Chapter Text
My roots are coming in. The other elves, my former cohort, have already noticed. Even the orcs will see it within the week, and then they will know me for a spy. Not who or for whom, but they will know I took pains to seem other than I am. My people think the orcs too stupid for strategy, but that is one of several ways we habitually underestimate them, and to our loss.
If I’m lucky, I will play it off as mere vanity. My silver hair makes me feel like an old woman, I will say, so I dye it brown. The orcs will mock my foolishness, perhaps shaving my head as punishment, and we will all move on. But if Médhor keeps frowning at it…
I’m being paranoid. There was a time when my silver-white hair would have marked me for who I am: Írimë, daughter of Finwë, king of the Noldor in Aman of old. Morgoth knew me in an instant, when he caught me under Thangorodrim long ago. Hard pressed I was to escape with my life. But that is a story for another day, and Morgoth is now long gone. These orcs are but an echo of the ruin he wrought on the world.
Still. I would prefer to continue as I am for now, just one slave among many, until I learn what I came here to learn. Why are the orcs carving tunnels all through the Southlands? Who is this leader they revere as a father? I have never seen their Adar, but I hear the way they speak of him, as if they love him. My people would say that orcs are incapable of love, but as I have said, we have been wrong before.
Not that I have great experience of the orcs and their softer feelings. It’s true that I have spent more time around them than any elf I could name, in my long years among the elves and men of Beleriand playing spy, saboteur, and peacemaker, as the need demanded; but I would not call them soft, nor loving. Yet unlike my people, who rarely learn their tongue or study them except to slay them, I have come to see the orcs not as a faceless, undifferentiated horde, but as individuals, each with his own thoughts and personality, however noxious.
My stated mission, as an elf serving in the border guard at Ostirith, was to watch the Southlands for the rise of any old evil or new rebellion. (The guard as a whole were far more concerned with the latter than the former.) Unofficially, my mandate is more specific: to root out Sauron, Morgoth’s lieutenant and presumptive heir. My niece Galadriel quietly placed me in the border guard a few years ago to be her own eyes and ears while she pursued rumors of Sauron in the north. Here I am known by my Sindarin name, Írien, and the elves I serve alongside have no hint of my family connections or complicated loyalties.
When I first heard the orcs speak of Adar, I wondered if he might be Sauron himself. I soon discarded this idea as unlikely; the Sauron I knew would never permit such familiarity. But if anyone knows where the old bastard went to ground, it’s the orcs’ new leader.
I am sorting debris with some of the other female slaves when a commotion at the digging draws my attention. Revion, the old Watchwarden of Ostirith, is arguing with the orc captain Magrot. Poor fool. Revion, among all of us, is the most unsuited to the myriad daily humiliations of captivity. He does not yet know that the secret to survival is to treat it like a game, one which you must get very, very good at before choosing–perfectly–the moment that you’ll break away or make your stand. This is not the moment, watchwarden, I think at him with all my strength. He does not hear.
I drift closer so I can hear their exchange. The diggers have reached an ancient tree. Its roots tangle out of the hard earth above our heads. Revion wants to go around; he is of course refused. Now the orcs pretend to laud his boldness. Oh, hells. We all know they cannot allow him to defy them unpunished. We wait miserably to see how cruel the reprisal will be.
When Médhor falls, I am almost relieved. It could have been so much worse. It could have been all of us. Immediately I offer a silent prayer of apology for this response. To survive this work it is necessary to develop protective callouses, but sometimes I fear my heart will calcify straight through.
Arondir, sick at the waste of life, agrees to cut the tree. Hardly thinking, I step forward to join him. We climb the roots until we stand at the base of the great trunk. Arondir murmurs his own prayer of apology now, to the tree we are about to kill.
I have mourned trees before. When I was a girl, I watched the last light of Laurelin and Telperion sink sickly into darkness. I wept, then. I do not weep now. This is just a tree.
Perhaps I have calcified.
After long labor, the trunk is cut. The tree falls back with a resounding crash. The orcs cheer. Arondir weeps: for the tree, for Médhor. I can feel his grief turning to anger in the air between us. “Peace, brother,” I murmur in Sindarin. He nods, mastering himself.
We turn to the roots. With the great weight of the trunk gone, it is easier now to dig them out and hack them into pieces. Some of the other slaves join us. Not Revion, though. He is tending to Médhor’s corpse, whispering prayers to the unseen–unseeing?--Valar. The orcs have been letting us bury our dead, but only in addition to our required labor. I make my way down to him with an armful of roots.
“I will help you with him, my lord, but we must finish the tree first,” I breathe as I pass him. He makes no sign that he has heard, but he follows me back up to the roots a minute later.
The orcs don’t like it when we talk, especially in Elvish, but it’s the heat of the day and they’ve already made their point, so they watch us now from their tented tunnel. There over the ruined roots of a murdered tree, we plan our rebellion.
At tomorrow’s highest sun, we will marshal all our efforts towards breaking one prisoner’s chains and covering his escape. Arondir suggests it should be me, for my stealthcraft, but I demur, saying that he or Revion know the land better than I, and can make better speed. I do not say that I have my own reasons for staying.
For a moment, it truly seems like it might work. We break Revion’s chains. The orcs send out a warg, but Arondir and I trap it. Revion crests the bank, and all of us, slaves and slavers alike, are still for a breath. But then an arrow flies–I do not see from where–and another, and another, and he falls, cut down like a tree by the orcs he once swore were gone forever.
Now the orcs are dragging Arondir back. But they are not watching me. I know precisely where to tap my axe on his taut chain. Once, twice, and, already weakened, it snaps violently. All the orcs who’d been hauling on it tumble to the ground, momentarily distracted. I toss Arondir a leafy bough from the fallen tree to use as a shield. He vaults to the top of the embankment with it, ducking low as soon as he lands, and then he’s off. I cannot see him, but I keep hearing the whir of arrows, so I assume they haven’t stopped him yet.
I have my own trouble now. The orc Lurka has my chain in hand. The slack is almost gone. Fast as fire, before he can make one more tug, I leap for Magrot, the captain. I land on him like a child riding on his father’s back and with a flick of my wrist, I wrap my chain around us both. With my other hand I press the blade of my ax to his throat, hard enough that a trickle of black blood drips down my blade.
“One more step and he’s dead!” I yell, my voice hoarse from weeks of disuse and dehydration.
The other orcs freeze, but Magrot just laughs. “There’s no way out of this alive, sweetheart, so you might as well take me with you,” he growls against the blade at his neck.
I ignore him. “Take me to Adar,” I say to Lurka, Magrot’s lieutenant.
Magrot tenses beneath me. He’s not sure what game I play. The other orcs eye me suspiciously, but I hear Vrath say in his own tongue, “Might as well be him kills her as us,” and Lurka seems to agree. I give no sign I’ve understood.
“All right, princess, drop the ax,” Lurka calls.
I unwind the chain binding me to Magrot and toss the ax away. I take a single step forward, ready to present myself to be bound, when out of nowhere there is a savage yell and something crashes into Magrot, knocking us both to the ground. Black blood spurts into my eye, burning and blurring my vision. With my other eye I see one of the human slaves, a broad, sullen man named Braga. He’s stabbed Magrot in the neck with some makeshift stiletto. A piece of tree root, maybe.
All this I see in a flash. Before the orcs have reacted, I pull the man off of Magrot and slam him to the ground. “You poor, blasted fool!” I whisper hotly in his face. “Can’t you see there was no need? I cannot save you!”
As if to emphasize my words, the orcs yank roughly on my chain and I fly back, landing in a crouch a few yards back. “Save yourself, princess,” Braga spits at me. I am surprised how much it stings me to hear the orcs’ name for me from his lips.
I do not turn away as the orcs deliver the same neck-blow to him that he’d given Magrot, who’s now gurgling on the ground beside me. The human, being far less hardy than an orc, dies instantly. I bow my head in sorrow for the senseless stupidity of it all. Red blood and black mingle in the dust at my feet.
An orc knocks me roughly to the ground with the butt of his spear. My hands are bound as well as my feet. They drag me, by the arms and the hair, deep into their tented warren. I do not resist.
The orcs chain me to an iron ring in a rock wall. I am in an alcove at the back of a large open space, a tented tunnel that feels more like a cave, from which I can look out and see the orcs milling around Magrot, whom they’ve laid out on a pile of skins. There is no slack in my chains either to stand or lie down, so I kneel on the rough stone with my arms pulled behind me. It is a posture of submission.
Submission is a funny thing. Most see only what you’re submitted to , as if something outside yourself has overpowered and subdued you. But if my captors looked closely, they would see that it is not my chains which hold me in this attitude, but I myself. I am not slumped against my bindings in defeat, nor straining uselessly for release; I am content to constrain myself within the boundaries they set me. In the line of my back there is no hint of captivity.
The secret of submission lies in the act itself, and in the actor. Many strong men have the power to accomplish their aims by direct force. Far fewer have the self-mastery to husband and conceal their true strength, and fewer still will choose to lay their power down in the service of some longer purpose. The secret of spycraft is not in invisibility, but in changeability. You must contrive to appear as whatever your target most needs you to be.
When I was a youth in Valinor, swimming with my friends in the twilit sea, we would challenge ourselves to find the furthest possible point our air would take us while still allowing us to return to the surface. The long, subtle dance of spycraft and diplomacy is like that: you find the absolute limits of your breath, of how much power you can relinquish without drowning outright, and you surrender to it. Sometimes you gamble on a new limit, because you must. Your success depends upon how much you are able to lay down, and when you choose to take it up again.
The orcs around Magrot have taken up a chant now: Adar, Adar, Adar. It sounds like the rumble of thunder, or an earthquake. Far away, the crowd of them parts, the orcs kneeling in a wave before a tall, shadowy figure who makes his way steadily towards us. Well, towards Magrot. The newcomer walks slowly, heavily, as if in pain, or bearing a great burden. He does not move like an orc. When he finally emerges from the corridor of orcs, I catch my breath at the beauty of him. The ruin of scars on his face only emphasizes, by contrast, the fairness of its design. The cut of his jaw, the sweep of his ear – this is an elf, or was. We might have been kin, back in the days of awakening. I watch him, rapt. I cannot look away.
He kneels by Magrot, grief written on his strange face. Magrot looks at him like an elf looks at the stars, like he’s seen the face of god. The stranger–Adar–touches Magrot’s horrible face, a tender valediction. There are tears in his eyes. Then I hear the sick squelch of a blade sinking home, and Magrot suffers no more. My stomach roils. My heart aches. A single tear slips down my cheek, an embarrassment, an absurdity, and with my hands bound I must let it fall.
Having cleaned his blade, Adar comes slowly over to me. I keep my head low, the picture of submission.
“Masse nóna nánelya, héri?” he rasps in Quenya. Where were you born, lady? A jolt of grief and longing runs through me at his words. I will not tell him that I was born under the mingled light of the trees of Valinor, in Aman the Blessed, in time beyond memory.
“Nalkroro urukuk lat bugd Adar?” I reply in orcish, lifting my eyes to his. Why do the orcs call you father?
He throws his head back and laughs, a sound like steel on stone. To my ears it is both lovely and grotesque. I look away.
Slowly, Adar lowers himself to sit on his heels before me. With a single claw of a fingernail, dirty and cruelly pointed, he lifts my chin so that I must look at him again. In the dim light of the cave, his eyes seem black as blood, but there is a spark in them I have never seen in an orc.
He studies me. He must see the tear track running down my dirty face, for he traces it with his clawed finger, not lightly but hard enough to draw blood. I cannot see it but I feel it, a thin line of wet warmth welling up from my eye down to my neck.
“Why do you weep?” he asks, almost gently. “You are the one who broke peace with my captain.”
He says it like I killed Magrot myself. “Not I, lord.”
“Your people, then.”
“Not by my word,” I insist. “It was badly done, and I am sorry for it.” My eyes flick back to where Magrot lies, at peace now as he surely never was in life.
Adar cocks his head at me. “Elves do not apologize. Not to the uruk.”
I shrug, an awkward motion with my hands drawn behind my back. “Nor do we sully our tongues with the speech of your kind, as a rule. A folly, for there is much we fail to learn.”
He eases himself down so he’s sitting against the rock wall opposite me, just a few feet away. “And what are you here to learn, little elf?”
I make no reply.
“Why are you here?” he asks again.
“I was a border guard.”
“That is not what I mean.”
I quirk half a smile. “I followed the tunnels?”
“Why did you beg audience with me?” His voice is deadly soft. A shudder runs through me at the sound of it.
“It seemed my best chance of surviving the next minute, lord.”
“I might give you a far worse death,” he observes.
“You might,” I agree. “You might not.”
He raises a brow. “Do you think me merciful, lady?”
I look again to Magrot. “I think you are merciful to your own, lord.” I turn back to Adar. “I will make no such appeals.”
He leans towards me. His clothes smell rank–old blood and orc-stink–but his breath is sweet and cold on my face. “Take a message to the people gathered at the old watchtower. Tell them that if they swear fealty to me, I will spare them. For I am indeed merciful to my own.”
“What are the terms of this fealty?”
“Absolute.”
“Many will refuse you, not wishing to fight their kin.” I hold his gaze.
“Many will not.”
I hum noncommittally.
“And what terms would you offer, lady?” He’s humoring me. I can’t quite tell why, unless it be simply that this is the most interesting conversation he’s had in some time.
“Not fealty, but a truce,” I say, playing his game. “So long as they raise no hand against you, they may live.”
“And what surety shall I have that binds them to their word?”
“I believe it is traditional to take a hostage, lord.”
“Shall I keep you, then?” he says lightly.
I feel an inexplicable flush at the thought, but I manage an easy laugh. “I’m afraid I would make rather a poor hostage, lord. There is little love between the humans and me.”
“Indeed? Yet you bargain with a monster for their lives.”
“I feel a certain responsibility for them.” It might be a mistake, but tentatively I add, “Something I think you can understand. Adar.”
His face darkens. Ah yes, that was definitely a mistake.
“Take my offer to the people: for those who will swear fealty to me, security and the chance of reward. For those who will not…”
With a movement as sudden as the stab that ended Magrot’s pain, Adar lunges at me and grabs my chin roughly in his ungloved hand. He leans in so close his nose brushes mine. My heart pounds.
“If you will return to me,” Adar says in a voice like a serpent’s, “and by your own will, place your head under my hand, I will spare the humans–for now.” He releases me and springs back, breathing heavily. “And if you do not return, or if they raise a hand against me or mine, I hold their lives forfeit.”
I bow my head, sensing this is the best I’ll be able to do. “It shall be as you say, lord.”
He leaves me without another word. I stare after him. I cannot say what game he plays. I cannot say what game I play.
I have won a concession, but I do not feel the victory of it. I feel rather the pall of doom falling on me, as if a high, far cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, were speeding towards me, heavy with rain, larger every time I look.
Within the hour, orcs come to release me. My limbs are stiff, but I am given no time to find my footing before they drag me through a wide, sloping tunnel to the surface, where the sun’s setting rays flash into my eyes. The orcs kick me hard in the back, sending me out into the light with a curse.
“Be swift, princess. For Adar,” they call after me, mocking.
I am already trotting off. “For Adar,” I murmur to myself.