Agarwaen

Part Nine
~Shadows Close In~

Brenn pushed his hair out of his eyes as he peered up through the streaming morning sun at the figure. “Is he all right?”

Still not altogether awake, Aragorn forced his dropping eyelids to open as he followed his gaze towards the old ash tree overhanging the hedge. “He didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, Brenn, that’s all.”

“Hurry up, you two, or we’re leaving without you,” Zaren called, slinging a light pack over his shoulders full of afternoon provisions.

Only the fastest and keenest trackers departed to try to pick up the elves’ whereabouts from the dead orcs Saeryn and Miren found last night. Moving light and fast was of the essence so they took little with them. Aragorn left everything but his sword stashed under the hedge.

Haldir watched them go. After last night and in spite of his oath, the dark woman insisted that he stay within her sight, something the elf chafed against bitterly. Imprisonment—even imprisonment without physical bonds—sat uneasily with him. So, in a spark of defiance, he had consented with consigning himself to a post in the crook of the massive trunk most of the morning. The sunrises were truly moving even in winter, perhaps more so because the splay of colors seemed to bleed together for miles with nothing but bare branches to impede the view.

“Elf, get down here! We’re going hunting.”

Carlóme, discontent but acknowledging Zaren’s sound advice on staying inconspicuous, had remained behind with the rest and currently stood at the foot of the tree, peering up through the stripped branches at him, hands planted firmly on her hips. It might have been comical had he felt like laughing.

He sighed and took his eyes off the greenery long enough to glance around. But, alas, wind and birds had carried away all but the most shriveled and least weighty seeds. Reluctantly, he began to descend, stiff from sitting in one place for so long.

Thirty feet from the ground, he stepped off the branch.

She leapt backwards as he landed a foot from her position. Scowling she flung a leaf out of her hair, her eyes unusually wide. “Are you mad? Jumping like that! Might have broken your legs.”

He calmly straightened the wrinkles out of his tunic, unruffled by the leap that would have cost any human—at the mildest—a twisted ankle. “I’m astonished by your concern.”

“It’s not concern,” the woman grumped over her shoulder. “If you fell and snapped your neck I don’t want to be scraping through the frozen sod to dump your broken carcass in.”

So far she had kept her promise and allowed him to keep his blade but she still clearly considered him unworthy of the trust it represented. And most of the others followed her lead. He could feel Kari’s eyes on his back as they left the hedge cautiously, striking off in an easterly direction in search of water and game. The day was unusually breezy and warm for winter, a mild reprieve that hinted at harsher snows to come.

Narturi walked very close beside him, the only one not intimidated or perturbed by his presence. On her other side, Haldir met Yyrin’s envious eyes gazing stonily back at him. The man had not spoken two words to him since the death of his friend; and Haldir didn’t expect that to change at all soon.

The attractive small woman between them was oblivious of the man’s jealous tension when she smiled at the elf captain who looked rather dapper to her eyes, despite his reputation according to Carlóme as “an untrustworthy scant.”

“You look quite comfortable, Nari,” the blonde woman behind them snickered, using the pet name she knew the other woman despised.

Narturi flashed a catlike grin at her and boldly slid her hand into his hair and up along the elf’s neck, brushing dangerously close to his ear. “You couldn’t do better.”

Haldir jerked her hand away as if electrocuted, ignoring the hurt, pouting look thrown his way.

“Just because I don’t bed everything with tight leggings, that’s nothing to brag about,” Kari curled her lip at the younger woman, yanking hard on her braid as she passed.

“Hah! At least I can!” Narturi retorted, shaking her long plait out of the blonde woman’s reach.

The back of Kari’s neck flushed though she didn’t rejoin.

The elf breathed again when the too-brazen female relented of her attentions and sped up his pace until he walked beside Carlóme who, while disagreeable, he could handle more appropriately than being groped by a little girl he considered barely out of babyhood. He rubbed his jaw.

Carlóme grinned at his all-too-obvious discomfort. “What, elf? You don’t like pretty girls? Prefer more buxom rangers do you?”

Haldir’s facial muscles tightened at the slight against Estel but a curious sense of relief filled him. This was the kind of female attention he could deal with. “You encourage such behavior among your women?”

The dark woman’s voice dropped to a growl as she turned her head to fix him with liquid oil eyes. “Not a hand on them,” she warned.

“And if they put a hand on me?”

Carlóme shrugged and glanced back at her group who had dropped a few yards behind. “Narturi’s just being friendly. Valar knows why. Not sincere.”

“Thank goodness for that,” he muttered in a voice he thought she couldn’t hear.

“You have a problem with females?”

“Not females in general, no,” Haldir sighed, wondering how on earth the conversation had wound round to this. He almost preferred her snapping at him. “But I do not appreciate being… treated so… by one who, in my eyes, has not yet left infancy.”

Narturi, hearing that, let out what sounded like a wounded squawk.

The Harad woman laughed heartily. The difference it made to her face was startling; the lines of hatred in her brow and around her mouth smoothed; and something seemed to loosen in her eyes. A woman ten years younger shone behind the rigid mask.

Haldir tilted his head calculatingly at her. “So, you are capable of laughter.”

The lingering smile wiped off her face instantly as she suddenly realized she had displayed something other than complete and absolute contempt for the elf. “Nothing much to laugh about these days.”

“Look!” Kari suddenly pointed, already fumbling for her bow as a white tail flashed up ahead startled out of the brush. “What luck!”

In their haste to keep after the hind, they raced right beneath the cracking oak tree without a thought to look up. None of them, not even Haldir, saw the figure perched among the boughs as his blue eyes tracked them. When he was sure they had gone, Arenath dropped agilely to the ground and sprinted in the direction of the now-empty camp.

----------

Saeryn and Miren found the orcs again with little trouble: just off the path they had traversed yesterday in a scooped-out, bramble-filled dell ideal for those who wished to hide during the day. It seemed the orcs had lived there for some time. Aragorn found deep pits of refuse and ashes of campfires not dispersed by the wind. They had been slaughtered where they slept.

The orcs’ bodies were almost useless to them by now though: the warming earth and melting snow decomposed them a lot faster than if the air had stayed cold. Broken swords and shattered arrows littered the clearing as though they had been felled by a whirlwind. But the white arrows through what was left of the throats and the bloated knife-inflicted wounds in some of the bodies let Aragorn believe no wind could have done this.

But even more ghastly than that, the orcs must have discovered the murderous elves’ deadly agenda and relished in the possibility of a “free meal” because there were other bones beside the usual game among the foul bodies. Bigger ones marked by teeth and fire scorching. Aragorn’s stomach heaved and he thanked whatever power that had prevented him from eating that morning. He straightened and rejoined the group on the little path they’d found leading to the clearing. It looked much-used until very recently either by the orcs or…another.

“Did you find anything, Strider?” Brenn asked eagerly. He had been forced to wait with Saeryn out of sight of the bodies, much to his disappointment.

“I told you there’s nothing worth lookin’ at Brenn,” Zaren scolded the boy lightly but his eyes locked onto Aragorn’s. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Aragorn couldn’t agree more. He did not pity the orcs. They deserved whatever fate they received; but he couldn’t help feeling at least a little discouraged now that their one lead seemed to have run dry.

“Looks like you will not get the payment you desire out of this,” he remarked almost casually when absence of trouble lulled them into a sense of safety so they could stop for the frugal midday meal.

Zaren sat in the driest place he could find and picked up a small twig to scrape the mud off his boot treads.

“So, you heard that did you?” the older man shrugged, his face wrinkling in concentration. “The town’s pooled their coin. Not a king’s ransom, mind you. But I’ll gladly split it with you if you help us find him. Carlóme didn’t want to but I figure might as well be fair if you do your part.”

“That’s why you wanted our help in the first place.”

Zaren wiped his hands on his trousers, exchanging a wary glance with Miren who was listening. “Look, it’s not like this changes anything. You’re still going to help us, aren’t you? I told you I wanted justice for those murdered boys and that’s true enough. The money’s just an extra. A weregild if you like, for the dead.”

“So, what happens?” Aragorn asked with a quietness at once uneasy and stern. He did not like being exploited for profit—no matter how noble the rationalizations sounded. “Bring in what you deem the murderer’s head and name your price?”

“Hey, now, it’s not like that.” The older man met the ranger’s eyes with a trace of umbrage on his raffish face. He sighed and picked at a weathered notch in his belt. “I shouldn’t be telling you this but I guess you might as well know. Just don’t you dare let on to her I told. Did Car ever tell you why she hunts this thing?”

Aragorn wondered where this conversation was going but nodded in affirmation, recalling what Haldir had told him of his late-night meeting with the woman in the Butchered Goat’s common room. “Her hand. He ruined her hunting skill with an arrow…”

Zaren shook his head, his unshaven jaw twitching slightly as though he had swallowed something sour. He glanced over at the rest of his company. “Hey, Miren, I thought I saw some parsnip back near the trail. Why don’t you take Brenn, see if you can find some of it to go with that soup will you?”

“It’s the edge of winter there’s not a green thing to be had for—”

“Just, go on and look, will you?” Zaren gave her a meaningful glare and realization flashed across her face.

“Oh, yeah. Fine. Come on, Brenn. Let’s go find some parsnip to make Zaren happy.”

Saeryn was bent over their cooking fire, studiously ignoring and being ignored.

Zaren turned apologetically back to Aragorn. “Sorry about that. I… I can’t have the boy listening in. He’s seen and heard too much as it is. Doesn’t need anything else in his head…”

“I understand.”

“That’s what she told you though—the arrow thing? Don’t believe it for a minute; she can shoot just as well as she always did. Which still isn’t saying much between you and me. But that’s not the reason,” he raked a hand through his hair and heaved a deep sigh. “The elf…forced her to kill her brother.”

Aragorn blinked in surprise but said nothing so Zaren continued.

“Carden and Carlóme were brother and sister, she a few years older. They’d had a rough time of it in the South and came North when they could. I met her for the first time because of him. Even as young as he was, he was the best hunter I ever knew—always got the fattest rabbit, the sleekest mink, the buck with the most points. He liked looking for weird things, hunting things he’d never hunted before and no one else would. Car would swear to anyone who’d listen that he’d killed a big cat when they crossed over the mountains—imagine that!

“They came down here one year and Carden heard about the “ghost” that was troubling these parts. I’d known him for a year or two then and I’d never seen him so excited. Carlóme thought the folk were just being stupid and superstitious for our benefit and Carden was falling right into it. He pestered for days until she finally agreed to go and try to look for the thing with him. I don’t know what he thought it was. I just know he wanted it. But we didn’t find it. Not even a trace.

“Car got frustrated and told her brother that when he decided to stop playing the fool he could come back. But he didn’t. I never saw him again. Carlóme went out to look for him. She was gone so long I thought she’d gone missing too. I was about to go search myself when she comes through the door. Said she found him. That was it. I didn’t figure out the rest until later days later after she’d been at the bar for awhile. She’d found the elf. And Carden… Gods, what that monster did to him…makes me sick to think about it,” his breath caught in his throat as he brushed a hand over the lower face of his face. “Even now, she still has nightmares.”

Uncertain of what to say, Aragorn lowered his eyes.

Zaren rubbed his face with the heel of his hand and stared at Saeryn’s back which had remained bent over the small stew pot. “Look, Strider, don’t—don’t say anything about it, all right? Especially to her or Brenn. And I’d caution you even against telling the e—Haldir.”

“I won’t.”

A rustle made both of them look up. They’d been so caught up in their conversation they hadn’t heard Miren and Brenn return. The red-haired woman and the boy were breathless.

“What’s going on?”

Miren, half-bent over her knees, clutched a stitch in her side. “We found something. Don’t know what it is. Little trail led off into the grass. Big rock…”

Brenn whose breath was a little easier said quite clearly, fear mingling with excitement in his eyes. “I think there was blood on it!”

Abandoning their lunch, Aragorn, Zaren and Saeryn followed the other two back the way they’d come, Brenn leading the way. It took a keen eye to spot an elf path especially when weeds had started to choke it. But they were right. Aragorn followed it with his eyes leading up a short incline.

“We go cautiously now. We don’t know what we might find,” Aragorn warned them. “We’ll go single file. Zaren, you take up the rear with Brenn just in case.” Without waiting for them to comply, the ranger loosened his sword in its sheath and stepped onto the path.

Mingled with the unmistakable touch of elves was a darker taint he had never felt before and it gripped his heart with fingers like claws. He shuddered, foreboding crawling the length of his spine as the boughs creaked overhead. The sun dimmed behind a bank of clouds.

Bathed in shadow against a further wall of trees, he could see the rock. It was roughly three feet taller than a man though wider by about two lengths. Every muscle in Aragorn’s body clenched. There were manacles nailed above a man’s height. Even from here, he could see dark spatters on the grayish stone.

He reached it ahead of the others. There were ridges and spatters ornamenting the stone like paint. He did not touch the chains and instead scraped at one of the spatters. Crimson flakes drifted loose. Brenn was right. It was old blood. Something tingled alarmingly on the back of his neck and he looked up.

Brenn’s warning cry came too late.

“Strider!”