Chapter Six: Desperate Tears and Desperate Plans

Into the darkness escaped the smallest of whimpers.  It seemed to echo in the eerie silence.

Instantly, Dómiel sat up a bit straighter, listening.  When no footsteps reached her ears, she relaxed her shoulders – but only slightly.  What if someone had heard? she scolded herself.  The guard might have returned…  An involuntary shudder ran through her, stemming from more than just the cold, damp air.  The last time the guard had found cause to approach her cell door, he had spent more than twenty minutes hurling curses at her, verbally abusing everything from her infirmity to her parentage to her very existence.  She had no wish to repeat that particular experience.

Casting yet another look about the cell, the princess curled up once more on her dirty straw pallet.  I must look a fright, Dómiel thought to herself.  She allowed herself the slightest of smiles.  To be thinking of something as trivial as her appearance in a situation like this!  However, anything that occupied her mind, even for a brief second, was welcome in this place. 

Dómiel could not tell how long she had lain in her tiny stone cell.  Down in this hole, lit only by far-away torches, night and day blended together in a hazy twilight of sleep and wakefulness.  The only thing she had to mark the passage of time was the approach of a guard, who threw a hunk of bread and a small skin of water through the barred “window” set into the door.  When this happened, Dómiel would drag her sore and protesting body across the stone floor, eat her meager meal, toss the water skin back out into the corridor, and crawl back to her pallet.  Each time, she was tempted to keep the water skin, if only to fling it into her guard’s face, but she dared not risk the guard carrying out the threats he had made the first time he had brought the food.  Helpless, Dómiel obeyed.

Right now, there was nothing to do but sleep.  And so, she closed her eyes against the terrifying sight of the close, dark, stone walls and willed her mind to rest.  As blessed unconsciousness – her only source of peace – descended upon her, her battered mind sent up a fleeting prayer.

Let help come…or let me die.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“No.”

“Strider…”

“No!  I will not let you take the risk.”

“And what other choice do we have?” Legolas asked.

Aragorn looked away.  “None…”

Legolas raised an eyebrow and waited.

Aragorn glared at the elf.  “None…that we have discovered,” he finished.

Knowing all too well the level of the human’s stubbornness, Legolas resorted to different, and somewhat crueler, tactics.  “And would you have us waste any further time in a search?”  He gentled his voice.  “We do not know how much time remains to us.”

For a moment, Aragorn looked away, eyes closed against the thought.  Finally, he nodded.  “You are right, my friend.  We do not have another choice.”

“Then let us waste no more time,” Legolas said. He slid his bow from his back and handed it to the man beside him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

A sound invaded the thick haze of Dómiel’s mind, causing her to spring to full alertness in a mere fraction of a second.  Remaining perfectly still, she trained her sharp hearing on the corridor beyond her heavy iron door.  Only the continual, oppressive silence reached her ears.

With a sigh, Dómiel returned her head to the pallet.  A horrible thought pierced into her mind – Am I going insane?  Normally, she would have instantly dismissed such a ludicrous thought.  But now, her mind latched onto the new thought with the rabid desperation of a bored and overactive imagination.  The only person she had ever heard of who had gone insane was Faramir’s father, Denethor.  Her tutors had told her the story – Denethor leaping up atop his own deathbed, threatening to light both himself and his still-living son aflame.

As Dómiel’s mind edged closer and closer to sleep, a horrific vision sprang up within her half-dreaming imagination.  She sat on one of the pallets within the Houses of the Dead, sticks piled around her, as she held a flaming torch aloft.  In front of her, wavering and indistinct, stood her family and friends.  Her father and mother were both there – Father in his Ranger garb, and Mother in her robes, the two making an odd match.  Eldarion stood beside Gilraen, his hand laid protectively on his younger sister’s shoulder.  There, too, stood Legolas the elf beside Gimli the dwarf, as well as her maids and Vandor.

Not one of the figures who stood before her moved to stop her as she waved the torch closer and closer to the oil-soaked wood.  Not even her own emotions could stop her arm.  Her body had left her control – closer and closer the torch came…

“Dómiel?”

The voice snapped Dómiel into full consciousness.  Slowly, silently, she raised herself to a sitting position, listening as intently as she could.  The voice did not come again.  I truly am going insane, she told herself, panic rising in her heart.  I hear voices that cannot be there.

Suddenly, the voice came again; this time, Dómiel could not ignore the soft, whispered voice, speaking in clear Sindarin.

“Keep hope close, Dómiel!  Your father is coming.”

Desperate tears welled up in Dómiel’s eyes.  She whispered desperately into the dark.  “Ada?”

No other sound came, so Dómiel let herself slump back down onto her pallet.  This time, however, all thoughts of her own insanity had fled, and a she let the tears of hope flow down her face unchecked.

The echo of the elvish voice within her mind chased away all the shadows that haunted her.  “Keep hope close.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Shifting position restlessly, Aragorn swept the surrounding landscape with his sharp gaze.  Here in these mountains, no life stirred.  All was still and quiet.  Too quiet, he thought.  The waiting – though necessary – chafed horribly at his spirit.  He hated waiting.  If he had his way, he would charge the main entrance of the cavern and force his way through to his beloved daughter.

If Dómiel is here, he reminded himself sternly.

His heart rebelled against that thought – to have come so far in pursuit, and yet fail now when he was so close was unthinkable!  And yet he knew he must at least consider the possibility that he had been misled.  He knew nothing of Telithar’s character – the Mayor could have easily led him astray.  Or she might have been here until…  “No!” Aragorn whispered.  He refused to believe that his daughter was dead.  Nor will I until I see her body myself, he vowed.

Aragorn forced his mind from the horrible thoughts playing through it and made what seemed like his thousandth visual sweep of the area.  This time, however, a flash of light caught his eye.  Instinctively, he crouched down a bit further behind the boulder he hid behind and focused his gaze on the patch of ground several feet down the hill.

Amidst the brown grass and rocks, a round-ish patch of brilliant yellow-white had appeared.  Aragorn risked raising himself a bit higher, mystified by this strange object.

Then, the light moved.

Aragorn dropped back down behind the rock.

And then the familiar head of Legolas the elf appeared above the ground, his bright blonde hair waving lightly in the soft breeze.

Aragorn’s shoulders relaxed, and he rolled his eyes.  That is what worrying does to a man, he scolded himself.  What good are the so-called skills of a Ranger when I cannot even recognize an elf?

By this time, Legolas had both hands atop the edge of the vertical tunnel he was crawling out of.  Suddenly, there was a noise like a snapping twig – though far louder – and Legolas vanished again.  Only the elf’s fingertips could be seen, still clutching the edge.

Aragorn scrambled from his hiding place, and ran down to the tunnel’s entrance.  By the time he reached it, Legolas had found new footing below.  The man grabbed his friend’s hand and hauled him free from the tunnel.

Neither man nor elf spoke as they crept down the hillside.  As they walked, Aragorn grew more and more agitated, enough so that he failed to notice that the usually graceful Legolas was now moving with a slight limp.

The instant the two warriors reached the relative safety of the horses, Aragorn turned to the elf beside him.  “Did you find her?”

Legolas sat down on a small boulder.  “Yes.”

“And?”

“I was only able to get a glimpse, but she seemed to be well.  If nothing else, she is alive and still capable of speech.”

Relief rushed through Aragorn, and he dropped down beside the elf.  “We have found her,” he repeated slowly, as if attempting to convince himself.

“Indeed.  And, I was able to whisper a few words to her,” Legolas added.  “She knows we are coming.”

Aragorn laid a hand on Legolas’ shoulder.  “Thank you, my friend.  You have given me hope.” He sat for a long moment, gray eyes focused on thin air.  Then, suddenly, he leapt to his feet.  “Now, we must only figure out how to free her.”

“It will not be easy,” Legolas replied.  “The passages are crawling with guards, and the door to her cell is made of iron and firmly locked.  Only the chief guard carries the keys.”

“Any other entrances?” Aragorn asked.

Legolas shook his head.  “I saw nothing other than the main entrance, which is too heavily guarded, and that vent I climbed down, which is too narrow.”

“Then we are no better off than we have been since this began!” Aragorn exclaimed in despair.

“We know she is alive, Strider.”

Silence fell upon the clearing.  For a long moment, the two warriors merely stared at each other.

Then, Aragorn spoke.  “I have an idea.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“I still do not like this, Strider.  It is too dangerous!”

“I seem to remember telling you that before you slid down that air shaft,” Aragorn retorted.

Legolas sighed.  “This is even riskier.”

“True, but I won’t slip,” Aragorn said.

Legolas sighed.  “Are you planning on holding that slight…miscalculation…over my head for the rest of this journey?”

Aragorn considered this for a moment.  “No - longer.”

Legolas smiled slightly.  Now that Aragorn had a plan that involved action, he was in a much better mood.  “If it were not for the fact that you shall need all your strength in the coming hours, I would be forced to give you yet another lesson on the superiority of elvish coordination.”

“Fortunately for me, you have more sense than that.”  Aragorn knew all too well that Legolas would have no problems whatsoever in “teaching him a lesson.”

“Be careful, Aragorn.”  Legolas’ eyes held no merriment now.  “A slip now on your part will bring far more than a mere twisted ankle.”

It will bring all our deaths.

Neither said the words; they didn’t have to.  They were both thinking them.

Without another word, Aragorn strode away back up the hill.

Legolas’ sharp eyes followed the man until he disappeared behind the outcropping.  As he walked back to the horses to prepare for his part in this desperate plan, he whispered to the air, “He shall either succeed, or never walk this world again, and I shall be by his side. For on him rests now the fate of many.”