I awoke to find myself in candleit darkness.
My chest heaved, the sheets wrapped around me damp with sweat. I felt something grasp my wrist.
I gasped and ripped my hand away, trying to shield myself from the blow I knew by instinct would come. A whimper of mortal fear surfaced from the recesses of my body as it curled into a position of defenseless submission. It was one I knew well.
"Daisy," said a voice - not the one I had expected. "Daisy, it's me, it's Frodo. You're safe, it's all right now. Nothing can hurt you."
The figure, wearing the darkness like a cloak, picked up the candle and held it aloft to light his countenance. Warm light flickered over the eyes that looked colorless in the glow of it, but I knew their true shade well. His eyebrows drew together in great concern, throwing the rest of his features into a cast of sharp, grim lines that aged him beyond his years. He outstretched his hand to touch me and muscle memory caused me to recoil, to turn my head away in preparation for the blow my body knew would come.
"Please," he whispered. "Don't be afraid. I would never hurt you…"
"Master Baggins?" I replied. My voice was hoarse, as if I'd been screaming, and it did not surprise me to find that I had. My throat burned behind its tangled veil of sweat and tears. "Is that you?"
"Yes, it's me," he said. "I heard your screams, they woke me from sleep. You must've dreamed something terrible...do you remember it?"
A dwindling vision of hands streaked with my own blood, mingled with the ash that fluttered above me, delicate wings like black butterflies from the hearth. Unfeeling eyes staring down at me while I trembled on the cold stone floor. The metallic bite of blood stinging my tongue. A steel toed boot whose shape matched the bruises appearing on my arms and legs. His name felt cruel in my mouth, the thorns of each consonant scraped against my gums. Even now I feared to speak it aloud and invite him in.
"I-" I said, faltering. "I don't remember…"
"You don't have to try," he replied. He turned, at once disappearing as his face turned away from the glow of the candle. "Here. Drink this. It will calm you."
He placed the warm china in my hands, holding it there until my trembling fingertips could remember their function and wrap around it. Boiled nettle wove its magic through and over me, washing me in the heat so that my twitching nerves began to settle as I took small, rhythmic sips of it.
"Thank you," I rasped.
"Who is he? The man you were screaming at in your dream…" Frodo asked. "He seemed to be hurting you."
I stopped abruptly in the middle of a swallow, but was able to convince myself to keep from choking on it. He waited with a patience that suggested he, too, had often found himself alone and frightened under the cover of nightfall. Night, with its cold stillness and the pale beauty of moon and gossamer stars, proved unfeeling in the way of comfort when uneasy dreams came.
He seemed to watch me without blinking as I lay still and quiet under his rapt attention. Part of me wanted to bring the monster who stalked my sleep to light, dwarf him in the clear light of reason. Perhaps it would cause him to shrink away on the horizon, firmly planted in my past where he belonged. But while the distance between us lessened my fear, it did not take it away completely, because he was still out there, existing, closing in. Searching for me with tireless resolve.
"Daisy?" Frodo's voice felt like a nudge coming from my bedside.
I could hardly imagine how wild I must have looked sifting through the old horrors and the new,.
"No one of consequence," I said. The words proved difficult to swallow, but another sip of tea helped them on their way down.
We hide ourselves away in our own private thoughts – I was thinking of my old master, of the bruises on my body that had faded away in color but under the superficial coating of skin, were permanent fixtures of my being. Frodo sat without moving, without looking at me, in his chair at my bedside. I could hardly guess what he pondered in his own brooding.
"I know that something terrible has happened to you," he said. "That's why you showed up in Hobbiton, isn't it? You're running from something. Or someone."
I ignored his question and tipped my head back to receive the last dregs of cold tea. Hoping against hope he'd forget it, I silently begged him to take the hint that I didn't want to discuss it further but let it drop, let it lie and rot away. But it was a fool's hope, I knew. If I had learned anything about him in the time since I'd arrived at Bag End, it was that he was tenacious. Nosy, even. Quite hobbit-like in that regard, it seems, I scoffed to myself.
"Come now, Daisy," he said, prodding again, but with the reserve that came with knowing how fragile glass can be. "You've been here a month and a half. I had hoped by now that you would have come to regard me as a friend, not an enemy."
"It's not that I think of you as an enemy, Master," I replied. "It is that the world is an enemy, and you are merely a part of it."
There was no equal ground on which they could stand – him, master of wealth and security and autonomy, an inherent trust that developed under the nurture of love, respect, and tenderness.
And me – a browbeaten servant, a close companion of want and need, the brand of abuse and hatred seared into every one of my short years so that they became ugly and gnarled like old scar tissue.
"Have I given you any reason not to trust me?" He asked.
"No," I replied. "But I have never been given a reason to trust anyone. Not in a long time."
"Who hurt you, Daisy?" He pressed. "Who made you so afraid of the world and everyone in it?"
My gaze was trained on the candle and the flame dancing on its smoldering wick, seeing nothing. "I am afraid. I don't want my past to find me here, because this is the new life for which I've fought and sacrificed much. If it finds me, then that sacrifice, which was great, was for naught. I must protect it at all costs. If that means taking everything I know to the grave, then so be it."
"It does no good to suffer on your own," Frodo said.
"I find that quite peculiar, coming from you Master..."I replied. "You who suffers in silence, day in and day out."
I could tell he was stunned by my accusation, but did not disagree with it, and there was something deep inside of me, made bitter and hard by the years under my cruel master's hand, that reveled in my ability to inflict pain on him. It was a part that I rejected, scolding myself for even daring to entertain such feelings against a gentle soul who had never raised a hand against me. I'd never even heard a cross word from him. Always kindness, always compassion. Even when I failed to deserve it.
"I was stabbed in the shoulder in October, two years ago almost to the day," he said.
The confession came without warning, without provocation, and my eyes dropped to follow the path of his hand. Horror flooded me as he pulled the loose, hanging collar of his nightshirt away from the sharp peaks of collarbone to reveal a hideous scar in his shoulder. A chill found its way under my skin. It ate away at layers of blood and bone and marrow until it found the core of my being, settling there and spreading with fingers like ice. The sensation was otherworldly. It came from a force so far removed from myself and everything natural that I'd ever experienced so that the knobby hills and far green country of the Shire disappeared, and I felt the presence of great evil swallow us in the heart of its lifeless shadow.
The wound looked unnatural even now, years after its infliction. The flesh still looked open and ragged, as if it had never truly healed. Spirals of blue-tinged black paved their way through the pathways of veins just under the surface of his marble white skin, spreading out in all directions, carrying its pestilence out and beyond the ugly epicenter so that it spread throughout his entire body. I felt a shiver against my own will. Even looking at the wound, I could imagine the pain he must have felt - adopting it, for the moment, as if it were my very own.
"How did you come by such a terrible scar?" I whispered.
"I was attacked on my journey by terrible foes, an ancient evil wrought by great suffering and betrayal. They had pursued me long before I even crossed the borders of the Shire, and their hunt culminated in a confrontation, an attack in a place called Amon Sul. Their leader rushed at me, his cold blade unsheathed, and he tried to take something I carried for safekeeping, promising to rip it out of my cold dead hands, but I resisted, attempting to draw him into a crossing of our swords. It was a foolhardy attempt. A friend...a brave and true friend, to whom I'm indebted for my very life, he saved me from certain death."
"Who were they?" I asked, the muscles behind my eyes pulling tight as they grew wider. "These enemies you speak of."
"Horrifying creatures, robbed of all humanity and purpose, until nothing human was left of them. They were held in bondage to the will of their master. They did not rest, did not eat, did not tire in the pursuit of their quarry. They rode in black robes that hid their cruel faces from sight, striking fear into the heart of all who looked upon them. Their captain was most fearsome and merciless of them all. To him I owe the existence of this wound, given to me by the tip of his foul blade. It healed, but never fully. It grows tender and aches around this time of year when the chill of autumn starts to settle in..."
Both of our voices barely registered above a faint whisper. We conspired under the watchful stars of twilight, as though the devil of whom Frodo spoke found us there on the perimeters of his black kingdom. We were stowaways in these shadowed lands of his fell memory, and it was as though we feared that he would come upon us, emerge out the halls of death, to unsheathe his terrible blade once more.
Frodo's body convulsed as his story finished, having lived through the events of it years ago, and yet still it followed him. The distress and bloodshed of that day was as keenly felt as though it had happened yesterday. My stubborn resolve melted away, challenged by his offering of vulnerability.
"I, too, am being hunted," I admitted. "I broke my leg, and with it broke my resolve to keep living under his tyranny. I was safe from his malevolence while I convalesced, being of no use dead, but I knew it would not last, and I fled from him before it fully healed. It aches still, whenever I walk too much on it, when the weather turns."
"When did this happen?" He asked.
"About four months ago. I was bedridden for three weeks. He set the leg himself, had a friend of his who'd dabbled here and there in healing look in on me, who gave it three more weeks of bed rest or it wouldn't heal properly. I chose a new life over a good leg."
"Some wounds never truly heal," he said. "We carry them for the rest of our lives."
"Especially when it comes to matters of the heart," I replied. "But I do not pretend to have been through half as much terror as you have encountered."
"My experiences in no way diminish the fear you felt for your life. It was just as real, just as dire, the situation you found yourself in," he assured me. "They are so different, our circumstances, and they happened to two very different hobbits with different backgrounds, goals, and temperaments. I would not compare them, nor declare one or the other as more deserving of empathy. They are equal in that regard."
Hot tears stung the sore muscles in my eyes, clustering like dew at the corners of them. At last I saw him for what he was...a kindred spirit.
"You are kind, Master, in spite of all you have suffered," I admitted.
"My Uncle Bilbo often said kindness often springs from suffering," he said. "I don't know if I fully believed him, but you are evidence of that."
I could not hold back the surprise that leapt at him from where I sat, arms circling around my knees, sheets bunched at my sides. "Me?"
"Why of course!" He laughed. "How kind you have been to me. In all of the Shire, no one has been more kind, more understanding, outside of the small and intimate circle of friends I hold dear."
I would not have been so generous. Not after all of the hours I spent fuming over how closely he guarded his information, his superficial laughter and lackadaisical treatment of my lines of questioning. How silly that all seemed now, and not simply because he had given away so much all at once in an uncharacteristic display of vulnerability. Knowing the particulars of every detail seemed so unimportant in light of all that had happened to us. His past, I realized, would not make the puzzle pieces fit together, but knowing him, who he was now - perhaps that was more important after all.
"Master I -" I swallowed. "I- I don't think-"
"Really, Daisy," he teased, a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth. "I think you ought to learn to take a compliment."
He retrieved the porcelain mug from my lap and took up the candlestick, now beginning to pool in a melted heap. The pliant wax leaked into the fibers of the wooden end table. Frodo did not speak again, but I listened to the whisper of his feet pressing into the sleepy floorboards, craning my ear to detect the sounds, until at last they could be heard no more. My door remained slightly ajar, and from the kitchen that seemed so very far away from my corner of the house, I heard the clink of porcelain brushing counter space. He seemed to disappear without a trace after that.
I smoothed the wrinkles from the sheets and pulled the coverlet over me, sinking deep down into its downy embrace. A cocoon of warmth lulled me back into sleep. I lay suspended over the edges of dreams, but when I woke again and light flooded my bedroom, I found that she had eluded them this time.