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Paths Taken  by daw the minstrel

I borrow characters and settings from Tolkien, but they are his, not mine. I gain nothing other than the enriched imaginative life I assume he expected me to gain.

Thank you to Nilmandra for beta reading this.  The rest of you cannot imagine what a difference she makes.

*******

7.  In the Infirmary

Thranduil rode right to the steps of the infirmary, jumped down from his horse, pulled his son’s limp body into his arms, and then kicked the infirmary door open to carry him inside.  One of the healers’ apprentices was in the hall, and she whirled at the noise with her mouth open, ready to protest, but gasped instead when she saw who had just entered.

“Get me a healer!” Thranduil snapped, pushing into the first room to which he came and fortunately finding it empty.

“Yes, my lord,” the apprentice cried and disappeared.  

Thranduil usually insisted that his sons be cared for at home where their family could also attend them, but he had been unwilling to wait for a healer to come to the palace and so had come straight here.  It maddened him that no healer was in sight.  But as he laid Ithilden carefully on the bed, running footsteps sounded in the hall.  Gwaleniel hurried into the room with the apprentice right behind her.

“What happened?” she demanded, peering at the swollen spot on Ithilden’s right arm.

“Spiders bites,” Thranduil answered.  “There and on his left leg too.”  She began pulling off Ithilden’s clothes to expose the bites. The apprentice moved around her quickly, getting a basin of hot water and clean cloths ready. Thranduil reluctantly took a step away from the bed to get out of their way, and the two of them began to wash and examine the wounds.

A sudden clamor came from the entrance way, and Legolas ran into the room, looking even more disheveled than he had when Thranduil had left him.  One of the guards came right behind him.  He looked helplessly at Thranduil. “I am sorry, my lord. We tried to take him home because we thought you would not want him here, but he--” he paused, groping for a word.  “He protested,” the guard finished lamely.

Thranduil eyed the guard’s red face and rumpled tunic.  “Evidently,” he said dryly and put out his arms for Legolas, who rushed to his side and pressed up against him.  He probably should send the child away.  If Ithilden’s hurts were too great, Legolas should not hear it in the infirmary from the healer, but at home from his father.  But the child was obviously distraught beyond bearing.  Thranduil could hear him breathing hard as he dug his fingers into his father’s tunic.  “He can stay with me.  You may go.”

The guard nodded and then hesitated, looking at the pale, unmoving figure on the bed.  “I hope Lord Ithilden will be well, my lord.  His warriors will be thinking of him.”

“Thank you,” said Thranduil, with sudden gratitude for the sympathy.  Ithilden was an exacting commander, but Thranduil knew that his troops respected him and liked serving under him.  The guard nodded and withdrew.

“I am glad you are here, Legolas,” Gwaleniel said calmly, laying a hot cloth against the bite on Ithilden’s leg. “You went camping with your brother, did you not?  So you should be able to tell me what happened.”

Thranduil stroked his son’s dirty hair, worried that telling the healer what happened might be too much for Legolas, but the need to speak to the healer seemed to steady him.  “Two spiders bit him, first on the leg and then on the arm.  He threw up,” he said, drawing his brows together.  Even through his concern, Thranduil felt a spurt of amusement.  At home, Legolas had reported every occurrence of vomiting that he had witnessed while working in the infirmary.  He had been appalled by them, and then, of course, he had usually been the one to clean up after them.

Gwaleniel laid her hand lightly on Ithilden’s chest.   Thranduil was unable to see it rising and falling at all and felt as if he too were having trouble taking air into his body.  “Did he take any antidote?” Gwaleniel asked easily.  Despite his worry, Thranduil found that he was soothed by her tone, and Legolas was obviously quieting down in response to her.

“He took a lot,” Legolas said emphatically.  “Almost two packets and then the guards gave him a little more, I think.”

The healer glanced at her apprentice.  “Light the brazier and fetch the herbs for easing breathing,” she instructed. The apprentice retrieved a brazier from some shelves, put it on a stand near Ithilden’s head, and used flint and tinder to light it.  Then she set a pan of water to heat over it and selected several jars from the shelves.  Thranduil had to move further away from the bed to get out of the way, drawing a clinging Legolas with him.  He sat down in a chair against the wall, pulled Legolas between his knees, and wrapped his arms around the child.

Gwaleniel selected herbs from the jar and scattered them in the water, releasing a pleasant, woodsy aroma. Then she turned back to Legolas. “How long ago did all this happen?”

Legolas paused, trying to sort out what probably seemed to him now to be a jumble of horrifying events.  “One spider bit him on the leg early this morning,” he said, his voice trembling slightly.  “And then he drank some antidote about half an hour after that, and the second bite happened then too.”

Thranduil was startled.  “Why did he not take the antidote right away, Legolas?”  For a terrible moment, he wondered if Ithilden had actually spent half an hour in a battle with spiders with Legolas watching.  His arms tightened around his youngest son.

Legolas hesitated. “I had to go get it,” he said, sounding near to tears again. Thranduil frowned.  Ithilden should have had his healing kit with him. A story lay behind this particular piece of information, one that upset his youngest son.

Gwaleniel rested her hand on Ithilden’s chest again.  To Thranduil, his son seemed completely lifeless, but the healer seemed pleased with what she felt. “He is breathing a bit better, my lord,” she told Thranduil, “and that is a hopeful sign.”  She pulled a sheet up to Ithilden’s chin and looked at Thranduil sympathetically.  “We cannot expect him to awaken for a while, I think.  The poison in his body has to work itself out.  But if he were going to die from it, he probably would have done so by now.”

Thranduil flinched at the blunt words, and it took him a moment to realize that the healer had said something positive.  He let out a long, trembling sigh of relief.

“He will be all right?” Legolas cried, evidently wanting to be sure he had understood correctly.

“He will be sick for a while,” Galeniel told him seriously, “but he is strong, and I think he will recover.  She studied Legolas for a moment and then looked back to Thranduil.   “Legolas looks worn out, my lord.  Perhaps you should take him home to rest for a while and come back later.”

“It is still daytime, and I am not tired,” Legolas protested immediately.  Now that Gwaleniel had mentioned it, however, Thranduil’s fatherly eye told him that Legolas was on the edge of collapse.  Thranduil hesitated, torn between his desire to stay with his injured oldest son and the desire to tend to his exhausted and probably traumatized youngest, whose needs had been put aside for long enough.

“Can Ithilden be moved to the palace?” he asked, thinking that perhaps he could at least have both of his sons in one place.

“For now, he should stay here where we can watch his breathing,” she said.  “And when he awakens, I am afraid he will be in pain.  If he is at home, he might not confess it, but we will be able to tell and then to give him something to ease it.”

For a moment longer, Thranduil regarded the paralyzed figure in the bed.  Then he rose.  “Come, Legolas.  We will go home.”

“No, Adar!” Legolas wailed, and now the tears did come.  “I want to stay here. It is my fault he was bitten, and I want to help take care of him.” Thranduil looked at him sharply.

He and Legolas needed to talk, and they needed to do it soon.

“Of course you can help care for your brother,” Gwaleniel said. “You know how to do that now.  But you should rest a little first so that you are strong enough to do a good job.”

Legolas turned a desperate face to Thranduil.  “They have beds here. I can rest here.”

Thranduil put his hand gently on the back of the child’s head. “You need a bath, Legolas, and clean clothes and something to eat.”

“I can take a bath here,” Legolas insisted.  Thranduil had a sudden glimmer of how unpleasant it was going to be if Legolas chose to “protest” being removed from the infirmary.  He was steeling himself to be firm when Gwaleniel interposed.

“We could give you the room next door,” she said, her thoughtful eyes on Legolas. “Legolas could bathe and rest there, and you could send for his clothes. And I think we can find him some food.”  She smiled gently.  “Would that be all right, Legolas?”

“Please, Adar,” Legolas begged.

Thranduil looked at his child’s unhappy face and decided that his son did not need another battle right now.  “We will be happy to accept your offer,” he told Gwaleniel.

“Good,” she said briskly. “My apprentice will see to it.”

The apprentice immediately beckoned the two of them to follow her and led them to the room next door, where there was a bed.  “I will be back with a tub and hot water,” she told them.  “Shall I send for Legolas’s clothes too?” Thranduil nodded, and she left, returning in a very short time with attendants who set a tub in front of the fireplace and poured several buckets of hot water into it.  One of them lit the fire and set towels and a comb on a stool, and then they all melted away, leaving father and son together.

With fumbling fingers, Legolas began to unfasten his tunic, and Thranduil hesitated.  Legolas was well old enough to bathe himself and had begun to become possessive of his privacy, but Thranduil could see that his son was still on the edge of hysteria and did not want to leave him.  He brushed a sticky strand of hair from Legolas’s face.  “Shall I stay and wash your hair for you?” he asked.

With relief plain on his face, Legolas nodded and did not protest when Thranduil reached to help him undress.  Thranduil looked again at the strands of web on the clothes and felt his breath quicken, even though he knew that his child was now safe.  Legolas climbed into the tub and sank down into the warm water.  Thranduil knelt next to him, took a soft cloth from the tub’s edge, wetted it, and wiped at the appalling black streaks on his son’s face and neck.  “Get your hair wet,” he instructed, and Legolas obediently ducked down and surfaced again. Thranduil moved behind him, took a handful of soft soap, and began rubbing it into the dirty blond hair.  Closing his eyes, Legolas leaned into his father’s hands.  Thranduil cupped his hands to scoop water and rinsed the soap out of the hair and then picked up the comb and began gently working out the tangles.

“Legolas,” Thranduil ventured, “what did you mean when you said that it was your fault that Ithilden was hurt?”  The blue eyes flew open, but Legolas stayed silent for such a long time that Thranduil thought he was not going to answer and was trying to decide whether to press his point.

“I was supposed to stay with Ithilden,” Legolas finally said in a small voice, “but I followed a deer on my own to where the spiders were, and Ithilden was bitten saving me.”  He turned huge, fearful eyes toward Thranduil.  “I was caught in a web.  The spiders were going to eat me, Ada.”  He was shaking again, and when a single tear rolled down his cheek, Thranduil’s heart all but broke.  Heedless of the water sloshing over onto his own clothes, he gathered his would-be-grown-up son into his arms.

“There, there,” he crooned.  “You are safe now.”  He wrapped Legolas in a blanket he pulled from the bed and sat down near the fire, with his son on his lap, clutching at the front of his tunic and crying in great, wrenching sobs.

“I thought I was going to die like Nana did,” Legolas panted.  For a second, Thranduil’s hand froze in its stroking of the clean, damp hair. Then he kissed the top of his son’s head.

“But you did not,” he said simply. “And Ithilden did not either.  You are both home now, and you will both be fine.”  It would be some time before Ithilden was fine though, Thranduil knew.   Indeed, he thought, rocking Legolas gently, it would be some time before either of his sons was fine.

After a few minutes, Legolas’s crying lessened, and then he looked up into Thranduil’s face.  “I have not told you about not having the antidote with us, Adar.” He drew a deep breath and began his story. As he spoke, an attendant entered quietly and left clothes and a tray of food, but Legolas did not seem to notice him.  Thranduil listened in dismayed silence.  No wonder Legolas felt guilty!  He thought about the warning to keep an eye on Legolas that he had given Ithilden before his sons left on this disastrous trip and suspected that his oldest son too might awaken with some guilt over what had happened.

“I am so sorry,” Legolas finished miserably.  “I should not have gone off on my own, and I should not have touched Ithilden’s things. I should have been more careful.”

Thranduil drew him close again.  “True,” he said simply.  “And when Ithilden awakens, you can tell him that.  But you were very brave to get the antidote and then to go for help. You are both safe, and you will not do such a thing again.”  Legolas nodded, obviously exhausted now that confession had drained him of his earlier tension.

Thranduil left him on the chair while he went to get his clean clothes.  He handed Legolas the leggings and tunic and waited while he pulled them on. Then he pointed to the bed.  “Get in,” he said, and when Legolas had obeyed, he put the tray of bread, and cheese, and warm milk on the small bedside table.  Legolas’s eyes were growing vague.  “If you drink the milk now, you can sleep and eat the other things later,” Thranduil said.  Legolas drained the glass and then collapsed on the pillow.

“Stay,” he commanded sleepily.

“I will be here or next door with Ithilden,” Thranduil promised.  “In either case, I will hear you if you call.”

Legolas nodded once and was asleep before Thranduil could resume his chair.

***

Ithilden stumbled along the path.  Pain throbbed through him with every beat of his heart, and something was wrong with his legs, so that he had to strain to move them.  All at once, from somewhere ahead, Legolas began to scream.  With terrifying suddenness, a black shape dropped from above and landed on him, driving him to the ground and pinning him there. He struggled to slice at it with a dagger, but his arm refused to move either.  The creature bared its fangs at him and then bent to bite his neck.  And all the while, Legolas screamed.

“Ithilden!” cried his father.  “Ithilden!  You are dreaming!”

With a ragged gasp, Ithilden brought his eyes suddenly into focus, to find Thranduil bending over him.  For a confused moment, he stared at his father, whose anxious face alternately blurred and sharpened before him.  Then Thranduil vanished, and Ithilden could hear him shouting from somewhere nearby.  “He is awake!  Gwaleniel!”

The healer bent over him.  “Can you hear me, my lord?” she asked.

He stared at her. Of course he could hear her.  She was about a foot away from him. The problem was he did not seem to be able to answer her.  The pain that had flowed all through his body had now settled with agonizing intensity in his left leg and his right arm. And his nightmare seemed to have followed him into the waking world, for he was still unable to move his legs.  Nausea suddenly turned his stomach inside out.  Gwaleniel seemed to know what he was feeling without being told, and she rolled him rapidly to one side and held his head while he vomited into a basin that someone he could not see was holding.  When he had finished and the healer had laid him limply down on his side, she wiped his face with a cool cloth.

He forced his clumsy tongue and lips into speech.  “Adar?”

“What is it, iôn-nín?”  His father was immediately there, with his hand covering Ithilden’s.

“Legolas?”

The single word was enough for Thranduil to understand what he wanted to know. “He is unhurt. He is sleeping in the next room and will be very glad to see you when he wakens.”

Relief nearly reduced him to tears, but apparently vomiting his guts out was to be sufficient humiliation for now, because despite the pain, he quickly slid back into darkness.

A spider sank its fangs into his right arm, sending a stab of pain through it.  He tried to jerk his arm away but the spider was holding it down. Legolas screamed. The spider bit again.  With a gasp, he focused his eyes and once again saw the healer.  She had hold of his right arm and was dabbing with a hot cloth at the place where the spider had bitten him.  And then, making his heart leap, from somewhere nearby, Legolas screamed.  “Legolas?” he gasped.

Her eyes flicked to his face. “Do not worry, my lord. Your adar is with him. He is safe enough. He is simply dreaming badly.”  And now he could catch the sound of his father’s voice, speaking too low for him to make out the words.

He ran his tongue over his dry lips.  That makes two of us dreaming badly, he thought, trying to ignore the throbbing in his wounded arm and leg.  His little brother must have been terrified by all he had been through, Ithilden thought unhappily.  He should have protected the child better.

“Are you in pain?” the healer asked.  “I can give you something that will ease it and let you sleep better.”

His stomach twisted at the thought of drinking anything. He drew a deep breath.  On the whole, he thought he preferred being awake and in pain to walking the paths of his troubled dreams again anyway.  “No,” he said.

She eyed him appraisingly and then walked away for a moment and came back with a cup that obviously held the very medicine he had just refused.  “The medicine will help your nausea too, if you can keep it down,” she said.  She lifted his shoulders and put the cup to his closed lips. He frowned.  “Come, my lord,” she said.  “You are not in command here.”  Conceding defeat, he drank the bitter brew.

“Gwaleniel,” called someone from the doorway behind him, “a warrior has come in with a deep cut.”

The healer lowered Ithilden to the bed again.  “I am coming,” she said.  He could hear her crossing the small room and going into the hallway. “Alfirin,” came her slightly muffled voice, “would you mind sitting with Lord Ithilden while I am busy?  I will be back as soon as I can. Come and get one of us if he seems in distress.  If the king comes back to stay with him, you may go.”

“Of course, Naneth.”  Light footsteps entered the room, and then the healer’s daughter came around his bed and stood in front of him.  His heart quickened, and he knew that it had nothing to do with his nightmares or the spider venom.  “How are you?” she asked, seeing that he was awake.

I ache for you, he thought, to his own astonishment.  “Better,” he croaked.

“Not much, I think,” she smiled. “But you will be.  My naneth will take good care of you.”

He smiled weakly back at her. And then, suddenly, his treacherous stomach rebelled again, and he could feel cold sweat on his face.  She must have had enough experience with sick people that she saw what was happening, for she jumped forward and held his head over the basin that had been left on the edge of his bed.  To his utter mortification, he retched repeatedly.

When he had finished, she lowered his head back to the pillow.  And then, miraculously, she did not take her hands away.  Rather, she stroked his hair gently.  He tried to open his mouth to speak, to tell her she did not need to stay here while he was so disgustingly sick, or at least to thank her, but she hushed him.  “Do not worry, my lord,” she murmured gently. “You do not need to talk.”

He lay as still as could, not wanting her to move away.  And before he knew it, he had slid away into dreams again. This time, someone bent to kiss him softly on the forehead as he lay in an unfamiliar bed.





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