Chapter Text
A measly horseshoe nail. We sat on the little hellion two weeks ago so Elrohir could yank the thing out of his heel. I hadn’t thought much more about it until all his muscles started to spasm and go stiff.
He suffocated. Couldn’t lift his own ribcage to breathe, in the end. Elrohir is outside now with Habadon. Might have to knock him out if he doesn’t stop going for his knife. To put it in himself or someone else, who knows. The kid had been his last family left, that’s the only reason he was along with the Rangers to begin with. Eleven years old and wild as a hare.
I sit and think about the symptoms for a while as the child lies there on the cot, at last relaxed in death, the leering grin of lockjaw smoothed away. We have seen it before, of course, more times than I care to remember. Not all of them die, but if they don’t it cripples them, more often than not. Body-wide atrophy.
All the usual speculations when it crops up. Everything from yellow humors to bad blood to demons.
But I think it has something to do with that damn nail.
Rust? I didn’t look at it that closely. Something to chew on.
These Dúnedain kids are hard to keep shoes on. Is it something in the dirt that creeps up into the puncture? They can get worms that way, and do pretty often.
We need to go soon. We’ll have to put him in the ground before we do. I rise and go to my pack still half-strewn around on a bedroll from that last sorry effort to keep his little heart going. I carry vials and swabs in a deep pocket because I am going to keep after figuring these sorts of things out. Right now there are only seven children in the whole of Arahad’s village. I know there are more out scattered in the hills and homesteads but they still can’t afford to be losing them to stupid, preventable things.
Elrohir and I were snowed in with them for six weeks last winter and in six weeks there had been three miscarriages, one of them late-term. Three dead babies out of only twenty or so women of childbearing age. We need to hash on that one, too.
A diminishing people. Not if I have anything to say about it.
I culture the boy’s mouth and nose and the wound in his heel and prick his finger and squeeze up the slow, still blood and tuck the capped phials back into their pocket to bear back to the Valley and the trappings that dwell there for far deeper study.
Then I bathe the little body and dress it and shroud it in a grey cloak and pin the Star over the breast. Little Ranger.
I will stay home this winter. Too much work to be done.