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Imladris, late summer, Third Age 2576
The letter is folded along the original creases and tucked into my breast pocket under my jerkin. The high pass is clear; the scouts have said so. We will go, now, and still have time to make it back over before the first snows.
Roccandil doesn’t know where my brother is, but thinks maybe he’d seen him head up the river a while back.
It is the voices that draw me, finally. There at the edge of the Spire pool I see—them. What the… I am in the cover of the trees still but I think they wouldn’t have noticed me if I stepped out and started chucking rocks.
Nose-to-nose. The roar of the waterfall drowning out all but the sharpest bits of discourse. She is hot. She doesn’t exactly incandesce the way her father does, but the mad is still rolling off her in waves. Rolling right off his back, too, if the way he’s got his shoulders held is anything to go by.
But then she says something that makes my twin stand up a little straighter and step in a little closer and I nearly give up my own cover, then, eavesdropping be damned. I’m not sure what to think of a bit of Elrohir’s dangerous look leveled at Glorfindel’s daughter.
I know Elrohir wouldn’t hurt her. There isn’t a word in her mouth that could bring about that. Still it’s a little unsettling to see.
I’m not certain whether to be relieved or doubly troubled by what Elrohir does next. He reaches out with an adder-quick hand and tugs her cloak-ties out of their knot and throws the long green thing away behind him on the stones. Next he bends and catches her behind the knee and yanks her foot out from under her so all she can do is sit down hard in the sand.
Elrohir tugs her boot off and flings it away and seizes the other ankle and does that one, too.
That would have been the end of it. Elrohir gone of his mind completely and undressing Laurelandë on the shore of a secreted highland lake. I wonder if I can get in one good hit before he notices I’m here.
But Elrohir is done with the undressing. He bends again and hoists her shrieking and slapping his arm and heaves her out into the deep pool under the rock.
The ripples of that mighty splash slap dark against the beach. Elrohir scoops up Laurelandë’s cloak and folds it crisply and lays it in the sand and sets her boots in a neat pair square beside it and turns and departs on sure strides through the trees. He passes me and does not so much as raise a brow in surprise, but only says, “You ready to go?”
I am. We go. It snows far earlier than most years.
We don’t return until spring, when I bring Eglerialph home with me at last.