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Far Horizons  by Bodkin

Far Horizons 15:  Unravelling 

The elleth looked them over thoughtfully.  ‘We have had word,’ she said, ‘that you are to be made welcome.  I have come to invite you share our fire and eat with us this evening.’   She stopped and waited for a response.

Aelindor bowed slightly.  ‘Thank you,’ he said simply.  ‘You must excuse our surprise.  We had no idea that there was a community nearby.’

She continued to watch him.  ‘Not so much a community,’ she said after a moment’s thought.  ‘Just a group of us.  We have been keeping an eye on you for a couple of days.’

‘And who was watching us before that?’ Vondil demanded.

She smiled noncommittally.  ‘Another group of us.’

‘Big groups?’ Falas asked eagerly.  ‘It will be much more interesting to move here if there are communities willing to welcome new arrivals.’

She looked rather forbidding.  ‘It is not my place to decide whether you will be permitted to live in these forests,’ she told him.  ‘That right belongs to the Lady.’

‘Who does not, I take it, owe allegiance to the High King,’ Alagsir ventured.

She shrugged.  ‘Are you coming?  I could quite happily leave you here to admire the waterfall if you prefer.  However, if you choose to come, I suggest you stop asking so many questions.  We are to welcome you, not tell you all our secrets.’

‘Are you perhaps,’ Aelindor enquired, ‘permitted to go so far as to tell us your name?’

‘I am,’ she told him, ‘but courtesy demands that you should tell me who you are first.’

He flushed slightly.  ‘I am a forester – formerly of Mirkwood, or Eryn Lasgalen as it has also been named.  My name is Aelindor.  Beside me are Falas and Vondil of the same realm and our companion is Alagsir of Lothlorien.’

‘I am Domeniel,’ she said, ‘of this forest. You are Wood Elves?’

‘I am,’ Aelindor shrugged. ‘Falas is part Sindar.  I am not sure about the others. You would have to ask them.’

She walked them down from the bare rocky ridge and melted back into the forest. Vondil was impressed by the ease with which she blended into the muted greens, golds and greys of the forest.  Even knowing where she was, she was difficult to observe, seeming to fade into the mottled shade. 

‘Are you able to journey through the trees,’ she asked impatiently.  ‘It is tedious to plod along the ground when we could be in the canopy.’

‘If you would care to lead the way,’ Vondil told her, sounding slightly offended.  ‘We will follow you.’

Domeniel look at him with amusement.  ‘I will travel slowly enough for you to follow,’ she said kindly, catching Aelindor’s half-hidden grin as she leapt into a nearby oak.

He had been annoyed, Vondil admitted to himself.  It was not right for a chit of an elleth to patronise one who had fought from the trees of Mirkwood for longer than she had been in the world.  However, he was forced to admit that, had she wanted to be one of Thranduil’s scouts, she was ideally qualified.  Within moments she had disappeared among the branches, both silent and invisible.  She deliberately gave them several minutes to be aware that they were unable to follow her without her consent and then emerged, standing so that the light caught her.

‘Do you have a problem?’ she asked lazily.  ‘I thought you were Wood Elves.’

‘But these are your woods, my lady,’ Alagsir pointed out. 

‘I am no lady,’ she sniffed. ‘Come, I will travel at your pace – this time, at least.’

Vondil was aware of a twinge of nervousness.  He must be very sure to keep track of their path, for it this elleth wished to lose them in unfamiliar territory she would be able to do so without difficulty.

What surprised Falas was how close the other party were.  Domeniel led them down into a small gap between the trees, where a delicious fragrance of hot stew drifted from the smokeless fire.  There were four of them; all dressed in muted shades of green and brown and grey that made them barely noticeable except when they drew away from the foliage.

‘Adar?’ Domeniel said.  ‘I have brought them.’

The elf by the fire stood slowly and turned round, allowing a slow smile to spread across his face, but he said nothing.

Vondil stared incredulously, his mouth half-open.  ‘Dumir?’ he said in amazement. ‘It cannot be! You passed to Mandos at Dagorlad.  Am I seeing things?’

‘If you are seeing things, then I am seeing them, too,’ he replied.  ‘It is good to see you here, my brother.  I came to myself again these many centuries ago – and all my new home lacks is the presence of so many dear ones.’  He glanced at Domeniel who was staring at Vondil, her expression closed.  ‘You have met your niece, my brother. Allow me to introduce you to her brothers and their naneth.’

 

***

 

It was as if, Aelindor thought, someone had taken up the forest, turned it round and put it down again.  It was no longer virgin territory, full of strange plants and haunted by the invisible shadows of alien elves.  It was now the home of family – like, but unlike, and close to the heart, despite time and distance.  Vondil, he could see, was in a state of confusion.  His brother, whose death in battle had been so shattering an experience that his parents had sailed to prevent his naneth from fading.  Not an uncommon story among the families of Lasgalen.  His own family had undergone similar tragedy, save that his grandfather’s death had been enough to leach the heart from his grandmother, so that no voyage from the Havens could have saved her.  His adar had been left, scarce grown – so young indeed, that even the need of those fell days had not been enough to persuade his daeradar to take him into battle – to be responsible for the care of his younger brother and sister.

Falas sat down next to him.  ‘It is beyond belief,’ he said.  ‘This has given me hope of reunions I no longer expected.’

Aelindor looked to him enquiringly. 

Falas shrugged.  ‘I was optimistic when we landed and I looked for them – but they were not there and nobody knew anything of them.  My parents and sister sailed when the Watchful Peace ended – Naneth said that she could not bear to go through it all again.  I stayed – I was not ready to leave the trees and I hoped I could do something to help hold back the Shadow.’  He stopped speaking and stirred the leaf litter with his finger. ‘I believed they would be waiting for me – but, when I found others who had known them, nobody knew what had become of them.’  He drew a deep breath.  ‘Adar was not one to stay among crowds – he would have liked it here.’ 

From across the small glade, Domeniel shot him a sharp glance before returning to the study of the elf her adar had claimed as his brother. 

Her naneth brought bowls of stew to the two elves.  ‘You are from the Greenwood?’ she asked, looking at them carefully.

‘We are,’ Aelindor said softly.  ‘This is an unlooked-for happiness.’  He nodded towards Vondil who was sitting next to his brother in bemused silence.

‘But it is always a shock,’ she said.  ‘It takes time to come to terms with the return of elves who have been long absent from our lives.’   

‘You have seen this before?’ he asked.

‘Many times,’ she agreed.  ‘Sometimes it works – to the benefit of all, but at other times,’ she shook her head, ‘the farewells have been made and it is not possible to move past the long good-byes.’

‘People learn to live other lives,’ Alagsir offered. ‘They cannot become the elves they were before the sundering.’

‘That is true.’  Her eyes were sad. ‘Sometimes not even all the love and grief and centuries of longing can bring husband and wife back together, for all the depth of their bond. The distance between other kin can be even harder to bridge.’  She looked at the elf of the Golden Wood.  ‘Do not expect too much,’ she suggested. ‘If you are offered the chance to start again, make it that – a beginning.’  She gathered the wooden bowls and returned to the fire.  ‘There is more if you want it,’ she offered.

‘That would be very pleasant,’ Falas said, coming closer and dropping a hand on Vondil’s shoulder.  ‘I am always open to the offer of more.’

***

The forest was hiding something from him, Legolas knew.  The trees were apologetic about it, seeming almost to hang their heads when he asked them for more information.  They refused, however, to break the confidence of the one who had imposed their silence on them.

‘I knew we should have brought him from the beginning,’ Glorfindel said quietly, nodding in his direction as Legolas communed with the welcoming song of the forest. ‘Haldir is good, but he is not the Prince of Eryn Lasgalen.  Only Thranduil himself would be better able to sense the mood of the forest.’

‘Why did we leave them behind?’ Rindor asked.  ‘I was surprised that Lord Elrond did not pack his sons off with us.’

Glorfindel shrugged. ‘Husbands and adars,’ he said. ‘I suppose they have different responsibilities now.’

‘It is not funny.’

The two elves turned towards Haldir, who was scowling at the twins.

‘I do not know about that,’ Elrohir teased.  ‘What do you think, my brother?  Here we have an elf who has spent all our lives boasting to us of his prowess in the trees, especially when compared with that of we unfortunate sons of a Peredhil.  And what has he done?’

‘I would have loved to see it,’ Elladan filled his tone with regret, ‘if only so that I could have described the sight to Daeradar.   Can you not just imagine his face at the image of his march warden cartwheeling from a tree?’

‘I will not be pinned to this contraption for ever,’ Haldir menaced them.  ‘You will suffer for every word you utter.  If you have any sense at all you will leave the subject now.’

‘Whoever accused the sons of Elrond of having sense?’ Glorfindel interrupted.  ‘Certainly not anyone who has the dubious pleasure of knowing them.’

Elladan grinned. ‘You know you love us really,’ he said, putting his head on one side and batting his eyelashes exaggeratedly.

‘Enough,’ Glorfindel aimed a pretend whack at the back of his head. ‘Stop annoying the patient.  We have more important things to discuss.’

‘That is a good thing,’ Elrohir said.  ‘I hate to break up the party, but I am afraid that we are unable to stay here too long – we must make sure we cover all the necessary business as thoroughly as possible.’

‘It is not that we would not stay to brighten your days,’ Elladan explained, ‘but Elrohir needs to get back within a reasonable time, or his wife is unlikely to forgive him.’

‘Naneth would be rather displeased, too,’ Elrohir added, as he waved to attract Legolas’s attention.  ‘That elf has been away with the forest song since we came down from the pass,’ he added. ‘Perhaps he should not be allowed to move here – it is doing very little for his intelligence.’

Haldir snorted, then coughed in an attempt to conceal his amusement. ‘Of course, you would not understand the bond between a Wood Elf and the forest,’ he said haughtily.

‘Nor yet between a Wood Elf and the ground,’ Elladan said amiably.

‘I believe that is called gravity, my twin,’ Elrohir put in.

‘Be serious, you two,’ Glorfindel chided them, before falling silent, his face unusually sober. 

‘I have put enough elves around us to be sure that we can talk in privacy,’ Rindor murmured.  ‘As long as we keep our voices low, what we say should stay between us.’

‘Then let us get on with it,’ the expedition’s leader sighed, ‘before anybody else comes to join us.  We want to trap any conspirators before they can do any more harm.’

***

Neldin looked over his shoulder nervously.  He could not get over the feeling that he was being watched, and yet, try as he might, he had never managed to catch a single glimpse of anyone who seemed to have the slightest interest in him.  Ever since they had arrived in this cursed forest, the sensation had been there, like a prickling in the back of his neck.  It had been preventing him from carrying out many of the small acts of sabotage which he had planned – the petty irritations that stopped people resting and spoiled their food, yet were hard to pin down and could go undiscovered for days.

It had seemed such a clever idea; to make himself known and dismissed as of no importance before instigating the campaign intended to make this expedition fail, only somehow, it did not seem to be working out like that.  He seemed to have to be working increasingly hard to ensure the success of a project that he was desperate to see in the dust.  Now, if he could only make one of these wretched flets collapse – preferably when Lord Glorfindel was standing on it, stamping his feet and telling everyone what a splendid job they were doing completing all the back-breaking labour, as he sat in the sun signing his name on a few pieces of paper.

The problem with that as a scheme was that he, Neldin, had been the one that everyone had watched up here in the trees, fixing the platforms in place.  He needed someone to take the blame – and he was a bigger fool than he thought if he could not pass the responsibility on to the shoulders of these green elves who had crawled out of the foliage and announced themselves as the true owners of the wood.  Why would anyone suspect Neldin of the Golden Wood, the argumentative but generally good-hearted engineer, who had been proved by Elrond’s clerk not to be the saboteur?

Neldin grinned to himself as he knocked out the pegs that held the sections of flooring together.  That was the trouble with the elves of Imladris, he decided.  They thought so highly of their own brilliance that they were unable to see when they were being led by the nose.  He looked critically at the wooden floor that was now held together by little more than good will.  That should be almost enough.  And, if the local elves were not ready to take the blame, then he would see what he could do to push suspicion over to those Noldor puppies who had come with the lordlings.  A few of these wooden pegs in their saddlebags could probably establish a nice little clan war to heat up everyone’s blood.

Tineithil touched his son’s shoulder and shifted his head to indicate the whereabouts of the leaders he wished to see.  Loareg slid away, the leaves not even moving as he brushed past them.  If his son were quick, Glorfindel himself might see what was happening and the fool would be caught in the act.

Neldin rubbed his neck and rolled his shoulders, tucking some of the pegs in his tunic in case he wanted to use them later. The others, he thought, would be best left here, in the hollow where a branch had been ripped away by the storm that had done so much damage.  He had better hurry with the last few pegs.  He had been here long enough.

Looking at the guards, clearly spread round the groups of elves talking quietly by Haldir’s shelter, Loareg could tell they would be reluctant to let him through, so, shrugging, he slipped through the undergrowth, a shadow in the dappled light.

‘Lord Glorfindel,’ he said, as soon as he was within range of a low voice, ‘my adar says that you are to come.  The one who injured the fair elf is up to his tricks again.’

They stiffened in a way that would have made him laugh if he were prepared to let anything about these intruders amuse him.  ‘Elrohir,’ Glorfindel said.  ‘If you and Legolas would accompany Loareg.’

‘You will not come yourself?’ the ellon asked him in surprise.

‘Not this time, Loareg.’  Glorfindel looked at him in a way that made him feel uneasy, similar to the way his naneth made him cringe when she felt he had been rude.  ‘Do you have time to discuss this now?’

‘Come,’ he ordered, concluding without thought that it would be wise to withdraw before the elf lord decided to express his opinions more freely.

He was surprised how quietly the two sent with him managed in the trees and he was even more astonished when, without apparent planning, they separated to make it possible to them to act in concert to take the one setting the trap.  Loareg turned his eyes to the flet.  One more peg was knocked free, slipping between the fingers of the elf on the platform.

‘What are you doing, Neldin?’ a sharp voice demanded from the ground.  ‘How did this get down here?’

Loareg listened with interest to the expression that the other elf muttered before he smoothed his face and called out with concern, ‘There is a problem here, Nintaur.  Someone has been interfering with the platform – come and see for yourself.’

The younger elf sprang into the tree and approached the high platform.  ‘What has happened, Neldin?’

‘It must be those Forest Elves, creeping around the way they do,’ Neldin said.  ‘I am sure they are trying to get rid of us.  Look – the pegs have been removed.  Anyone climbing up here could have been thrown to his death.’

From his vantage point Loareg released a hiss of breath, but before Neldin had time to do more than freeze, a cool voice spoke from a nearby tree.  ‘A good story, Neldin,’ Elrohir said in a tone of mock approval, ‘but unfortunately there is no truth in it – we have been watching you for long enough to be quite sure of that.’

Neldin erupted from his position and threw himself past the surprised Nintaur, kicking him out of his way, before leaping to the neighbouring tree and disappearing in the foliage.

Elrohir cursed fluently.

‘Stop wasting your breath, my friend.  Get after him,’ Legolas called as he threw himself in pursuit.

Loareg grinned with excitement and chased after the blond elf, followed by his adar and the dark one.  They moved swiftly, leaving Elrohir behind as the trees helped the Wood Elves chase their prey.

Neldin headed in a straight line, too panic-stricken to realise that his chances of escape were non-existent.  When the broad width of the river appeared in front of him, he stopped, swinging indecisively on the swaying branch, but the nearness of the pursuit gave him little time to decide and, with an anxious glance over his shoulder, he flung himself into the water and began to swim.

‘How do we get him out?’ Elrohir panted as he drew level with Legolas and the two local elves.

‘I do not believe we can,’ Legolas said sadly, as he watched the current pulling the desperate elf downriver.  ‘He swims at least as well as I do – and I know that I could not fight the strength of this river.’

‘We will follow the river,’ Tineithil told him.  ‘If he manages to escape the water, he will be too exhausted to fight.’

‘I will accompany you,’ Legolas insisted.  ‘Elrohir – would you go back to the camp and send some of Adar’s guards?  If he survives, we will want to have him kept securely, so that he can be questioned.’ 

Elrohir opened his mouth to protest, but then nodded.  ‘I will return with them, Legolas,’ he informed his friend, ‘and so, I daresay, will Elladan.’

‘Hurry, then.’  Legolas leapt into the trees to follow Tineithil, who was already speeding down the bank, his eyes on the figure struggling against the force of the water. 

Loareg looked at him with interest and joined the chase.

***

‘What are your plans now?’ Dumir asked.  ‘You used your little boats to come down the great river, but you will not find it so easy to take them back.  The current is very powerful.’

‘We are working our way back to the camp,’ Vondil shrugged.  ‘We have allowed more than double the time – and we will travel a short way at a time, investigating the forest as we go.  Lord Thranduil wants maps to help him decide who should come to these lands – how many and what skills they will need.’

‘Has the Prince sailed then?’  Dumir said in surprise. ‘I find it hard to imagine him leaving the Greenwood.’

‘He has been King for many long centuries since Dagorlad, my brother,’ Vondil stated.  ‘He held the forest beyond all reason, fighting the forces of the Dark Lord and holding back the Shadow, but the time of the elves is gone, Dumir.  He no longer had any reason to fight.  Yes, he has sailed.  He found his son waiting for him and is building a new life.  He would wish to come here to start again with a forest kingdom in the purity this land offers.’

Dumir digested his words.  ‘Who else wishes to bring elves to the forest?’

‘Lord Celeborn – do you remember him from his fight to hold Eregion against Sauron?’ Alagsir asked.  ‘And Lord Elrond, of Thingol’s line, who was herald to Gil-Galad, the High King.  Their people wish for their own place and have been granted the chance to come to these lands.’

‘Nobody knew,’ Aelindor said apologetically as Domeniel sniffed in irritation, ‘that there were elves already in residence here.  I do not know what will happen now.’

‘I remember Celeborn,’ Dumir said thoughtfully. ‘He is cousin to Thranduil, is he not?’

‘He is,’ Alagsir, shrugged.  ‘And his daughter became Elrond’s wife.’

Dumir nodded slowly.  ‘I am glad it is not my problem,’ he said. ‘It will be for the Lady to decide.’

***

By the time Elladan, Elrohir and the four guards jogged along the riverbank and caught up with the others, the chase had lost its urgency.  Neldin was still visible in the water, but his desperate struggle to thrust himself across the deceptively calm water had ceased and he was floating face downwards as the water spun him in lazy circles.

‘Can we get him out?’  Elladan asked.

‘The water is dangerous here,’ Tineithil told him.  ‘If we go downstream to the point where the river bends, he will be pushed into the bank and we can wade deep enough to pull him in.’

‘How long will it take?’ Legolas asked.

‘Not long,’ the knowledgeable elf told him. ‘The water is fast here.’

‘Let us hurry – there might still be time,’ Elrohir began to run along the edge of the bank.

‘Elrohir – in the trees,’ Legolas called.  ‘It will be easier.’

They made a chain to wade into the water, determined to pull Neldin from the grip of the river.  Legolas was amazed by the power in the serene flow, but refused to give up, grasping the waterlogged clothing as the body drifted towards him and hauling Neldin towards the bank, stepping back carefully, Elladan gripping his arm. 

Elrohir began to work on limp elf, struggling to restart his breathing as Elladan kept his heart pumping.  Tineithil watched with interest as the apparently dead elf choked back to life, drawing breath for himself before he coughed up more river water, groaning weakly as he began to return to awareness.

‘You seem to be useful people to have around,’ Tineithil remarked.  ‘That was an impressive feat. You displayed courage, determination and a great deal of skill.’

Legolas grinned.  ‘What do you expect?’ he said.  ‘They are their adar’s sons.’

 





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