Author's Note: Just saying, the chicken thing is accurate. My husband grew up on a farm with chickens and that's what his mum used to do.
Chapter 11: The Stranger
It seemed to Aragorn that there were too many things he needed to do and much too little time in which to do them all. Protecting the Shire and Bree grew more dangerous by the day and his newer, more perilous quest to capture the creature Gollum bore no fruit this time. He rode North uneasy about the dark days he could sense ahead; his unfinished task bore heavily on him.
For all his weariness, he found it impossible to miss the new jubilation of the Rohirrim. On his way to the wastes in the east he had passed a royal caravan in the night and at the time thought it odd. What could Theoden King be doing so far from his capital?
The answer was provided when he appeared in Edoras to buy a few supplies for the journey home: an upcoming royal wedding. Apparently a mysterious stranger had come from the south with a caravan of refugees fleeing the wars- something that Aragorn feared they would see more and more of.
Also, one of the soon-to-be princess's sisters had threatened the crown prince on her behalf. It was quite the scandal in Edoras.
Aragorn had only listened with careful ears to the tavern chatter. Not like anyone would tell him things willingly, he thought wryly when the locals would shoot him a suspicious look.
Yet when he was about to leave, a royal guard had waved him down. The man had asked if he was going past the Fords of Isen. Upon Aragorn's confirmation, he had been entrusted with a sealed missive. "For the Lady Andromeda, from Prince Theodred," the guard had explained although he eyed Aragorn warily, "Theoden King instructed that it should go with you."
Ah, of course. Last time Aragorn had been so visible in Rohan, Theoden had been a small child; his memory was impeccable. With all due deference Aragorn had of course guaranteed that it would make it to this mysterious Lady Andromeda.
That was over a week ago and he'd had quite enough time to think on the matter. A few times in Rohan he had heard the name Tharbad. The ruins were the gateway to the north, where he was headed. Rohan was a vital bulwark against the evil in the east; he needed to see that it wouldn't fall because of a woman.
Driving rain accompanied him into Tharbad and made the place seem like a haven. It was easy to find the occupied buildings and huddled into his cloak, he knocked hard on a door made of relatively fresh wood.
It opened and an old woman peeked out the door. "Hello?" she half-greeted, half-asked. A whiff of roasting meat and berries followed.
"I come with a message from Rohan. Is the Lady Andromeda here?" Aragorn asked patiently, despite his mouth watering.
Immediately he was bundled into the structure, being instructed in a motherly cluck to, "Put those wet clothes on the hooks there dear, and take off your boots. Your sword and such can go on the rack, dear" She then called, "Andy, you have a visitor!"
Awkwardly Aragorn obeyed, because what else was he supposed to do? This was her home, after all, and taking his boots off felt like Valinor.
A tall, curvy, somewhat plump woman with bright burgundy hair approached. "Hi, I understand that you're looking for Andromeda?" she said in an unfamiliar accent. Her face was round and friendly but her hazel eyes were suspicious as they looked him over.
Good, at least she had the sense to be wary of strangers.
"I have a missive from Prince Theodred, for you," Aragorn explained and rummaged in his pack for it. The envelope was slightly crinkled but whole when he handed it over, seal still in place.
Upon seeing it, she brightened like a sunrise.
"Ooohhh, look who's got a love letter," teased a young woman with bright scarlet curls.
"Oh shut it, Electra," Andy said absently and slit the envelope open with a finger.
The old woman was back then, offering Aragorn a seat by the fire and, "Some elk and potatoes, once they're done cooking. After such a long time traveling, you look like you need a good meal."
She wasn't wrong, and the fire was warm, so Aragorn gratefully took the opportunity.
That had him sat beside a woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties, hair streaked evenly between red and grey. "Hello there, stranger. What's your name?" she asked in that same accent.
"Please, call me Strider," Aragorn told her in a polite tone, "And yourself?"
The look she gave him was unimpressed; it was clear as day that the name he gave was not one a mother would name her child. "Elizabeth, but I go by Libby," she introduced and offered a hand. The shake she gave his was like a warrior's greeting in grip, but on his hand instead of his forearm. How odd.
"Otherwise she'd get confused with the dogs," said a young dark skinned man, smirking.
"Not my fault Mum named her dogs after the Queen," Libby replied, scowling.
"Well, they are corgis, dear," the elderly woman reasoned, "It was the only theme I could come up with for them."
Not much of it made sense to Aragorn, but he watched them argue and debate good-naturedly.
Motion caught his attention from knee high and he watched a small child with light tan skin toddle toward the fire. He reached out to bar the child from harm, but he was beaten by an odd little dog; it was a short dog like some vanity pets he had seen in Minas Tirith long ago, but very long and had a happy expression. Together with two more of its kind it herded the child away.
"Don't worry, the animals are wonderful babysitters," said a woman across the fire from him. She smiled kindly, but it turned her twisted face into something startling. Only half of her mouth moved properly and a bit of her nose was missing, scars shining in the orange fire light. Were it not for the tone of her voice, Aragorn would have wondered if she were a man who had seen many battles.
At her feet a heavy boned black dog appeared to snooze but peeked an eye open cautiously at Aragorn.
"I'm Cassandra, but everybody calls me Cass. Those are two of my sisters over there, Andy and Mackey, or as you might have heard, Andromeda and Andromache," she pointed to where Andy and an identical woman giggled over the missive, "You're sitting next to my aunt, and that was Electra's son Aaron who nearly got scalded." She gestured with her head to the scarlet haired young woman now fussing over the boy.
As it turned out, the soon-to-be princess of Rohan had a horde of sisters as well as a brother who was almost tall enough to be mistaken for being of Dunedain stock. It was strange for Andy to introduce a man who appeared to be one of the Haradrim as her father and his children as her brother and sister, no matter that it was obvious they shared no blood. It took Aragorn back several years to a time when he too had been adopted by strangers in a far away land.
Another dark skinned woman was introduced as their cousin's wife. It was obvious that she was not Haradrim however, her features were too rounded; she was something that Aragorn had never seen before. Admittedly he stared a bit, trying to figure out where she could have come from. A place far beyond Harad, for sure.
Although did it matter when it was obvious that she and her husband loved each other dearly? Seeing them made Aragorn long for his own love more than usual. And their new baby was well-looked after by them both.
Polite inquiries were made about himself and where he came from, where he was going. Details were kept to a minimum but Aragorn did answer: he was looking for someone at a friend's request but was going home empty handed.
Sympathetically Libby had nodded before she handed him a plate of dinner. Just as the old woman had said, it was elk and potatoes but a sauce made of winter berries was unexpected. Seeing that everyone else ate without consideration, and his own food had come from the same pot, Aragorn had no fears of poison and ate gladly.
All the while he examined the household around him. It was obviously new to them, the smell of freshly hewn wood still lingering from the rough but well made furniture. At the back of the room a variety of weapons were hung high up on the wall and gleamed sinisterly in the fire light, beside a door which he later found out led to a bucket privy.
The people themselves struck him as stranger than their dwelling. Several women wore their hair rather short, just off the shoulders instead of having it long, and half of everyone wore spectacles like he had only seen of the bookkeepers in Minas Tirith. It was obvious that beards were beginning to grow only reluctantly.
And their strange attitudes toward each other! Aragorn himself did not always get along with his elven twin brothers, yet that was nothing compared to the insults they threw so casually at each other. It seemed like an absurd form of endearment when Cass told yet another sister to, "Suck it up, buttercup."
Unfortunately the night was not entirely peaceful. A woman who looked older than the other young ones but younger than Libby had kept a fearful watch on him that only wavered when she keenly eyed a girl of seven or eight. When he passed to go to the privy after dinner, she had hugged her daughter tightly to her despite how the girl wiggled and complained.
While he was in the privy, a burst of chatter broke out as he had expected. His keen ears caught most of it; the younger ones thought he was good looking, if dirty, and the older ones appeared to be trying to reason with someone.
"You can always go upstairs if you're uncomfortable, he's sleeping in the main room and you know I'm always up at night," Cass was offering to the woman who appeared to be afraid of Aragorn.
"DO YOU THINK THAT HELPS?" the woman shrieked, red faced, and suddenly she was screaming through her crying, "ALL THE SHARP OBJECTS ARE DOWN HERE! AND THE FIRE! HE CAN BURN THIS PLACE DOWN AND KILL US ALL IF HE SLEEPS HERE!"
Taken aback, Aragorn lingered in the privy doorway to watch. Why would he burn down a home in the middle of winter? Or at all, when they're not his enemies?
"We can bring the pointy stuff upstairs if you're that worried," pointed out one of the odder women of the group, luminous blue eyes frightened behind her spectacles.
"There's no reason for him to want to hurt us anyways," pointed out the Haradrim sister, "And it's the middle of winter, why would he burn down the place where he's staying the night?"
"I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE HE'S A LUNATIC!" the woman screamed.
"THAT IS ENOUGH!" thundered Libby, on her feet in her fury. She was utterly magnificent to behold, lit from behind by the fire and green eyes flaring.
The younger woman cowered, crying and clutching her daughter like the girl would disappear.
"Cressida Lavender van der Zee!" Libby addressed the woman, then began to scold, "That was horrible of you! There's no evidence he means badly, and he's been standing right there since you first started screaming about how he's going to murder us all! Without evidence! You've disrespected our guest horribly after he took a long journey to deliver that letter, and you've been nothing but rude!"
"I'VE BEEN NOTHING BUT AFRAID!" Cressida shouted back.
Libby's expression turned to one of frustrated disbelief and she raked a hand through her unruly mane.
"I can sleep in one of the other buildings tonight," Aragorn offered quietly. The last thing he wanted was to cause pointless strife.
Despite Cressida's vehement nods, everyone else scoffed or scowled. "We need to show Cressie some way that not everybody is out to get her," Cass reasoned, shrugging her wide shoulders, "And I'll be awake most of the night anyways, so just in case you are a nutter…" She winked playfully at him.
"The only other buildings with a roof are all filled with animals anyways. It would be cruel to send you to sleep with the horses or in the rain," Andy confirmed.
As a concession to Cressida's terrible fears, the various weapons were taken upstairs when everyone went to bed.
That night a straw sack mattress was moved into the main room for him, from one of the other rooms on the ground floor. "Don't worry dear, we just washed the sack last week and the hay is fresh," assured the old woman, who he finally found out was called Katherine.
"Thank you, for feeding and sheltering me for the night," Aragorn told her quietly. The hurt from her granddaughter's baseless accusations lingered, despite that he knew he looked a scoundrel. If he were honest, he was more humiliated on the family's behalf than his own.
"We know what it's like to travel a long ways. I'm glad to make that easier on someone else," she had replied with a motherly pat to his cheek. It reminded Aragorn of his own long dead mother, despite that this woman was perhaps his own age.
Everyone else was filtering to bed in different nooks of the house. Most of them went upstairs but Katherine and her husband had a room on the ground floor, as did Libby in what appeared to be little more than a cupboard; they all wished Aragorn a good night before he was left alone with the banked fire.
And a pile of corgis, he noted with amusement as they settled down to chew on fresh elk bones.
Now that he had a moment of peace, Aragorn laid back on the straw sack to think. There were so many people here that it was difficult to get a real gauge on any of them. That being said, none of them struck him as disingenuous or threatening. A sadness radiated from them all, and clearly they had issues that they needed to deal with, but at a fundamental level he felt nothing bad from them. No ill intent.
Of course he would have to tell his men and Lord Elrond about this new development. Having allies at this crossing could be useful.
Especially if Aragorn were to continue on this quest of Gandalf's.
He covered himself with a thoughtfully provided blanket and fell asleep quickly.
In the morning, I was the one to see off the strange man who called himself Strider. "I'm really sorry about last night," I told him, face burning, "We're working on some issues."
He too gave me a look that made me wonder if I dribbled on my shirt. Tunic. Whatever. Then it softened into something understanding. "Every family has problems," he said reassuringly.
That was spoiled when he warned, "If yours are not seen to, you may perish."
Right then. Not like he had to tell me that; we walked a fine line even without the family disunity.
"So, do you travel this route often?" I asked to change the topic.
He grimaced down at me. "Hopefully not very often. It is a long journey and takes me from home for far too long," he confessed.
Honestly that was something I could get behind. And it brought an idea to mind, helped along by half-remembered inscriptions on an ancient wall. "Do you know if there are any traders going from the north to Rohan? Or anything worth trading?" I asked.
For what seemed like a long time, the stranger thought. "The last trading links between the north and south were severed before I was born. The way has been too dangerous for too many years after the North Kingdom fell," he told me with a heavy sort of sadness.
Did he have some connection with Tharbad from before it was ruined? That was a bit personal for a mere run-in like this, so I kept quiet.
"Were a new trading route established, I would suggest they begin with spices from the south and pipe weed from the north," Strider eventually said, "and spirits sell everywhere."
I barely noticed him shimmy across the bare bones frame of the bridge repairs, just the motion of him waving from the far bank. Absently I returned the gesture before I headed back to the house.
"So guys, Strider gave me the best idea ever," I announced upon barging inside.
"Was that to give us all heart attacks?" Electra snapped. Despite her words, she didn't miss a beat with the butter churn.
Meanwhile Cressie had barely avoided the contents of hers spilling all over the floor when she startled.
"Nobody's denying that we need money, right?" I asked, just to be sure.
I was given a great many sarcastic responses.
"Apparently nobody's done a trading route between the north and south since some kingdom in the north went down a while ago. So how about it? We've got the wagons and horses, and I'm pretty sure we can all agree that everybody being together all the time hasn't worked out too well," I explained, much like one of the elevator pitches I had heard about.
Considering last night's debacle, no one could disagree that we had all been together too long. If Cressie had one more outburst, I'd probably fucking strangle her.
"We need to get soap from somewhere until we can figure out making it," Mackey pointed out.
"Feeding our ridiculous amount of horses is hell, just saying," Liam put in, entirely unamused that he got stable duty more often than not. For all that he disliked horses, he was good with them.
"Where are we going to get the money to start up, though?" Gran put in as she stirred the pot on the fire.
Good question… We couldn't exactly lean on Rohan for everything, marriage or no.
"We've still got what, five ivory tusks?" Electra answered.
A grin split my face as I contemplated the beginning of our new enterprise. "If they paid well in Edoras for ivory, what do you think we can get further north?" I suggested.
"Did you check the coops?" Grandpa interrupted from behind his mother's book.
Under my breath I cursed, glad that I hadn't taken my cloak off. "Be right back," I mumbled and grabbed the basket for eggs.
While I gathered the delicious eggs, I noted that unfortunately one of the chickens was hacking up her poor little lungs. "Sorry, baby," I told her and gathered her up by her sides. All it took was one quick chop with a cleaver, although I did feel bad about it.
Of course Dezzie immediately freaked out when I brought in not only eggs but a beheaded chicken. "He was a wacko!" she exclaimed, pointing at the feathered carcass.
I shot her a look of disgust, and then handed the dead bird by its feet to Anahera. "Poor thing was sick and if I didn't put her on the chopping block, the rest would get sick too," I told my cousin's wife rather loudly, "Chickens are prone to that." Thank you, people of Afghanistan for teaching me a few things about chicken farming.
"If it was sick, why are you bringing it in here?" Cressie demanded quite reasonably.
"As long as we don't eat the respiratory tract, we'll be fine," I assured her, "They did it overseas all the time."
Suspicious but hungry for familiar meat, I heard no more objections. There were few preparational differences between this and any other animal we've eaten in Middle Earth; only that the head and lungs were buried deep in a field rather than fed to the dogs like the other bones and innards. The chicken meat was damn delicious when added to the usual soup pot.
Over dinner the trading route idea was plotted, with the main concern being bandits. Not to mention possible complaints of unfairness about who gets to go on "vacation" from the hard work of farming, so to speak. But a plan was made.
I was the obvious choice for going out with the caravan: clumsy with the farming implements, more prone to fighting with Cressie than anybody except Electra, and absolutely jumping at the chance for new adventures. Only when we settled had I realized how much I loved seeing new places every day and the chance of danger that only came with travel.
At least on this round, it was decided that the twins and Matt would come with me. They wanted to see what the northern reaches of Middle Earth looked like before they would be stuck in Rohan for the rest of their lives. Okay, maybe not "stuck" but Andy was going to be bound to the place by marriage and like hell was Mackey letting her twin go alone. And wherever Mackey went, so did Matt.
With something to look forward to, I waited out the weather with considerably more patience than usual. It seemed to take forever and a day before the rains stopped being downpours.
Then the bridge had to be fixed so that we could cross, which had barely even crossed my mind. The river here was shallow enough that in months past I had been able to swim from one bank to the other with my toes firmly planted in the silt. Now when spring was coming the river occasionally gushed from its banks and rushed past the settlement; too dangerous to take a horse through, never mind a wagon.
When things were finally set up for my first run north, the area was beginning to bloom like a fairy castle. Seeds planted in harsh weather were beginning to sprout, vines and trees shooting upward with baby leaves. The shutters were thrown open more often than not to let in the sunshine.
I almost regretted leaving right when everything was beginning to go well.