uncomfortable…
Yes, she thought ruefully, he'd make a good King. He was clever and wily enough. He just had to make it through his attempts to act as her therapist.
"What do you think?" she asked, unwilling to be lured into his scheme like she had on previous occasions.
She was still looking at her hands. They were relatively small hands. She had always thought they were too small and the fingers too short but her grip was strong. Her nails were currently a disaster; once perfectly manicured they were now torn and bloody. But her hands could handle a seraph blade, could wield a stele…they were the hands of a Shadowhunter, trained and marked.
"I think you've never let yourself consider something else," said the Ranger quietly. "It's all or nothing with you."
She froze. A cold feeling growing within her…all or nothing…she had heard those words one too many times in her life.
"You give yourself so few opportunities to ask yourself, Aiedale, what it is you really want to do." The Ranger sighed, his voice very gentle, "I think you are afraid…not of death or of fighting, but of yourself. What you might do. What you are capable of."
She met his grey eyes, voice sharpening, "What does it matter to you?"
"Just think about it," said the Ranger.
"Think about what?"
She'd play the fool, the oblivious teenager all night if she had to. She'd done it before.
"I've heard you speak a little about the Clave," said the Ranger slowly, "and I've seen how you fight, Aiedale. It's all of you or nothing. You commit every last ounce of yourself to everything you do, without hesitation or you don't do anything at all. I think it was the only way for you to survive. You didn't have the luxury of doubt - couldn't afford it. But the knowledge of everything you have done is still playing out in your head. Because you had to do it. Because it was all you knew…"
Aiedale had gone very still and her expression was blank. But she was listening. Yes, she was listening and she wished she could stop but Aragorn had a kind of authority to him that she could not ignore. His words were hitting hard. She couldn't see the point in denying or looking to incite a reaction.
"You fight like you've already lost yourself. I think that is what they wanted because it makes you deadly, it makes you very good, it makes you exceptional. It makes you take risks that you shouldn't take. Because you don't have anything to lose. But you can't go on like that." The Ranger stood, looking away, "Because, despite everything, you don't want to be another knife, another tool. You want to do what is right." He glanced once at her, his grey eyes soft, "But every time you do something that you believe in, every time you let someone in, you punish yourself. Its like you want to disappoint yourself, like you want to take yourself to edge just because."
She was holding her breath.
Aragorn leaned forward, "Why? Why Aiedale? Why do you go to the edge every time?"
For a brief moment Aiedale considered trying to tell her full story, to try and explain the events which had brought her to this place…to explain the Oaths and the silence.
She almost wanted to.
She almost wanted to explain about her brother - two little children in the Paris Institute and how they had leaned on each other as they grew up. She almost wanted to explain about the ritual of receiving your first rune. She almost wanted to explain about the fire that was ignited within each Shadowhunter soul by the burning sting of the stele. She almost wanted to explain about the way the stele scarred a Shadowhunter forever and the way the Oaths pulled at a Shadowhunter's soul until it left them torn and bruised, caught between the mortal and the divine. She almost wanted to explain about the great rushing, hulking silence which hung over her, the silence between Shadowhunter thought and action which were all a Shadowhunter had left of their sanity by the end of it all.
She thought about saying that there was a reason not founded in practical rationality that Shadowhunters wanted everything from their Gear to the ink they used to write reports to be black. Her life had been inky darkness, a life lived moving from shadow to shadow, existing in the night and the hidden, forgotten places. And just occasionally, she would emerge and see a glimpse of a wide open expanse of sky as the sun set, colouring the sky with a blaze of gold and red and yellow as the sun slipped away. She would sense the limitless possibilities which existed during the day, the brightness of life and joy which existed under the sun and was celebrated in the rich colours of the sunset… whilst she remained forever trapped within the claustrophobic confines of the night.
But she couldn't.
She had already come to the realization that they would never fully grasp what she was, what she had been made into and that was okay. Better that they didn't, better that some aspects of her training and mentality were not explained. Better they did not know what price a Shadowhunter paid every time they drew a rune, every time the called on the seraph blade…every time they turned their eyes upward and made an oath to Raziel.
To light a candle, to shine a witch light was to cast a shadow. She held out the light, she brought Shadowhunter fire to the darkness but there was a cost.
"You know nothing," she said, "about what I am, Aragorn. Why I am the way I am."
He looked profoundly disappointed.
She steeled her heart, looking away from him deliberately. With a quiet sigh and a rustle of his cloak, the man left, moving to join Legolas, and she was left on the edge of their small camp to brood all by herself.
She felt the anger flair within her and then it cooled, dying out.
His words had reminded her of other words, of secret doubts which now crept out and secret desires to lay bare the shadow world that she had grown up in, lived in.
Damn him. Damn him, for speaking words which unlocked things that she had long denied to herself. She lifted one hand to rub at her temples, eyes closing, still tired and muzzy from the long run. Around her stretched Rohan, endless and sweeping expansiveness made even more vast by the dome of inky night that arched above. An endless expanse across which she could scatter these bitter truths, examine them in all their wretched detail.
Aiedale knew that the Clave held her strings, they had made her.
It was the Clave who had taught her the knives. It was the Clave which had educated her, chosen the languages she was to learn and the political treatises she was to read. It was the Clave which had authorized which missions she was to officially undertake and which ones she was not. It was the Clave gear she wore and the Clave weapons she used with deadly force. It was in the name of the Clave that she had killed, doling out the justice the Clave told her was in Heaven's name.
But like the glamours which hid Shadow world from mundane, there were terrible truths hiding behind the Heavenly mandate. She knew all too well what the Clave was capable of and just how ruthless they were - how quickly assets and operatives in the field fell out of favour. How quickly rising stars were snuffed out in favour of new ones. How petty arguments could become bitter feuds. She had seen how they were treated and how she had been treated to. She wasn't sure when she had stopped trusting the Clave only that the idea of being made a fool of in this way washed over her even now in a cold shiver.
'Would you die in the service of the Clave?'
'In the service of Raziel I would give my life, Inquisitor.'
'That is not the same thing, child. Would you die for the Clave?'
A subtle distinction to live one's life by. Aiedale clenched her hands, her nails digging into her palm. A distinction she had become aware of only a few short years before.
But she tried not to acknowledge it. She knew that flirting with independent thinking and rebelling directly against the Clave was…unadvisable. It was a one way ticket to a cell and an execution in the Silent City or just a quiet disappearance that no one mentioned. She had tried not to think about the reports that never made it to Alicante, the favours done for those she should not have deigned to speak with…she had done her work, she had upheld the Oaths to Heaven. By maintaining a cautious balance between her ideals and her loyalty to the Clave she had been able to set in motion her own plans, to discretely begin to craft her own sense of right and wrong.
And yet…she was here. All that was very far away and too close all at once.
She wished she could go. She wanted to return to the precarious balance that had defined her life for so long. And she wished she could do it in such a way that she would never be welcomed back. She wanted the remnants of this Fellowship to hate her, to mistrust her, to see in her what the Downworlders were so quick to see: a killer, a Clave operative. It would make leaving so much easier.
She wanted the silence. The silence that lay in the space between each breath, each action. As her aunt had said to her after a particularly upsetting patrol: You are a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick or knife to cut an apple, but that will not change its nature.
When she woke a scant few hours later with a jolt, all those thoughts and all the memories they conjured in her mind had seeped away into the cold dark of night, leaving only an eerie emptiness, a silence as profound as that which filled the City of Bones.
She shivered…
"Acquire knowledge," said the Faerie, flicking the end of its lit cigarette toward the ash tray that sat, almost full, between it and the black clothed Shadowhunter whose pale, tense face was illuminated by the single, dim light. "Knowledge is what will make you worth something to them. You need something they want otherwise you are just another disposable asset."
Aiedale flinched. "It isn't enough just to know something about the Clave…"
"Knowledge," said the Faerie as if Aiedale had not spoken, "is the only armour one has against enemies like them. It is the defence of the strong. Find something, Shadowhunter, know something that they need…and you might have a chance."
"The Clave is not my enemy. I am the Clave."
"You say that now," said the Faerie, "but one day that might not be so clear. One day you might need to ask yourself who the enemy is: us, the Shadow people, or the Clave and their Angel knives."
They spent the following day in much the same way as they had the previous. The small group rode through the clear dawn, riding with a wind which swept across their path, bending the tall grasses. It was only as the sun rose high in the sky that Shadowfax suddenly stopped, throwing back his head and neighing as if to celebrate how far they had journeyed. Gandalf pointed ahead, his words lost to the Shadowhunter as a sudden gust of wind snatched them away.
Aiedale strained her tired eyes. Before them stood the mountains of the South: white-tipped and streaked with black. The grass-lands rolled against the hills that clustered at their feet, and flowed up into many valleys still dim and dark, untouched by the light of dawn, winding their way into the heart of the great mountains. Immediately before the travellers the widest of these glens opened like a long gulf among the hills. Far inward, just visible, Aiedale glimpsed a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak; at the mouth of the vale there stood like sentinel a lonely height. About its feet there flowed, as a thread of silver, the stream that issued from the dale; upon its brow, still far away, a glint in the rising sun, a glimmer of gold.
The Golden Hall of Medusled, explained Gandalf. They would reach it after another full day of travel if they kept to this steady, ground covering pace.
So that was Edoras, she thought. Her first glimpse of what had been a small label on the maps she had poured over in Rivendell. A label she had associated with the small collection of texts she had been provided with about the Rohirrim and their customs, stories and origins.
Prepare to be dwarfed by giant blonde men with spears and gawked at by golden haired women who, on occasion, were known to pick up a sword, muttered a voice inside her mind.
So intolerant, she thought with an inward wince as she quickly curbed that line of thinking. A product of the training which was relatively intolerant and dismissive of everyone not Nephilim. In this case, when she knew so little, however, it was a bias which could cloud and impair her thinking.
The horses started moving again, Gimli unable to hold back what sounded like creative dwarvish curses.
They rode for the rest of the day, stopping only when darkness had descended upon the land like a thick blanket. Aiedale knew they were close to their destination but she understood the desire to arrive there in the light. In their present state, she thought, any sane person would bar the gate. The only one of them that didn't look like they had been dragged through the mud, fought one too many orcs, and encountered a tree root with a nasty sense of humour was Gandalf whose pristine white garment seemed to glow in the fading light.
Settling down on the sweet smelling grasses with her knees crossed, the Shadowhunter did not bother to try and undo the stiff braid which kept her dark auburn hair in one somewhat contained hairstyle. She was so filthy and dirty that she suspected it would take more than one long soak in a bath tub, a great deal of soap and even more shampoo to begin to clean the sweat, blood, mud and orc gunk from her person. Pulling at the strap of her quiver, she wrinkled her nose.
Trying to distract herself from how disgusting she knew she looked, the Shadowhunter glanced at the rest of her companions and saw the Ranger was in conversation with Legolas. Gimli was already asleep, using his shield as a hard pillow. She was relieved when Aragorn did not turn towards her and try to engage her in conversation again.
"How did you make it out of Moria, Aiedale?"
She glanced quickly to her right to find that the wizard had moved silently closer and was now gazing down at her with those far too perceptive eyes.
"I almost didn't."
She wanted to leave it at that but the wizard would not leave it be. Instead - to her endless annoyance - he sat down close to her, his eyes never leaving her face.
"But you did," said the wizard. "You somehow survived the long fall, navigated your way out and found the Fellowship. I need not say that such a feat impressed even Lord Celeborn." His eyebrows drew together, "That the actions of a mortal woman impressed Lord Celeborn is…unusual and difficult to say the least."
Aiedale studied the grass which rose around them, not seeing the landscape but the endless sweeping blackness of the chasm as it closed around her and the suffocating darkness…
"It was not my time," she said quietly. "My journey was not yet finished and so I was spared. I was provided with an opportunity and I took it."
She was relieved when the wizard did not press the issue any further. He seemed to understand, at least a little, that there was nothing more she could say about the matter.
"I have not had the opportunity," said the white wizard, "to ask you about the marks you bear."
The tone of his voice, the way he had brought the conversation around to a topic that Shadowhunters were instinctively tight lipped about made her tense as surely as if the wizard had challenged her to a sparring match. Her voice careful, she responded with a question:"Runes?"
"It is a unique form of power," said Gandalf. "The power which is contained in the lines you draw, in the meaning that lies behind them. The only time I have seen anything like it in this world is in the inscriptions carved by the Kings of the North ages past."
She said nothing, eyes studying the wizard.
Gandalf continued, "Elves learned to imbue power in rings and in swords. My staff is a source of power…but runes are another thing entirely." The wizard returned her considering gaze with one of his own, "You carry your runes always. You use them. They are as much a part of you as they are a tool at your disposal."
"What do my runes have to do with the Kings of the North?"
The wizard shrugged.
Aiedale studied for him for a long moment, unsure if she should press this line of questioning or not. The wizard never spoke idly, she'd come to take great care to listen to what he said…and what he didn't. And there was something - what she did not know - which made her want to inquire further about the North and the men who had ruled there…
Before she could speak again the wizard asked his original question again, "How did you survive Moria, Aiedale?"
She was too well trained to let any emotion show, too well trained to be surprised. She gathered her thoughts and spoke in a measured voice, "As I said before, I am well trained and there were other forces at work."
The wizard was looking at her with those all too perceptive eyes. "Forces? What do your suspicions tell you about them?"
Aiedale refused to look away, refused to capitulate, "I have many suspicions, wizard. But it is a little like my runes. You say they are a part of me, Gandalf, and that they are a tool to. What does that make me?" She looked at him for a long moment, answering her own question, "It makes me a tool, wizard. I may bear the marks, I may use them, but what am I really?"
The wizard said nothing for a long moment and then, with a quirk of those eyebrows, "I very much doubt, Aiedale, that there is anyone so unwise as to use you as a tool."
Aiedale shrugged, "I have found that wisdom is usually in short supply. Haven't you?"
The wizard looked amused, but Aiedale wasn't done.
"What aren't you telling me, Gandalf?" Her already sharp voice dropped a few octaves.
The wizard studied her for a long moment, saying nothing.
She leaned forward, eyes gleaming as she pressed her point, "The worst crime a Shadowhunter can commit is not the murder of a Downworlder or mundane, but desertion of their comrades."
"You haven't deserted…
"If there is a way for me to return to my world right now," she said, "and I do not take it then yes, wizard, I am deserting my comrades." Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, "And I would deserve to be executed. I would deserve the trial in the City of Bones and the scorn of the my fellow warriors. I would deserve to stripped of my marks and, when my body was burned, I would deserve not have my ashes placed in my family's tomb, but at a crossroads."
Her words echoed harshly between them.
"The way back to your dimension," said the wizard, "is linked to that jewel." He looked at her seriously, his words careful, "I cannot send you back, Aiedale."
What was it with this world and pieces of jewelry, thought Aiedale. Why couldn't her pendant just be a normal sapphire set in silver and hanging from a rune strengthened chain around her neck?
Because nothing made sense, snarled an inner voice. It never makes sense. The second it can go from run of the mill to utterly, outrageously stupid it does. Every. Time.
No one seemed to have learned that just because you could make something doesn't mean you should…
She straightened her spine, shoulders thrown back and she forced herself to focus. You got used to this, she thought. These twists and turns, these complications which derailed plans and forced you to adapt at a moment's notice…such was the life of a Shadowhunter.
Be the agent. Be the trained operative she was.
"That does not mean you do not know how to use the jewel," she said evenly. "And I have no more petty excuses to use, Gandalf. When I chose to follow Frodo I could justify it by the fact there was no way I would find a way back in Rivendell. But Frodo held my promise of protection fulfilled. I could justify staying with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli because there was no clear answer in Lothlorien or after Boromir died. But now? Now my excuses are running out because you clearly do have the answers."
"I must ask this of you," said the wizard, "although I have no right, Aiedale. I must ask of you the same thing I asked of you mother: stay for just a little longer. Ill things are at work in Rohan and I sense that things will become clearer, your path forward more certain very soon."
She was silent.
"I know your Law demands much," said the wizard, "and that it holds you accountable no matter the circumstances."
Aiedale was silent for a moment and then she said, "Silent enim leges inter arma." She met the wizard's eyes, "In times of war, the law falls silent. Some say that the Law is for those Shadowhunters who are weak. Others might say that this is war, and in war the only crime is to lose."
"Losing has unthinkable consequences for Middle Earth."
"Ah," said the Shadowhunter, "but then I run into the other argument, wizard. Is this my world to die for? Is this the fight I am sworn blood and soul to? My actions have unthinkable consequences for me, Gandalf. For if I stray too far from the Law then I might break my Oaths. And Shadowhunters execute those who break the Oaths they make to the Clave. My Oaths bind me to Earth, they bind me to the Clave and its Mandate."
"I promise," said the wizard, "that I will tell you everything I know. But not yet," he said with a forestalling hand, "because what I know will not be helpful until you find out why, Aiedale, you were brought here. And that," he continued, "I cannot help you with."
She studied him, analyzed the bargain the wizard offered her with clinical coldness. She did not like this. It required that she keep tagging along, that she keep waiting as if the answers would suddenly appear before her. It went against her training, her instinctual reaction to act, to pursue, to understand fully and completely.
But there were other lessons and instincts which whispered to her. Shadowhunter training instilled many core lessons and one of them was: if you are going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, do not even pick up the seraph blade or take the rune. It did not matter if the act of total commitment meant losing comrades, family or even your sense of self. It could mean suffering and pain. It could mean mockery and isolation.
Everything or nothing.
There was no hesitating on the brink, no pausing and then missing the moment in which you should have acted.
"This," she said carefully, "is quickly becoming an untenable situation for me, wizard."
"Things are happening quickly," said the wizard, countering her intense stare with one of his own. "Although it might not seem that way to you right now."
"No," she admitted, "it feels as if all I've done is walk and walk some more…and then run."
The wizard smiled ever so slightly, "Your mother was not patient, either."
Aiedale met his gaze squarely, unwilling to show even the slightest trace of emotion or to discuss something as personal as her mother. "We are trained to do."
"Yes," said the wizard, quietly as he studied her closely. "To do. Not to stand by when the good fight is being fought." He leaned toward her, bright eyes seeing far more than Aiedale was comfortable with. "You could rattle the very foundations of this world," he murmured very softly as if he could read her very thoughts, see the conflict raging within her as she sat perfectly still in front of him. "You have rattled the foundations of your own world. You could do nearly anything you set your mind to, if you dared. You know this because you have. And deep down, you know it, too. That scares you." He peered at her and said very softly, "What you are capable of scares you the most."
She could not quite hide her flinch. "Does it frighten you? What I am capable of?" she asked cooly, eyes fixing on the penetrating ones of the wizard.
"Sometimes," said the wizard, "but I have never once thought you would lose control of yourself. I have never once thought you would act carelessly or without thought for the repercussions."
"Others have not shared your confidence."
"I saw you," said the wizard in a measured, calm voice, "comfort a hobbit after a warg attack. I saw your face when Frodo was struck with the spear. I can still see the grief and regret you feel for Boromir." He peered at her, "You cared. Not because of an Oath, not because of some rational, strategic strategy you are playing out over the long run but because you are - whatever others have said - a young woman who cares very deeply about others. I have thought it a remarkable quality before and I still think so."
"Or an unforgivable weakness," said Aiedale without thinking, the words coming before she could stop them.
"Perhaps," said the wizard, "and I can see why your life's experiences and training would suggest that. However," he continued, "I think you know why that is not true."
She glanced at him and then away. She wondered what the wizard might say if he heard some of things muttered about her kind by Downworlders. One of those things - spoken bitterly by one who knew it all too well - was that there was nothing more painful, nothing more terrible than the kindness of a Shadowhunter.
"Had you truly not wanted to," said the wizard, "I don't think any argument made by me or Aragorn or even Frodo could have swayed you." He peered at her, "Have a little faith, Aiedale - difficult as that may seem - in your own instincts."
On silent feet the vampire walked unhurriedly forward.
The head vampire of the Paris Enclave had met with Aiedale Darklighter twice before. While he had dealt with many, many Shadowhunters over the course of his long life and knew he would deal with many more after Darklighter, he had educated every one. Some of them had been accomplished and others had been stupid. Many of them had tried to kill him, treated him like a monster and insulted him at every turn. Many of them had displayed a terrifying langueur, a potentially fatal disinterest in being professional. Aiedale was different, interesting. There was an edge to her, a focus, an aggression in pursuit of doing the thing correctly.
His eyes narrow with pleasure at seeing the young woman walking towards him, his hunter's instinct instantly picking her up. She seemed to sense the energy of the street. She was always switched on. She was watchful, never jittery. A little raw, - a little compulsive - but capable and she didn't kill for sport or out of ignorance. She was also one of the very few Shadowhunters willing to work with the Downworlder community, to try and secure the peace not through force, as the rest of the Clave was want to do, but through collaboration. She got the hate that sustained their kind, she understood the anger and she did not try to brush it aside.
Not many had her fire, and the vampire approved. Not many had her vision, either.
She was no solider. A warrior, but no soldier. There was a difference.
He drew close to her. He spoke with her and he told her what he had told many young fledgling vampires: You can be the pawn, be the reward of someone else, and spend the rest of eternity bowing and scraping and pretending you are nothing. A shame, wouldn't it be?
A graceful motion of a pale white hand.
Or you can make another choice. You can master the skills, you can make every single action count. You can play a role in this war. Because the war is here, and it is never wise to delude yourself.