Epilogue

~ a few days later ~

At a shout from the steward, Thain Peregrin looked up. Found it! He returned Regi's wave, then watched the hobbits of the escort converge on the spot, scrutinising the ground. Evidently some of the coins had spilled from the pack when it had separated from its bearer.

'That's excellent news,' Pippin said to Ferdibrand, sitting on a pony at his side, watching over the young Thain at the same time as Thain Peregrin had watched his hobbits of the escort comb the hillside for the coin-filled packs they'd lost in the storm. 'That ought to be the last of it.' He patted the pack, laid across his lap, that had been found an hour earlier.

'It will have to be counted,' Ferdi warned.

The young Thain laughed. 'No doubt Regi will insist! But to my mind, if some wanderer had found either or both of them, surely he'd have either picked up the pack to try and find its owner, or else taken all and not just part, whether he'd stumbled across your pack – or mine – or both together...'

'They were not together,' objected Ferdi. 'Else my hobbits would have found them more quickly!'

'Perhaps they were not,' Pippin said, momentarily distracted. 'For the searchers only just now found the second pack. Thus, if both packs had been together in that place they would have just now found this pack, as well,' he concluded, referring to the pack Regi had brought to him an hour ago.

'It's always in the last place you look,' Ferdi grumbled under his breath, and Pippin laughed again.

'O' course!' he said merrily. 'For why would you go on looking once you'd found what you were looking for?'

'Snow's melting nicely,' Ferdi said next, suddenly changing the subject, for the conversation was veering too far into the territory of whimsy for his comfort. 

Pippin suppressed a sigh. Their recent ordeal might have thawed the cousins' strained relationship somewhat, but he could feel the wall between them solidifying once more: gentry versus common hobbit. Ferdi was "gentry" by blood and birth, "common" by circumstance – and at that, Pippin could hardly think of his older cousin as common in any application of the term. Like Pippin, he was descended from the Old Took. Thain Paladin had acknowledged him as one of the heroes of the Tookland for his exploits during the Troubles. He'd also recently proven himself – once again – the top archer in the Shire at the annual All-Shire Tournament.

But here they were, talking about the weather as if they were strangers and not close cousins. Pippin briefly contemplated his response. If he were merely polite, he'd simply echo Ferdi's observation: Aye, melting nicely. 

Instead, he said, 'You were right, you know, and I was wrong.'

'Sir?' Ferdi said, understandably confused.

Pippin met his escort's questioning gaze firmly. 'Had I not slipped the escort that day... had I not tricked you so that I could ride off alone to Buckland – only to be caught out by the weather...'

He saw Ferdi move uneasily at his choice of topic but forged ahead anyhow. 'Had I waited a day, as I made you believe I intended to do, then the storm would have swept over the land, but I would not have been in it.' Pippin spoke dispassionately, belying the ruin his impulsive decision had made of his life as well as Ferdi's. His damaged lungs were a constant reminder of his error – and worse, because of that youthful folly, Death was all too likely to carry him off much sooner than later. His time was short, and he must make the most of it.

'On the other hand, if I had told you I was leaving a day early – had allowed you to accompany me as my father wished you to do...' I can see now, how different the outcome might have been, Pippin thought to himself. Just as we helped each other to safety in this recent storm, so we might have combined our wit and our strength to reach shelter, all those years ago. Our lives might have been completely different...

But Ferdi surprised him. 'Had I travelled with you that day, we might have perished together in that long-ago ice storm,' the older cousin said reflectively. He looked over, met Pippin's astonished look, and nodded. 'Thinking back on this recent storm, I would've died of cold-sickness in that cavern, I think, had it not been for your knowledge of the shepherds' way-station and your insistence that we take the risk of seeking its shelter.'

It was nowhere close to an acceptance of Pippin's profuse apologies for his past actions, but the younger cousin thought there just might be a crack in the wall that divided the cousins, with the tiniest of rays of sunlight shining through.

But then Ferdi retreated again to safer ground; he cleared his throat and repeated, 'At the rate the snow's melting, it will have disappeared like a Mad Baggins in another day or two.'

'O aye,' Pippin said for want of anything better. He squinted at the top of Hoard Hill, looming above them, and ventured a cautious step or two past the borders of strict politeness. 'The hilltops will remain snow-covered, perhaps,' he agreed. 'But the valleys will soon be as green as they ever were.'

As a matter of course, the young Thain refrained from voicing the observation that this country would better be named the White Hill country  (at least in the wintertime), or the Green Valley country, perhaps. Nevertheless, despite his efforts to spare his cousin's sensibilities, Pippin turned his head and caught a quizzical look on his older cousin's face before Ferdi resumed his usual bland expression. 'What is it?' he asked.

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' Ferdi answered.

'You have it,' Pippin granted, but then he persisted. 'But I want to know what you were thinking just now...'

'Thinking, Sir?' Ferdi said.

Setting aside his earlier resolve, Pippin said, 'Yes, you know, what happens inside your head – at least, I assume that something happens inside that thick skull of yours, and that it's not completely void of all thought...'

'Sir,' Ferdi said stiffly, the strongest protest a working hobbit could voice against one of the gentry who was overstepping his place.

'Before we were Thain and escort, we were cousins, Ferdi,' Pippin said. 'I know that look of yours all too well... There's something you're not telling me that you ought to be telling me, only you thought better of it before you opened your mouth and actually said it...' 

Ferdi seemed to sit in the saddle as still as a stone troll, but his mare moved uneasily under him, betraying his inner turmoil.

The head of escort remained silent in the face of the Thain's scrutiny, his face expressionless, but Pippin stared him down. At last, reluctantly, he answered Pippin's question. 'It's what you said, there in the cavern, when I could see no way through the problem of ensuring your safety.'

'What I said?' Pippin queried, tilting his head slightly.

'I'm responsible for your safety, as you know,' Ferdi said as if in explanation, though as an explanation, it did not go very far in Pippin's estimation.

Still, the young Thain decided to follow Ferdi's lead and see where the conversation might go. With a grin that was more of a grimace, he answered wryly, 'How well I am aware of that fact.' Continuing to eye his cousin closely, he added, 'I'd be perfectly happy to take over all such responsibility from you on that account...'

Ferdi shrugged. 'Tell it to the steward.' Such an answer might have bordered on insolence if not for his neutral tone, and the truth of the matter.

Reginard had taken the idea of the Thain's escort very seriously since an early point in the time of the Troubles, when Lotho Sackville-Baggins had arranged for serious "accidents" to befall Thain Paladin and the Master of Buckland as the self-styled Chief had sought to consolidate his power. Lobelia, after her release from the Lockholes, had revealed Lotho's role in those incidents, confirming Regi's suspicions. Before her death the following Spring, she had even begged Paladin's pardon for her son's wrongdoings.

Though the Troubles were far behind them, and despite all the arguments Pippin could muster, Regi stood firm in his insistence that the Thain's escort remained essential and must continue to shadow the Thain and his family. If only they would leave him to his own devices, Pippin would have been content to see his immediate family protected: specifically, Eglantine, Diamond and Faramir. But no. As the Thain of the Tooks, he was doomed to suffer the inconvenience – nay, aggravation! – of being followed by archers nearly everywhere he went. Thankfully he'd been able to persuade Regi that he'd be perfectly safe in Buckland under Merry's watchful eye, or the poor beleaguered young Thain would never have been able to find a moment of peace to think his own thoughts.

Even worse, the steward had been hinting lately at expanding the escort, adding more archers to ensure that unforeseen circumstances would not spread them too thin in fulfilling their duty to adequately protect the Thain as well as his immediate loved ones.

As Ferdi showed no signs of bringing them back from the side trail that seemed to have diverted them from the subject of interest, Pippin took up the thread of conversation once more. 'What was it you wished to ask of me?'

Ferdi blinked and then dropped his eyes. 'I would ask nothing of you, Thain,' he said stiffly. 'I have all I need, and more.' But then, dire circumstances had forced the hobbit to live on the Thain's charity in his youth, and spiteful old Mistress Lalia had thrown his destitute state in his face.

'No,' Pippin pressed, for he had the notion that the topic he was pursuing was important to his cousin somehow. 'I fear you've mistaken my meaning. From what I gathered just now, you were referring to something I said, there in the cavern...'

The escort's face cleared, and he raised his eyes to meet Pippin's gaze once more. 'You said...'

'Go on,' Pippin encouraged when his older cousin hesitated.

After a pause to consider, Ferdi nodded. 'It's not as if we won't survive this situation,' he said, sounding uncannily like the young Thain, 'though in truth, you actually meant the opposite.'

Pippin thought back to their conversations in the cavern as they had attempted to wait out the storm. Only a few days had passed since their rescue, yet that bleak time was misty in his memory, more dream than reality. 'Well, at the time...' he began, but the older cousin interrupted.

'You said it was about as bad as bad could be,' Ferdi said. Resuming his own voice, he added, 'Those were your very words. Along with, Though we may not come out of this...'

'Ah,' Pippin said. Ferdi was probably right; he had likely said such a thing. The two cousins had been exhausted, chilled to the bone, stranded in a violent storm without fire or food or even dry clothing, and sheltering in a cave that kept off the rain, ice and snow and blocked the wind but offered about the same degree of warmth as the beer cellars in the Great Smials.

'The Tooks will survive, and with them, the Tookland,' Ferdi recounted, his eyes fixed on the great hill that rose before them. 'That is what I remember you saying.' His gaze returned to Pippin as he asked, 'But do you really believe it's true? ...that the Tookland will survive without your hand on the reins?'  

'Well of course,' Pippin said, taken aback. 'She's been through worse, after all. Even stood against Lotho's campaign to bring the entire Shire under his thumb, and all of Saruman's machinations after him. Come to think on it, Saruman didn't want any such trifling thing as mere domination – he meant to see the Shire in ruins, the sky and streams fouled, the Shire-folk crawling in the dust, starving slowly to death...' 

But Ferdi was shaking his head. 'I beg to differ, cousin,' he said very quietly, speaking cousin-to-cousin now, Pippin thought, and not as the head of escort addressing the Thain.

Some years earlier, before he'd gone there and back again, through fire and battle, ruin and death, healing and restoration... before he'd betrayed this cousin's trust and left him to bear Paladin's wrath... before he'd ridden into an ice storm and nearly died... before he'd been elevated to the position of Steward of Buckland and served Merry and the Brandybucks' homeland with all his heart and mind... before the Tooks had called him back to fulfil his duty to his own homeland... Pippin might have made a joke of it, to lighten the heavy conversation.

Now, instead, the young Thain maintained silence for a moment, firmly meeting Ferdi's gaze. At last, he spoke, as quietly as his older cousin had bare moments before. 'Help me to understand, cousin.'

Ferdi lifted his eyes again to the hills around them, as if he sought comfort in the familiar sight of the wild Green Hills where he was more at home than in the more rarefied atmosphere of the Great Smials, and then he spoke. 'In the short time since you returned to us,' he said, 'things have changed.'

Pippin nodded. Short and to the point, the kind of obvious reflection that Shire-folk appreciated. 'They have,' he acknowledged.

For some reason, Ferdi found that reply wanting. 'No,' he said. After a pause for consideration, he began again. 'You have changed,' he emphasised. 'You are not the reckless young hobbit I once knew. At least, you don't seem to be.'

'I should hope not,' Pippin said fervently.

Ferdi's lips tightened – a smile or grimace, Pippin was not sure which it might be. But the escort resumed. 'Moreover, the Tooks have changed – and not for the better. The Troubles – they marked us.' 

'I don't understand,' Pippin admitted slowly.

As he'd mentioned the Troubles, pain had replaced Ferdi's bland expression. Now, leaving his reins to lie on his lap, the archer raised his hands, palms upward in seeming entreaty. He took a shaking breath, causing Pippin to stare at him in astonishment.

But Ferdi seemed to have forgotten his Thain's presence for the moment. He stared at nothing; and then he said haltingly, 'The lives I've taken – the blood will never wash away.'

'Ferdi...' Pippin breathed in dismay.

Ferdi nodded, once again acknowledging his younger cousin, though he continued to look into the far distance as he spoke on. 'We defended the Tookland,' – in truth, the archer had nearly given his life for his homeland – 'but we were forced to kill to do so, Pip.' His voice broke as he made this confession, and his eyes briefly closed. Opening them again, he fixed his gaze on his empty hands and shuddered. 'Out of all the archers... all who kept the borders... too many have paid a terrible price. And your father...'

'What about my father?' Pippin said numbly.

Still staring at his hands, Ferdi replied, 'He sent hobbits into danger. Regi said it haunted him, "sending hobbits out to die", as he saw it. And he ordered the deaths of Lotho's men once we discovered the hobbit was hiring half-orcs... monsters... to hurl against the Tooks, to bring us down to our doom.' The archer took up his reins once more and turned haunted eyes to Pippin. 'He was never the same after that... he never quite recovered from the horror and grief, though he hid it as well as he could...'

Shaken, the young Thain remained silent. His own difficulties with his father had blinded him to Paladin's pain. He'd thought he'd known all he needed to know about his father, yet since his return to Tookland, he'd learned so much more. Not for the first time, he wished he could go back and talk to his father – no, not just talk, but listen. He bowed his head, and tears spilled from his eyes.

But Ferdi was still talking. 'It took the heart out of us, the Thain and the proud Tooks who followed him. All we had was our pride. Empty, twisted pride – so Lotho's ruffians never burned our homes and fields or cut down our trees or gathered the fruits of our labours as they did in the Outer Shire... but there was little of joy in our defiance – nor even in the Shire-folks' victory!' Lower, he added, 'After the Shire was set free, we were left to lick our wounds in our hard-won peace. It might ha' been better had the ruffians pillaged our homeland, leaving us to rebuild...'

In shock, Pippin looked up, dashing away the tears he'd wept. 'Bite your tongue, Ferdi!' he remonstrated.

'Because we kept Lotho's Men from laying waste to Tookland's trees, we never needed Mayor Sam's services. All that time he was going about the Four Farthings planting trees, he never came to the Tookland,' Ferdi said. With a tinge of bitterness, he went on, 'We never saw the need – we never asked him to come, bringing with him his common sense and wisdom and understanding and... and generosity.' Suddenly sorrowful, he added, 'I'd almost forgotten what kind-heartedness looked like, until the first time he came to the Smials to greet you as the new Thain...'

Pippin was struck dumb. He'd come home to a Tookland that had seemed untouched by Lotho's greed and malice. By comparison, the Shire had suffered obvious harm. Pippin remembered his first impressions upon the Travellers' return, greeted by great spiked gates that blocked the Bridge of Stonebows and tall ugly buildings with narrow straight-sided windows, bare and dimly lit, all very gloomy and un-Shirelike. The worst of it had been the change wrought in the hobbits who'd guarded the Bridge and who'd attempted to escort them to Frogmorton. In the back of his head, Pippin could hear Sam's summation: No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead.

The Tooks, by contrast, had been refreshingly Tookish: strong, proud, and spoiling for a fight. No, he thought to himself in sudden startlement, spoiling for a fight would have been all wrong for hobbits! I only found their attitude refreshing in light of the Outer Shire's captivity in contrast to the Tookland's resistance!

Ferdi might have mistaken Pippin's silence for inattention or, perhaps, a lack of understanding on the young Thain's part. Impulsively, he reached out to grasp Pippin's arm. 'You came at last, and you brought healing with you, Thain!' he said urgently. 'In the short months since you've been here, you've seen to it that widows and gaffers have enough wood to keep warm, and enough food to eat – without having to suffer the mortification of the Thain's charity! For you've sought to uphold their dignity, as if they are the ones doing you the favours even if they can only serve the Tookland in small ways – or not at all, due to circumstances and through no fault of their own.'

'But of course,' Pippin said. 'That's how it should be.'

Ferdi shook his head. 'You don't understand,' he said in wonder. 'It hasn't been that way – not since the Troubles.' He fisted his right hand and thumped his thigh to emphasise his thoughts. 'No – longer! Not since the time of Mistress Lalia! For her name lives on as a byword for meanness and spite, though few will say so in as many words...'

While Pippin was digesting this remarkable idea, Ferdi swallowed hard and went on. 'The Tookland needs you, cousin, even though we Tooks are too proud to admit to such. We need the new ideas you bring, and the new eyes – to look outside ourselves, to think outside ourselves, to learn new ways... and...'

'And?' the young Thain asked gently.

'And new hope,' the older cousin whispered. 'We've lived without hope, without wonder, without joy, for so long...' He withdrew his hand from Pippin's arm, bowed his head and sighed. 

Had Pippin not been listening with his complete attention, he might have missed his cousin's next words. 

'I'm so weary,' Ferdi murmured under his breath, shoulders slumping.

Suddenly, the young Thain saw his head of escort in a new light. Paladin had repeatedly sent Ferdi into deadly danger to gather information, to be ready to meet the ruffians' next moves in their attempt to overrun the Tookland and subdue the Tooks and Tooklanders to Lotho's will. The fate of Pippin's homeland and its people had rested especially heavily on Ferdi's shoulders – his, and those of the other spies who'd ventured into the Outer Shire and seen the ruin being perpetrated on the land and the Shire-folk. The information they'd gathered had helped Paladin and Reginard formulate their plans to keep the Tookland free and seemingly intact.

But, as he could clearly see now, not unaffected...

Moreover, he understood better now, he thought, the driving force behind Ferdi's stubborn watchfulness and dedication to his duty to safeguard the Thain, in general, and Pippin, in particular. The archer was still doing everything in his power to protect his homeland. In essence, he was still fighting Lotho, along with that hobbit's minions – whether men, complicit hobbits, or monstrous half-orcs – and the blight they'd imposed, the result of greed and malice, which still lingered in the Tookland and troubled her inhabitants.

Pippin reached to rest an encouraging hand on the older cousin's shoulder. 'You gave your all in the defence of the Tookland, Ferdi, heart and soul and spirit, and very nearly your life. But now, I promise to take up the fight – to bring her through to a new day...'

'The Tookland needs you,' Ferdi whispered, eyes downcast, as if he hadn't heard or perhaps had not understood the implications of Pippin's pledge. 

'Ferdi,' the young Thain said sternly, and waited until the archer looked up to meet his demanding gaze. Softening his voice, he added, 'I promise, dear cousin, I'll not leave her – not willingly – until my task is through, and I've prepared others to take up the reins after me.'

'Promise...' Ferdi echoed.

Pippin nodded firmly. 'I will make it my aim,' he said, and raised his right hand as if swearing an oath. 'It is my purpose that the Tooks shall survive, nay, that they shall heal and grow and thrive... and the Tookland with them.'

Ferdi stared into Pippin's eyes, blinking away tears, but his relief shone clearly. 'I can ask no more than that.'

Pippin laughed. 'I should think you could ask a great deal more!' he started to say, but he was interrupted by the arrival of the steward, hefting the second recovered pack filled with coins.

'Here we are!' Regi said cheerfully. 'I should say, the packs are heavy enough, I might hope that nothing more was lost when you or Ferdi tumbled down the hill besides the few coins we scoured from the ground.'

'But you'll count out every coin in both packs anyhow,' Pippin observed, then turned his pony's head towards home. 'Let's get back and set to work. There's so much to be done...'

~ * ~ *~ * THE END * ~ * ~ * ~