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Of woodland arthropods, wet lembas and dancing gold

The first thing Legolas did, the moment Kaela was foolish enough to leave him unattended with his boots within reach, was steal back the contents of his own life.

Not much of it had survived his imprisonment in the Healing Halls intact. Two weeks under watch had a way of reducing even a prince to the status of a politely supervised patient, which was only a more elegant species of hostage.

His clothes had been returned one by one and under protest, as if the room itself had only reluctantly admitted that perhaps he could not be expected to greet the wider world dressed in healer-issued indignity. His boots and the small daggers he always carried with him had been arranged on the side table with all the solemnity of funerary offerings. Legolas gathered them with speed and feeling.

His private chamber on the Healing Halls was quiet at that hour, washed in the pearled light of late afternoon. Beyond the balcony, the forest glimmered in that suspended way it sometimes did before evening settled fully. It was, in Legolas’ opinion, a very encouraging view for someone about to make a series of poor decisions.

He paused only long enough to look back at the room with deep resentment. The bed was still heaped obscenely high with blankets, as if Kaela had spent the entire fortnight laboring under the impression that recovery was a matter of heat, broth, and being smothered beneath enough wool to lose one’s identity beneath it. The table still bore a bowl of something medicinal and steaming. There was a chair in which Kaela had sat the night before and informed him, with the calm of an elf who had no respect for joy, that “taking an arrow on behalf of the Royal Guard” did not become less reckless merely because one happened to survive it.

He slipped out onto the balcony.

This, admittedly, would worsen the inevitable scolding. He knew that. He was not an fool. Well, not in the broad, general sense. In the narrow, immediate sense, perhaps one could make a case.

But the point remained that Kaela and his father would almost certainly go to his private hall in the Healing Halls the moment he was formally discharged, and the idea of being  ambushed by concern in its most exhausting forms -shouts-, was enough to fill him with a sudden and vigorous commitment to the idea of fleeing. The balcony rail was cool under his hands. He swung over it and caught the outer trunk of the tree beyond it with the ease of an old habit, boots finding the familiar ridges in the bark.

The climb down was not difficult. It should have been less noticeable, however.

By the time he reached the lower branches and dropped lightly onto the grass below, there was a small, irritating heat in his lungs and a faint pull along his side. Legolas ignored this with the hauteur it deserved.

He had, admittedly, done something insensate even by his own standards, and there had been several unpleasant minutes after the fever broke in which he had looked down at the extensive damage done to him and thought, in complete private honesty, ah. He had obeyed Feredir and Kaela perfectly for almost an hour after that. It was, he still felt, a noble effort. Then the boredom had displaced the shock again.

He kept low as he crossed the green.

The grass there spread in a broad hush beneath the palace boughs, touched gold in places where the light reached through. He had nearly made the shelter of the lower path when voices drifted across from beyond a clipped stand of hazel. Aeron and Beleg.

Legolas halted as if the forest floor itself had risen to forbid another step.

Excellent.

Because being hunted by kings and healers had not been sufficient, apparently. Now fate had chosen to improve the day by placing his direct military superiors across his intended route. The same two, moreover, who had rendered Kaela’s herbs entirely redundant a week earlier by shouting at him with such vigour that no sedative in Middle-earth could have matched the effect. He had not slept afterward so much as lain there in a state of stunned auditory ruin, staring at the ceiling and reconsidering the cost of having people concerned for one’s wellbeing

“He will be out by now,” Aeron was saying, in the tone of someone who had long ago accepted that a truly unreasonable share of his duties now involved preserving one particular category of poor judgement from its natural consequences. “The King told me we might speak with him again before dinner, once Lord Kaela, Lord Thorontur, and His Majesty himself had finished with him.”

Beleg made a low sound.

“Excellent,” he said.

“I just hope he has not fled the Healing Halls already,” Aeron said.

“Would you accept a bet?”

“Sure.”

“I bet he has.”

Aeron stopped. “Then the bet is off, because I also bet he has.”

Legolas closed his eyes for one brief moment of offended reflection. The lack of trust was astonishing. Entirely earned, but astonishing.

He waited three more beats, then slid away in the opposite direction, quick and noiseless between the trees, skirting the lower edge of the training grounds and cutting toward the outer rise that curved back beneath the royal wing. He did not, under any circumstances, wish to meet anyone.

By the time he reached the outer wall below his rooms, he was feeling rather pleased with himself. This was, in his experience, often the first symptom of disaster.

The stone rose pale through the leaves, and from the ledge above his balcony hung the thick rope of an old vine he had tested often enough to trust with his life, which perhaps said less about the vines dependability than about the general quality of his judgment. He glanced once over his shoulder, saw no one, and set his hands to the climb.

It demanded more of him than it should have. Halfway up, his arms had begun to burn, and there it was again: that small, treacherous awareness in the body, that unwelcome reminder that two weeks in bed and his body’s best attempts at boiling itself did not simply cease to matter because Legolas had grown bored of it.

For one brief and deeply irritating instant, Legolas considered the possibility that perhaps he ought to have obeyed the spirit of his discharge, if not the letter. Kaela had not, in fact, declared him well, he had merely informed him that he might continue his bed rest in his own rooms rather than under direct observation in the Healing Halls, which was a very different and far less festive arrangement than Legolas had initially chosen to hear.

Still, as he hauled himself higher against the stone, he found a thread of reason generous enough to defend him. He was, after all, going to his chambers. Precisely there. If Kaela had wished him to arrive by the door, he ought to have had the foresight to be more specific.

He reached the high balcony with more force than grace, hauled himself over the rail, and stood still for a breath, one hand braced against the stone. There was a faint flutter in his chest and a small, hot pull along his side, both of which he declined to dignify with concern. After all, if one could not ignore one’s own body in the privacy of one’s illegal return to bed rest, where, truly, was the freedom in being a prince?

Then he stepped into his rooms and nearly smiled from sheer relief.

Home.

At once the entire chamber seemed to lean toward him in recognition: the long windows, the carved chest at the foot of the bed, the untidy stack of books by the chair, the half-folded cloak he had left draped over the bench before everything had gone so thoroughly wrong. There was an almost holy pleasure in seeing his own bed again, his own hearth, his own disorder, and not one white-walled corridor full of healers pretending not to monitor how much water he drank. After a fortnight of being fussed over, drugged with only the most decorative degree of consultation, force-fed broth, and tucked under enough blankets to survive the collapse of the age, even his own silence felt luxurious.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Really, when considered fairly, everyone was being extremely dramatic about the whole thing. Yes, he had nearly died. Yes, throwing himself into that rescue had involved a degree of tactical recklessness one might call inspired if one were feeling generous and idiotic if one were not. Yes, he had been properly unwell afterward. But there was no reason for every person in the palace to behave as though he had single-handedly declared war on Judgment itself.

He leaned back on one hand and exhaled.

His father, Kaela, Thorontur, Aeron, Beleg. All of them, in their various ways, unbearable. Loving, yes. Loyal, yes. But heavy-handed to a degree that should have required royal sanction. One could hardly limp across a corridor without one of them appearing from a side passage to inquire after one’s pulse, appetite, sleep, spirits, intentions, future plans, and level of repentance. Legolas, who had no objection whatsoever to being cherished in principle, objected very strongly to the bureaucratic form it tended to assume.

Voices sounded faintly from the royal hall beyond the antechamber.

He stilled.

Thorontur’s voice was unmistakable, low and broad as carved oak. Galion answered him with that smooth inflection of immaculate competence that always made Legolas nervous even when he had done nothing wrong, which admittedly was not often.

“-not seen him return, my lord,” Galion was saying. “But I can go up and verify whether he has reached his chambers.”

Legolas was on his feet before the sentence ended.

There are moments in life when dignity must be laid aside in the service of speed. This was one of them.

He crossed the room at once, scarcely feeling the floor under his boots, flung open the balcony door, and went back over the rail with a muttered curse directed equally at Thorontur, Galion, and the entire concept of accountability. The descent was worse this time. By the time his boots hit the ground, there was unmistakably too much effort in his breathing, and the annoyance this caused him was almost purer than the fatigue itself.

He straightened and disappeared into the deeper woodland.

At first the movement itself was enough: branch under hand, moss under boot, the palace sounds fading behind him into something far-off and harmless. He climbed almost without thinking, choosing an old oack whose limbs spread broad and high. The bark was cool beneath his palms, the leaves above him thick enough to break the late light into green fragments. He settled himself in the cradle of two branches, leaned his head back against the trunk, and shut his eyes to catch his breath.

When he woke, the forest had changed color.

Afternoon had deepened into proper evening. The gold was gone from the leaves. The air was cooler. Somewhere far below, a night bird called. Legolas blinked, drew in breath, and sat upright with the abrupt, sick clarity of someone whose soul has just arrived before his mind.

“Oh no,” he said aloud.

He had been asleep for hours. At least two, likely more. The palace lights were already kindling through the trees.

He descended fast, though the quickness of it bit at his side enough to make him hiss once under his breath. By the time he reached the ground he was fully, lucidly aware that matters had passed out of the realm of forgivable recklessly and entered that more serious country where his sanity would be seriously questioned.

Still, perhaps not all was lost. At this hour they ought to be occupied. The King would have duties. Thorontur, meetings. Aeron and Beleg, reports. Kaela possessed more work than any one healer, or elf, should. It was possible, just possible, that his brief disappearance had gone unnoticed or at least unconfirmed. He could still recover this. He could slip in, regain his rooms, place himself in bed with a book and a tragic air, and receive any later concern with enough offended fragility to redirect the shape of the conversation.

This, he thought as he reached the palace approaches, was a very fine plan. For a moment, he considered climbing up the vine again. But, with a sharp pain of resentment, he had to concede to Kaela that he was not entirely well yet, because just the idea of climbing that vine up again made him exhausted. He would have to try more unconventional methods, that is, the door.

The palace was livelier than he would have liked. Lamps glowed under carved arches, voices crossed softly beneath the high boughs, servants and guards moved through the halls with the purposeful calm of evening’s second labour. Legolas kept to the edges where he could. Several people greeted him in passing, and he returned their salutations with exactly the right measure of warmth and forward motion, enough to avoid suspicion, not enough to invite delay.

“My lord, you look well.”

“I am devastatingly improved,” he murmured to one of the kitchen staff, not breaking stride.

Another guard bowed. “Good to see you up, my prince.”

“Good to see you up too,” Legolas replied.

He reached the royal hall at last, and there a pair of guards stood before the main space in gleaming stillness beneath the lamps. Legolas approached them with one finger raised at once to his lips.

“Not a word,” he whispered.

Both guards looked at him.

“If anyone asks, you have seen nothing. Nothing at all. Empty corridors. Wind. I arrived hours ago and have been inside all afternoon.”

One of them, to his credit, kept a straight face. The other looked as though his loyalty was undergoing strain.

Legolas nodded at them both in solemn approval and slipped inside.

He had taken no more than three steps into the royal hall when he found Galion standing there as if he had grown from the polished floor.

Galion’s hands were folded. His expression was composed to the point of insolence. He looked at Legolas up and down for a long, still moment, and in that moment Legolas had the distinct sensation that he was being measured not merely as a prince but as a logistical failure.

“Galion,” he said quietly. “Please do not say anything.”

Galion’s face changed almost imperceptibly into something conspiratorial.

“Of course, my lord,” he said. “No need to worry. His Majesty is in your chambers at present. If you would like, you may wait in his office until he comes down, and I shall tell you when it is safe to go up.”

Legolas could have kissed him.

Not literally. Galion would have made such a face that the memory would have soured generations. But in spirit, certainly.

“Yes, yes,” said Legolas eagerly. “Let’s do that. Thank you.”

Galion stepped toward the office door and opened it.

Then, just before he let Legolas pass him, he lifted one hand and delivered a sharp, perfectly judged cuff to the back of his head.

Legolas jolted and spun around in outrage. “Galion!”

“How dare you disappear like this, moron,” Galion muttered.

And then he opened the door the rest of the way.

Legolas looked in.

His soul left his body, paused in the corridor, and considered not returning.

Thranduil stood near the desk, very upright and very still. Kaela was beside the long table with both arms folded, which on him usually meant a lecture and now appeared to mean an execution. Thorontur occupied one side of the room like a military wall. Aeron’s jaw was set hard enough to chip stone. Beleg, arms crossed, looked less murderous than the others only because he looked tired enough to resent the effort of killing someone with his hands. All five of them turned toward the door together.

Legolas remained on the threshold.

There are many forms of fear in the world. There is the fear of battle, bright and clean and sharpening, which steadies the hand rather than shaking it. There is the fear that comes with grief, slower and colder, sinking by degrees into the marrow until one scarcely remembers what it was to move without it. And then there is this: the swift, unmistakable understanding that every person who loves you has reached the end of patience in the same breath.

For one exquisitely brief, devastatingly lucid instant, Legolas considered flight.

Too late for that, of course.

Behind him, Galion shut the door with a soft, careful click so deceptively mild in sound and so utterly final in effect that it might as well have been a portcullis slamming into place behind a condemned prisoner.

Kaela descended upon him at once, one finger already raised.

Legolas had, in the course of a life that had grown regrettably eventful, found himself menaced by blades, fangs, poisons, politics, and once by a furious swan, and he judged the finger to be the most alarming of the lot.

“Tell me,” Kaela said, tapping two sharp fingers against Legolas’ temple, “has something inside your skull come loose, or has the fever finally climbed high enough to annex the territory entirely? I ask in all sincerity, and with no small degree of professional interest, because what stands before me cannot possibly be the finished product of a well-developed mind. At what point, precisely, did sanity simply throw up its hands and allow you to improvise?”

Legolas took one measured step backward, then another, collecting what dignity remained to him and folding his hands behind his back in the faint hope that he might resemble a prince at bay rather than a criminal looking for the nearest exit.

His fingers found the latch.

Pressed.

Pulled.

Nothing.

He tried again, more discreetly.

Still nothing.

Ah.

So Galion had not merely escorted him to judgment, he had remained outside to ensure the execution proceeded with administrative efficiency.

Kaela, who had never in his life mistaken silence for mercy where reprimand was concerned, advanced another step and said, with the kind of calm that usually preceded either surgery or homicide, “What, exactly, was your plan? No, do enlighten me, because I feel deprived of a masterpiece. Had you merely escaped the Healing Halls and reappeared elsewhere by means too idiotic to contemplate, that would have been one thing -medically unsound, offensively inconvenient, monumentally irritating, yes, but one thing. Instead, Legolas, we have spent the last two hours looking for you.”

The first words landed.

The next drove the blade in.

“There is a search party in the forest.”

The blood went out of Legolas’ face so quickly that even he could not deny the thoroughness of the effect.

At once his mind, ever industrious in the manufacture of self-reproach, supplied the images with revolting efficiency: lanterns moving under the boughs, guards spreading along the lower paths, someone searching near the riverbank, someone else already imagining wolves, orcs, or some older and fouler thing rising between the trunks because the King’s son had found a new and inventive method of being unbearable.

Kaela saw the change and seized it at once with the cold, brisk satisfaction of a healer who has at last located the wound after spending half an hour listening to the patient insist there was no pain at all.

“So,” he said. “Once again, and now with the hope that your answer may at last involve sentient thought: what was the plan? Was this a temporary disappearance, or had you committed yourself to the full dramatic tradition and meant never to return? I ask only because I should like to know whether I am currently speaking to an idiot, a lunatic, or some thrilling third category not yet recorded.”

Legolas cleared his throat.

Several lies presented themselves, looked around the room, and wisely chose to throw themselves out the high windows.

“I fell asleep,” he said.

Stillness dropped over the chamber.

He could have stopped there.

He did not, because one of the more regrettable features of his character was that, once a strategy had failed, he rarely possessed the wisdom to abandon it halfway and flee the wreckage with repentance.

“In a tree,” he added. “Accidentally.”

Every face in the room settled on him.

The anger did not lessen.

It evolved into worry.

That was worse.

Beleg’s expression shifted only slightly, but enough to suggest that his patience had just withdrawn its formal support from the proceedings. “You have been in bed for two weeks,” he said. “How did you manage to fall asleep in a tree?”

Until then Thranduil had said nothing.

He had been standing beside the desk in that terrible stillness kings acquired when discipline, grief, and habit had all entered into some unholy alliance. Now he looked at Legolas.

“Are you unwell, ion-nín?” he asked.

That did more damage than everything Kaela had said put together.

Legolas raised both hands immediately. “No. Yes. I mean, no. I am well. Entirely well. I was only tired.”

Something in Kaela’s face altered.

It was very slight.

It was also deeply ominous.

“Tired,” he repeated. “From what.”

“Nothing.”

“Legolas.”

“A walk.”

Kaela regarded him with the expression one might reserve for discovering mildew in a fresh wound.

“A walk,” he said. “How delightful. We crawl, by increments, toward truth. I assume you escaped the Healing Halls by way of that repellent tree outside your balcony, which I am going to have cut down and burned this very night. But even I am prepared to concede: the climb from that branch to the ground is hardly enough to leave you in such a state that you need sleep for two hours. So I ask again: what have you been doing?”

“Nothing,” Legolas said. “Very little, in fact. Arguably less than nothing.”

Thorontur moved then.

“When I went to your rooms earlier,” he said, “Galion told me you were not there. He went up to be certain. He found the bed disturbed, as though someone had been sitting on it, and the balcony door open.”

Legolas closed his eyes for one brief instant.

When he opened them again, he could almost see the thing assembling in the room.

Not thought, exactly.

Construction.

Piece by piece, with all the dreadful efficiency of elven minds once they scented a pattern: one fact lifting, another turning, a third sliding neatly into place, each locking against the next with that terrible domestic thoroughness which was admirable in war and should, in civilized households, have been forbidden by law.

He considered fainting.

It would offend Kaela so profoundly that the satisfaction might almost justify the aftermath, and it would end the conversation.

It would, unfortunately, begin a worse one.

Thranduil had gone still.

“And Galion says he did not see you enter,” the King said slowly. “Which means you did not come in by the door, because if you had, Galion would have known before you had reached the threshold. So unless you have lately acquired invisibility …”

Legolas said nothing.

There are moments in life when silence ceases to be strategy and becomes simply the least humiliating object left within reach.

“…then the only way you could have been in your rooms, and then not in your rooms, and now exhausted…”

Thranduil stopped.

His eyes widened.

Legolas understood at once that disaster had not merely arrived but taken a seat.

“…is that you climbed.”

No one spoke.

Then Thranduil said, with the awful steadiness of someone approaching comprehension and finding no railing anywhere in sight, “But your room is very high, Legolas.”

All of them were looking at him now.

Kaela blinked once, slowly, as if the sentence had entered one side of his mind and had not yet fully completed its passage through the other.

“Legolas,” he said. “Your room is very high, is it not?”

He was not, unfortunately, asking after architecture.

Legolas considered lying.

He searched for something elegant, something dismissive, something polished enough to survive contact with this room and perhaps even reverse the pressure.

What he found instead was an internal wasteland so thoroughly desolated by circumstance that no decent falsehood had ever been permitted to put down roots there.

In the end, with weak honesty and no visible assistance from the Valar, he said, “I mean, it is not that high.”

The room broke

“Mother of mercy, Legolas,” Aeron groaned.

Thranduil, who had remained standing through most of this with the terrible stillness of a king watching disaster assemble itself piece by piece in his own study, now seemed to reach some private and exhausted conclusion regarding the limits of upright dignity. He let himself drop into the chair beside the desk and pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. Thorontur exhaled through his nose. It was a deep sound, full of discipline and despair.

Beleg, meanwhile, turned away without a word and crossed to the balcony.

He stepped outside, looked down once, and even Legolas, who had more immediate concerns, felt the stillness of it. His face, as he stood there with one hand braced lightly against the stone rail, went through a sequence of reactions so eloquent that it might as well have been delivered as formal testimony: disbelief, offense, professional insult, and finally the bleak acknowledgement that yes, in fact, it was high.

Kaela did not move at all.

He simply kept looking at Legolas with an expression so concentrated in its disgust that one might have mistaken it for clinical examination were it not for the fact that no healer in Middle-earth had ever inspected a wound with such open contempt.

Legolas, who had now become the fixed centre of five distinct and deeply unfavourable varieties of attention, drew himself up as much as the circumstances allowed and attempted, against every indication to the contrary, a defence.

“You must at least try to understand me,” he said. “I had been shut up in there for two weeks. I was becoming thoroughly stifled. I only wanted a walk.”

Kaela rounded on him at once.

“Oh, the shamelessness,” he said. “The lack of shame. The famine of it. ‘Stifled,’ he says. Legolas, I am moved beyond speech by the image. Caged, confined, persecuted perhaps by blankets and soup. Forced, no doubt, to endure the unendurable indignity of being kept alive.” He placed one hand flat against his own chest with grave theatrical sincerity. “Now do, if you can, attempt in turn to imagine our position upon learning that while we were occupied with such trivialities as preserving your pulse, you had selected as a hobby the act of throwing yourself bodily into the path of an arrow. Imagine the atmosphere of ease and spacious calm that descended upon us then. It was extremely restorative.”

He turned sharply to Thorontur.

“Is this the new military fashion now? Is that what you are teaching in the training grounds? Tactical idiocy? Boldness unto hemorrhage? Have I missed a reform in doctrine whereby soldiers are now encouraged to solve problems by seeing how quickly they can place their vital organs in danger?”

Thorontur answered with admirable restraint.

“No.”

Kaela swung toward Aeron and Beleg with terrible speed.

“And you two? Did you teach him this? Is this a squad exercise? ‘Today, lads, we will be practicing formation work, knife drills, and flinging ourselves at projectiles’.”

Aeron folded his hands behind his back.

“No, my lord,” he said. “That particular form of lunacy lies well outside our standard instruction.”

From the balcony, without even looking at them, Beleg added, “We generally begin with easier material. Like using doors.”

“Excellent,” Kaela said. “So no one taught him to leap in front of arrows, no one taught him to escape the Healing Halls by way of the balcony, and I can say with complete certainty that I did not teach him to climb the outer walls of the palace like some appallingly elegant woodland arthropod. Legolas, in the name of all coherent thought, what possessed you?”

Thranduil lowered his hand at last and looked at his son with an expression so tired and so genuinely bewildered that it might, under other circumstances, have inspired repentance.

“Legolas,” he said, “setting aside for one impossible moment the fact that you did it while wounded, climbing such a wall is extremely dangerous. It is very high, ion-nín.”

“No, but look, there is a vine,” Legolas began. “A very secure one. It has always held my weight-”

He stopped.

The words hung in the room.

And then, like a slow-moving natural disaster, understanding arrived.

Kaela changed colour.

Across the room, over Kaela’s shoulder, Beleg lifted one hand and waved it perpendicular to his neck.  

Stop talking, Legolas thought it meant.

Although it could also mean I will end you.

“It has always held your weight?” Kaela spoke in a soft voice.

Legolas said nothing.

Kaela took one step toward him.

“What,” he said, “do you mean by always, Legolas.”

Legolas remained silent.

This, in itself, was an answer so vivid that it scarcely required speech.

Kaela took another step.

“Exactly how many times,” he asked, “have you climbed into your own chambers by that route?”

Legolas, who had usually thought silence a rather graceful thing, discovered that it could also be heavily armed.

He did not answer.

Kaela turned slowly to Thranduil.

“I am going mad,” he said. “This is not a figure of speech. I am speaking literally. My mind is loosening in its fittings. Thranduil, I could have sworn this palace was constructed with doors.”

“It was,” Thranduil said faintly. “It is. There are many of them.” He looked back at Legolas, and now the bewilderment in his face was almost painfully sincere.

That nearly did more damage than Kaela’s entire speech.

Because indignation, Legolas knew how to withstand. Anger was loud, structured, survivable. One let it crash, waited, and eventually it exhausted itself. But this, this wounded, baffled honesty in his father’s face, was infinitely harder to meet.

He actually felt a twinge of pity.

He took half a step toward Thranduil.

“Ada-”

He got no farther.

Kaela caught him by the arm and pulled him smartly back before he could advance on paternal softness and exploit it, the grip firm enough to stop him and careful enough not to jar the healing wound more than necessary. Legolas noticed this with a flicker of resentment so reflexive that he could hardly be blamed for it. Even while furious, Kaela remained maddeningly precise.

Always the healer.

“No,” Kaela said at once. “No, absolutely not. None of that. You may put the eyes away as well. I know exactly what you are doing, and it will not work on me. No ‘Ada,’ Legolas. Not now. You will listen to me, because your father is as soft as wet lembas.”

“Hey!” said Thranduil, with offended majesty.

Kaela spun on him.

“It is true. It is true and you know it. You can be terrifying, but when it comes to Legolas, you issue threats with magnificent diction and then he says Ada in that voice and suddenly all justice in Greenwood dissolves like sugar in tea.”

Thranduil straightened in his chair, one hand lifting from the armrest with grave affront.

“I had been under the impression,” he said, “that this reprimand concerned Legolas’ insensate behaviour, not my shortcomings as a father.”

From the far side of the room Thorontur said, “Hardly a shortcoming.”

Kaela rounded on him instantly.

“‘Hardly a shortcoming,’ says the other one, who is even worst.” He gave a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “Hardly a shortcoming would apply if the child in question were ordinary. Moderate. Some average, manageable son given to the occasional lapse in judgment. This ceases to be hardly anything when what stands before us is a high-born calamity in boots whose single apparent purpose in life is to determine, by repeated experiment, whether Elves are in fact immune to death by stress.”

Then he turned back to Legolas.

“Who,” he said, with terrible clarity, “is conducting your medical examination tomorrow.”

Legolas now managed to look, if not exactly timid, then at least significantly less pleased with himself than he had been minutes before.

“Feredir,” he said.

Kaela nodded once.

Then he shook his head.

“Of course it is,” he said. “Another wet lemba. Excellent. Splendid. Apparently I am surrounded on all sides by competent elves whose sole weakness is an inexplicable tendency to develop mercy in your direction. Very well. Cancel Feredir. I shall do it myself, since it appears that if anything in this palace is to be done with the necessary level of suspicion, I must personally drag it into existence.”

He stepped forward then, closing the remaining distance until he towered over the Prince.

“In fact, set aside the entire day. You and I are going to sit together for so long and with such thoroughness that by the time I am finished I shall know not only what your ribs are doing, but what your thoughts were doing while your ribs were doing it. We are going to examine every private absurdity that has lately passed for reason inside that shining skull. I am going to ask you such deep and searching questions that before we are done we shall likely uncover why, in all the obscure turnings of your soul, you accept roasted potatoes with enthusiasm and boiled ones as though they were insulting you.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“And,” Kaela said, very softly, almost nicely, “if I discover that you have omitted so much as a single detail tomorrow, if you neglect to mention torn stiches, pain, dizziness, shortness of breath, weakness, strain, bleeding, stupid thoughts, stupider actions, or any fresh innovation in the field of self-endangerment; or if I learn that these little excursions of yours are continuing, I swear to you that I…” He stopped, looking up to the ceiling. He chuckled. “I do not even know what I swear,” he said at last. “That is where you have taken me now. Beyond threats. I am going to leave this room before I strangle you with my bare hands.”

He turned on his heel, crossed the room in three brisk steps, yanked the door open, and swept out.

From the corridor Legolas caught the briefest sight of Galion standing there with his hands folded in front of him and the composed face of a steward who had just witnessed nothing at all and agreed with every word of it.

The door closed.

Silence followed.

Legolas remained where he was for the space of a breath, acutely aware that though one storm had departed, four gigantic black clouds remained in the room and all of them, in their separate ways, looked capable of causing damage. He turned, carefully this time, and looked at the others.

Aeron pushed himself away from the wall.

Beleg followed.

Together they crossed the room and stopped in front of him.

Aeron looked at him for a long second.

“We knew,” he said at last, “that you were careless. It, regrettably, falls within the boundaries of what I had already learned to expect from you. This, however, surpasses every reasonable estimate. In a thousand years, Legolas, and with the full benefit of my imagination, I would still not have predicted that you would flee the Healing Halls and proceed, while injured, to gamble your life on a wall.”

Legolas was briefly tempted to mention that he had in fact overheard the two of them betting on whether he had already fled the Healing Halls, which seemed to him evidence that his conduct, while perhaps not exemplary, had not been wholly unforeseeable.

He did not say this.

The survival instinct, though intermittent, was not entirely absent in him.

“Yes, sir,” he said instead. “I am sorry.”

Aeron’s face did not change.

“I do not believe those apologies for a moment,” he said. “Not because they are insincere, but because you are sorry only now, under circumstances in which being found has rendered regret convenient. We will speak tomorrow.”

Legolas nodded, because there existed no useful reply to this that did not worsen matters.

Aeron held his gaze one second longer, then turned away.

Beleg lingered a fraction behind him, gave Legolas a look, and followed his sargeant out without a word.

Thorontur and Thranduil remained.

Thranduil was still seated by the desk, one elbow resting against the carved arm of the chair, his fingers near his temple.

Thorontur, after a moment’s hesitation, came toward him.

For a second he seemed uncertain.

Then, unexpectedly, he smiled a little.

It was small, gruff, and entirely familiar.

Legolas smiled back at once, openly this time, because Thorontur had never in all his long life quite managed to be properly severe with him, and both of them knew it.

Thorontur lowered his voice.

“I’ll speak to Aeron,” he said. “I will try to see that whatever sanction he devises does not become excess- VALAR!.”

Both Thorontur and Thranduil jumped on their spots.

Behind Legolas, who had sharply turned around towards the doorway, came Kaela’s voice.

“Truly,” said the healer, coming into the room again. “I beginning to suspect active sorcery, Legolas.”

Thorontur stared at him.

“Were you listening behind the door?”

“No, I was not listening behind the door, Thorontur,” Kaela said at once. “I leave that habit to your scouts, who at least have the decency to call it a profession. I came back because I had forgotten my books.” He crossed briskly to Thranduil’s desk, snatched up the two volumes he had indeed left there, and tucked them under one arm.

Thorontur opened his mouth.

Kaela did not permit him the luxury.

“I do not understand,” he said, turning. “I truly do not. He disobeys, vanishes, terrifies half the palace, has the forest turned upside down looking for him, scales walls like a burglar with royal blood, and now apparently the discussion is whether he ought to be punished gently. What next? Shall we give him a medal? ‘In recognition of distinguished service in the field of alarming every living creature who loves him’?”

Thorontur, to his credit, looked faintly abashed.

Kaela took this as invitation.

“Come along,” he said, already reaching for the General’s arm. “You are leaving.”

With that, Kaela seized Thorontur by the arm and propelled him toward the door.

The door shut behind them.

And at last, in the sudden hush that followed, only Thranduil and Legolas remained.

Thranduil looked at Legolas.

After a moment, he sighed, low, long, and tired in a way that seemed to come not merely from this evening but from years of loving one impossible child through one impossible history.

Some of the rigidness went out of Legolas then. He crossed slowly to the chair opposite the desk and sat, his movements suddenly quieter than before, as though the room itself had grown more solemn now that only Thranduil remained in it. He kept his head lowered.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean to cause so much trouble.”

“Rarely do you mean to, Legolas,” Thranduil said, “and yet you continue to produce it.”

Legolas did not answer.

His hands rested in his lap. His gaze remained lowered. For once he did not seem inclined to defend himself.

Thranduil studied him for a moment longer, then leaned back slightly in his chair, one hand resting against the carved armrest.

“Why, Legolas,” he asked at last, “why did you do it? Why flee the Healing Halls in such a manner, why climb up and down the outer wall, why go off into the forest alone when you knew perfectly well what it would cost everyone who discovered you gone?”

Legolas lifted his head.

He looked younger when he did that, when the defiance was quiet, when the bravado had burned away. His father saw it at once, and resented it a little, because there were moments when Legolas’ youth arrived so suddenly upon his face that it felt almost accusatory, a reminder that the soul causing all this strain was still, for all his skill and scars, painfully early in its making.

“Ada,” Legolas said, “I know they mean well. Kaela, Aeron, all of them. I know.” He hesitated, and when he went on his voice was lower. “But sometimes I feel as though I cannot breathe. There is so much attention, so much watching, so much… keeping. I know why they do it, but sometimes it feels as though the air goes out of the room. I only need a little space now and then. A little room to breathe.”

Thranduil’s expression did not harden. If anything, it changed in the opposite direction, though so slightly that no one but Legolas would have known it.

“Legolas,” he said, “they only want you well.”

“I know,” Legolas said at once. “I do know. But that does not make it easier. I cannot bear being restricted every moment. You know I can’t, Ada.”

Thranduil was quiet as he studied his son.

For all Legolas’ annoyance at being treated gently, he was still, in the end, very young. Very young, and carrying circumstances that would have buckled older souls than his. The trouble was not only his age, nor only his talent, but the union of the two: the impulse, impatience, and fierce instinctive defiance of youth bound to the competence of someone far older and far more dangerous. It was, Thranduil had long known, a deeply alarming combination. It had already cost many elves their peace of mind. It would almost certainly cost more.

He sighed.

“Legolas,” he said, “Kaela is a reasonable elf.”

Legolas’ eyes widened so abruptly that Thranduil had to turn his face aside for the briefest instant to keep from laughing outright.

“Yes,” he said, recovering. “He is. You only have the singular gift of driving him beyond the last boundaries of his restraint. But he is reasonable. If you speak to him and explain that you require a little more room, he will hear you. Have you ever known him fail in care toward anyone placed under his charge? Have you ever known him not to worry himself hollow on behalf of those entrusted to him?”

Legolas’ mouth twitched.

“Feredir is not much better.”

Thranduil inclined his head. “Also true. Feredir is cut from very similar cloth, though with fewer speeches and, perhaps, slightly better bedside manners.”

“Give him a few years,” Legolas muttered.

Thranduil chuckled. Then his gaze steadied again.

“Speak to them both, ion-nín, if you feel hemmed in. Tell them. Argue with them if you must. But do not decide, in future, that the preferable solution is to flee the Healing Halls, descend from a balcony, and go wandering into the forest.”

Legolas looked at him then with that same hesitant softness as before, but now there was a small smile behind it, ashamed and affectionate both.

“Sorry,” he said again.

Thranduil let out a theatrical breath and tipped his head back against the chair.

“Ah, Legolas,” he said. “What am I to do with you.” But the question escaped him with a smile already in it, quiet and unwilling and entirely defeated.

That smile, slight as it was, proved fatal to the last of Legolas’ composure.

He rose from the chair, circled the desk, and came up behind his father without haste, the way he had done as a child when seeking pardon without formally requesting it. Then he bent and wrapped both arms carefully around Thranduil from behind, mindful even now of the angle of his own healing side, and pressed a kiss to his father’s cheek.

“Well,” he said, the smile now plain in his voice, “I suppose my chief contribution is that you are never bored. What would become of you otherwise?”

Thranduil laughed then, softly and despite himself. He lifted one hand and laid it over the forearm looped across his chest, giving it two light pats in that way one reserves for the beloved and the incorrigible.

“Go on,” he said. “Off to bed with you. Tomorrow, I believe, promises to be a day of exceptional length.”

Legolas groaned at once and straightened, making for the door.

“Do you think,” he said, hand on the latch, “that he will still be so angry by morning?”

Thranduil shook his head.

“For all his moods,” he said, “I have never known Kaela remain angry for more than a few hours.”

Legolas looked visibly relieved.

“Good night, Ada,” he said.

“Sleep well, Legolas,” Thranduil answered.

When the door closed behind Legolas, the chamber fell into stillness. The papers lay where they had been abandoned, Kaela’s displeasure still lingering in the air like the last sharp note of a song, but already it seemed unimportant, diminished by the warmth Legolas had left behind him.

For a while, Thranduil remained where he was, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the desk, his gaze lowered, his expression touched by that rare softness which belonged to no king at all.

Then he rose, taking up a small lamp to illuminate his way, and went, because power had never yet cured a father of the need to see with his own eyes.

And indeed, when he entered Legolas’ room, he found what he had expected. The blankets had scarcely been pulled into place, one corner trailed loose, and Legolas, overtaken by sleep with all heedless trust of one who feels safe, had already surrendered himself wholly to it.

There was something in the sight that struck always at the hidden chambers of Thranduil’s heart. Sleep made something holy of him. The restless brightness was stilled, the laughter and defiance folded away, and all that remained was the unbearable sweetness of his son as he had once been and, in some secret place, still was.

With grave care, Thranduil drew the coverlet up about his shoulder. His hand lingered there a moment, smoothing the edge into place with a touch so light it was nearer a blessing than a gesture.

“Rest, my heart,” he whispered, so softly that the night itself seemed to lean close to hear. “I love you.”

Then he bent and pressed a kiss to his temple.

Afterward, he straightened and crossed to the wall beside the bed. There, among the interplay of lamplight and shadow, his fingers found the hidden seam in the stone. He pressed upon it, and the secret door yielded inward between Legolas’ chambers and his own.

Thranduil stepped through, then turned, one hand already half-raised to draw it shut behind him. Yet the lamp’s glow fell once more across Legolas’ sleeping face.

And there came over the King a small and sudden hesitation. So he left the door ajar, as he had done countless times when Legolas had been very young and the dark beyond a closed doorway had seemed too vast to bear alone. A faint smile touched his mouth.

He quietly set the lamp upon the table by the hidden door and left it there as he walked towards his own bed.

And, for a little while longer, a slender river of dancing gold ran quietly between the two rooms.