Chapter Text
Prologue
Bree, April, TA 3020
Legend has it that our greatest revelations and brightest ideas come to us in our dreams. That Maglor, the fabled songwright of the elves, composed his Noldolantë after waking on a beach strewn with charred Teleri wood, while Tobold Took came up with the potato chip after falling asleep upon one such tubercule, which he had reduced to parchment-thin overnight under the weight of his considerable jowls.
“Wake up! Wake up, Cockscrew!” The door shook under the caress of a meaty fist. “You owe me two weeks’ rent, you lazy mumblecrust.”
The dream shattered to splinters.
Sereg gasped as he and reality collided, heart hammering against his ribs like a ball in a game of bagatelle. “Corkscrew,” Sereg muttered miserably into his pillow. “It’s Corskscrew, Merv.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he scrabbled at the fading remains of his would-be glory. In vain. Shards of rainbow thawed under imaginary fingers, much like soap shavings in a bathtub. Sereg rolled over with a soft groan, regretting his decision as the ache beneath his temples flared with a vengeance. His head was pounding – a dull, dogged pulse that ended in a high-pitched whine inside his left ear, where ‘Cuddles’ Fairweather had socked him the night before. Something about a round of gauntlet he’d lost a while back, and had failed to honor.
Which he just might’ve…but the way Tammy’s eyes had lit up when he’d presented her with that scarf he’d spent his wages on instead, was worth the pain.
“Open up, you slacking half-breed!” Merv yelled, before adding, not unkindly: “I hope you’re dead…for your sake.”
For an instant, Sereg’s heart soared with the dream of Merv indulging such a sweet delusion. He prayed, silently – and, if he was honest with himself, quite unexpectedly – to Ivon and her apple-shaped breasts that if Merv buggered off, Sereg would repent his many terrible choices and, eventually, might even find his way back to eyeballing, from a distance, the straight road of honesty.
A key scratched snidely inside the keyhole. The handle sunk slowly – once, twice – but the panel didn’t budge, wedged as it was against the footboard of Sereg’s bed. A frantic jangling ensued, interspersed with Merv’s colorful cursing. Sereg winced as the irate landlord walloped the door once more. The hinges rattled under the assault.
“You son of a….”
Sereg’s good ear picked up the shuffle of iron-tipped boots beyond the threshold, along with a breath exhaled from a keg-sized chest which betrayed the presence of at least one of Merv’s trusty associates, Pat and Borlas; both individuals of unadvisable company, questionable morals and commendable dedication to their job, which consisted in convincing Merv’s debtors to cough up. A slight wheeze accompanied a puffing akin to a forge’s bellows, imperceptible to human hearing, but Sereg’s senses picked it out amongst the background noise like a tick from a bald man’s head.
Borlas.
What were the chances of him still resenting Sereg for his harmless frolicking with Borlas’ sister, before he’d met Tammy and all but forgot another woman had ever existed?
Perhaps, if he was lucky…?
In a fit of brain-addled, sheet-clutching panic, Sereg cast a bleary gaze around the cramped little room he was renting for five paidrins a week, in the hopes of finding a way out. Plain, whitewashed walls and dusty floorboards; an oil lamp atop an empty crate branded with a toymaker’s sign, though Sereg couldn’t remember whether he’d ever possessed a toy. A curtainless window that gave onto a steep, tiled gullet formed by the converging pitches of the house’s roof, which tumbled into a well of a courtyard, some three stories below.
“Cockscrew!!”
Biting back a grunt as a throbbing ache lanced through his skull, Sereg leapt to his feet and towards the pile of clothes upon the chair, whose carved backrest served as both a seat and a wardrobe. After an awkward little dance to the rhythm of a clattering door, Sereg was in full possession of a loosely tied pair of breeches and a hard choice.
His buskins lay at hand, but so did his scabbard.
The bed jolted under the kick of a clog-shod foot. “Open up, you worthless scobberlotcher! I know you’re in there.”
“Do you?” Sereg grinned crookedly under his breath. “Do you, Merv?”
He grabbed the scabbard before hoisting the bottom sash up, and sticking his head outside. The crispness of early morning cleared his senses, a sharp wind slapping him awake, carrying the scent of damp soil, fresh bread, and smoke. As always, something stirred in Sereg’s blood as the fragrance of spring filled his lungs, evoking deep, dark woods and long-lost paths.
Screw you. Screw your cruel laws, and your immortality.
Grimacing at the taste of copper in his mouth, Sereg climbed through the casing. The tiles were slick with dew beneath his palms and soles, crackling with frosty lace in recesses not yet reached by the sun. From this vantage point, the town of Bree lay offered before him: a knobby dollop of ribbed ridges, blazing spires and tawny scales like those of a pinecone. To the east, the sky was a bruise, mottled with gold above the Weather Hills.
Sereg’s fingers spasmed around the casing as one of his feet slipped on thawing hoar, jerking him towards the courtyard below. A cold sweat that had nothing to do with the chill erupted along his spine, and he pulled himself upwards with shaky arms. Unless he managed to hold onto the gutter with the sheer strength of his toes, even the elven half of his blood wouldn’t spare him a fall too short to grasp anything on his way down, while still providing ample time to regret his decision.
He was trapped.
The dry snap of splintering wood reached his ears as Borlas delivered a vicious kick to the door, followed by Merv’s cry of outrage at seeing his property so manhandled. A scuffle upon the landing told Sereg that the landlord had shoved his goon aside to peer in through the keyhole. Perched astride the windowsill, he hunched his back and bared his teeth, fingers curled like talons around the scuffed handle of his sword, wondering which greedy part of Merv’s soul would win: the one chasing after a long-due rent, or the one already summing up the costs of a broken door?
If Sereg was lucky….
If the Valar noticed him at last…if Ivon, with her sickle-sharp smile, took pity on this wild, willfully straying child of hers, and granted him this one last chance…?
What would it take, Sereg wondered, to earn said pity? He hadn’t prayed much before; not since his mother had passed, and all the pleas he’d heaped at the feet of each and every deity he’d known of had rotted like piss-soaked straw. Not since his father – a being torn between two peoples, and whom Sereg had barely known – had faded in turn, too blinded by grief to notice the child she’d left him with. It was then that Sereg had first perceived, with the keenness of one starved for affection, that he was not enough.
Not since Tammy, anyway. Tammy, soft and curious, unwittingly irresistible in the way she beheld him; as though Sereg were a hero from legends of old, instead of a simple guardsman with only one chair to his name, and dreams larger than his pockets.
His left ear lanced in the cold wind; a lingering sting, and he rubbed at it out of instinct.
Tammy had been working, yesterday night, weaving well-worn paths between the tables of the Murky Mug, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed and unspeakably, painfully lovely beneath the apron fastened tight around her narrow waist. Tammy, his Tammy, with her dimples and her easy laughter. Her breathy giggle had come floating out the door before Sereg and the other watchmen had even set a foot beneath the Mug’s rafters. Sereg had frowned, sullenly wondering what – or who – it was made had her sound so happy.
He needn’t wait long to find out.
oOoOoOo
Bree, the night before
They’d washed up in town sometime around nine, sweaty and sore and starving after a day of patrolling the roads to Combe and Staddle, their sabatons clunking obnoxiously upon the cobbled throughfare. A merchant’s wagon got trapped in a ditch, its spokes mired deep in sludge, a scrawny, apathetic oxen laboring under the weight of a load of grain and a dozen cages full of squawking poultry. Though the sun had shone as bright as a newly minted coin, they’d found the merchant beset by a sorry horde of would-be bandits: a pimply and bedraggled lot that’d scattered at the very first shout. Sereg and his comrades-in-arms had pushed the wagon out and, for their trouble, had relieved the merchant of a small sum and a pair of chickens, which they’d roasted for lunch that very same day. They’d laughed as the man had hurried away, slinging unkind insinuations regarding their lineage over his shoulder once his wagon gained enough speed; Sereg more loudly, perhaps, than the others.
The sound had echoed harshly off the blackthorn hedges in bloom.
Said lunch was far away, however, and it went unsaid that if dinner was to be had, it would happen at the Murky Mug. Stooped with an honest man’s fatigue, Sereg fingered his share of the merchant’s coins inside the pocket of his coat – grown warm from the many times he’d thumbed them – while the small band made its way down the streets of Bree. As they reached a crossroads cramped by jettied facades, the tinkling of paidrins and the slapping of cards upon the weathered wood of the Serenade’s gaming table called out to him as sweetly as only Tammy’s voice could, trickling out the open windows like the fabled golden rivers of Erebor.
Sereg clenched his jaw, striving to ignore their sirens’ call.
Everything he earned, was for Tammy; on the few nights he’d found her after closing, shamefaced and empty-handed, she’d denied him the kisses he so craved, a newfound resolve in the swaying of her hips.
“You’d promised,” she’d scold him, the fierceness of her gaze dousing him with a chill as deep as a bucket of icy water. “You said you could stop.”
“I can stop anytime,” Sereg had started, licking his dry lips, but her gaze had grown pitying.
“I can’t wait forever, you know that. Alastair’s offered to marry me twice already –” there was the flash of something hounded in her eyes, something hungry and prideful – “and I’m running out of excuses to tell my father why I won’t.”
I’d taken Sereg all the way back to her father’s house to placate her, until at last Tammy had mellowed, melting into his embrace with a vanquished whimper. Now, as he strode towards the welcoming shimmer of the Murky Mug’s windows, the edge of a silver star biting into his palm, he wondered how long it’d take before Alastair’s – the miller’s copper-mopped son’s – money bought what Sereg had worked so hard to keep.
As on cue, Tammy’s laughter burst from the open doors, spilling over the sounds of a lute being bullied into a tune. Sereg’s grip tightened into a fist over the coin; he elbowed his way past Cole and Ornil, and over the threshold, squinting at the chandeliers hanging from the rafters, where old, chipped mugs served as candleholders. He combed through the room, expecting to see a stocky red-head with rolled-up sleeves flaunting his father’s wealth…and stopped short.
There he was, in all his gilded glory, lounging upon one of the benches by the back wall, his long legs sprawled out beneath the table.
The elf.
He threw a word Tammy’s way with a languid tilt of his head, as one tosses a bone to a dog. Yet, instead of putting him in his place, Tammy giggled once more. Worse: she blushed, coiling a chestnut curl around a finger, and Sereg felt a wave of heartburn climbing up his throat. A half-breed he may be, but his blood was still fey enough to feel that inexorable pull, like a hook embedded in his breastbone, whenever Tammy was around.
She was his doom.
“Come on,” Ornil mumbled, dragging him by the arm towards an empty booth in the corner while Cole waved another girl over.
Though she was quick and eager, Sereg spared her no glance. His stomach in knots, he emptied one tankard of Rodnor’s swill after the other, growing angrier and more heartsick with each swallow. He watched the elf run a pale finger along the rim of his goblet, his eyebrows knitting at whatever he saw in the skimmed pewter surface, his scalemail glimmering like a dragon’s hoard beneath a sky-blue cloak. He’d thrown back his hood, and his face, all straight lines and selcouth lure, grew pensive under the shifting lights, almost sorrowful – more so than one as lofty as he had a right to be.
Cole let out a low whistle. “That’s mithril, alright,” he bleated in awe as the stranger allowed a flushed Tammy to refill his cup. “I’ve heard even them elves don’t know how to make it anymore.”
Sereg pulled at his gorget, trying to ease down the sourness smarting in his windpipe. A town guardsman’s job was a thankless one, the wages as meagre as a candle stub, but seeing him in his city-issued armor never failed to bring an appreciative gleam to Tammy’s eyes, which made walking rounds in the rain and breaking up fights marginally more bearable. Sereg searched her regard out in hopes of finding it unchanged, but Tammy merely nodded in his direction, offering him a tired smile, before she flitted to the elf’s table once more.
The elf ignored her.
“Smart girl, that one. Knows where the money is,” Ornil asserted, before dunking his large nose into his tankard under Sereg’s withering glare.
Sereg had loathed him, then. Had loathed each and every one of them, and the elf most of all. He’d resented him for the way Tammy admired him; for the easy way he took up space in Sereg’s world while he, Sereg, wasn’t welcome to even breathe within earshot of his father’s kin. He hadn’t felt it, when his legs had carried him towards the stranger’s table, where his venom finally spilled from his lips.
“You think you’re so high and mighty, do you,” he lashed out, shrugging Cole’s hand off his shoulder and cursing the way Rodnor’s rotgut made his tongue fumble. “You think you’re better than us.”
He’d spoken louder than he’d thought. A stunned silence fell upon the room, those late in catching on being hushed by their neighbors. The elf dragged his heavy-lidded gaze from the drink he’d been nursing, cradled between hands so large that even Borlas would’ve winced away. Only then did Sereg notice he wasn’t alone: two other men sat at the table, hidden in the shadows by the wall, long cloaks of grey and brown drawn around their shoulders. As one made to rise, the elf shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and the man was quieted.
“Tonight,” the stranger said softly, “I would rather be one of you. Sharing in your songs.” He lifted his goblet towards the smoke-stained ceiling. “Drinking the same wine.”
“Few of us got the means to pay for our wine with gold,” Sereg snarled, jabbing his chin towards the crown the elf had slid across the table at Tammy’s intention. The thought of what that gold could buy a man in a place like the Mug brought the taste of bile to his lips.
The stranger frowned. “Have you come to rob me, then?” If anything, he seemed perplexed, like a bear watching a puppy chew on its hind leg. The lack of outrage, or even concern, made Sereg’s blood boil.
“I’ve come to teach you a lesson in humility.” His forearm ached from the convulsive grip throttling his belt. “I bet,” he ground out, nodding towards the ornate pommel of the elf’s sword – a golden rose with serrated petals blooming over a grip of burgundy leather, wicked thorns strangling the cross-guard – “that you’re nothing without this fancy toy of yours. All bling and no action.” Dimly, he registered the hurried shuffling of Cole’s backtracking feet. “I bet I’d win.”
The elf blinked. “You appear quite certain of yourself,” he mused. “I dare not disagree.” His voice thrummed like a string, low and melodious, plucking at something deep inside Sereg’s chest, summoning a bone-deep melancholy for shores he’d never see. For secret doors and bone-white spires, and the cry of eagles over snow-capped peaks.
Sereg chased the spell away with a toss of his head; the room reeled around him. “Damn right I am!” Then his brain caught up with his ears, prompting his left hand to seek the hilt of his sword. “You condescending bastard! Do you think I’m simple?” he growled, advancing towards the table in a groan of leather. “Or are you craven as well as foppish?”
The men at the table tensed, exchanging glances that might’ve forewarned Sereg about what would follow, had he bothered to look. The elf heaved a weary sigh, and set the cup upon the table with a clink. Then he stood.
Or, rather, unfolded with a smoothness belied by his bulk, rising to crown himself with the shadows that lurked under the rafters. Sereg sensed it, then: the tremendous power coiled between the stranger’s shoulder blades; like a rockslide about to happen, or a frozen river splintering under your feet. The thorns upon his sword seemed to curl ever tighter, their long, vicious barbs gleaming crimson in the firelight. The scales of his faulds whispered – a cold, metallic hiss, that would remain etched in Sereg’s mind as the last thing he’d likely ever hear.
All the bad choices he’d made so far seemed rather innocuous, all things considering.
“I seem to have upset you.” The elf tilted his head in a birdlike manner; a hawk eyeing a rabbit caught in a trap.
Wrapped in his clammy hand, the handle of Sereg’s short sword didn’t seem as reassuring as it’d been moments before. His legs turned to jelly, yet he refused to run. Tammy was watching, wide-eyed, gnawing at a plump, rosy lip. Drawing a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, Sereg grit his teeth. “Might be I just don’t like the look of you.”
“I suppose there is no way around it.” The elf nodded in that quaint, aloof manner of his, as though warring with himself over a choice of livery rather than deciding a man’s fate. “So be it.”
Sereg drew a shaky breath, squaring his feet upon the scuffed floorboards. Tammy gasped, and lunged herself into the protective embrace of the tavern’s matron, hiding her tears in the crook of the woman’s shoulder. The stranger glanced between the two of them; perhaps was it the liquor, but Sereg could’ve sworn he’d seen something odd ghost across his face.
Something akin to envy.
He released a solemn breath. “I concede my defeat.”
Somewhere, someone couldn’t hold in a laugh; a reedy, ragged bark that ripped the volatile silence like a sack of grain. A mean, mocking glee sprouted from all sides in its wake, rising in swelling waves that brought the tips of Sereg’s piked ears afire.
“Like Void you do. Face me!” he snarled, encompassing the audience into his choking hatred.
The elf, however, watched the room riot with a mix of curiosity and consternation, hunched over the table lest he knocked himself out on a beam. His face was shrouded in shadows, but his eyes shone with an eldritch light – a glimpse of sun from the bottom of a lake. A leaden knot snared in Sereg’s middle as it dawned upon him at last: this was one of the Old Ones, who’d once walked a vastly different world under the light of the Trees.
The realization seized him by the throat; a surge of grief so keen he thought he’d drown standing. Either he died today – which was almost a certainty at this point – or he spilled a blood so ancient, the earth would weep upon tasting it.
“Heed me!”
The elf had raised a long, pale hand. Under the sleeves of Sereg’s tunic, his hairs stood on end, like that one time he’d gone wandering into a storm to scream his bitterness into the churning sky; the tang of iron coated his tongue. Around them, the mirth ceased as quickly as it’d begun, and the din from outside poured into the void it’d left: the wailing of an infant, the clanking of crockery and the muted roar of the evening crowd.
“This warrior,” said the elf, while gesturing towards Sereg, “claims he can surpass me in combat.”
Sereg was only dimly aware of the stares, busy as he was with keeping his knees from buckling. A foreboding shiver crept along his backbone, counting its way up with cold fingers before it went and dropped a block of ice into the pit of his stomach. Stone sober now, he regretted his decision – all of them, really, and some that his parents had made – but it was too late.
“I say onto you that he is right. Is there any among you who questions my word, or the honor upon which it is spoken?” An embarrassed shuffling ensued, as each and every man strived to find himself out of the elf’s pointed stare. “Then let us settle on my forfeit, and mention this no longer.”
The smile that bloomed upon the elf’s lips came like a sudden summer. Just as unexpected was the hand he extended towards Sereg, who took it with the firm conviction of having narrowly escaped his own murder. Someone – one of the elf’s companions? – called for a round of drinks and, in the chorus of cheers that ensued, Sereg found himself staggering under the weight of Tammy’s arms as she flung herself against him in a flurry of chestnut curls and cinnamon. She sobbed into his chest, pounding weakly at his gambeson and calling him a fool. Emboldened by a survival as lucky as it was auspicious, Sereg pulled out his day’s earnings to dry her tears and, perhaps, secure her hand while she was suitably inclined.
It was then that the sparkle of coins attracted the attention of one Bill ‘Cuddles’ Fairweather. In the tussle that ensued, Sereg lost all his money, took a punch to his left ear, and thus failed to register the scene that took place at the table by the wall.
“That was generous of you, my Lord,” one of the cloaked men said with a disapproving shake of his head as the tavern erupted into chaos. “If anyone deserved that lesson in humility….”
The other chuckled into his dark beard while reclaiming his seat: “Leave it, Arodgar. Can’t you see the poor fool is in love? It can drive the smartest of us to unwise ends, and yet it’s a sickness we all crave.”
“I would not know,” the elf murmured as he lowered himself back onto the bench. “It does, however, seem to be of the catching sort.” Unlike before, he did appear troubled.
“Then it’s a lucky thing you’re immune to human ailments, my Lord. Else it might strike you out of nowhere. Today. Or tomorrow,” the black-bearded fellow grinned. He emptied his tankard with a grimace, before the folly of imparting wisdom upon the immortal dawned upon him, and made him slant a worried eye towards the elf. “Not that you’d ever be prone to such…mawkishness, my Lord,” he added in haste.
“Lucky.” The elf rolled the word upon his tongue, trying it out for taste, before his throat worked it down. “I shall have to take your word for it.” He cobbled his lips into half a smile, and drew the sky-blue hood over his golden hair. Before long, his restless fingers had resumed their movement, idly caressing the rim of his cup for lack of something dearer to hold. “I do not suppose we shall ever find out.”
oOoOoOo
Bree, present time
Sereg wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t an honest man, either, and was as likely to rob you as he was to help you out though, in his own words, in a continent still quaking from the War, everyone was doing it. Everyone, in their own, subtle way: by watering down their wine before selling it a king’s ransom to thirsty travelers…or overcharging rent for a room barely bigger than Sereg’s empty crate. The world was a hard place, and it took a hard, bitter man to carve a living out of it when you were an orphan with pointy ears.
“Sereg, you shameless hornswoggler! Are you there?”
It’d taken him biting, clawing and, ofttimes, running with the wolves to raise himself a man who owed nothing to no-one. Sereg had become the Corkscrew, prying open hands and purses before Tammy’s doe eyes had steered him towards a kinder path. Yet, as he sat half-naked upon a flimsy windowsill, trembling in the morning wind that nibbled at his skin, his hands numb upon a near-useless blade, Sereg allowed a weariness to set into his bones. A life-long exhaustion, akin to that last lungful of water, when the pain and the fear turn into something else. A sense of resignation and, dare he say it?
Peace.
He could’ve died, last night. By Araw, he should have. All that talk of choosing a death of valor instead of living like a coward was a load of bull, spewed by braggarts as green as a jar of pickles, who’d never stared death in the eye like Sereg just had. And for what? For his blood to be swept into the gaps of the Mug’s flooring, washed away in haste with bucketfuls of water lest it stained the oak. Void! The world, vile though it was, could stoop lower still, and have Tammy herself haul said buckets from the Brandywine, while weeping quietly into her sleeve.
Tammy, who believed in him enough to keep refusing a life of comfort while waiting for Sereg to man up.
“Cuddles did ‘im in good, Merv. I saw it. ‘Might actually be dead.”
Yesterday night had to mean something. As the hinges squeaked under a final push, Sereg raised his face towards the morning sky.
Beyond the sunrise-kissed ridges of Merv’s fine establishment, the chirping of birds grew louder, the smell of pine and earth wafting from the rolling plains that lay South of the town borders. At this hour, the gates would be open, the ochre ribbon that was the Greenway meandering ever on between knolls of bleached-out cocksfoot, clumps of stitchwort like stars sprinkled through the gossamer mists.
A road Sereg was supposed to ride that very day.
A contract as easy as they came: escorting some lass to Gondor, his job as a watchman a solid recommendation when you didn’t know him, or didn’t bother to look too closely. Until that moment, Sereg’s plan had been to relieve the young woman of her purse, and leave her upon the Greenway, where any kind-hearted merchant would soon find her and return her to her parents while lending a sympathetic ear to her sorry tale. Now, he saw his paths as clearly as a fingerpost in the middle of a crossroads. Only one had Tammy waiting at the other end, her arms wide open to welcome him home. It’d cost him, as all good things tended to do, including his pride.
If Ivon willed it, Merv would end up believing he’d died.
If Ivon willed it, his maternal grandfather wouldn’t turn him away, should Sereg come to his house with his tail between his legs, and beg him for that long-standing position of scribe in his study. A job as dull as dishwater, but that’d put a roof over his and Tammy’s head, and a healthy distance between Sereg and his debts. When last he’d spoken with the old man, Sereg had stormed away in fury, vowing never again to darken his doorstep with the dolorous reminder of his existence. Under the light of a new dawn, he was willing to try again.
If some mighty Elf-Lord could hang his ego on a peg, why wouldn’t he?
For the very first time in years, Sereg closed his eyes, and prayed.
“I knew it.” The dry noise of stubby fingers scratching at a receding hairline in begrudging discomfiture. “He was of an alright sort…except for that business with your sister.” The landlord’s clogs shuffled beyond the threshold. A heartbeat passed, then two. “Come on. Let’s find someone to open this door before he rots through the hardwood.” Sereg’s heart soared as Merv plodded down the narrow stairs at a lumbering pace, followed closely by the tink of Borlas’ boots. “Remind me to tell Cuddles he now owes me two weeks’ rent.”
As the steps creaked in decrescendo, a door slamming somewhere in the distance, Sereg hauled himself back in through the casing. For an instant he stood, bereft and blinking, in the middle of his tiny room, as stunned by the turn of events as a fighting dog released from its collar. The strangling around his neck was gone, yet he felt naked without his anger. Adrift. Weaponless.
“I suppose there’s no way around it,” Sereg mused with a tilt of his head.
For Tammy’s sake, he’d have to learn to live without it.
The sun that poured over the windowsill of Sereg’s room some hour later found it empty, his lanky silhouette striding towards the Southern gate with a full crate in his arms, the fading toymaker’s brand bobbing with every step. At his side hurried a chestnut-haired woman who, despite his frayed clothing, kept peering rapturously into the half-elf’s face.
From a stall inside the Mug’s stables, two men in brown-grey cloaks watched them pass.
“What do you think’ll happen to him?” the dark-bearded man wondered, his hand slowing in the fastening of his mare’s cinch to stare wistfully onto the street.
“What do you think will happen?” Arodgar groused, following his gaze. “Hathellas, my friend. When a man and a woman love each other very much….”
“Not him.” Hathellas puffed out an exasperated sigh. “Remember what Lord Elrohir said. The time of the Elves is ending.” His weathered face creased with concern, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkling as he scratched his chin through a streak of silver in his beard.
Pausing in the grooming of his own steed, Arodgar straightened, pinning his companion down with a stern look. “So it is, and yet here you are, dragging it out with your maudlin’. Lord Elrond’s expecting us in Imladris three days hence.” He shot a wary glance at the wooden ceiling, where even the veils of cobwebs that breathed in the morning breeze stilled in fear of being overheard. “What he now does or doesn’t is none of our business.” Then, softened by the beseeching expression on Hathellas’ face, he reached out, and clasped a hand to his companion’s shoulder. “There are ships,” he said, “to carry him beyond the Sundering Seas. He’s got a well-deserved life of eternal glory awaiting him there. Who wouldn’t want that?”
Hathellas nodded reluctantly. “Who wouldn’t?”
Later that morning, they rode down the cobbled streets of Bree together, amidst the upheaval of market stalls being mounted and the hollering of children. As they reached the old waypost pointing towards Staddle, which stood as stout and squat as a hobbit upon the East Road, Arodgar began to sing: a melancholy ode to long-lost friends and coming home, his deep voice rising and falling in rhythm with the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves. What nameless worry had needled at Hathellas faded and, by the time they entered the green fronds of the Chetwood, it was as though the previous evening had never taken place at all.