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Title: The Rescue of Celebrian (#3512)
Author: NeumeIndil
Chapters: 15
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Archive: Tolkien
Category: Lord of the Rings
Description: "Elrond, who had remained unwed through all his long years, now took to wife Celebrian, daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn of Lorien. His children were the twin brethren, Elladan and Elrohir, and Arwen Undomiel, the fairest of all the maidens of the Third Age,"…
"…Celebrian, wife of Elrond, journeys to Lorien to visit Galadriel, her mother; but she is taken by Orcs in the passes of the mountains. She is rescued by Elrond and his sons, but after fear and torment she is no longer willing to remain in Middle-earth, and she departs to the Grey Havens and sails over Sea."
(Histories of Middle Earth, vol. 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth: Part VIII- "The Tale of Years of the Third Age".)
In the mean time…
(Rating increased; talk of co-ed nakedness.)
Published: 14 Jul 2007
Updated: 03 Dec 2012
Warnings: Angst and scary images/flashbacks.
Type: Drama
Characters: Elrond; Elrohir; Elladan; Celebrian.


Chapter 1 - Flight

The woman awoke on the back of a horse, balanced gingerly across someone’s legs. Noticing next the warmth of a sheltering arm behind her shoulders, she turned her head, surprised and pleased to feel any sort of comfort after so much cold and darkness. Quickly, though, her instinct for self-preservation surfaced and she put the dream of a world beyond wet stone and stink from her mind again. Such things no longer existed. Almost simultaneously, her rescuers looked at her shuddering form, covered only in identical borrowed cloaks, then each other.

“She stirs?”

“Aye. We should stop. She needs water.”

“And food. But we should press on at least until dawn.”

“Think you the goblins would come this far at this time of morning?”

“I couldn’t care less about the goblins brother, but if they’ve ventured from their holes in pursuit of us, I should like to see her safe before we remove their heads from their shoulders. She has been through enough.”

The man glared at his brother but slowed his horse all the same. 

“So you propose to lead them straight to our home instead?” 

Silver eyes flashing even in the murky pseudo-light of earliest day, the second warrior drew rein. “Think you for a moment our father would not like to sink his knives into a few goblin hides? If he knew where we were, he would likely ride to meet us and carry her back himself, slaying as he went. We are two alone with no sign of aid and a pack of goblins on our trail. We’ll be safest in a settlement.”

“I would not have him see her now were the fate of the world dependent upon it, and she may not make it to a settlement, brother. Do you wish to finish what the filth began?”

“Elrohir! Elladan, enough,” the wraith-like woman whispered, the sound a tortured relief to the elves she addressed. “You speak as though I am already dead.” 

“Mother, you can hear me?” Elladan asked.

“Why else would I answer you, son? Though, at first, I did not think you were real.” For a moment her eyes opened and fixed on the identical faces of her rescuers, but then widened as memories sprang unbidden to mind. With a choked cry her fair head dropped to her son’s shoulder again and she clung to his cloak, shivering. 

“Mother, shall we stop?” Elrohir asked moving his mount closer to his brother’s as he did. “Do you wish to rest here or carry on to Father? Mother? Mama?” But the woman remained silent, curled into a protective ball against the darkness, against the first peeks of daylight, against everything. Visibly shaken, Elrohir looked up at his brother’s identically lined and careworn face, knowing his own exhaustion and helplessness was mirrored there. Elladan looked terrible. Celebrian, however, looked worse. The months in the torture chambers of the northland goblins had not killed her, but unless Elrohir missed his guess she wasn’t far from fading. They had to get her to Rivendell as quickly as possible. There was no time to spend tarrying, and yet turned in on herself so, their mother- always light and cheerful and quietly strong- seemed too fragile to withstand the leagues left before them. Perhaps they should risk a rest.

“We will go on to the nearest stream,” Elladan whispered, stroking their mother’s matted hair. “Perhaps she will have awakened more fully by then.” Relieved that a decision had been made, Elrohir nodded. 

“Do you tire, brother? I will-”

“She is no burden.” Glancing over his shoulder, Elladan shifted Celebrian to a different position across his legs and muttered a prayer that the goblins feared to follow their obvious track so close to sunrise. Then he spoke to his mount and the big bay plunged through a thicket, streaking southward like an arrow. A moment later its stable mate thundered behind through the gloom. 

When the trio finally stopped again, the sky to the east had turned the deep, cheerful blue of early morning, spotted here and there with clouds. The day would be sunny. Excellent. Elrond’s twins rode their winded mounts into the stream, letting the water cool their steaming legs and throats as they bent to drink. Elrohir dismounted first, soaking his boots on the first step but paying no heed to his own discomfort. Celebrian had neither moved nor spoken since their brief pause before dawn and her condition worried him more deeply than anyone but his brother could know.

“We are here Mother,” he said as Elladan reluctantly handed his cargo to his brother and immediately stooped to drink and stretch his aching legs. “You are safe. We have you. Won’t you open your eyes, Mama? The sun rises on a beautiful day. Won’t you greet it with us Mother? Please, open your eyes.” 

As he spoke quietly to the limp form in his arms, he waded ashore and laid their mother on the deepest pile of pine needles he could find, a poor comfort for the daughter and wife of the mightiest elves left in Arda. Elladan followed behind with a hastily refilled water skin and a flask of miruvor from his brother’s pack. 

“The flask first.”

“Aye. Leave a bit for us too. We may yet need it.” 

Taking turns, the twins urged a few drops of the liquor at a time between their mother’s cracked and bloodless lips, followed occasionally with tiny sips of water. Minutes passed in tense, waiting silence. Nothing changed. Celebrian still lay motionless, exhausted, her lashes casting tiny shadows on her sunken cheeks. Elrohir sighed and passed a grimy hand through his hair. Elladan dribbled another taste of miruvor between their mother’s lips. Still, they waited. 

“Take water, brother,” Elladan said after more age-long moments passed. “There is dried meat in my pack. We must simply wait.” 

Elrohir did as his brother suggested and left to get the food and take a few quick gulps at the stream. Their horses had dropped to browsing the banks, tearing up grass and weeds loudly enough to make him jump as he drank. After one last swallow and a deep breath to calm himself, Elrohir cast a glance back the way they’d come, expecting any moment for the racket of goblins to descend on their resting place. Thankfully- eerily- the woods were nearly silent, as though the trees too watched and waited for Celebrian to awake. As he rose he tossed his brother the pouch of meat and tore into a piece himself, joining Elladan and their mother in the shelter of the pines again. He hated waiting, always had and likely always would. It was as much a part of him as the hair on his head or the teeth in his mouth- teeth that, even now, he would be willing to use against the scum that had kidnapped his mother, tortured her in ways he was sure he would never want to know. The desire to avoid that knowledge was surpassed by only one other- the desire that his father never, ever see Celebrian the way she was now. For all of his wisdom, Elrohir worried that his father was not strong enough to accept the extent of her torture without some sort of retaliation. If nothing else, Elrond was passionate about his family. This affront would not go unpunished. 

~*~

Miles away, as he had for months uncounted, Elrond Half-elven paced the balcony of his chamber: of their chamber. If he slept at any point between the sinking of the sun and his rise the next day, it was snatched briefly from a chair near the fire with a piece of needlework in his hands. It was a shawl, by his best guess, the row of silver flowers around its border half finished. She had touched it shortly before she left. If he allowed himself the fancy, sometimes Elrond swore he could smell the perfume of her skin drifting up from the silk in his hands. Honeysuckle and sage. Though they were past the years of childbearing- and truly had more children than most- he’d never grown used to an empty bed. Never had to; from the moment they’d wed she’d been there, if not within touching distance at least within calling distance. Any time he’d needed her, or wanted her, she’d been as close as a heartbeat and a few pattering steps. But when she’d needed him…

It was unseemly for a ruler to brood so; Elrond knew it, but watching the sky lighten with the promise of a new day that would still feel bleak and lightless to the master of Rivendell, the insubstantial thought that plagued his waking and half-waking hours surfaced again. He’d failed too. First his father, now Elrond himself, left their dearest treasures to the hands of enemies long known but not feared enough. How could he, given foresight and resources beyond even his own belief, have been so stupid? He should have gone with her, or at least sent more guards. Twenty Elves, half of them women, against how many legions of goblins from the cracks beneath the mountains? He would never know and was not convinced he would want to know. But if it would return Celebrian, he would listen to every gruesome second of her captivity from attack to rescue, then follow his father’s track through the sky and hand the Silmaril to Fëanor himself. Whatever it took, he would do. But with positions of power came entrapment: he could not do whatever needed done, for he was the master of Rivendell, Lord of the Last Homely House on Arda’s shores. He was too old, now, for what it might take to return Celebrian to her people. He had sons for such things; sons who, like their father, fought the yolk of inactivity and helplessness like a green horse in the traces of a cart. 

Elrond mastered himself in public at least, but the boys had been nigh uncontrollable when it was learned that their mother was made captive; worse still when Elrohir learned the maid Nariel was thought taken but later found dead in the pass. His mate gone, Elrohir drifted, bobbing on a sea of anger with only one rope— the tie between he and his brother— mooring him in a friendly harbor. When Elrond’s own melancholy lifted, it was his elder son he worried for most. While he was unsure if Elrohir knew it, he and his father faced a similar pain. If it tears at him half the way it torments me, Elrond thought, I’m again my father’s son for allowing it to happen in the first place. 

A familiar tread in the hall alerted Elrond to a possible visitor and he folded the filmy shawl away. Erestor, probably the only soul in Rivendell who knew the extent to which his Lord allowed despair to take him, seemed to use the passage outside Elrond's chambers far more often than he had before the attack. Checking on me again, Elrond thought, allowing his frown to decrease a tiny bit. The whisper of his friend and librarian’s steps was, interruption that it was, a necessary reminder. There were still those who cared and who looked to him for guidance and healing; they were the simultaneous reasons he chafed at the bonds of his responsibility and yet was borne up by them when most of his heart and mind cried out to fight. But as quickly as that small comfort settled, his concern rose for his sons. Something was wrong. Where were they?
~*~
Author's Notes:

Thanks go to Robinka for her constant cheerleading and encouragement.
 
Thanks also to Sulriel and her wonderfully helpful web resources "Rohirrim Grey" and "A Meara for Me" (http://www.theoriginalseries.com/mearas.htm), since all I really know about horses is which end to feed and which end to follow with a shovel. 

For photos of horses identified by color, try this site. (http://www.lwranch.com/activities/horsecolors.html)


Chapter 2 - A Noble Retreat

Dawn flushed pink and gold before the twins remounted, Elladan in the lead, Elrohir cradling their mother before him. Still the forest watched and waited. Still hardly a sound was heard but for the rumble of hooves and occasional heavy breath from one of the elves. Celebrian remained unconscious, wrapped in her son’s cloaks with her delicate bare feet bouncing against the horse’s side. A second behind the other, the twins flashed past familiar side paths that led to hidden guard talans and sheltering caves, intent to return now to Rivendell at whatever expense save their mother’s fragile condition. Eventually though, Elrohir caught his brother up, and then paced just ahead, driving his horse harder than was likely safe simply to avoid having to think. Dawn had never been the same since Celebrian’s party had been attacked- since so many were killed. But, he vowed as he rode, once she was safe at home again, he would see every goblin in Arda bleeding at his feet before they would cause his family another moment’s pain. 

Elladan watched his brother’s back as they rode, feeling the familiar burn that told him Elrohir had turned hurt and regret into anger at himself yet again. It was a feeling Elladan knew well, and one he often found puzzling. He supposed there were times when it served a good purpose, but in his brother’s case, it seemed to be just a means of distraction. How long would his twin go on being angry, rightly so or not? From such passions were their enemies wrought, twisted by the anger and jealousy and rage of the dark Maiar. Elladan knew, though, that speaking of it would help nothing. The wounds were still too fresh; many had, in fact, not yet been made and he felt his chest heave with a sigh for his mother. 

What did they face once she was safely within their father’s lands again? Could Celebrian recover? Would she? Briefly a thought of Celeborn and Galadriel crossed his mind, but knew they would not come. The danger of the pass was now too great, even for the Lady of Light. His grandmother would not come to tend her daughter. The task would be left to the elves of Rivendell, though Elladan was glad indeed his sister had reached Lothlorien safely and would remain there. She, too, should be spared the sight of their mother if she could. In truth, he thought dodging tree limbs as his blue roan thundered through the wood like balrogs nipped at her heels, one could follow and they would scarce have known it. They neared the boarders even now- would cross them before the sun crested the trees- but still the fear drove them south as though on wings. If Elrohir blamed himself for Nariel’s death and their mother’s capture, then Elladan supposed the anger he felt was toward his own cowardice. It chafed him to flee when his knives and bow nearly begged to slay something, anything, as long as it was blackened by the touch of Morgoth. Instead, he and his brother ran like frightened hares. No, he contradicted a second later, not like frightened hares, but like saviors, guardians who knew that there was nobility in this retreat. Staying to slay would, he was chagrined to admit, likely slay Celebrian as well. 

~*~

To the south, Elrond’s sleepless eyes flashed silver in the muted light of early morning. A warm, paternal feeling came upon him, breaking him out of his tortured memories. The twins. They were near. And then his head clouded briefly with heat, revealing a vision of his two tall sons dismounting in the courtyard, a cloak-wrapped bundle before Elrohir passed from one to the other and back again, a fall of sliver-blonde brushing his boot tops, long, slim white calves dangling from his arm. 

They have found her. She lives.

The pressure behind his eyes faded with the vision, but a buzz like raining arrows rose in their wake. Jaw set, eyes flashing, he cast off the blue and silver robes he had worn the previous day, pausing long enough to fling his slippers on top of the pile of silk in his wake. The wardrobe door met the wall beside it with a ringing thud, and a moment later Erestor entered to find his liege stripped to his small clothes, donning a worn leather hunting costume.

“My lord?” Erestor ventured, but got no further.

“They come,” Elrond snapped. “All three.” Storming into the corridor past a gaping librarian, Elrond found a maid staring through his doorway, wide eyed. “Have my horse readied,” he snapped. “I ride north.”

~*~

Had Elrohir not spotted a familiar golden head before Glorfindel intercepted them, their father’s long time friend and adviser might have met his end within the relative safety of Elrond’s domain. As it happened, the younger elf only rode on, leaving it to his brother to explain their haste or not. He was surprised, then, when Glorfindel pulled up along side him, close enough to speak.

“Give her here,” he said over the thunder of three sets of hooves and the wind rushing by. “Your mounts are nearing spent. I will get there more quickly.” 

Elrohir only sped on, ignoring the older elf’s demand, logical though it was. But Glorfindel was not her son, or her husband. He had not failed her. This blind run through the forest was Elrohir’s responsibility, no one else’s. 

“Would you run your horse to its death?” the fair elf asked, more loudly still, keeping Asfaloth neck in neck with Elrohir’s blue roan. 

“Go ahead and prepare them if you would do something,” he replied in a growl. “Or retrace our track and see that we are not followed. You shall not have her.” 

Stung by the lad’s tone, Glorfindel frowned. “I would not harm her. You know this.” Elrohir gave no reply and rode on as though nothing had been said. Finally Glorfindel dropped back a pace to speak with Elladan, hoping for a cooler head. 

“They may yet follow,” Elladan said dodging a low hanging limb. “Is there a squadron nearby?”

“There should be,” Glorfindel replied.

“Our tracks may have been followed. I would see no harm befall our people because of our haste.”

“I’ll send someone to cover or confuse your trace,” Glorfindel replied. “And I’ll tell your father of your arrival myself.”

“Thank you, friend,” Elladan sighed. “Just… don’t let him see her like this. Not yet.”

~*~
Author's Notes:

For a visual of the horses, visit this site (http://www.lwranch.com/activities/horsecolors.html), or Sulriel's immensely helpful "Rohirrim Grey". Special thanks go to Sulriel for her informational site "A Meara for Me" as well.

Big thanks to Robinka for being inspiring and encouraging. You know just how to nudge me in the right direction. ;)


Chapter 3 - Advance

Where were the claws of these hands that held her? How did the scent of spruce and mud and breeze penetrate the caves? Decay had never smelled so clean, or had it once, long ago? 

She had dreamed- oh how she had dreamed!- of being warmed by the sun and ushered to sleep with the bright songs of birds. In the dark cold days beneath the mountains, she had wept herself dry longing for the sight of just one star, or the touch of a friendly hand, or a blanket. She’d had none of these; was offered only rock and cold and damp as her playmates, only reeking, rotting spirits yet breathing as her companions... the slavering jaws running with drool while they carried her from chamber to chamber, diversion to diversion, and cruel obsidian claws digging into her flesh... She would never be free of the bruises, the weals, the scars, she knew. She would never be free of anything. Her world, now, was blackness that ended somewhere between the tip of her nose and the void in which all things would end.
#

While he gave no order, an armed host followed Elrond Half-elven from the confines of Rivendell into the northward forest. Far from the quiet, stately processions his people were used to, the troops had made all haste into the morning, mounting on the run with weapons in hand, many but newly woke with hair streaming unrestrained behind them. As he watched the last ones leave the stable yard, Erestor saw his own nephew on the back of a blond mare, black hair snarling with the horse’s as he lay flat to her neck. His sister would have been proud at the site of her son following in her footsteps, had she lived through the pass.

The impromptu escort pelted over the bridge onto the trail Elrond had picked seemingly at random, marring the freshness of a rose and salmon dawn with clouds of airborne dust, the thunder of their horses’ hooves silencing the birdsong as dew pattered down from trembling leaves overhead. Those with better knowledge of their lord, however, knew he’d found the inexplicable link between parent and child in times of trouble, and rode now to seek them. Only his sons remained within reach of the Lord of Imladris, and bereaved though he might be, he was no fool to ride to the Golden Wood and his daughter alone. The thought that perhaps their lady had been found, living or dead, came to few, but none foolish enough to mention it.

Erestor, of course, knew all there was to know and once the rumble of distant hooves died away, he stood for a moment more enjoying the sun’s emergence over the valley wall and rubbing the last exhaustion from his eyes. While most of those who rode— some three dozen, if he had a guess— had not seen their liege lord’s eyes as he charged from the yard, Erestor had. Whatever else could be wrong, and he had his own silent worries in that regard, the librarian knew healers would be needed before the sun finished her route this day. With lips pressed into a bloodless line, the librarian turned back into the Last Homely House to dress and have the healing rooms prepared. If they were lucky, no graves would be necessary, but he added stone gathering to his already lengthy mental list. Cairns, if needed, could wait. Now was the time for hope.
#

The farther south they rode, the friendlier the woods became, and Elladan took the slight feeling of ease as a blessing. They would know if a goblin party had followed. There would be no birdsong, the fresh air greeting his sweating face would be tainted with the stink of corruption and death and things unclean. Their horses too would know, and would tell them, each in her own way. For now, the blue roan raced on ahead of him, her precious burden no more than a silver-white blur over the bend of his brother’s arm. The bay between his knees blew hard, but was not tired enough to stop. She had the rest of the ride in her, barring accident or surprise attack, but only just. Anger, he knew, drove his brother on, and sending Glorfindel away had been a difficult task. The fear of rear attack was addressed, however, and with that worry gone, Elladan had little to chew on but his mother’s state, his brother’s seeming slip on his senses and the plan they must formulate to shield their father from the worst. He would insist, Elladan knew, as Elrohir insisted on bearing the burden of their mother’s unconscious form now. So alike, they were, his twin and their sire, and right now, all they had were the other two to keep their family connected, rooted in both sanity and in Rivendell. 

Elladan again studied the woods around him, this time taking in the small pleasant signs of life that would bring him joy, a trait learned from his mother. Brown mushrooms grew talan-like from the side of a tree they sped around, dripping dew onto the litter below it. Strips of bark peeled from slim, white-skinned trees where birds had harvested it for nests. Already, some of those nests stood empty, their occupants fledged and probably begging food from harried parents in the canopy. A moment of shock snapped Elladan from his thoughts. The birdsong had fallen still. Lifting his head, he drew a breath though his nose and wrinkled it in disgust. The sickly-sweet odor of decaying flesh came faintly on the breeze from the northeast. Had his brother noticed it too? Elrohir slowed to a canter, silver eyes shifting side to side. The stench came from a long way off, and yet it was ahead of them, and close. Too close. 

Elrohir waited until his brother dropped to a trot at his side, then nodded to the south and east. 

“Glorfindel is behind us,” Elladan sighed. “By now the archers are too.”

“The goblins are ahead,” Elrohir replied. 

On his shoulder, jounced and jostled by the horse’s gait, Celebrian stirred, opened her eyes and shrieked, flailing at the cloaks cocooning her. Elladan felt his gut turn to stone. Stealth and secrecy, their former friends, had just left them.
# 

Gorhk snorted and waved a heavy clawed hand at the beam of sunlight creeping into their hiding place. Filthy stuff, sunlight. They’d been lucky to miss it on the way through the wood. Well, most of them had been lucky. Snargelt hadn’t, but then again even for a Westerner he was stupid, and the memory of his squeal when he’d gotten tangled in the brambles and took a blast of sunlight straight to the face made her grin. He sat now as far from the entrance as he could get, attempting to lick his burns and scowled up at her when she laughed, a long string of saliva dangling from his twisted lower jaw. “No better than a warg,” she thought, looking ahead to where the sentry crouched, watching. “Come to think of it,” she mused, “I’d rather have the warg. They smell better.” 

Fard didn’t like the way the wind blew and growled about it every time more sickly sweet fresh air went past. There was no helping it. They had to stay under cover or the elves would see them too soon, and the mouldering log was the only place that offered shelter within sight of the trail. 

“Much more of that talk and the elf folk will burn the remaining chunks of you where they fall… if they could even find them all. Unless you’d rather be out in that sunlight? That could be arranged too. All you need to do is open your mouth again, dung heap.”

Fard snarled but said no more, keen eyes and ears straining on the road below them, and Gorhk smirked again. He was a coward with a big mouth, but most of them were when faced with her reputation with a blade. Small stature was usually a bad thing among their kind, so she had used it to her best advantage. No one wanted to be left for elf toys with sliced hamstrings, and the maggot pile to first test that treatment had been her own brother. Sometimes, she thought smugly, it was good to be the commander. But it wouldn’t be such a comfortable position if they didn’t get the elf woman back, and getting the two who rescued her would finish the job with the sort of flourish Gorhk liked. Let them watch their pretty female weep for a fortnight, she decided, then see what color their blood ran. 

But now was not the time for daydreaming. The maggots weren’t caught yet. Fard was worse than louse vomit, but he was a far better tracker than even Gorhk herself, and she wasn’t stupid enough to move until the little pustule said it was time. So, they waited, all two dozen, crammed cheek by jowl into a half rotted and fallen tree while the sun slowly followed them into their refuge. 

“The offal should have been here by now,” someone snapped, and Gorhk grunted in agreement. 

“Any sign of them?” she asked, putting the toe of her boot into Fard’s arse in lieu of using his name.

“Faint hooves,” he hissed, queer greenish-white eyes growing wide and excited. “They come.”

“Bout time,” Karzot snorted. 

“Whad’ya want me to do, dangle a sweet on a string for ‘em?” Fard rasped over Snargelt’s liquid, slurpy noises. “Now, shut yer’ yaps. They’ll hear.”

“Wait’ll we’re out to draw,” she growled back into the log. “There’ll be no accidental knifing of yer commander, now will there?” 

“Won’t be no accidents,” Karzot promised, and Gorhk stopped herself from simply breaking his neck on the spot with the reminder that they needed the big ones for carrying the elf scum back… when they caught them. And it wouldn’t be long. Not long at all.


Chapter 4 - Treed

He dropped her! How, Elladan did not know, but he was as shocked as Elrohir looked when they realized Celebrian suddenly sat on the ground at the base of a massive oak tree instead of his brother’s saddle. He’d dropped her. But, as he had, her shrieking ceased and she cast about her at the hillock where they stood, then focused on a pine cone near her hand with furrowed brow. That was all he had the time to observe as the thumping of a booted foot sounded from their left in the base of a ravine. 

“Goblins,” Elrohir snarled, his roan prancing back two paces, then forward two, then back again. His knives made a cool slithering sound as he drew them from the sheaths at his back, his seat sure. He was familiar with Blue Girl’s war dance.

“Mother, you should climb the tree,” Elladan whispered, his mare shifting ahead of the roan to the side of the path and planting her feet firmly, her head up and nostrils wide. There was a reason her name was Bloodstone, for she held as solid as the walls of Cirdan’s Havens when battle loomed, until given leave to unleash her fury on their opponent. He almost smiled when she snorted and stamped, impatient now for the opportunity to kick in goblin skulls. Blue Girl preferred to bite, but she turned into a swirling grey and black whirlwind when given her head, forcing whatever foe they faced directly into Bloodstone’s range, as the bay did for the roan. They, like their riders, worked well as a team. But would even the four of them be enough to keep Celebrian free? 

More boots shuffled through the remains of last year’s leaves while Elladan thought. They were in as defensible a location as they could reach without leaving the horses to flee or be eaten. The chances of getting Celebrian back onto a horse after the trials of her day and the jarring fall she’d taken were slim. Reinforcements were far behind them, or too far ahead to be of any assistance. The best option, depending on the number of attackers they were about to face, seemed to be stand and fight. Slowly Elladan began to look forward to threshing through a pack of the scum that had reduced his mother to the pile of bones that sat behind them, still studying the pine cone. He looked back at her once more, frightened by the way her hip bones jutted out, sharp enough, it seemed, to slice her bluish flesh from within. Celebrian had never been even remotely plump; now she was almost a living skeleton. How had she survived this long? 

“How many? Can you see?” Elrohir whispered, the knives in his hands casting reflections onto his face and the tree trunks around them. 

“Many, but I cannot count,” his twin replied.

“We should stay here,” Elrohir continued. “We would not know into what we rushed.”

Elladan nodded. “Let them come to us,” he breathed, then slipped his bow over his head while Elrohir sheathed his knives again. They waited. The forest waited. The clouds did not, and slowly the dappled light of the sun was hidden, slapping their faces with a sudden coolness. Behind the twins and their waiting mounts, the wife of Elrond Half-elvin whimpered.
#

Green and grey and brown and black sped past his periphery in a blur. The jingle and creak of the leather gear he wore had joined the grinding of his teeth and the whistling of the wind as faint background noise. He knew his legs burned from the unfamiliar task of sitting a horse at full gallop. The remains of some insect, he knew, were lodged between his teeth. The braid had come undone behind his head. He neither cared nor felt these things. He felt only rage, and deeply down, the glory that came with acting, with finally doing something. 

Far in the distance he heard a faint shriek, and his eyes flashed quickly ahead and to the right though thousands of trees and bushes blocked his view of anything but their brethren. Had that been the sound of a wounded animal, a dying goblin, or a damaged woman? He could not tell, and so he rode on, the gelding between his knees just losing his first wind.

“Slow if you must friend, but make all haste,” he said to his mount and the animal dropped to a canter once they crested a rise. Elrond patted the gleaming chestnut neck by his knee. His own fear and fury should not cost the life of an innocent. Enough damage had already been dealt by the blackness beneath the mountains that no more was necessary... unless the casualties be theirs.

The horse tossed his head when they entered a clearing, sniffing the air with wide velvet nostrils. Then he picked up his pace once more, his inky hooves striking sparks on a scattering of flint stones as another cry sounded to the north and the distant rumble of hooves followed from the south.
#

“Go quietly, maggots! They’ve already heard us once!” Gorhk snarled as loudly as she dared. A dozen of them she sent in two files to circle the hill where the elves had stopped. The other eleven spread out through the log and prepared themselves for the run through the sunlight, already glaring off of the dampened leaves in the bottom of the ravine. She was not looking forward to this, and swiped at the side of the log’s interior with long, pointed claws, dyed red at the tips on a whim. They looked like they’d been dipped in blood. The image made her hungry. Perhaps she wouldn’t play with them first, she mused, jabbing Fard in the ribs with the hilt of her cutlass to get him moving. A cloud had just covered the sun. This was their moment.
#

What unusual dream was this then? So small and smooth and perfect, this thing in her hands, smelling of earth and growing things. Each scale stood out from its stem like a pouting lip, and she thought of her children and laughed. A dozen dozens of a nearby pine tree’s petulant children sat there in her hand. Then there, near her foot, was another and with it the round brown ball of an acorn. This she picked up as well, rolling it back and forth in her palm, feeling the cool of the leaf litter seep into her hand as she did. Down the hill, beasts screeched and roared. She was used to their noise. They were probably eating, but what she did not want to know. She was content to sit playing with the children of the trees, leaning against their nearest parent, now and again shifting one out from beneath her legs. But soon she saw something else that caught her eye and, setting the children aside, crawled to it. This was not of the wood, and yet she knew it. It, too, was smooth and pleasantly cool, but it was all long lines and angles without the playful chubbiness of the children of the trees. And yet, for the angles, it was graceful and sharp where she tested the edge with her thumb. Yes, she knew what to do with this. Her jaw set, Celebrian rose, the cloak falling into the leaves behind her.
#

The goblin was quick, but not so terribly strong as some others. It knew the fact, though, and more than once Elrohir had danced Blue Girl away from the dull sheen of its cutlass aimed for the long tendon at the backs of his legs, or hers. Crafty, the scum. As quick as it was to strike, though, it was equally quick to retreat, and the crush of goblins was thick. The small one danced in and out of the throng, attacking when the opportunity arose, and unless he missed his guess, Elrohir would swear he had seen the small one fell one of its brethren considerably larger than itself. There were only a handful left, had only been a dozen or so to begin with. He started to think that perhaps they would be able to reach Rivendell before the noon meal when many startling things happened all at once. The first was the flash of white and silver caught from the corner of his eye, causing him to turn and catch sight of his mother- naked, ravaged by her months beneath the mountain, and carrying one of his brother’s knives in her bony hands- descending on a certain small goblin with surprising speed and stealth. The next came after a parried overhand strike and a feint to his opponent’s leg that opened his opposite ribs for a hard, squelching thrust that punctured a lung audibly. The small goblin stood over his brother, cutlass raised. Neither of them had been felled by a goblin in quite some time, and almost without looking at the attackers to his front and left, Elrohir’s blades gleamed in the light while he examined his brother’s situation: still armed with one knife, but on his back, scrabbling in the leaves. A neat cross of his knives sliced the head from the facing goblin, and a risky but lightening quick cross-body thrust put a blade up into the throat of the left hand monster that squealed like a pig as it slumped. He had to get to Elladan… 

But Celebrian got there first, and moments later the smallest goblin’s thick black blood painted Elladan’s lost blade.

“I knew you,” Celebrian said to the head in her hand, held aloft by a queue of coarse black hair. She smiled then, closed her eyes for a moment, and wiped the bloodied knife on the body that lay at her feet. 

“Mother?” Elladan yelped, rising quickly to kick away the goblin that had circled around behind her, and finished it with rapid stabs to the abdomen and chest. She seemed to ignore her son’s summons, but turned then toward the last uninjured goblin that stood terrified, drooling on itself through a hideous twist in its jaw. 

“I knew you too,” the Lady of Rivendell said, her eyes dark and focused only on the goblin’s slavering face, the pointed tip and graceful sweep of the knife extended before her blending into the sharp angles and softer curves of her arm and shoulder. Lanky silver-blonde hair floated like a sunbeam as she whirled, the power of the stroke unexpected but sure. The beast’s head seemed to fall apart, the twisted lower jaw attached to the neck still dripping saliva onto the forest floor while the skull flew upward, spiraling, spraying blood and glistening strings of drool as it rose, then fell. The thud of the body slumping to the ground brought silence in its wake.

“Where are the rest? Wheezer and Metal Face and the others? She would not have come without them.”

Startled, the twins exchanged glances.

“Who, Mother?” Elladan asked, dusting the leaves from the back of his shirt.

“The one they call Gorhk,” she replied, gesturing to the head she had addressed before. “She always brings her favorite servants.”

Elrohir was unsure what surprised him more, that his mother was having a lucid moment, or that the mystery in his mind of female goblins had, at least in one case, been solved: smaller, faster, sneaky, but as much a part of a raving pack of the beasts as the males.

“These others are not here?” Elladan asked, turning over one dead goblin after another. When Celebrian shook her head, Elrohir’s gut turned icy.

“They’ve circled us,” he hissed, turning Blue Girl to look beyond the great oak at their backs, but even his keen elvin eyes saw nothing through the trees and bushes but more of their brethren, stretching on endlessly between his family and their home.


Chapter 5 - A Dream

Elrond almost didn’t realize what he had slain until a stray drop of thick black blood struck his cheek, but when a second goblin, and then a third, appeared off to his left, a shift of the knees sent Steady after them. A screech told him there were more to his right, but others would take them. The vermin were headed, he was certain, toward his family. He slew as he went, felling two more before, humped ahead of him and to the right, a great oak stood on a hillock, remarkable for it’s girth and the spread of its branches, stinking of goblin blood. And there also, as he rounded the side of the great tree, a gleaming white form he had seen a thousand times before, but had never feared so much, drew his eye. 

Elrond watched Elladan lift a cloak from the ground but cried out in dismay and fear when the white shape, the shade that was by some miracle his wife still living, stretched out the knife she held before her. Their sons, one by one, lifted their hands, the horses stamping and whickering greetings as Steady skidded to a stop at their flank. 
#

“It is a dream,” she said, looking around her like one lost. “It is a dream. It is a dream. It can be only a dream.” Then she laughed, a mad sound, as Father’s boots scuttled in the leaves. “And look, here is my brave husband come to rescue me. Which are you, then, disguised this way?” 

Seeing our state, Father too raised his hands, slipping his knives back into the twin sheaths across his back and moving slowly in our direction. It was as I had feared as we rode, should he see her this way. Between looking at our mother and each other, Elladan and I watched our father’s heart break. Who would fade first, I wondered, Father, Mother or our sister when she learned of all that had passed from Mother’s failed attempt to see her for her two thousandth begetting day?

I was surprised when still more people arrived, though I realized belatedly I should not have been. Father would not ride out without guards. Moments later more arrived from our rear dragging behind them four snarling, slavering orcs tied at wrists and ankles. Mother’s eyes widened as the rescue party grew and finally the blade drooped into Elladan’s waiting hand.

“We are no dream, Mother,” he said softly tossing the knife aside. “See, here, this is my hand,” and gently as he’d always handled the wounded birds and beasts we often found in the forest, he reached again for our mother. I heard Father’s breath catch when she took it, turning it this way and that in her own hands, testing each nail with her own, a look of astonishment on her face. After a moment punctuated by the blowing and stamping of horses, he offered the other, and she studied it with equal shrewdness. My brother hooked his cloak with a booted toe and slid it toward them, leaving his right hand under scrutiny while he lifted it and shook off the leaves as best he could. 

“Are you not cold Mother? Here is my cloak. It will warm you,” he crooned and her gaze fell on the swatch of green in his hand. 

“Has she been like this all night?” Father asked, and asked too loudly for Mother’s hand stopped in mid-grasp and she froze like a fawn in the meadow, her eyes riveted on him.

“It is a dream,” she murmured, shaking her head, pulling away, then finally running back to the tree and huddling against its trunk, her head in her hands. “No, it is a dream. It is a dream,” she muttered as she rocked, hugging her knees to her chin. “This is not real. This cannot be. I dream.” 

“It is a dream, my lady,” a voice said softly. “Yes. You are right. It has been a dream. Just a nightmare. If you will, my lady, I will take you back to your bed. You may finish the night there in peace.”

“Lark? I have… I have dreamed. Horrible, terrible dreams,” our mother said, and her chamber maid took her outstretched hands as though she were a child awake in the night. 

“I know, my lady, I know. And you are chilled with the dew. Here, let me slip this over you,” Lark said and dropped her own surcoat over our mother’s shivering frame. “Now then, shall we go home, my lady? I will make you tea to help you sleep.”

“Yes. I should… Wait!” Mother said, pulling away from Lark and turning again toward the tree. “I have almost forgotten the children,” she said, scooping up the pine cone and acorn she had played with through most of our skirmish. Once again she held them up to the light, studying them as minutely as once she scrutinized her embroidery.

“My lady?” Lark said again reaching for her. “The tea?”

“I… yes. Tea. I should like a cup of tea, I should think. It feels as though yenni have passed since I have had your tea.”

“Then perhaps two cups, then,” Lark said, somehow finding the strength to both hoist Mother onto her horse and offer the shell of her Lady a smile.

Four or five of the others rode around them, the women snuggled together on an already tired sorrel that I would personally see had an extra measure of sweetened grain upon my return. But there was more to be done before we could rest. The women and their guards out of sight, our attention turned now to the captive orcs. Looking down on their snarling mouths, their matted hair, my hand twitched. I thought of my knives. So, I saw, did Father.
#

Elrond stood staring at the creatures near his boots for a much longer time than most expected. It came as a shock, then, when he abruptly snatched up the nearest of them and held it dangling at least two hand spans above the forest floor, locking eyes with the beast with a snarl matching its own. 

“How many of you are there?” he hissed. The creature smiled, exposing chipped, greenish teeth, and laughed. Only the flash of a blade gave away what happened, but he had dropped the still kicking remains of the first orc and snatched up a second before anyone realized that their lord had just slain the creature. Again he lifted the beast from the litter, slamming it hard against the trunk of an elm. 

“How many!”

“More than you could count,” the beast spat before looking down and catching his guts as they were freed of their confines.

“We’ve no need of the others,” Elrond said as coolly as water over stones, his eyes focused somewhere in the distance that no one save he saw. “Pile their bodies with the rest and burn them. Spare the trees. Make the pit very deep. Leave no trace of them. I want them obliterated from the earth.”

“It shall be as you say, Lord,” Storm replied, and already a few had gone to find an appropriate place, while the twins descended on the remaining orcs with shining steel. 
#

“Now then, my lady, we’ve returned,” Lark was saying from the dooryard. “We’ll slip to the kitchens now and get you that tea.

A ball of ice in his gut, Erestor hid in the shadows just inside the library balcony while Lark and some of those who had ridden out at dawn motioned the others away on the lower levels. She had returned. She was alive. She was… broken, in body and spirit, it was as plain as the sunlight streaming down through the trees. To Erestor’s tired eyes, it almost seemed as though he could see the leaves of the dooryard ground through her long, slender feet.

“Wait. I… I wish to see the sun,” Celebrian said, looking up. “I have missed the sun.” 

“I see,” Lark said, her hand gently stroking Celebrian’s bedraggled hair. “Perhaps, then, we should take our tea on your balcony, over the gardens? Or a bath, instead? I could have a tub taken to your chambers, with your violet soap and warm towels and your dressing gown.”

“A bath, on the balcony,” Celebrian said, turning toward her own chamber. “With tea.” 

“As you wish, my lady,” Lark replied, showing no sign of surprise at Celebrian’s request. And so it was that, when Elrond and his sons returned some hours later, the lady had retired to her chamber and the back gardens were closed to all visitors. The Lady was having her bath in the sunlight, on her balcony, and taking tea.
 
#


“I have not been this exhausted in a yen or more,” my brother said over the door of a sorrel’s stall.

“Nor I,” I replied, fairly itching with the need to bathe away the stench of goblin blood and sweat and horse, but, Blue Girl and Bloodstone came first. Their rubdowns finally complete, my shoulders burned with the effort it took to hang their feed and water buckets on the wall and close the door behind me. Bloodstone found the slices of apple I’d scattered on top of her feed and whuffed, crunching happily. Blue Girl, in the next stall, slurped her water, an ear cocked toward Elrohir and the sorrel across the way. 

“Thank you, light one, for carrying my mother safely home,” he said, scratching the sorrel’s neck, while beside me, Blue Girl snorted. 

“Jealous,” I teased, patting Blue Girl on the shoulder. 

“The pools or tubs?” Elrohir asked, sensing my foray into daydreams of a bath. 

“Tub, for me,” I replied. “I have had enough of cold.”

“And not enough of the chamber maid,” he retorted, nearly smiling beneath the layers of dirt that coated our faces. 

“I have not had the chamber maid, Brother,” I replied, never too tired to counter his persistent attempts to link me physically with nearly every single maid in Rivendell.

“You need one,” he chuckled, beating my cloak so a cloud of dust rolled up. 

“You are no better,” I retorted, combing my hair back from my eyes. 

“And yet I will bathe at the pools,” he said. “Not for the cold, but for the quiet.”

“I cannot,” I said simply, and he nodded. 

“Until dinner, then.” 

We nodded farewell and went our separate directions, my brother picking his armor buckles apart as he walked. My own pinched horribly and I fiddled with my arm guards as I entered the house, finally freeing the left one as the door drifted closed behind me. Someone had ordered fresh rushes for the floor since last we had been home, and the smell of sweet grass floated up from them. Back in the kitchens, dinner was in the making, and roast fowl and sage teased my stomach into growls. Bread was baking, too, and as always the dry smell of old books came down from the library wing, stirred by frequent passage. The only thing missing was the honeysuckle smell of our mother meeting us at the door with a strong embrace and a kiss on the brow. Instead Niphredil stood looking down the staircase, a smile on her face, but sadness in her eyes. 

“You have returned, as you promised,” she said descending with an outstretched hand. 

“I have.”

“And your mother is home, safe,” she said, her hand in mine, squeezing lightly. 

“She is.”

“You need a bath,” Niphredil continued, her delicate nose wrinkled. And finally, I smiled.


Chapter 6 - Reunion

~*~

There was never enough light. Candles, lamps, even the direct rays of the sun herself were not enough once Celebrian came home. At night she huddled in her bed surrounded by every candle and lamp her servants could find, and still she cowered with the blankets clutched to her chest, rocking herself until dawn. Lark could sometimes read her to sleep. Her brother Raven, surprisingly, had luck calming her by singing and his voice had finally allowed Elrond a few hour’s sleep as well. But if healing sleep came at all for the Lady of Rivendell, it was snatched during the brightest part of day on a cot on her balcony.

After she had been home two weeks or so, and still had such a burning need for light, Elrond had a team of fifty strong men, all volunteers, and six yolks of oxen purchased from the human settlements to the south, moving the great pine that blocked the Lady’s westerly chamber window so that she could have her light for as long as possible. She ate, thankfully, whatever Lark gave to her, though slipping sleeping draughts into her food had proved nearly useless and only brought her nightmares. She woke the entire valley with her shrieking, and once struck Aster such a blow with a lit candelabrum that the girl was confined to the healing wing for a week. Elrond attended the child himself, reading to her or reciting from memory poems and epics of the time before his peoples had come to Middle-earth. He had nothing else to do, for through it all, Elrond Half-elvin could not visit his Celebrian, except from a distance. Faced with the sight of him, her fits grew so violent and frantic that they were afraid she would harm herself as well as someone else, and so Elrond was forced to keep his distance. At the least, Aster’s chamber offered a view of the Lady’s balcony. From there he could watch her sleep.

While Elrond watched his wife, his sons watched him with growing concern. To their shrewd eyes, he had aged more in the past two seasons than he had in their entire lifetime. But mentioning their concerns for him had only led to them both being ushered straight out of his sitting room and commanded to bed as though they were still children. Though he did not see it, between themselves the twins decided that their mother did grow stronger, slowly, now that she was home. Some of her color had returned, and while she remained gaunt and chill, her bones did not seem intent to slice her skin to ribbons. Their father, of course, did not know this, though luckily she would suffer her sons in her chamber during daylight hours. At night it seemed that they, too, brought to mind the dreams or hallucinations foisted upon her in the darkness under the mountain, and for everyone’s safety Elrohir and Elladan did their best to stay away, though her crying and shrieks were often hard to endure without offering aid. 

It was difficult for the two warrior peredhel to be trapped in such a way, responsible at least in part for her freedom, but unable to help their mother restore herself and enjoy her liberty. At the same time, though, Lord Elrond had laid strict controls on his people; no one was permitted to leave or enter the valley without the express permission of himself, Glorfindel, or select few other captains. Rumor talked of an assault being planned on the mountain holes where the goblins dwelt, but since nothing had been said to the twins, they remained, for the most part, skeptical. After the show of strength that greeted their return to their realm, it made sense to both Elrohir and Elladan that the people would once again enjoy a trip north with bloody thoughts in mind. What they would not enjoy, for the most part, was an engagement with the full strength of the slime that oozed through the sponge of the pock-marked mountain. Generally in times of peace, as before, warfare was left only to a few experienced elders among Elrond’s people, and Elladan believed it was for this reason that the traveling restrictions had been laid. Most of their people who had ridden out for their lady that day knew plenty about butchering chickens and hunting deer, but not nearly enough about dispatching goblins. He also had the sneaking suspicion that the idea, while approved by his father, had been the mind child of Glorfindel, who was often in the forest and prone to worrying overmuch about both the twins and their people in general. 

At least, Elladan thought, sighing with relief, messages had finally arrived from Lorien. Their grandfather had written, as had their sister, though her note of love and relief was short. Apparently Galadriel was too excited when first knowledge of her daughter’s state arrived, to make herself able to sit down with quill and ink. But lamps and dishware, Celeborn had jested, were easy enough to replace. Even after a thousand and more years of relative calm, her Noldo temper was sometimes quick to spark. They had been alike in that respect, Celebrian and her mother. But now, it was difficult to tell if their mother would ever be herself again. 

With this thought in mind, Elladan took himself to the library, while Elrohir did… whatever an angry, bereaved, worried warrior did while wandering the areas to which he was confined for his safety and the safety of the rest of their people. It wasn’t that Elladan didn’t trust his father’s judgment in such matters, only that this was an unusual case. Elrond was generally not so strongly bonded with those who sought healing in his valley, and his son began to wonder if his father’s suffering was too strongly linked to his mother’s. By ending one, he thought, he could ease or perhaps even end, the other’s. So he spent night after night with candles and lamps (the few that were spared from service in Celebrian’s chambers) combing lore books about sicknesses of the spirit and how some of them had been successfully treated in the past. 

Two more weeks passed in the search, and Elladan grew frustrated. Niphredil grew similarly frustrated by his reticence and frequent absences from both meals and the Hall of Fire, where even in such dreary times, or perhaps because of such sadness, people gathered after the last meal for talk and singing and stories. He hoped that Niphredil would understand, if she thought on it, that his affection for her was not waning, only that he was more sure of her continued health and well-being than he was of that of his mother. Besides which, he told himself reasonably, one’s mother was the first and most important woman in one’s life. Logic seemed to dictate that she would be ever on his mind in her convalescence. 

The idea first came, not to Elladan, but to his brother, after yet another very long, boring day of watching his twin shift from chair to floor to lounging couch to perched on the table top with a dusty old book in his lap. Elladan, it seemed, was sending himself quite mad, squinting at the faded brown ink that some healer many years before had used for her, or his, spider web like hand. He was also quite tired of sneezing into his tunic sleeve when a breeze ruffled the pages and sent a cloud of dust and shed book parts up his nose. Elrohir knew this, or perhaps just wanted his brother to participate in a bit of mischief with him after such waiting. 

“Did you not find, in some book early in your hunt, a passage about taking shocks to the spirit?” he asked suddenly from the reading chamber doorway. Wearily, Elladan nodded. “What sort of shock was mentioned?”

“Some seem to believe that, after a physical or spiritual trauma, the spirit can be chased or encouraged back into the body by exposing the person to another seemingly dangerous situation. The author of that green bound book there suggested something else entirely.”

“And what was that?” Elrohir asked, flipping open the cover of the aforementioned tome with one finger and listlessly paging through it. 

“She, yes, I believe that one was written by a woman, suggested giving the afflicted the same tasks and surroundings as they experienced before the trauma occurred. Once the change in atmosphere registered within the mind, the spirit and body could reconnect.”

“But she has not left her body,” Elrohir said. “At least, not entirely.”

“I know this,” Elladan replied. “But I find myself wondering how close she came.”

“Too close,” the look that passed between the brothers said. 

“What would it to do Father?” Elrohir continued.

“I do not know,” Elladan answered, “which is why I have set it aside and kept searching. He is…”

“Worse than he was before we left.”

“Worse than I have ever seen him.”

“Will he allow it?”

“He can’t treat her himself, not when he cannot even be in the same room with her,” Elladan said, leaning back in his chair with a grunt. “Someone has to do something. I can’t stand to listen to Lark reading aloud through the night anymore. She has nearly lost her voice.” 

“And I would very much like to have my lamp back,” Elrohir agreed. “I made that lamp with Grandmother on our last visit to Lorien. She would be sad to hear if it has been broken.” 

“Nothing we have done has made any progress, beyond feeding her, and she has been home nearly a month,” Elladan concluded. “Something new must be tried.”

Elrohir’s eyes narrowed in thought, skimming the page Elladan had turned to in the green book. “…returning the afflicted to the same tasks…” he muttered. 

“What are you planning brother?” Elladan asked, feeling suddenly cautious. 

“When was the last time you rolled in the mud?” 

Pausing for thought, Elladan replied, “The last time I blacked your eye.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh no…” Elladan groaned, rubbing his already aching head, thoughts of Niphredil’s reaction to what he was sickeningly sure was about to happen settling like frozen stones in his stomach. Elrohir merely smiled.
~*~

(A.N.: Sorry about the false start, there. There was an Unanticipated-By-Canon player on the field. The author has been penalized 15 yards and gives up a down. The officials ask that 42 seconds please be added onto the game clock. The officials also want to thank line judge Binka for flagging the play.)


Chapter 7 - Awakened.

“Absolutely not, Brother, do you hear me?”

“She won’t find out,” Elrohir said, tugging his twin toward the part of the garden overlooked by their mother’s balcony. “It will pass almost as soon as it is said. And if this brings Mother back to herself…”

“She’ll find out,” Elladan insisted with a stubborn shake of the head. “Niphredil will find out and she is already so put out with me she’s not spoken to me in two days. I will not chance it.” 

“Then you do love her?” Elrohir asked. 

“I… could,” Elladan replied softly. “I could. I do not know. But, I could.” 

Disgusted, Elrohir sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Then, trust my word on this Brother, you don’t, and you’d be better off ending things anyway. Now, hit me.” 

A part of Elladan, a large part of him just then, wished to reply “gladly” and pull back for the swing, but the more temperate part of him refrained. It was foolish. It was useless, wrestling about in the mud, flinging punches at someone with whom he had no real quarrel. It would not-

All thought was cut off by the jaw cracking thunk of his brother’s fist smashing into his face.

“You hit me!” he yelped, hand to his mouth. Already he could feel heat pooling on the right side of his lower lip. 

“Damned right I hit you, calling me a coward,” Elrohir yelled, turning his head toward the balcony where Celebrian’s doors stood open, curtains peeking through as a breeze passed. 

“You hit me, you immature little worm!” Elladan retorted again. 

“I see Father’s brains must have skipped over you, Brother,” Elrohir replied, grinning with all the contentment of a cat in cream. “Is that the best you can come up with? What will you do next, Book-sniffer, run to Mother and cry in her lap?” With a growl and menacingly narrowed eyes, Elladan fixed his brother with a deadly stare, but still did not move. “Or will it be your little doxy now? The serving maid that’s joined you for your baths these past few weeks?”

“I TOLD YOU not to bring her into this!” Elladan thundered. 

“Well really, you always have been easy to needle when it comes to women. But it does nothing to prove you don’t like boys—”

With a roar of rage and frustration, Elladan threw himself at his brother, hooking him around the neck with one arm and beneath the shoulder with the other, bootheels digging into the mud of the courtyard as he threw him sideways. Elrohir… laughed. 

“Come now, you can do better than- OOF!” he taunted until a doubled fist jammed his breakfast up toward his lungs and his brother’s equally hard forehead smashed into his nose with a crack that sent colored stars in front of his eyes. 

“Ai! Low blow, Little Brother!” Elrohir growled and tried to lift a knee to shift his twin aside, but his legs were pinned by his brother’s weight and his hair ground hard into the mud under a fist. He couldn’t lift his head either, though one of his arms was free and he put it to good use with a couple of quick blows to Elladan’s rib cage and left kidney. It was his weaker arm, though it apparently hurt enough. 

Once into it, there was no stopping either of them but to pull them apart, and usually no more than a few blows were landed before someone— historically their father and Erestor— were there to grab them by collars and belts and haul them away, blistering their ears with lectures about the proper decorum expected of Elrond’s sons. But, while Erestor stood gazing open-mouthed at the brouhaha in the back garden, he made no move to step in, even when one of the identical combatants pinned the other to the dirt and leveled a devastating punch at an already bleeding nose. They were like two wild cats set on each other, and the librarian had lost any advantage of height and experience he had ever had over the twins some centuries before. Best to let the boys sort this one out on their own, he decided, crossing his arms and leaning against the door frame while a thicker and thicker crowd gathered beneath Celebrian’s window. 

“No!” someone shrieked, startling all but the fighters from their daze. “Stop it! Boys! Stop it this instant! You’ll kill yourselves, and just look at your clothes! Elrond! Glorfindel! They’re at it again,” and with a disgusted sigh, a white and blonde streak left the balcony, followed shortly thereafter by the slamming of a door and a feminine growl of rage echoing through the stairway. At the sound of his name, Elrond had gone to the balcony where he had sat watching his wife for so long, then hearing blows, looked down.

“What in…” Erestor heard him mutter, before he too turned and bolted down a set of stairs and into the courtyard, coming face to face with his wife over the recently churned mud of the garden. Shocked, he stopped, eyes round and fixed on Celebrian’s still too gaunt face.

“Well?” she snapped, hands on hips, looking so much like her mother in a rage that Erestor almost laughed. “Do something! Don’t just stand there gaping like a frog!” 

For a moment Elrond still stared, then shot a look at Erestor, threw up his hands, and caught one of his sons by the back of the pants, dragging him off the other one with a grunt. Once separated, Celebrian caught the other by the arm and hauled him to his feet, propelling him toward the recently moved pine tree with surprising strength. 

“Which one do you have?” Celebrian called, staring at the son before her with snapping grey-blue eyes. 

“I… How should I know? I can never tell them apart when they’re this out of sorts!” he shot back, forgetting, in the moment, that it was the first time his wife had actually spoken to him in months. “Which one do you have?”

At the question, Celebrian leveled a stare at her child, jaw set, head cocked to the right in a gesture Elrohir had never before realized his sister mimicked exactly. 

“Papa has Elladan, Mama,” he said quietly. “And I’m very glad to see you out of bed. Would you like to take a walk with me?”

“Walk? Out of bed? What in the world are you talking about?” she snapped, catching him by the sleeve and dragging him toward the courtyard again. She studied the other twin for a moment before fixing Elrond in her stare. “That’s Elladan,” she said, then turned to first one twin, then the other. “Who started it this time?”

“He did,” Elladan said sullenly just as Elrohir raised his hand and snorted blood from his nose onto the ground near his boot. 

“Why?” Elrond barked. In reply, Elladan set his jaw and cocked his head to the right, staring Elrohir in the eyes. 

“We were trying something,” he said finally, looking at Elrond somewhat sheepishly. “And it worked.” 

“Trying something?” Celebrian said, the point missed entirely. “What madness were you inventing now? Really, Elrohir you are far too old for this sort of foolishness.” And that quickly, she stopped, looking at the battered face of her eldest son as if for the first time. “Too old for… Wait, how old are you, Son?” 

“As of today? Two thousand, three hundred and forty…” he looked at his twin.

“Forty-two,” Elladan said. “Arwen’s two thousandth begetting is not quite a year past.”

Looking bewildered, Celebrian studied first one son, then the other, and finally turned again to Elrond. Her lip quivered.

“Two thousand, three hundred and forty-two,” she murmured. “Then it… it was not a dream?” She watched Elrond, stared into his eyes, and waited; he could only nod, and put out his hand for her. She took it, clung to it, pressed it tight against her chest, above her heart. 

“We came for you,” Elladan said. “Both of us, and Father, went looking for you, and brought you home.” 

“You’ve been here five weeks,” Elrond said, finding his voice finally, wrapping his other hand around his wife’s, and rubbing the thin skin along the back of one. 

“I’m home,” she said in a tone somewhere between a question and a statement. “It was not a dream, but I am home.” Those closest saw Elrond shudder as her arm slipped around him and her head fell heavily onto his chest, hiding her face there in the curve of his neck. He pressed a kiss to her temple, their hair, the black and the blonde, catching their tears while Elladan’s ran unchecked down his filthy face. 

“All right, so it worked,” he grumbled when his brother threw an arm around his shoulders. “But did you have to hit me that hard?” 

“You wouldn’t have hit me back otherwise,” he said, unable to chuckle past a split lip to match his brother’s. “We should go clean up. The pools or tubs?”


Chapter 8 - Loosed

~*~
Elladan sank gingerly into a hot tub, alone in the chamber for the first time in a long while. Let Elrohir tease; he could not bring himself yet to visit those pools. He had not meant all those months… almost a year gone now… to interrupt them. His brother might well have been wed, at least in the manner their maternal grandparents had chosen, before that disastrous trip toward Lothlorien. And, thinking on that, he realized that perhaps the interruption had been fortunate. The pain and terror and rage of nearly losing his mother to the goblins could not be nearly as strong as losing a mate; but, for all he knew, the bonds were formed between their spirits before the bond of the flesh had been knit. It was not as though he and his brother had spoken or simply been together in the same ways as they had before the world had tilted so violently off its axis. 

It saddened him, truly, to realize that his last memory of the maid who would have been his sister by marriage was the look of interrupted anticipation on her face when he rounded the last bend in the path and saw her watching his twin step naked into the bathing pool. He had turned and left as quickly as he could, but the damage, he knew, was done. Elrohir had been sad that afternoon. Not angry, as was his wont, but sad, and that, truly, scared Elladan more than almost anything he had seen or done in the last year, almost as though his twin had known the missed opportunity would be his last. 

It was guilt that drove him to avoid those pools, and that avoidance of those pools that put Niphredil so often in his path. Elladan felt himself still tense in spite of the heat of the water and the scent of the oils he had added to it, thinking of how to explain himself to the maid who seemed more attached to him than he to her. Her name had been used in Elrohir’s successful and yet hurtful plan. Elladan had not wanted this, truthfully had wanted to keep the seeming attachment between him and the girl as quiet as possible. That was, apparently, not to be the case. Worse, though, were his brother’s words before the fight. “Then trust my word on this,” he’d said with the look in his eyes he only got when thinking of the opportunities he’d lost, “you don’t, and you’d be better off ending things anyway.” 

Was he better off ending things, or was he, perhaps still too distracted by what lay behind them to evaluate the situation clearly? There was no real impediment to their joining, should they choose to do so, save the misgivings Elladan did his best to keep to himself. But the pairing, somehow, did not feel entirely right, and in trying to look at it from an outsider’s perspective, it certainly did not seem like the sudden ignition and whirlwind of joy that had been his brother’s realization of Nariel’s status in his heart. Nariel with her hair like darkest night, clinging wetly to her neck and shoulder, drifting around the rest of her in that pool, and the onrush of excitement and joy and burning, sweeping lust he’d felt from his brother came to mind again, and his cheeks flushed in shame. No, he did not feel that for Niphredil. He felt affection, esteem, contentment in her presence: he also felt those things in the company of their sister and many of the other maids within the household, a number of which had changed his soiled clothes and warmed his baths when he was a child. She was as family, but not, he realized, as his wife.

Now, to tell her this, he thought, but peered out of the curtained area of the bathing chambers when the door opened. 

“You were thinking of me,” Niphredil said, more solemn than her usual, which said much already. 

“How did you know?” 

“The hue of your cheek,” she said, sitting on a stool within his eye shot but several paces away from the antechamber he occupied. “And the flash of guilt in your eyes when you realized who it is that disturbs you.” 

“You are perceptive,” he replied, hooking the curtain around the top of one of his discarded, and mud-caked, boots, freeing his hand for the bath again.

“Perceptive enough that I hear things I am not meant to,” she added, sad but direct. He admired that about her, a trait she shared with his sister. Yet another comparison to his sister, he thought with dismay. This would be difficult.

“It will sound childish, I know, but it was not my idea,” Elladan said.

“I did not think the fight was such, no, but your honesty with your brother before it began?” Niphredil asked, one brow arched. “That was entirely yours, and not feigned.”

They sat studying each other for a long moment over the rim of the tub Elladan occupied before either of them spoke. Still, he did not think it best to begin with an apology, for he was not entirely certain he was responsible for the past months’ misunderstanding. 

“This conversation just became infinitely easier from my perspective, did it not?” he asked, and thank the stars, she smiled.

“Likely.”

“I truly am sorry,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. “I cannot explain myself.”

“In a time of loneliness and loss and worry, companionship of whatever kind can be found is a welcome haven?” Niphredil suggested, her hands crossed around one bent knee. 

“Yes,” Elladan said, surprised that she saw so quickly to the heart of something that still left him utterly puzzled.

“I have been afraid of that,” she said. “For quite a while I wondered if you were simply in need of a friend during a difficult period, and I think it was with that in mind that I began to spend what free time I had seeking yours. I believe…” She paused then, worrying a finger nail and breathing in such a way that Elladan knew she was holding her emotions in check with difficulty. “I believe that it was fear that led me to overlook what I knew deep down was not precisely right.” 

“Then perhaps the same could be said of me,” Elladan replied, turning to brace his folded arms on the rim of the tub. “I do not think you unlovely, Niphredil; please, understand this. And you are vastly intelligent, and charming. It would take a fool as large as me, I think, to overlook the gift of your esteem. But it is said that those spirits which are destined for one another know it from a very young age, and I, at least, am considerably more than young.”

“We would have known,” she agreed softly, nodding. “I wonder how it is to know,” she mused almost to herself.

“Consuming, judging by what little I have understood of my brother’s bond with your sister,” he replied. 

“And I am, in all honesty, not consumed,” she said. “Not that you are not worthy of--” she added quickly with eyes wide in concern at what had sprung from her mouth unconsidered. Elladan cut her off with a laugh and a wave of a dripping hand.

“I understand. It is well, or well enough.” 

“And your ruse worked,” she said, standing then and rummaging for clean towels and the standing screens that the elves of Elrond’s valley used for additional privacy while dressing. “Your mother seems to be returning to herself.”

“It was Elrohir’s idea,” he said, closing the curtain again to finish washing. “I, likely, would have remained buried in books until the end of the age had he not chosen to act.”

“You are like my sister was,” Niphredil said from the other side of the curtain. “Content to let someone else rush and decide and direct, while she quietly and methodically went about the business of details.” 

“We would have been siblings, had they wed,” Elladan said, sluicing water from his hair as he stood. 

“That seems a better fit, to me, now that I think on it,” she replied, a disembodied hand appearing through the gap between curtain and wall to give him a towel.

“Aye,” he replied. “It does.”
~*~

It was quiet at the pools. Deserted too, as it always seemed to be when Elrohir lowered himself into the crystalline water again. He spent much time there under the wavering leaves, letting the fall of water at the far side of the pool pummel his neck and shoulders and back. While not precisely warm, the pool was fed in part by a hot pond some way under the earth, and it sometimes sent vapor skyward on cold nights. It had been Nariel who had found this out, spending so much time at the bottom of the pool one day that Elrohir had grown worried and swum down after her, pulling up short as her inky black head and silver eyes popped out of the gloom. They had swum together naked, had dried their hair in the breeze laid out over sun-warmed rocks, they had spoken of marriage, of children and a home of their own and grandchildren. They had never joined body to body as they had spirit to spirit. 

As with any time he thought of what he had lost, and also what he had been spared, Elrohir felt his throat grow thick and his eyes sting. He set out across the pool with a few strong strokes, swimming into the deep area beneath the water fall and stood up into it, letting the aching stone of his muscles send spray off in all directions. It was a matter of time, he knew, until his brother overcame his embarrassment and joined him at the pool again, and it wasn’t until that time that Elrohir thought he could speak of what the damned goblins and that infernal pass had taken from him. Away from this place of peace, the words simply did not come. But once here, in the last place he and Nariel had enjoyed togetherness and solitude, it seemed the thoughts of her were almost touchable, hovering somewhere near his elbow, where she would have been. 

With a sigh, Elrohir turned and sat, his body behind the waterfall, his legs dangling down into the pool with water hammering down on his thighs. His brother and Nariel’s sister were also near the forefront of his mind, now that he had seen his mother’s restoration begin. They were meant to be siblings rather than husband and wife, he thought, though having never seen them closer than across a crowded room, he could not be entirely certain. There had been an uncomfortable distance between the twins since the interruption at the pool and the obviously frightened messenger from Lothlorien that came seeking Celebrian’s party some weeks later. Some days, Elrohir felt as though both an arm and a leg had been removed at once; all the completion he had once felt was so quickly ripped away in just a few short weeks. Everything else seemed off balance since.

Idly he traced the edge of the head piece Nariel had worn on her journey with his mother, the only thing identifiable among the remains Glorfindel had found in the mountain pass. With a few careful alterations at the forge, Elrohir had made it into a passable torque, and wore it now around his left arm, his strong arm, the one that he had draped so casually and so often over her sun-kissed shoulders. The feeling of her beneath his hand came back so suddenly, the warrior almost choked. Falling water hid his welling eyes quite well from any that might pass the spot; his loneliness, he knew, would not be so easy to mask when he returned to the residence. But, his brother would not come with him to grieve, and his father was consumed with the joyful return and eventual restoration of his own bride. In the mean time, Elrohir allowed himself the time to weep, hidden safely behind the curtain of water where he had first seen her bare and gleaming and pale and undeniably his. He could not bring himself to do so anywhere else.


Chapter 9 - Awareness.

If boredom drove his sons to madness, Elrond Half-elvin did not seem to notice it. The night of her remembering, Celebrian asked that the Hall of Fire be opened and all those willing brought into it, so that she might see them, and they her, to rejoice that she was home. So flautists and harpers were made ready, a fire fed huge in the great hearth and attempts at joy were made, for the sake of their Lady’s homecoming. But the shadows haunted Celebrian, even when Elrond stood between them and her, muttering softly. But still, she stayed, doing her level best to take up where she had left off as Lady of The Last Homely House. 

In private, it was not so difficult, though even that concession allows little. The day of her remembering, Elrond finally held his wife for the first time in months. That night, she struck him for the first time in all their long years of marriage, having wakened from a dream to see him standing beside her bed, between her and the lamplight. Equally shocked, they stood staring at each other for what felt like an eternity, Elrond’s lip cracked and bleeding slightly. Then Celebrian wept apologies into her hair until dawn, and would not be consoled. Elrond cursed himself for a fool for rushing into what he felt he should have known would be a frightening thing for her still, even in spite of the realization that her ordeal was over. 

But the second day, Elrond asked Celebrian to walk with him, and surrounded at a distance by archers, the two spent the afternoon deep in their woods, Elrond speaking on what had changed in her absence, which horses had foaled, what travelers had come to Rivendell, and subsequently gone. He did not notice the first time he mentioned groups of elves seeking ships that Celebrian’s eyes grew distant and misty, but near the end of their walk, he mentioned the Shipwright and heard her sigh. He looked at her again, met her eyes and studied them as he always had, before he felt his heart break anew. Those simple words, “seeking a ship”, had awakened in Celebrian the Longing. He knew with a certainty that the years had told him was not simply worry, but truth. His wife’s restoration, if it came at all, would not come in their home. She would leave him. She would go into the Undying Lands, ever green and peaceful, and safe. Of all that he would give, could give, would kill or steal or die to give, he could no longer give her the protection she sought. The evil was in her mind. The Havens and what lay beyond were the only healer that could help her now. 

But did she know? As they walked silently back to the House well before dark, Elrond found the idea surprisingly easy to accept. It was what must be done for his wife and the wholeness of her mind. As miserable as the long years without her would be, her life was his priority, now more so than ever. If the Havens were what she needed, he would see that she arrived there safely. But, awakened to the reality of now, months after her disappearance, would she try to heal herself? Would she admit that her heart lay elsewhere now, no matter her love for her home and family? The best way to know this was to ask, Elrond knew, and yet he hesitated. Perhaps it was too soon after her remembering for her to admit she could not become well under Arda’s trees. Her mother’s homeland, so often sought and rhapsodized by all elvin folk, was still a distant and unknown thing, and Celebrian had barely tolerated the familiar play of light and shade on the walls of their own Hall. And then, too, there was the chance of mentioning it too soon after her nightmare. The crack in his lip was still swollen and sore. She could well think he suggested seeking the Havens only because she had struck him, which was of course not the case. He would never cast her aside. She should know that; somewhere, he was sure, she did know that, but perhaps that part of her was still to frightened of the shadows in her mind. 

Celebrian’s voice cut through his thoughts as they came within sight of the stables. “I have not been walking much of late, have I?”

“This is so,” Elrond said, each word measured, his tone of voice restrained. 

“I am weary from what would have been a short ramble. I should remedy this.”

“As you see fit, my love, but there is no hurry. You are still no where near your full strength. There is no reason to exhaust yourself,” Elrond countered.

“Yes there is. Putting it behind me,” she replied, and loosed his arm to walk the short distance into the house on her own, as she might have done a year before. 

Perhaps, Elrond thought as he watched her enter the house, the healing had to begin here. But when the time came, he would have to let her go.

~*~

All right, so he had set it up. There was no helping it now, Elrohir grumbled to himself under the guise of grumbling to Blue Girl. It was easy enough to lead a wandering deer past the bathing pools, and easier still to get Elladan into the forest after it. Keeping up the ruse that the entire excursion was not, in fact, a ruse, however, was growing difficult. But at last they reached the pools as expected, and Elladan whirled on Elrohir with accusation in his eyes. 

“Yes, it was a trick. You would not listen any other way.”

“Why are we here?” Elladan replied, already itching to be gone.

“You need to forgive yourself,” his twin answered and watched a look of shock spread across Elladan’s face. “It was not your fault, that I lost her. It was not my fault. It only is.” He felt the old grief welling up in his throat again, and turned Blue Girl away toward the soft, mossy area where he often let her roll. Taking off her tack gave him something else to think about, time to regain his scattering thoughts.

“But it’s my fault that— that day—” Elladan began as he stripped Bloodstone of her gear as well. 

“Your confidence in my strength is comforting, Brother, but think you I would have survived losing her and Mother too, had we wed? I do not.” 

“You still grieve,” Elladan said. “Still feel pain, and it is not unexpected.” 

Over his horse’s withers, Elrohir met his brother’s eyes. “Pain is not an adequate word for it,” he said softly. “I cannot explain, but I would have you help me try. If you can bear to be here, where you last saw her.” 

“I… interrupted—”

“And I thank the stars for it, or we would have been wed ere she left, and I would now be made a widower before my first child was born. I would not have that burden on my heart. I would give… anything, to have her back. But to have had only a tiny portion of our life as one, and then have it snatched away? That is a cruelty I call myself 'coward' for rejoicing to avoid.”

The woods grew quiet after Elrohir spoke, and Elladan’s eyes narrowed in thought, but his twin was not finished. 

“Come to the pools with me. Please. Give me at little of your time. Help me… start to forget.”

“You will never forget, Brother. You know this?” Elladan said, but put a toe to the heel of the opposite boot, slipping it free. 

“I do. But, let me fool myself from time to time?” 

“I can try,” Elladan answered, barefoot now in the remains of last years leaves.

“That is all I can ask of you.”


Chapter 10 - Seeking

His brother needed his mate. Now. There were no two ways about it, Elrohir realized. His own aimless drifting was nothing compared to the depths of melancholy he knew his twin would find if something were not done. Bookish, quiet, reflective, it was not that their mother’s spark had somehow passed over Elladan, only that it took extremes to wake it. He looked at their mother across the hall, surrounded as she was by lamps and candles and flickering firelight, and realized with a start that he’d heard her laugh more recently than he had his twin. Now, instead of his mother or his father, it was his brother he feared would fade. 

“We should bring Arwen home,” Elrohir said when their father next passed his way. “She has not yet seen Mother restored, and her worry has been deep.”

“It is not safe to use the pass,” Elrond replied, as though the obvious had escaped his son. 

“We can loop southward with a troop of guards, and bring more back with us from among Grandfather’s men. He will certainly not begrudge us that, considering.”

“Knowing your grandfather, he’d send half of his Wardens here to get you if he suspected you were thinking of riding off there. But I find myself wondering why, suddenly, you feel the need for a journey?”

“Restlessness,” Elrohir replied honestly. “I am not considered fit to slit the throats of Mother’s captors, and yet I feel I must do something. Arwen is the only other woman I have to love and look after, and she wants to know her mother is safe.” 

“It is not that you are unfit—” Elrond began, but Elrohir cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“It is that we are too precious to you to be lost, I know. But the knowledge does not always feel so affectionate, Father. You must know this.”

“And the journey would help your brother, I think,” Elrond added. 

“Yes. He is high on my list of concerns as well.”

“I will ask your grandmother,” Elrond concluded, patting his son on the shoulder. “It may be that she will want to come too.”

A fortnight and a bit later, a party was requested from among the people of Rivendell, and traveling companions were chosen. No women, but good, sturdy fighters from among the men, which angered more than a few of the female wardens that wished to see kin and friends among Galadriel’s people. But, in light of what Elrond and his sons had nearly lost, little more than isolated grumbling was heard. Twelve set out six weeks before the midsummer, and rode fast and hard by day to keep careful watch by night, even in the safe places where fear had faded like the past summer’s grasses. 

Elrohir felt an improvement within himself almost immediately upon their departure, but for the entire length of their journey, still Elladan gave off the brackish melancholy feeling of a stagnant pool. Summer was passing them by, and swiftly; whatever caused this mood, Elrohir knew, must be shaken from his brother before the cold came down from the mountains again. Neither Elladan nor Celebrian herself had ever been fond of winter with its crystalline whiteness and isolation. They were not spirits meant to endure the cold, but to rejoice in the sun. And yet, even the sunlight held no cheer for the youngest son of Elrond, not until they arrived at last at the river running round their grandparents’ land and crossed side by side on twin ropes, racing each other across the rushing water and arriving, in spite of their best efforts, perfectly in step. In the back of his mind, Elrohir thought he heard a familiar, indulgent laugh, and knew that their grandmother was aware of their arrival. The twins exchanged looks; Elladan felt it too and finally found it in him to smile. 

Months of worry and fear had deepened the lines in their sister’s brow and around her lips, but her eyes still were exactly those of their mother, even shining with tears of relief and joy. The Lady Galadriel’s features, of course, remained as careworn and ancient as they had always been, their light, rather than dimmed, simply shaded. But it was to Celeborn that Elladan turned after the formal greetings were made and into his embrace the younger twin fell. Odd though it might have seemed, Elladan had always felt a stronger kinship to his grandfather than his own father, though he loved both dearly. Another quiet, observant sort surrounded by those of quick minds and smiles, or hot tempers and irrepressible urges to act, Lord Celeborn knew better than most how it was to stand and measure and judge before acting… and he knew the burden of a lonely soul deprived of something a part of it, but separate and unknown. While Elladan held tightly to his grandfather’s still solid frame, Elrohir went eagerly from their grandmother to their sister, sweeping both from their feet with into great, spinning hugs, and held longest to his sister with her head tucked tight against his shoulder. 

“You are weary, and should rest,” Galadriel said after embracing her other grandson tightly. “But how best to take that rest, I wonder? I think more idleness will not do either of you much good.”

“We’ve been idle long enough,” Elrohir said, squeezing Arwen close against his side again. “Though staying still long enough to eat, I think, we could tolerate.”

“Always thinking of your stomach first, brother,” Arwen teased, jabbing her elbow at his ribs. 

“Only here,” he said, smiling to see Elladan walk away in quiet conversation with Celeborn. “Only in Lorien.”
~*~

“Can it be tempered?” Galadriel said far into the night when finally the festive air of the party’s arrival had slowed its tempo toward restfulness. 

“I think it can, with time,” Celeborn said across their bedchamber. “But he takes much on himself that he should not.”

Galadriel chuckled to herself at the irony of that statement from that man, but shook her head fondly all the same. “And how do we teach him to release this burden, or at least set it by for a time? He is too young to feel so worn. Always, our young ones grow old before our eyes, and never a way to slow the march of time and heartbreak.”

It was then Celeborn’s turn to smile at the irony of his lady wife begrudging time its toll. To her, even Celebrian was still a youngster, though her thousands of years had been well spent as scholar, teacher, wife and finally but greatest to her credit he thought, mother. Their grandchildren, he realized, seemed still as toddlers playing in the trees to his wife. 

“We cannot fight time, dearest. You know this,” he said, removing a layer of robes in preparation for a short sleep. 

“One can wish to, can she not?” Galadriel replied over the carved wooden comb she still used some thousand and more years after he made it for her.

“It is not the passing of time we should address, but the loneliness in which he spends it. Even with his brother, he says, he feels separate.”

“His guilt,” Galadriel agreed, nodding in the mirror before her. “Elrohir seems to think it is time his twin had a mate, as though they are as easy to find as deciding which wine cask to tap.”

“He was lucky. For him, like myself, there was no choosing. You have put away her jewel? It would not do for him to know of it, I think. His own mood seems strangely fragile as well.”

Galadriel nodded, her hair finished, the lights dimming as her own energy flagged at the end of the night. To fall asleep in her husband’s arms was a joy she had never forgotten to appreciate. That he had once been forbidden to her had made him all the more desired, but once custom was flouted, desire became too weak a word. Her poor children— all of them— so alone in this aftermath. True, only a small number of lives were lost, but to a fading race, each was as precious as adamant. And to her identical grandsons, it seemed, one in particular was more necessary than the ring on her finger. They could not share a mate, in a sense, but Galadriel understood to a degree how the twins shared each other’s joy. By seeking the match to his brother, she knew, Elrohir was trying to heal himself. 

“Very well then,” she sighed aloud, tucking her feet under the bed linens. “We will simply have to see that they meet all possible candidates. Elladan cannot hide himself away.”

“And Elrohir cannot hide behind his brother,” Celeborn added as he snuffed the last lamp.

“It will not be Elladan behind whom he hides,” Galadriel decided after the room grew still. “He has missed the company of women. Arwen will have one of her brothers, at least, glued to her girdle.”

“Well, she already has them both around her little finger,” Celeborn said, yawning. “She should be able to manage him.”
~*~

Somewhere around midday a few days later, Galadriel called her quiet grandson to her and gave him an errand. 

“We will have more guests this night,” she said over a book. “They reached the eastern boarder last night, and the guardians bring them hence now. Go, take our welcome with you, and bring them here in gentleness. They have been sorely harried, and have need of warm welcome.”

‘Harried’ did not begin to describe their journey from the Greenwood, from what Elladan got out of the party’s archers. First spiders in their own lands, then wargs at the forest’s edge, then goblins from the Iron Hills, and still more goblins had beset the travelers on the open lands between the hills and Lorien. The party of over two dozen had shrunk to just 15, with few enough archers left to attempt the return to Thranduil. They would need reinforcement, after a time of rest in the Golden Wood, before any even thought of attempting to reach Rivendell. For these were not just travelers: they were the first of Thranduil’s people to make for the Shipwright. 

“The darkness in that forest grows ever thicker,” a captain with a fresh slit in his eartop declared. “After this journey, I will not be returning to the east, and may my father and sisters forgive me. I am no coward, but the unknown monster of the sea seems a better choice than the known and barely survived monsters spat out by the north.”

“No, you are no coward,” a female voice replied. “And one may suffer only so much before the spirit takes hurt. Even the largest boulders sometimes crack, Sardo. There is no shame in going.”

“From you, Nindé, I take that as a compliment,” the guard said, and spared the only dark haired woman among the party a small smile. The child, obviously, was linked to her, for when he was not high atop the cart, he was wrapped around her torso, feet nearly touching at the small of her back. He was perhaps ten summers old, and very frightened. Elladan, feeling pity, sought the boy’s eyes, and got instead the steely gray ones of his keeper, Nindé, she’d been called. His smile earned only a faint softening of her frown, and he bowed, then turned away.

“Enough then,” Elladan said as the talans came into sight through the trees. “We will talk more tonight after dinner. We are visiting, my brother and I, to take my sister home. Festivities were planned long before word of you reached us, but you are welcome to attend, or not, as you choose. I feel safe speaking for my grandparents when I say that you are welcome to your ease here for as long as you should need it.”

Very softly from behind him, Elladan heard the child whisper, “Dancing, Auntie Nin?” and an even softer, “Yes, my heart. We shall go if you wish,” and his own heart was warmed.

~*~

“Honestly, it’s just a dinner, with dancing after,” Arwen sighed. “Why must you insist on every show of finery every night?”

“I’m putting on a brave face for our brother, you know that,” Elrohir retorted while Arwen wove elaborate braids into his hair. 

“I think you just want to be prettier than me,” she replied with a snort, tugging the plait she’d just finished. 

“Not that I could, ‘fair Luthien Reborn’,” he said laughing as Arwen rolled her eyes yet again. 

“Stars, help me outlive the reputations of famous grandmothers,” she sighed, but got no further when the padding of feet was heard beyond the balcony. Looking down, the siblings saw a very familiar guard walking at the head of a small, bedraggled party of people, obviously worn with the pace of their journey. All in green, Elrohir noted, and several of the men among them the strapping blond archers of Thranduil’s domain, and all of those injured.

“Look there, the lad,” Arwen said softly from the shadows of the drapery. “I have not seen a child since… home.”

Like Arwen, many others had noticed the youngster among the party, perched high on the back of a two wheeled horse cart, and murmured softly among themselves, most in tones of pity. There was no missing the bandage wrapped around his head, or the patch of blood where an ear should have been. The party, it seemed, had been waylaid. 

“We should go down,” Elrohir said, making for the stairs. “There may be news we should send to Father.” Fast enough on her feet, Arwen caught him up on the decent and stayed near his heels as they circled again and again around the great tree, while all around them, the rest of the people of the Golden Wood did the same. 

At the foot of the talan, Elrohir pulled up short. 

“What’s the matter now?” Arwen hissed, freeing her hem from beneath her brother’s boot.

“Somewhere in that party is Elladan’s mate,” he declared. “He’s already seen her. He already knows.”


Chapter 11 - Restlessness.

Galadriel herself carried a cup of welcome around the new arrivals. Consciously, carefully, with each new face, each offering of the cup, she lifted their cares, eased their troubled hearts, as much as was possible after the peril they’d escaped and the griefs they carried with them. She smiled when the little boy, called Veon, drank too greedily and brought the hiccups upon himself. Here was one like her Elrohir as a youngster; curious and as at home among strangers as he was in his father’s woods, or would have been, had he not taken the journey from the Greenwood to Lothlorien when he had. Even the elf child, hardly old enough to trace the passing of the seasons, carried a hunted look around his eyes. When she came, finally, to the woman that accompanied the boy, the gift of peace was harder to give; the woman expected it and set her spirit against the unburdening. Perplexed, Galadriel studied the woman a moment longer, dusting the forgetfulness of ages away as she did.

“You were among my uncle’s people, many years ago,” she said, finally, the cup all but forgotten. “I remember you from a lembas making before the great war.” 

“This was so,” the woman replied. “I also remember you, niece of Fingolfin, my lady.” The Lady of Light stood silent, betraying her shock, as she studied the woman again. This woman, like herself, had known the Light of the Trees. She had crossed the sea and seen first hand the Kinstrife and the Doom that confined Galadriel within the Middle-earth. Here was one like her, and yet… not. This woman was not, primarily at least, a scholar, for her clothes were threadbare and her apron of heavy leather. Her hands were worn, the fingertips rough and calloused from frequent work with a difficult material. Fine lines marred the edges of her eyes and lips from peering closely at something in weak light. And her cunning showed through her gaze, more strongly even than the mark that accompanied those born beneath The Trees. But happy, this new guest was not, and to Galadriel’s mind it seemed had not been for a very long time.

“We were children together?” Galadriel asked.

“My father was your uncle’s master of hounds, and his fletcher.”

“And you have been this for Thranduil?” the Lady of Light asked, catching on. 

“As you say,” the smaller woman said, bowing again. 

“What are you called, that I may address you as befits one of my kin?”

“Nindé, my lady.” Finally, after their conversation, Nindé began to relax, though still kept her spirit some little withdrawn. It had been a long while, indeed, since she had felt happiness. 

“We could speak more, if you care to do so, while you visit here,” Galadriel said. “I would be glad of the company.”

“As you say, my lady.”

And then, the youngster hiccupped again. “Pinch your earlobes,” Nindé said to the red-faced lad. “Then hold your breath, cross your eyes, jump up and down on one foot and count backwards from fifty.”  

“Hic! Why, auntie- Hic!- Nin?”  

“If they are not gone after that, I will be forced to dangle you by the feet until they desist,” Nindé insisted, struggling to maintain a straight face. Finally, Galadriel noted, a hint of joy.  

“But why? Hic!” the lad asked again, attempting valiantly to follow her instructions while speaking.  

“When one is upside down,” Galadriel offered, “he cannot, in fact, hic-up. To hic-down is far less noisy.”  

“I thi-Hic!- you’re playing with me, my lady.”  

“I think you are right, Veon. I think you are right.”  

~*~ 

Rather than tempered by the arrival of so many unexpected and distressed travelers, the festivities that night seemed enhanced by them, as though the opportunity to shed their cares at the edge of the wood had struck extra brilliance into the eyes and hearts of Thranduil’s people. Circling round the center of it all was Celeborn, apart from the festivities not because he preferred to be, but because of the ruling pair, he less needed the companionship of others than his lady wife, and one of them should be attentive to potential problems, should something arise. He knew her well, his Lady of Light. Somehow, in her loneliest times, the times when even his presence and silent understanding brought only small comfort, someone always came to them: their daughter, their grandchildren, travelers from the other elvin realms. While she did not dance, Galadriel circled along the edges of the crowd, summoning a page with wine at one group, listening intently to the repairs needed to a widow’s talan at the next. And the more she spoke with their people, the more of them she touched, embraced, the brighter she grew. They had held that in common, he mused, his wife and daughter. Would his daughter’s delight in companionship, in meeting strangers and hearing new tales, come back to her? Or was her mind somehow trapped still in those caves beneath the mountains?  

It was a trial, and a sore one besides, for a father to stand and look on unmoving at his child’s suffering. Worse, even, to know that the cause of it went free, feeling no remorse, no touch of justice for their wrongs. True, Elrhoir had told them all with chilling callousness how the raiding party had been dealt their deaths, but for all that… Celebrian should be there among the guests, circling opposite her mother as she always had, her focus on curiosity and enjoyment and inviting these new but not unfamiliar people into their home. To think of his daughter afraid of the shadows of her own hall…  

The Dorwinian turned to vinegar in his mouth, and he handed his half full cup to a passing page. In all his long years, in all the battles he’d seen, Celeborn had never felt so helpless. His little girl deserved justice. More than that, she deserved vengeance.  
Immediately following the darkness of that thought, Lord Celeborn felt the first jolt of attack in the vicinity of his shins, followed shortly thereafter by surprise.  

It had been hundreds of years since a child had gone pell-mell into his feet, and both child and lord stared at each other in silent shock. Eventually, a chuckle broke their wide-eyed stare. 

“I did not mean to swing you that hard,” Elrohir said, reaching for the child. “Are you all right, Veon?” 

“Yes, my lord, fine. I landed on my bottom, not my head.” 

But no sooner were the words past the lad’s lips than a dark haired shadow cut through the pack of revelers to swoop down at Celeborn’s feet and scoop the lad into her lap. “Are you hurt? What happened? Did your bandage loosen again? And apologize to Lord Celeborn immediately. You could both have been injured,” the woman fussed, checking carefully time and again at the wound on the child’s head.  

“I believe I am sufficiently stable as to withstand small projectiles such as this,” Celeborn found breath to answer, “even when thrown by my formidable grandson. We are none the worse for the spill, my lady.” 

“Perhaps a rest is advisable, though,” Elrohir said, dusting the knees of his trousers with a catlike expression about his eyes. “The four of us might sit for a while, to catch our breaths.”  

“We have rested well since you brought us to the city, my lord. But my thanks go with you for entertaining the child,” the woman replied distractedly dusting off her young charge. At the familiar misconception, Elrohir smiled.  

“That was my brother. I am Lord Elrond’s elder son. Elrohir Half-elvin at your service, my lady,” he explained, offering a reverence and his hand to help her off of the forest floor. She inclined her head in reply, but ignored the hand in favor of sweeping the child onto her hip as she stood, where he gladly, and sleepily, nestled into the hollow of her shoulder.

“She’s cold,” Elrohir thought to himself. “Or so she seems. But is it coldness, or is it caution? She has been hurt, and seen much.” Over the retreating lady’s head, he exchanged a curious glance with his grandfather. 

“There’s something… familiar about her,” Celeborn said in a puzzled tone.

“I agree, and yet, she is not active in the pursuit of friends,” Elrohir added.

“But she has need of them,” Celeborn decided. “Hers are eyes that have seen the ages pass, and have done so alone. It is not good for one to go always alone.”

And Elrohir could but silently agree.

~*~

Long after everyone had gone to their rest, Elladan sat on the landing before the talan he shared with his brother, his pale bare feet dangling over the hundred foot drop to the forest floor. He could not pinpoint what troubled him, but some shapeless thing haunting the edges of his mind kept him from sleep. Irritatingly, the harder he looked, the more vague and misty the thing became, almost as though it did not wish to be found out. As he sat, frustrated and weary, his ears picked up the sound of footsteps far away. Too light to be a Warden on rounds; too slow to be a messenger, or someone sending for aid in the night. Someone else in the Golden Wood could not sleep, and from the sound of the steps, she— yes, it was a woman— was heading in his direction. 

It was not until an unfamiliar dark shape passed beneath the neighboring mallorn and out of the inky black of shadows before Elladan realized that she sang in a voice so low he could not make out the words. But the tune he knew, and if it had not been changed by time and distance, it was the same song he had found himself humming when bad luck or chance took him past the bathing spring in Rivendell, about the journey of Earendil and his wife Elwing’s transformation into a great white bird. What bard had written it, Elladan did not know, and it seemed no one did, though since it was about his family, Elladan had learned it faithfully as a tiny piece of his inheritance from the Second Born, which his father found difficult to speak of. And who was this, then, singing that song so softly into the night, with great dark eyes turned up toward the stars? And why did she, so other-worldly beautiful in the light of the moon, walk about at night with tears streaking her face? When she passed beneath his perch, he recognized her as the craftswoman from the Greenwood party. She who had shown such reserve and inner steel during the day, it seemed, merely hid her grief for the night, and walked alone among the silent trees instead of seeking her bed. Not a fitting night for the guest of the Lady of Light and Lord Celeborn, Elladan decided. Even in Lothlorien, one should not go far at night unless one knows the way. 

Very quietly, he folded his sinuous frame in half, tucked his heels onto the talan’s edge, and stood, padding quietly through the bedroom for his shoes before taking the stairs two at a time. The only two awake at this time in the Golden Wood should perhaps share their concerns together, or, barring that, at least he could offer to walk her to her quarters when the demons had been put to rest. But whatever the pesky, niggling thing at the periphery of his mind was, something else told him that he should not leave this woman alone.
~*~


Chapter 12 - Lessons.

Some days later, three or perhaps four, Elladan had found time away from his grandparents and siblings and made his way undetected to the practice field. Part of him was thankful that it was deserted by the Marchwardens. He grew tired of constantly throwing every ounce of strength, will, and skill against man after man of his grandfather’s fighting companies, though his brother thrived on the competition. For some time now, he had thought, he would prefer peacefulness, to wield his knives with only a chunk of wood to parry against and no chance of losing a limb in a training accident, to remember the grace and beauty to be found in the flash of light on blade and the bond between man and weapon. 

There was a comfort in the routine of it that he found as he turned and swiped and spun through the exercises Glorfindel and Erestor and his father had put them to time and again. The day he had pummeled Erestor so relentlessly that the advisor had lowered his Noldorin head in yield and looked back up with tears of pride in his eyes still brought a choking feeling to Elladan’s heart. One by one he had bested his teachers, and now felt concerned that he would fall into the trap of the talented: that he would forget that his reputation— and his brother’s of course— preceding them was never enough to stop a stray arrow or a chance slip in the mud of a battle field. While he would not want to be crippled by an unwary Marchwarden bent on besting the best of Rivendell’s fighters (save Glorfindel of course), he did not wish to become complacent on any field, practice or otherwise, and constant competition did not do as much for his ability to concentrate or focus as simple time alone with his thoughts often did.

So it came as a surprise when he noticed he had a spectator. 

“Veon? What are you doing here, lad?”

“Hello, Lord Elladan. I…” the boy began, entering the circle where Elladan had spun and parried and thrust at the unopposing air for the better part of an hour. “I… don’t know how to explain myself.” 

Sensing where the conversation might go, Elladan put up his blades and dropped into the grass, where thankfully the boy sat beside him. 

“When Auntie Nin and I left home, my parents were with us too,” he began, sitting very straight-backed with his hands folded tightly in his lap. Elladan nodded. “But, before we’d gone far, the spiders came. One of them picked up my pony, Holly, and then another one picked up our neighbor Oron. And then another one picked up Mama, and wound her up in its string and ate her. That’s what spiders do, you see, even the big ones. They pick up what they want to eat and wrap it tight in special string they make and turn its insides to jelly and drink them. Daddy told me, long ago, when we found a normal spider in the pantry and Mama had been frightened. She wouldn’t have wanted to… she wouldn’t have wanted that to happen to her. But it did.

Then later, after we’d gotten out of the woods, the goblins came. And Daddy hid me under the wagon and told Auntie Ninde to watch after me and drew his sword and went to kill the goblins like he did before with the spiders, but… he didn’t come back.” 

Unsure of what Veon would need most, Elladan put an arm around his little shoulders, and swallowed hard when the boy held tight to his ribs and buried his tearful face in his shoulder.

“You have had a very difficult journey,” Elladan said when the boy had calmed himself again. 

“And it’s not over yet,” Veon said sadly. “We’re to go to the sea and sail to the Undying Lands, and we’re not even half the way there. But I’ve never been this far from home, and I don’t have a family any more. Auntie Nin isn’t my real aunt, she’s just a neighbor that was friends with Daddy and Mama, so I call her Auntie because all the rest of my family is in Rivendell and I’ve never met them. And I’m scared, but I don’t want to be scared because warriors aren’t scared and my father was one and I want to be one too just like he was.

“Will you teach me how not to be scared?” Veon asked all in a rush looking up at Elladan with sad grey eyes. “Will you teach me how to use swords and not be scared of spiders and goblins and balrogs and dragons and dwarves? I want to be like Daddy was and make him proud of me, and you’re already like him, it will be easy for you to teach me, won’t it?”

It was hard not to laugh at the child’s surety that warriors were never afraid, but Elladan managed, though only barely. 

“Veon, I think we are talking about two entirely different things. Just because one can use a weapon calmly when faced with danger does not mean that he or she is not frightened; usually, for me at least, being frightened helps me concentrate and use my knives or my bow better.”

“Really?” Veon asked, incredulous. 

“Really. But, using a weapon is a very, very big task in itself,” Elladan continued, drawing one of his knives for the boy to see. “Do not touch the blade or the tip. I keep them very sharp.” 

“How long have you used it?” the child asked, wide eyed.

“For longer than you’ve been alive, I don’t doubt. And it’s been the last thing many goblins have ever seen, the poor souls.”

“Poor souls?” Veon yelped. “They’re goblins! They kill people and eat them and make their skin into clothes!”

“Do you know what they were before they were goblins?” Elladan asked, turning the pommel toward Veon’s hand. 

“Thralls of Morgoth, Mama said,” Veon answered, the blade forgotten. “But I don’t really know what a thrall is.”

“They were elves and men once,” Elladan said, “many many years ago, but just like a spider isn’t evil for its own sake or by its own will, neither are goblins. They are the result of a much greater evil, something so twisted and befouled that the valar themselves couldn’t even contain it for long. And he was named Morgoth by an elf who was very wronged by him, and went on to do many very wrong things himself out of anger.”

“That doesn’t excuse it,” Veon said stubbornly. “Doing something bad to someone who has done something bad to you just makes you bad too.”

“A very wise statement,” Elladan said as Veon took the blade from his hand. “Which leads me to why you are holding my knife right now. Why do you want to learn to use it, really? You said you don’t want to be afraid and want to be like your father, but is that really all, or are you angry too?”

“I… I’m angry,” Veon said, thinking. “But mostly I’m sad. I miss my Mama,” he choked, his eyes tearing once again. “And I miss Daddy and I want them back and I want her to stop crying! I want to make her stop crying.”

“Who, Veon?”

“Auntie! Auntie Nin. She cries at night too, and she shouldn’t have to. She killed the goblin that hurt me and bunches more besides, but she cries herself to sleep every night. And maybe if she doesn’t have to take care of me, she’ll stop.”

Closing his eyes tight against the image Veon’s loving words painted, Elladan sighed. So many worries on those little shoulders, and he thought that becoming a warrior would lift them. If he only knew. 

“Using a sword or a bow cannot do all that, lad. The ability to kill does not remove the burdens of loss and sorrow, though I think you’ll learn that with time. All it does is change the sorrow to a different kind. Sometimes we still lose those we love, even when they’re right in front of our faces. But sometimes we can prevent that loss for a while. I think you’re old enough to begin to learn, but there are many, many years yet to go before you will be the kind of warrior your father was. I have no doubt, though, that you will make him proud. But, I want your word of something before we even think to begin.”

“What is that?” Veon asked.

“That you will never, and I cannot stress it enough, never pick up a weapon in anger. If the other children in Rivendell tease you, you do not fight them, or if you do, you use your words and your hands, not a blade, not a branch, not a bow. Do you understand me?”

“Yes… but no,” the child said, puzzled. 

“What troubles you?”

“The goblins hurt your Mama too, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Elladan said, hoping he could answer the child honestly and not appear the hypocrite. 

“And now you go and kill them whenever you can, because they hurt her. Don’t you use your weapons when you’re angry then?”

Elladan paused for thought, to decide how to explain to the lad at his knee, brighter than any child so young had a right to be, what his quest with his brother had done. 

“I don’t kill them because I’m angry at them, though you’re right that I’m angry too. But mostly, I’m sad, like you are. The goblins don’t have a choice but to be how they are, but they used to be something better, and I believe deep inside them somewhere is still a spark of what once was. I don’t kill them because I hate them, or because I’m angry with them,” he finished thoughtfully. “I think their deaths are kinder than the life they have had.”

“And they can’t hurt more good people that way,” Veon said, nodding. 

“That too,” Elladan added. “Protecting your people is important too. And that is what I’m willing to teach you to do, eventually. I will help you start to learn how to kill if you need to, but you must promise me that you will not do so unless you absolutely must. Is this fair?” 

“Fair,” the lad said, jumping to his feet. “Shall we shake on it?” And they did, arm in arm as men, though the urge to hug the child tight to his side again didn’t fade easily. 

“Then let’s start with the basics,” Elladan said, dusting off his seat and taking his other knife in his right hand. “Which is your dominant hand?”

An hour passed in the practice field while Elladan explained the parts of a fighting knife and how to hold it, where to strike an opponent to do the most damage quickly, and what would cause one to be injured by his own blade. The child showed remarkable aptitude for it, though the knife did prove to be heavy for his size and build. Elladan let him continue to hold it anyway to build the muscles in his arm and back that would one day be needed for any number of activities besides defense as well. 

“Keep your tip up. That’s the lad. Now, show me the pommel? Good, and the hilt? Good, and where is the tang?”

“Inside the handle… I mean, grip.” 

“Good. Well done,” Elladan said, smiling, struck by the notion that this was how Glorfindel or Erestor must have felt when he and Elrohir were this age. 

“And that’s enough,” an unexpected voice called from the edge of the field, turning Veon the color of spoiled milk. 

“Auntie Nin! Elladan was—”

“Trying to teach you to use a weapon two times too large for you,” she finished sharply, reaching for the blade. Reluctantly, Veon handed it over and hung his head, but Elladan was surprised to see Ninde stoop and pick the boy’s chin up to meet her eyes.

“Your father was the bravest and most talented warrior I have ever seen among the Green Elves. But your mother was of the Noldor, lad, the people who brought swords to Middle-earth. If you’re going to learn how to use one, you’re going to learn it right,” she said, looking up at Elladan. 

“You should have started with the footwork.”

“I thought it best to teach him the terminologies first before even attempting a swing,” Elladan replied, somewhat stung. “And in the mean time, plan to make him a practice sword better suited his reach and strength. It’s what Glorfindel did for me.”

“Oh Glorfindel,” Ninde snorted. “That show off. I must talk to him long before he comes anywhere near my nephew in a practice ring.” 

“You know Glorfindel of Gondolin?” Elladan asked.

“Of course,” Ninde said, untying her worn leather apron and dropping it in the grass. “I am a single woman. He made himself well known to all of us. On guard, if you please, Lord Elladan. Veon lad? Watch my feet,” the little dark haired woman said, kilting her skirt one handed to expose her calves and ankles. 

“We will… You intend to spar with me, lady?”

“I do. It’s what he wants to see, and it’s been a while since I’ve used a knife. Or is the best of Glorfindel’s students afraid to spar with someone who learned to parry before his teacher was a golden gleam in his father’s eye?”

“Lord Elladan says that he fights better when he’s afraid,” Veon added helpfully, and there was no hiding the smirk that flashed across Ninde’s face. 

Yes, Elladan thought as he adopted a ready stance, this must be exactly what Erestor and Glorfindel felt like all those years ago. 

“I said that only to assure Veon that fear is a natural part of the necessity of combat,” Elladan said.

“Of course, lord Elladan,” Ninde replied through that maddening but surprisingly pretty smile. “Any good warrior knows that. Now, on your guard, if you please,” and when Elladan responded, Ninde proceeded to systematically drive him in circles until, backed against a tree with the flat of his own blade at his throat, he was forced to yield.

“Were you watching my feet, Veon?” she asked, panting and smiling all at once.

“I tried, Auntie Nin, I really did, but…”

“Distracted by the sword play?” Elladan asked knowingly.

“No, my lord,” the child said, clutching his aunt by adoption around the waist. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since we left home Auntie. But I’m sorry, I’ll try to do better next time, I promise.” 

Ninde’s smile wavered momentarily as she looked down at the one-eared head buried against her chest. “And I’ll try to do better too, my heart. You are right; it has been a long time since I have smiled.”


Chapter 13 - The Next Journey

“You should go with them, darling,” Celeborn said one night just before autumn.

“With who, dear?”

“With the twins, and Arwen. Celebrian would benefit, I think, from the opportunity to see you.”

“Then we will go,” Galadriel decided, taking up her carved wooden comb. “I’m sure a few weeks away will do the realm no harm.”

“I had not intended to leave,” Celeborn countered, laying aside his own comb. 

“What? Why?”

“One of us should stay, to look after things here,” Celeborn said reasonably. “And of the two of us, you, I think, would be a greater help to her now.”

“We do not know fully what it might be that she needs,” Galadriel replied, turning away from her mirror. “It might, in fact, do her more good to see you. You are and have always been the one of us most content here. You should be the one to teach her that shadows are, occasionally, only that.”

And thus began yet another of the Lord and Lady’s famous fights, which took place right in front of whatever servant or neighbor happened to be present, but in total silence. Over breakfast the next morning they bickered, back and forth between minds linked for so long they were both able to carry on other conversations at the same time. Lunch was taken separately, though still they argued, for it was easier for Celeborn to restrain his irritation if Galadriel was in another part of the forest and he did not have to watch the tilt of her eyebrow or subtle smirk when she made a point. Dinner carried the argument further, though it seemed to Celeborn that they simply went round in circles over the same points time and again. His lady wife would simply not give up. 

After a week, the Lady’s sheer stubbornness won out, and together, they made ready to set out on the long ride west via the south pass near Nimrodel and into Dunland. The northern pass, of course, was out of the question, and Galadriel did not fancy the thought of attempting the passage through the dwarves’ delving to the immediate north of Lorien in the mine they called Moria. Once was enough.

A bright, sunny autumn day broke the morning of their departure, and the horses, realizing that the cold season approached, seemed well disposed to a journey. With luck, all parties involved would reach their final destinations before winter, though the party from the Greenwood would have to over-winter in Rivendell before it would be safe to take a ship from the Havens. Their need for stealth, they had decided, was not so great for the western journey as the twins’ journey east had been, and with over five dozen people in the group, secrecy would have been difficult. So, the leave taking was made with perhaps a bit more fuss and sadness than may have been allowed in the past, but the final departure of those who over the summer had become friends was a sad moment for all of the First Born who remained: this party was just the first of many, many more to come and go. The time of the Elves was ending. 

If the horses and ponies were excited, however, the majority of the traveling party viewed the journey with veiled apprehension. Not the least of these was Veon who, having recovered fully from his physical injuries, was still much more cautious than a child of his age generally behaved. Seated securely on another little hill pony— a grey dapple called Agate— he kept his wooden practice sword strapped across his back in a sheath made specifically to fit both weapon and warrior-to-be, Elrohir’s contribution to the enterprise Elladan and Ninde had undertaken at midsummer. If he thought more of the arrangement than a child’s sword lessons, he did not let on, at least, not to his brother. Frequent glances passed back and forth between the elder twin and their sister, but nothing need be spoken when a simple flick of the eyes would do. 

So the party rode out at early dawn, leaving darkened smears and patches of disturbed dew on the grasses behind them as they left the forested areas. Well before lunch, they had reached the crossing point of the Nimrodel and stopped to rest the animals before beginning the climb into the foothills that lay between them and the pass. 

It was an ill-timed rest. The first to notice a sign was Arwen who bent to fill her water skin up stream from where the horses drank and saw what appeared to be a bootprint. Sensing her disquiet, her horse jumped, causing Elladan to check it briefly, and see the same trail of boot prints his sister studied so cautiously. 

“These are not the prints of elves, or men,” she said in an undertone, looking up into her brother’s steely grey eyes. Naming what had left the prints was unnecessary.

“I had hoped we would not see them this far south,” Elladan replied, looking quickly for his grandfather or brother, or even the captain of the Marchwardens that accompanied them. The first gaze to meet his belonged to Ninde and he quickly looked away. 

“You just gave yourself away, brother,” Arwen said softly as she reached for her horse. “She will be curious now.” 

“No she won’t,” he replied, tipping his head for his grandfather to join them. “She is far too wise for that. She will already know, or at least venture a correct guess.”

Celeborn did not need to be told what had caused the disruption, but stood thinking for a moment while two of his grandchildren looked on. 

“These tracks point north,” he said finally. “I count 3 horses, one of them burdened with something quite heavy, and three or four captives walking in the center.” 

“A small group though,” Arwen said. “There could not be a dozen of them.”

“Still a dozen too many, as close as they must be,” Elladan growled, and Celeborn nodded. 

“Our way is blocked through the pass to the south,” Galadriel said unexpectedly, exchanging a significant glance with her husband as she joined the group at the water’s edge. “There has been a rock slide now that the autumn rains have begun.”

Catching Elrohir’s gaze from slightly downstream, she smiled with an unfamiliar look in her eyes. “We must turn north.”

“There are goblins to the north,” a Greenwood elf said.

“There are also other elves,” Celeborn replied, “and many fierce warriors in this party. We will be safe until we reach the next useable pass, and be that much closer to our destination once we cross the Misty Mountains.”

“What about the goblins under them?” someone else asked. 

“If they approach us, we shall have warning,” Galadriel said smoothly, “and we have safety in numbers.” 

Suddenly it came to most of the party that the lady too, perhaps, had the desire to spill goblin blood that had taken such hold of her grandsons. Barely restrained apprehension turned to very visible fear in a moment. The party turned north at the river all the same, all eyes alert and weapons loosely sheathed, glinting now and then in the sun. 

When it came, the meeting with the goblins was brief. They had stopped for the day before the elves had tracked their sign, and the out-riding Marchwardens found the camp well before night fell. The captives appeared to be part of one of the wandering companies, though none were familiar to the elvin scouts. The goblins had taken refuge in a south-facing cave and slaughtered, or at least eaten, some large animal. The offal lay thick around the outside of the cave’s entrance, where the captives had been restrained, each tied to an individual tree as one would tether a horse or a dog. As with the party from the Greenwood, one of the captives appeared to be a child, though little else could be told from a safe distance.

“There are eight of them,” the Warden finished, “and at least one is injured. It sits near the cave mouth licking the gash in its arm. They must have had considerable opposition in their last skirmish to have run this far in daylight.”

“But even they must stop to eat,” Celeborn decided, dismissing the Warden. “And so shall we. Camp would best be made, I think, a little way into the forest. Do you agree?” he asked, looking first at his wife, and then his grandsons. 

“The Greenwood elves will feel safer there,” Elladan added. 

“And the women and child will be harder to find if a goblin happens to sneak past us,” his brother added in an undertone. 

“My thinking precisely,” Celeborn said. “We will choose our warriors after the meal is eaten. Each of you will take five men and choose a side from which to approach the goblin camp. The remaining five I will lead in the frontal assault.”

“You should go before full dark,” Galadriel added as they turned back toward the rest of the party. “They may choose to move on through the night in spite of their injuries.” 

“They won’t have that option, dearest,” Celeborn promised with steel in his voice, and Galadriel smiled. 

Over the meal, the twins debated the merits of the fighters among the sixty-odd members of their party. 

“Greenwood elves would be best for the western assault,” Elrohir decided, “and you’re far better up a tree than I am. I’ll take the eastern approach with some of Father’s men, assuming Grandfather does not take them for his company.”

“I believe he’ll use his own fighters first,” Elladan said. “He knows he is more familiar with their specific skills than we are.”

“And that there are enough of them that would like to teach us our places that it is perhaps best that he commands them himself.”

“That too. Will the Greenwood elves listen, do you think?”

“I would assume so. They already like you better, when they can tell us apart,” Elrohir chuckled. 

“I will have to choose carefully,” he decided, tearing off a chunk of bread. 

“You could ask the boy’s guardian. She has seen them all in battle. She would not lead you amiss,” Elrohir added casually. Almost, he thought, too casually.

“You have a point. Perhaps I should speak to Ninde.” 

“Then go. I can eat the rest of my meal without you,” Elrohir teased. “We are no longer joined at the navel last I checked.”

Dusting off his seat, Elladan took his dish to the fire and piled on a large second helping, knowing that if offered, the child would eat it as well. Veon and Ninde had settled themselves against the bole of a very large oak tree, one with branches sweeping just close enough to the ground that with a good boost Veon could be aloft and invisible in a matter of moments. Which of them had chosen it, though, he would not venture to guess.

“May I join you?” Elladan asked as he drew near, and his own face split into a grin when Veon looked up with a hint of hero worship in his eyes. Clearing a space on the horse blanket on which they sat, Veon and Ninde welcomed him cordially enough, though the drawn look about Ninde’s eyes told Elladan that she, at least, was concerned about the night’s camp. 

“Finish your dinner little apprentice. Your auntie and I should discuss something,” Elladan said, adding another slice of roast meat to the child’s plate.

“What is that, my lord?”

“I take a party of Greenwood elves on our journey tonight, but I find I do not know them as well as I feel I should. Tell me, of those fighters here camped, who do you trust most to guard Veon and yourself?”

After a long pause for thought, Ninde listed the strengths and weaknesses of each of the remaining elves from the Greenwood party. From her careful consideration of each warrior, Elladan knew how thoroughly she had studied them even as danger flew around her head from all directions, and admired her intelligence all the more. 

“And as for myself,” she concluded, “my reach is limited, I’m old, I’m female, but I’m the best archer in the party, a fair hand with sword and knives, capable with a bladed staff, and nearing on deadly with a sling and stones.”

“Who would look after Veon if you went north tonight?”

“I thought you would say that,” Ninde said, “but you asked my opinion of the fighters from the Greenwood camping here, and I am one such, so I gave my assessment. It is yours to do with as you will.” 

“She really is good, my lord Elladan,” Veon said around a mouth full of meat. “She can hit a fly from fifty paces. I’ve seen her!”

“But hopefully,” Elladan said, rising, “I won’t have to. You both should stay here and rest. We’ll be back soon enough.”

And so the raid began, and as the last purplish-blue turned to black at the horizon, the party returned with the freed captives guarded carefully at their center. The new child came last, carried by Celeborn himself to the tent where Galadriel waited. 

“She will not speak, though she took water and food,” he said, nestling her gently in his own bedroll. “Her parents, one of the others said, were…” 

The rest of his report was finished between their minds over the tangled blonde head on the pillow before them.

“And she was forced to watch?” 

“We assume. She should stay with us tonight.”

“Indeed. Come little one, let’s wipe away some of the dirt you’ve gotten into,” Galadriel soothed as she prepared scented water and a flannel. “Then we’ll have a long rest and dream pleasant dreams.”

At some point in the night, the child began to cry. Within a few moments, Celeborn woke and, scooping her carefully from the pallet they had prepared for her, brought her with him to the bedding he shared with Galadriel. Nestled snugly between them, she spent the rest of the night in peace.
~*~


Chapter 14 - Ancestral Voices

When dawn broke, the party woke with it, the captives feeling much better for their rescue the night before. Only the little girl remained mute with shock, though at least one of the other captives said that she had been that way for quite some time. 

“Her folk brought her to us a few weeks ago,” one of the men said over his breakfast. “They had all had a rough fortnight, at least. I think that’s why the orcs took them first.” 

“They knew Fanye and Taro would not make the journey and be fit to work at the end of it,” another man growled bitterly. 

“I’ll never eat meat again, after that,” the woman who sat with him said softly, her face drawn. 

“You mean, their meal was…?” Elrohir yelped, disgusted. The woman could only nod, her peculiar indigo eyes shining with tears of rage. 

Elladan looked down at the left-over venison on his plate and pushed it aside with his knife. “No wonder the child does not speak.” 

“Thank the stars she slept with grandfather and grandmother last night,” Elrohir added, gesturing to the front of their grandparents’ tent where Celeborn shared out a bowl of porridge between himself and the child, a spoonful for her, then one for himself. She would not eat otherwise. 

“My lord sons of Elrond,” the first captive said finally. “We are not as a rule prone to irrational behavior, or acting out of anger or hurt. But what those goblins… those… beasts have done, will keep doing… it cannot go unavenged.” 

“I wish, once I am recovered, to take a party after the rest of their kin, but I will need far more warriors. May I ask your help in this?” 

“It is known among the Wandering Companies that your hunt for the goblins has been fierce this last year,” the woman added. “We would… ask your help.” 

“What are your names?” Elrohir asked, his appetite seemingly unaffected by the knowledge of what the goblins had killed the day before in that cave. 

“I am Eruindil,” the first man said. “With me are Rusco and Filit.” 

They nodded each to each as Elrohir swallowed his last bite. “Then Eruindil, you will be our third in command, assuming Grandfather does not go as well.” 

“This pack of abominations came across our sights at an opportune time,” Elladan added. “We shall ask grandfather to divide the group and send a party of warriors north, then send for more Wardens from the Golden Wood to accompany the travelers by the southerly road. Since they are only a day to the east, there will be little delay.” 

But as word spread through the morning of how the captives had been found, and what had been found with them, the twins discovered that even among the women there were few who wished only to flee. 

“What if there are more?” a woman from the Greenwood said over the section of a creek being used to clean their cookware. “I can’t bear the thought of another little child like Veon or that girl being dragged into the mountains and never seeing the sun again. Someone should go after them.” 

“The journey is shortest through the pass,” another one said. “If we could get past the goblins.” 

“The best warriors of the three elvin realms are here with us now. If ever there was a chance of it, this is it,” the first concluded, surprised to notice she’d been speaking around the bent golden head of the Lady of the Golden Wood as the latter washed the bowl from which her husband had coaxed the captive child to eat. 

“I will tell your thoughts to my husband,” Galadriel said, rising. “If the general sentiment is such, we shall go north and rout the goblins, or at the least, subtract a few from their numbers before the snow falls.” 

With mouths agape and eyes wide, the women watched Galadriel turn immediately to Celeborn, who sat on a folding camp stool with the captive child in his lap and a flannel in his hand, cleaning her face and hands. 

“The breaking point has been reached, I think,” she said, sitting gently in the grass by her Celeborn’s feet and stroking the little girl’s hair. “Even the women of the Greenwood despair for this little one’s fate, and of the potential for others like her.” 

“They do not wish to turn back?” he asked, handing Galadriel his comb. 

“They would go north to rescue more, should there be any.” 

“Then we shall turn north,” Celeborn decided, folding aside the flannel. “And I think Losse fits her well.” 

“She is still and quiet and soft and cool. Losse, then,” Galadriel agreed. “Very well.” 

So, the party that set out that morning had a decidedly different purpose than the one which had departed from Lothlorien the day before. Instead of flight, they had on their minds instead strategy, and rescue, and hope, which had been missing from some of their lives for a very long time. The little foundling girl, Losse, rode with Celeborn or Galadriel, and once notably, on the wagon beside Veon and his pony, who treated her as one would a fragile baby bird fallen from its nest. He spoke quietly as they rode, pointing out to her the beauty of the first turning leaves they passed and the gleam of apples and pears on occasional wild fruit trees near the edge of the forest. When they stopped near evening to rest the horses, he climbed one of these and brought back two juicy, sweet green pears. It was the first food she took of her own volition since her first capture by the goblins, one of the former captives said. It was a good sign. From her seat beside the wagon box, Ninde kept a watchful eye on the forest around them, and hid a fond smile for her little almost nephew. Caring for others seemed almost as much a part of his personality as his curiosity. For a moment, she felt a twinge of jealousy that he was not truly hers. But, she reminded herself, she was blessed to be the one that took care of him in place of his parents. That was, perhaps, the greater honor, for unlike being born into a family, being chosen spoke to the child’s own heart and preference. 

The party stopped early to rest that night, and those who were not regular users of weaponry gathered together by Elrond’s sons, Veon among them, to see where their aptitudes might lie. For no one, not even the children, would go unarmed from that day forward. There was no telling where goblins hid, or indeed if a group of them would find the obvious sign the party left behind, and track them in the night. 

Their first problem came from an old man, loremaster of old to Orophir, who had lost most of the use of his left hand in the battle with the spiders. With only one hand, books and scrolls would still recognize his skill, but fighting knives were best used in pairs, as were most other common weapons. 

“I just drove, before, with the goblins,” he said quietly. “I am content in that now. My usefulness is past.” 

“There’s the thrown dart,” Ninde said quietly from the edge of the circle. “If he could have time to practice it.”  

“You mean that old hunting dart of yours?” the loremaster asked, his eyes brightening. “Yes, I could… I could manage that, one armed.” 

Seeing Galadriel’s eyes light up as well, Elladan found himself curious. “I do not recall hearing of this. Do you have one, Lady Ninde? May we see it?” 

Nodding, Ninde went to her pack, tucked deep inside the wagon bed, and removed from it first a cupped piece of wood, then a quiver, the side of which housed a second storage space of smaller, unflighted darts. Removing one of these, she dropped it tip up into the cupped implement, then drew back her arm, took careful aim, and flung the dart overhand with surprising speed. It struck a fallen log some half a furlong away, and stayed there quivering. 

“It may be used for rocks as well,” Ninde said, handing Elladan the throwing device while Veon ran to retrieve his auntie’s dart. 

Exchanging looks, Celeborn and the twins nodded their approval. “How long,” the Lord asked, “would it take to make enough of these for the two children and the women that do not already use bow or staff or blade?”

“If we could find the wood, and set those who ride to work as we travel, a week, perhaps,” Elrohir guessed. “Oak?” he asked Ninde. “Or maple?” 

“Oak was sufficient for my uncle’s,” Galadriel said, taking the tool from her grandson’s hands. “I have not seen one of these in… quite a long time.” 

“I think mine may be the only one still used on this side of the world,” Ninde agreed, sharing a secret look with the Lady of Light. “It was my father’s, for his trips into the woods without the dogs.” 

“And from these,” Galadriel concluded, handing the weapon back to its owner, “was the long bow conceived.” 

The party’s second problem arose shortly thereafter, when it came time to convince the already trained fighters of the party that they did not also need a throwing dart, and that this newly introduced old weapon should remain the realm of those who had no other means of self-defense.

~*~
A.N.: The weapon here called a thrown dart is known as the Atlatl. More information about it is available here: http://www.worldatlatl.org/WhatisAtlatl.html

Chapter title taken from the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lines: 
"And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !"


Chapter 15 - Beyond the Point of No Return

The pace of their journey quickened as the days wore on. As much ground as could be safely covered in a day was walked from earliest light until an hour or more before dusk, when a camp was made and lessons were continued. Instructing the women in their dart throwing fell to Ninde, while Galadriel and Arwen, trained in arms as well, took groups to practice with bladed and quarterstaves, while others went elsewhere within the forest to shoot and spar with swords and knives. By the time the anxious but ready group sighted the pass through the Misty Mountains, autumn had finally left its first mark on the tips of the leaves, faintly dappling the forest with gold and orange and crimson, though green still dominated the landscape... except where a great dark track snaked out of the mountains, rocky and rough, clearly made by the tramping of booted goblin feet and the herding of prisoners and livestock. 

“In the trees we would pass unnoticed for some time,” Ninde said to Elladan, riding beside her. 

“And be so far downhill that, should we need to enter the pass, we would be forced to leave the horses and wagon behind,” he replied with regret. His instincts, too, said to keep to the trees, slow though the going might be.

“It’s only what feels safest,” she muttered.

“I know,” he replied, and tentatively took her hand. “He’ll be all right.”

“His father left him with me for that purpose,” Ninde agreed. “I can only hope they’re fully prepared for what we’ve decided to do.” 

“They are as prepared as we can help them be,” Celeborn said, joining the pair just left of the path. “And your nephew has excelled in those preparations. I do not think you need worry so much, Lady Ninde.” 

The conversation continued, going over remembered features of the pass’ interior the last time any of the three had seen it, identifying ambush points and potential resting areas. While they spoke, Ninde’s hand never left Elladan’s. From fear, he wondered, or something else? The significant looks between Elrohir and Arwen had hardly escaped his notice, and he saw the tiniest hint of a smile at the corner of his grandfather’s lip. 

It would work itself out in time, he decided, and simply allowed the contact to continue, or would have, had a high pitched shrieking not cut it off.

“ADA! ADA! ADA! ADA!” The winds of Manwe seemed to turn in their favor and blew down from the mountain, away from the ears of the goblins within. Every man in the party hearing the sound started like a deer before, as one, the party followed it to a ravine a little way into the forest. Far at the bottom, Lossewen had slipped on fallen leaves. The first over the edge, and the first to reach the child, was Celeborn. 

“I’m here, I’m here. You’re alright. Hush now, Lossewen, you’re safe. Ada has you…” 

Elladan and Elrohir exchanged glances. No, their grandfather did not realize what he said. And yet, as Galadriel joined them with little Veon at her heels, it seemed to work. The girl stopped her shrieking and buried her grubby face in his tunic. True she still sobbed and shook with unrestrained terror, but they’d seen a change in her silvery eyes before she hid them away. Her battered little spirit was attached to her body, fully and fiercely. It was the first time in the weeks since her rescue they’d heard her voice. 

“What were you doing all the way out here Darling?” Galadriel asked. 

“We must stay away from the goblins,” the child whispered past the thumb she nibbled. “Mama says we must always stay away from the goblins, and never never use the mountain pass where the Rivendell lady died.” 

“The Wandering Companies haven’t heard about Mother’s return,” Arwen remarked, seeking a way out of the ravine that would carry them further along their intended march. One of the horses took the opportunity to snatch at an apple tree above their heads, shaking loose fruit down on top of them. It was all the reminder they needed, and without further discussion, they filed back out of the wash and remounted, the child huddled protectively across Celeborn’s knees. The next miles went faster than any they had traveled since changing course; for the first time, the entire party could almost feel the breath of a band of goblins on their heels. 

Riding together at the head of the party, Celebrian’s family had a decision to make before night fell; to press on into the pass and travel to the first likely campsite in the dark, or camp early at the mouth and travel only with the benefit of sunlight. Which was best, to cover the most ground in the least amount of time, or to proceed with caution and take every advantage they could get? To transverse the pass without incident would be too much to ask; attack would come, it was as assured as sunrise. The decision lay in second-guessing the goblins’ intentions.

“Well, Grandmother, what do you think?” Elrohir asked, ever the direct one. “Do we camp early or press on through dusk?”

“Why do you ask me?” Galadriel replied, amused. “I am no soldier.” 

“But you are the only one here present with foresight, unless our baby sister has been keeping secrets.” 

If Arwen had a reply, it was forestalled by Celeborn’s quiet chuckle. 

“Your grandmother and I think it best to rest well before entering the pass by daylight. At least, with only one likely angle of attack, if the goblins move tonight, the women and children have better means of escape. We disagree on whether to continue to rest nightly with heavy guard, or to push straight through, relying on speed to avoid more than a passing skirmish.” 

“Once within those walls,” Elladan added, “any attack will lead to fighting our way out, or fighting our way back.” 

“And we cannot expect everyone to go three days or more with no rest. Stealth might serve us best,” Arwen said reasonably. “If we make all haste during daylight and camp with caution, we decrease our chances of detection.” 

“Were we alone,” Celeborn said to the twins, “or a group of hardened fighters, my thoughts would be different. We three together could make the trip by night or day, but we could not do so and remain undetected. But the children make me second guess my instincts.” 

“My instinct tells me none will rest except for pure exhaustion within sight of the pass,” Galadriel said. “We would waste time, I fear, attempting to rest by night, waiting for our enemies to descend upon us at any moment, and exhaust beyond usefulness those who would both guard by night and defend by day.” 

“Will the children bear up under such conditions?” Elrohir asked his grandmother. “And the injured and women from the Greenwood?” 

“It was they who made the decision to take this route,” Arwen added thoughtfully. 

“These goblins are not the most intelligent of creatures,” Elladan said, “but they will know their territory. They will wait until we are near the middle of the pass, when escape will be the most difficult.”

“Like they did to Mother,” Elrohir added through a set jaw. 

The family fell silent, thinking. 

“I say we camp tonight outside the pass,” Elrohir declared, “then push hard until it is clear the majority need to rest, and use the freshest as guards in shifts. Perhaps we can shorten both the travel time and the rest periods without endangering anyone more than we already are.” 

“I continue to doubt the wisdom of this decision,” Celeborn said, looking at the sleeping child on his lap. “But, as it is already made, your plan sounds best. We shall camp below the pass, and spend one more night with the comfort of trees.” 

~*~

The night passed without event, and morning dawned pink and crisp, the picture of early autumn splendor. No one, however, enjoyed it, and the camp was packed silently with all possible haste, a feeling of dread lurking around the edges like the last wisps of a smoky fire.

Elladan walked what little remained of their camp, a list of details running through his mind. They had tended any wounds or injuries on the horses, to help avoid sudden lameness in the pass. Packs had been checked and rechecked, with weight redistributed now that their food supplies had been partially used. The wagon, then, would need seen to. The axles checked, the wheels gone over.

But when he turned toward it, he found all but Ninde’s feet and legs beneath the conveyance and a grease pot near her bent knees. 

“Great minds think in similar ways,” she said quietly. 

“Will it endure the journey?” 

“It will, barring rockslides and fire,” Ninde decided as she sat up. “I’ve greased the hubs more thoroughly than usual. No squeaks to bring them down on us.” 

Elladan nodded. “I’d not thought of fire. It could be used against us as a roadblock, if set alight.” 

“They may have thought of it. It would be best to leave me in the rear. If beset, it is faster to cut the horse loose and set torch to it myself to keep them off our retreat.” 

“You would be the first attacked,” Elladan said. 

“Yes.” 

“Perhaps I should drive,” he continued, extending a hand to help her to her feet. 

“You would then have me scout?” 

“No. That is equally likely to leave you the first to encounter them.” 

Ninde laughed. “I cannot be carried to Rivendell in a golden casket like a gem, and it is not your express duty to keep me safe. I’ve fought goblins off and on since long before you were born.” 

“You should not have to do so,” he began, but stopped. Why was this discussion even taking place? 

“Why?” Ninde asked. When he made no reply, she continued. “You cannot protect everyone from everything. You are one man, even if some think there are two of you at times.” 

Elladan remained uncharacteristically quiet. 

“Fear impacts us all in different ways,” she said, and slipped an arm around his waist. “You said yourself to Veon that it can be a strength at times. There is no shame in this. I’m frightened too, for my nephew and the little girl and even your sister.” 

“My sister is well looked-after,” Elladan replied. “I have less concern on that score.” 

“Then why?” Ninde asked. 

“You know.” 

“What do you think I know?”

Elladan couldn’t stand having empty hands any longer, and reached for her cheek. He met her gaze, held it, careful to disobey the newly wakened part of him demanding he crush her against his chest and steal her breath with kisses. His other hand slipped down her arm to find her fingers and pressed them to his chest over his racing heart. One step backward and they would lean against the wheel. She would get grease smears on her skirt, and would she care? 

He did not know. But he took the step anyway, buried his fingers in her hair… 

“You know.” Ninde froze, trembling faintly, breathing faster than she usually did. “Ninde… you must know?” 

She nodded, and air rushed into Elladan’s lungs like a sudden draught of spring. 

“But…” She swallowed hard, and began again. “But I also know that I am old, and you are not; and I’m taking my last journey in this earth, and you... are not.” 

“None of that undoes the knowing,” Elladan vowed. 

“Would that it could,” Ninde said, dropping her forehead onto his chest. 

“Never,” he argued. “I would kiss you breathless, love you to exhaustion, and see that you’re never sad again, if I could. I can’t. I know this. And nothing is sure. But,” Elladan paused to lift her face and meet her eyes again, “I would have what I may while the music allows it.”

“Too brief,” she said with a gravelly voice. “It isn’t right. Not fair.” 

“Better too brief than not at all,” he replied, inches from her lips, planning in that moment to move no further. The decision to consent to loving him, or to break their hearts, must be hers. He closed his eyes, and waited. Ninde grasped his shoulders and his heart leapt like a startled grouse. She was warm and quivering against him, brushing his nose with hers, pressed up on her toes and leaning into him for balance. Misgivings still gripped her, held her back even as he cupped her hip and pressed them closer than either had ever been with another. He would go mad, he was sure of it.

“Please?” he begged in a breath, barely a whisper. A sob escaped her lips in the split second before they met his, and their first intimacy tasted of salt and fear and hope and the frightful elation of knowing. 

Eventually one of them had to breathe, and they parted different people, conscious each of the other even when they no longer touched. Was this the bonding, then? How Elrohir had felt with Nariel at that pool and beyond? Had he known, felt the blows, when she died? Would he suffer vicariously, as Elladan himself had at the time of Nariel's death, if Ninde were killed in this foolish journey of revenge? So many questions! 

“Whatever are we to do now?” he asked as Ninde dried her eyes with her sleeve. She took a breath and looked away past the edge of the trees.

“I plan to drive through this infernal pass and kill as many goblins as are necessary for you and my nephew and myself to reach the opposite side safely. After that, I should like a good long rest, and a hot bath, and a meal featuring as much good wine as can be had. Beyond that… I do not believe it is wise to plan.” 

It was hard to overlook the wisdom of the decision, so Elladan nodded. “Then I shall ride and fight and bathe beside you.” 

Ninde smiled. “Good.”

~*~
A.N.-- Chapter title taken from "Point of No Return" from Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera adaptation of "The Phantom of the Opera" by Gaston Leroux.
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