The Rescue of Celebrian

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", 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.