Among the Lost

It took her four days to find him. The first was wasted trapped in a bed with a face too swollen to allow her to speak, or see from her left eye. The Southron had struck her quite the blow, she knew, and tongued the raw hole in her gum where once a pair of teeth had been. It would heal, the translator said, but keeping a clove there certainly wouldn’t hurt. Pity she hated the taste of clove.

Starting the second day, when she wasn’t being peered at and plied with teas and water and soup and still more infernal tea, she wandered the nearest men’s ward.

He was not there.

The walking tired her, made it possible for her to sleep, and the third day, she managed to walk through three more wards full of men, blond and brown and even a few black heads propped on pillows, limbs elevated on still more, or simply removed, wrapped in strips of linen.

He was not there.

But the fourth day had been the worst. It had taken that long for her to stumble across a burdened set of stretcher bearers and the hank of tangled blond hair dangling over its edge made her realize that he could have been there before but already be gone, taken down into the lower levels where he could be cleaned and prepared for burial.

She might never find him.

So she walked all day but for the meals forced into her by clucking nurses and aides, peered at every blond man in every ward she could enter. When a nurse corralled her back to the women’s ward and forced her into bed, she found herself simply too tired, and too anxious, to sleep. But after so long with such stress, sneaking past aides and junior healers who were almost as exhausted as their patients wasn’t difficult at all. Four more hallways. One set of stairs. Three men awake in the night calling for water, a fourth for a chamber pot. She saw to them as she could, pulling her braid over her left shoulder to shield that side from notice. One saw it anyway and frowned.

“You’re not an angel,” he said, water bowl in hand.

“I’m not,” she replied.

“Why did you come?”

“Why did you?” she asked, meeting his eyes in the half-light of the sleeping ward.

“So that our women did not have to,” he growled and turned her face with a finger to her chin.

“Well, some of us did anyway,” she said, setting his water aside again, “and we would not be Rohirrim if we hadn’t.” She turned away…

And as easy as that, she’d found him. She would know that profile anywhere; the lump in his nose from when her brother had first caught them behind the barn with her laces loosened and his shirt untucked was as familiar as the back of her own hand. He slept, heavily, as though drugged, but this did not matter. He still smelled of hay and horse and leather and <i>him</i>, and it didn’t take much of her flagging strength to shift him a bit to one side and stretch out beside him in the bed that had, in that moment, become theirs instead of simply his.

He breathed. He was warm and firm in all those places he should be, though his beard against her fingers was as soft as ever. Her relief was unimaginable, until she reached for his hand.

Only linen. Warm, round linen. She wept.

Far too early, she was awakened by an aide berating her through a translator for being out of her ward, out of her bed and wrapped around some man, which was quite enough for her soured temper to bear.

“Tell that over filled bag of gut wind that what I wish to do with my betrothed is none of his affair. I am only here because, had he died, I would follow him anyway. Now that I know that he has not, I have no intention of leaving.”

“You are married?” the other man asked.

“I haven’t given him the sword yet, but the promise was made,” she replied and lifted her hand where her silver ring glinted in the lamplight. Its mate had been on his missing hand, and briefly she wondered where it had gone, then decided she had best not. “And if he won’t listen to that,” she concluded, “tell him I’ll shove his head back up his arse and make him leave us in peace.”

The man, apparently, translated, and whatever was said was enough for the aide to nod his head and leave the room and come back with someone else, who also nodded and left and came back with still another someone.

“He says they will find a room for you,” the injured man who translated for them said. “They did not know there would be married couples among the injured.”

“I would assume there would be more halves of married couples, were I them. I do not begrudge them the mistake,” she said, turning once again to his side. Sharing his pillow, she dozed.

The healers taught her to administer his medicines and helped her through feeding and cleaning him, then saw to her as best as she’d let them.

“Just the first few days,” someone had a man translate. “They will stop giving him the sleeping drugs soon.”

“They are the doctors,” she replied. “I have to trust them.”

On the sixth day, his medications were changed. On the seventh, he awoke.

“You weren’t a dream,” he said, looking down at the blonde hair spread across his chest.

“I was not.”

“Foolish woman.”

“Foolish man, to think I would stay. I go where you go,” she said. “Did I not promise you that?”

“Weren’t supposed to come here,” he replied, kissing her head.

“Couldn’t leave once I’d arrived,” she said, snuggling closer. “Couldn’t find you, once it began.” Tears came unbidden and would not be checked. “I… couldn’t… find you!”

“I’m here,” he said, and reached for her cheek to catch a tear, but pulled up short, staring in horror at the hand that was not there.

“No. No. Where is it? No!”

“Down some orc’s gullet, I should think,” she found the wits to say. “Choked him to death from the inside, I’m sure.”

“Leave me,” he ordered, floundering in blankets, pushing her away.

“I just found you,” she said, staying put. “I’m not doing without you again.”

“Leave me!”

“You have always been more than a limb, more than a ring. You know this. You are my right hand as I am yours. Now lie quiet. We need to sleep.”

“Leave me!” he ordered again, plucking at her clothes with the other hand, but she held tighter, pressed closer, and said simply “Never.”

“Leave me!”

“Never.”

“Leave me?”

“Never.”

“Never leave me?”

“Not ever.”