Part Ten
The wind gusted around Síladon’s small form, tangling his hair and making him clasp his arms closer to his sides to try and keep warm. It had a lonely, high-pitched whistle, quite unlike the way it sounded at home in the valley. The night was dark and frightening, like a bad dream, and the moon looked wrong. Nonetheless, obediently he took the ring out of the pouch.
“Síladon, what are you doing?”
He froze, literally unable to breathe for a moment, the ring just over the tip of his finger. Spinning round, he gaped at Calareg hurrying up behind him. Somehow in the strangeness of the night he had completely forgotten he might be followed. “Leave me alone,” he hissed, remembering just in time to keep his voice down in case someone from the barracks heard. The words somehow carried less conviction out here than they had down at the cottage surrounded by the safe and familiar.
“Put on the ring! Now!” Ada’s voice grated and scratched with urgency. Síladon had finally stopped trying to understand. All he could do was cling to the idea that this was Ada, his Ada who had ridden away with the fighters and not come back, his Ada who he missed so much and who always knew the right thing to do. Why else would he be up here on the high trail in the middle of the night, even though he knew Nana would be really, really cross with him? He closed his eyes and slid the ring fully onto his finger. It was very loose and he had to close his hand into a fist, but it was there.
“I’ve got it on Ada, I’m wearing it,” he breathed. As the words left his lips, the strange stone in the ring began to glow with a cold, green light and the world around him changed. An unearthly yellow-green suddenly outlined the trees, the tips of the blades of grass, even the stones along the trail, while the moon sailing high above cast an eerie yellow luminosity over everything. He could not see the valley at all, as though there was nothing down below the trees. Fear bubbled up inside of him, twisting his stomach. More than anything on Arda right now he wanted Nana.
Calareg had reached him now. “Who are you talking to? There’s no one here, just me. Come on, we’re not allowed here.”
“Get rid of him,” Ada snarled, “he’ll spoil everything. Deal with him and then come to me. I am waiting for you where the trail reaches the high land.”
“I told you to go away!” The words came out thin and high, and the wind pounced on them, whipping them up and carrying them away.
Calareg, the son and grandson of warriors, stood his ground. “No, I’m not going away. You would get in terrible trouble for being up here, you know we’re not allowed to in case we’re seen by one of Angmar’s spies. We have to go back down right now. It’s cold and dark and – and we’ve crossed the line. Adar showed me where it was when he took me out with the patrol a while ago. You can feel how the air changes on the trail. That’s Lord Elrond’s line of protection, it stretches right round the valley…”
“I don’t care, I don’t want to hear about what you did with your father,” Síladon finally managed to get out. “I’m not going back. I have – I have a thing I need to do. For my father.”
“Your father couldn’t have sent you to do something up here in the middle of the night,” Calareg exclaimed. “He’s de… he hasn’t come back yet.”
Síladon rounded on him. “He’s not dead! He’s – he’s waiting at the end of the trail,” he insisted, still trying to keep his voice down so they wouldn’t be heard. Even to his own ears, he sounded shrill and unconvinced. “Now will you just – go away. We don’t want you here. This is nothing to do with you. Just – go!”
Almost crying, he emphasised the words by pushing Calareg hard. Although bigger and more solidly built, Calareg staggered back, more surprised than anything else. “Have you gone crazy?” he yelped. “Of course he’s not there. Come on, Síladon, you’re…” scaring me “… not well. We need to go home.”
“I told you to get rid of him,” Ada rasped. He sounded angry, more angry than Síladon had ever known him, and the ring felt ice cold against his skin, so cold it burned. Further up the trail, half obscured by branches, a figure began materializing, a slow glide of light and shadow over emptiness.
“Yes he is,” Síladon told Calareg in a deathly calm voice that came from a place beyond terror. “He’s there. Right there. Look.”
~*~*~*~
Erestor sought the main street, listening for any hint of voices or footsteps, but except for the waterfall the night was quiet. It was almost like walking through a ghost village. He hurried along the river path, trying to think where two small boys might go after dark. He reached the House without incident and slowed, looking around, but there was nothing out of place. Hoping the boys had gone inside, he went in through the main entrance and hailed Gellon, whose duty it was that evening to watch the door.
“No, sir, not seen a soul since the dinner bell,” the elf told him in a very sure voice. He had been sitting comfortably with a plate of food and a cup of wine, but hastened to his feet when he realised who was coming up the steps.
Erestor made an impatient sound. “Two boys. About this high. You’re sure?”
He got a blank look in return. “No, Master Erestor. Like I said, no one’s come in here since before dinner.”
Erestor gave the river path a hard stare and decided he might as well go and fetch his cloak while he decided what to do next. There was a lamp burning in their rooms – his rooms really – and the fire was built up and ready for lighting. Erestor chose one of his warmer cloaks, closed a window against the night because the air felt damp, and tidied his hair, all the while trying to think where to look next. He had half a mind to leave matters for the parents to sort out, but the boys had been so adamant that Síladon was in some kind of trouble, and for Thavron’s sake he felt impelled to see for himself.
The room was growing really cold and he had the strangest sensation of being watched. He put it down to not having eaten properly since breakfast, coupled with the small unsolved mystery that had fallen into his hands. Also, the wick must have been old, because the light the lamp shed was dim and failed to reach the corners of the room. Shrugging Erestor gave a final pat to his hair and left, closing the door firmly behind him.
He was already on the steps when the doorwatch called him back.
“You said you were looking for two boys?” Gellon asked him. “No one came in here, but now I recall seeing them go past towards the bridge. Not together, looked as though the one was following the other. Put it down to some kind of game…”
Erestor didn’t stay to hear more. In a swirl of midnight blue cloak and black hair he was back down the steps and striding towards the bridge that was the first stage of leaving Imladris. There were a few garden spots with benches and the like along the way, but he dismissed them; it was too dark for either child to have reason to stop there. When he reached the bridge he spent a moment peering into the darkness of garden and trees and sheer rock, then considered the view across the ravine. As he hesitated, a voice in his head that was not truly in his head said one word: “Up.”
There was no one in sight. Telling himself that imagination was getting the better of him again, Erestor nonetheless crossed the bridge on swift feet. He had no idea why the boys would choose to break the basic rule that no child should climb the steps up to the barracks without an adult in attendance, but it was less likely that they had doubled around and gone back to the House.
At the top of the steps, Erestor stopped to listen again, but the night yielded nothing unusual. He looked back over the water at the House, lights flickering cheerfully in windows and spilling out the open door, then considered his immediate surroundings. The barracks was a remnant of early Imladris, built to hide light or habitation from prying strangers, with the result that the gloomy structure set into the cliff seemed utterly deserted. He found it hard to believe the boys would have gone further than this. Either they were in the stables or he had somehow missed them amongst the trees and bushes along the way. He had already moved back a few paces towards the steps when a voice said very clearly,
“Save my son, Master Erestor. Please.”
There was still no one there; the shelf of land in front of the barracks was empty. Slowly Erestor became aware of a presence, someone whose personal energy though subtly changed was still familiar. He stayed very still, waiting. For long minutes nothing happened. The wind whispered through silent trees and the river danced below him, leaping down falls and throwing up clouds of spray. Then someone pushed him in the small of the back, hard, in the general direction of the stony track leading up past the stables. Erestor raised an eyebrow, but set off at a brisk jog, sensing it might be wise to save the questions for later.
The track wound up between slabs of rock, curved amongst trees, the twists and turns deliberate. There were watch stations overlooking it in places, and he made a note to have Findel ask later why he wasn’t stopped. He supposed they were on the alert for potential intruders, less concerned with someone leaving the valley. Whatever the reason, he seemed no more visible than the being who currently kept pace with him. Erestor was a child of the First Age, no longer young as elves reckoned such things, and it took a lot to make him nervous, but he was finding this walk above Imladris in search of missing children with one of the Houseless for company unsettling. The trees seemed to share his mood; they said nothing, watching him pass with an unnatural stillness.
He was on the stretch just before Vilya’s invisible boundary around Imladris, their final line of defence, when the trees suddenly roused in a chorus of inarticulate alarm. He paused between one step and the next, trying to make sense of the jumbled phrases, strongly aware of the presence beside him. The trees were warning one another of ‘thing that rots roots’, and for once he took them seriously. He could feel it too, something very dark rousing close at hand, making the air tingle unpleasantly. Beside him pale light flickered urgently.
“Yes, I know,” he said, not waiting to be shoved again, and passed through Vilya’s defensive line into the world beyond, where the moonlight was always harsher for the first few minutes and the wind’s bite sharpened. Moments later he heard voices up ahead, carried to him by the wind that whistled off the moorlands and between rocks. He tried to listen, even though his half-seen companion had passed him and was leading the way now. Then a sentence carried clearly, and another, and he started to run towards the sound and towards a sense of unrelieved dread, the source of the trees’ distress.
“Let go of me! I have to go to him, he has to touch me. He needs to hold me so he can see through my eyes.”
“That’s not your Ada, Síladon. Look at it. Look at it!‘
He rounded a bend and found the boys standing directly in front of him in the middle of the trail. Almost sobbing, Calareg had hold of Síladon’s arm and was shaking him, pointing ahead while Síladon tried to pull free. Facing them loomed a half-materialised shape, tall and terrible, the face obscured by an ornate helmet, a crown of white flame flickering about its head.
Every instinct Erestor possessed screamed at him to get back among the trees, out of sight. He ignored it and sped up, trying to ignore memories of Gil-galad charging Sauron and how that had ended. Eyes that were not eyes left the children and fastened on him and he remembered he was unarmed. Bending he picked up a rock. The apparition resolved in a blaze of greenish light and dank air, and now he could make out long robes trimmed with fur, a full cloak, a sword belted about the waist, a long, gloved hand reaching out towards him.
“Take it off. Síladon, please take it off! That’s what’s bringing it, that ring.”
Erestor risked briefly looking away from the apparition to see what the boys were doing. Síladon was standing so still he seemed hardly to breathe, staring at the fully-realised figure in horror, then with a frightened whimper he threw something down onto the stones at the side of the trail and stumbled back from it, closer to Calareg.
Light blazed from the being, painting the night a vivid green, and the sound that issued from it was like nothing any elf had ever made, a shrieking, skittering howl of rage and frustration, rising and falling like the baying of a wolf. A buzzing, scratching noise began, rising in pitch and intensity, the light started flickering blindingly, then as Erestor was forced to put his hands over his ears to block out the onslaught, light and sound abruptly vanished.
There was a moment of stunned silence, broken finally as Síladon reached out a desperate hand, calling, “Ada, Ada!” Then he sank to his knees and the tears started, great, aching sobs drawn from his soul.
Calareg was trying ineffectually to pat him when Erestor reached them. He squeezed the boy’s shoulder then dropped down to kneel on the stony trail, taking the sobbing child into his arms and murmuring, “Sshh, shhh, it’s over, it’s all right now.” The words were unimportant, what mattered was his tone. Looking up at Calareg he said, “You did well, really well. I can think of any number of warriors who would have turned and run for their lives in the face of what just happened. Now – I need you to find whatever he was holding. Don’t touch it, just show me where it is.”
He continued talking quietly to Síladon while Calareg searched around in the moonlight and the trees chattered on in the background. They were like parrots Erestor thought, irritated without any real cause. Gil-galad had owned two parrots, a gift from one of the southern city states, and Erestor had never understood what all the fuss was about, finding them ill-tempered and raucous. It didn’t take Calareg long to find what he was looking for, the greenish light was fading from the ring but had not yet totally vanished. Using the tip of his boot he pushed it over to within Erestor’s reach. “Here sir, it’s a ring…. “
Keeping his arm firmly around Síladon, Erestor studied the ring carefully first before picking it up. He turned it in his hand, studying the workmanship. “This is from Ost-in-Edhil, from the great days just before the end,” he told Calareg, making his words easy and calming. “I think his grandfather was a smith there, trained by Celebrimbor himself. This looks like one of the lesser rings, those that Sauron helped them experiment with before Celebrimbor made the Three. A minor ring, but deadly in the wrong hands. You were a good friend here tonight, not just to Síladon but perhaps to the whole valley.”
Calareg came to sit on his other side, away from the ring, and put his hand on Síladon’s back. ”It wasn’t his fault, sir,’ he told Erestor earnestly. ‘He – he really thought his Ada was talking to him, wanting to touch him… I saw something different, but he only saw it clearly when I shouted at him – it broke the spell or whatever it was. It wasn’t his fault.’
Erestor waited while Síladon’s sobs faded into tired, hitching breaths and sniffing. Unless he missed his guess that had been the Witch-king himself and they needed to raise the alarm, but Elrond would already be aware something was very wrong, as would Glorfindel who had known it from the start. He had no idea how much or how little the Witch-king had learned, but it was time to seal the entrances and stay quiet, hoping that once again the enemy’s eye would pass over them. That was work for other hands, he thought, stroking Síladon’s hair. Right now he was content to wait while a father stole a last few precious moments close to his son.
He watched light glimmer and dance in the darkness under the trees and whispered, “I’ll look after him. You have my word.” Briefly there was a touch of mind to mind, then the glimmering drew together into a point of soft white light which hovered bright enough to outline the dark shapes of the trees before it slowly contracted and faded from sight. With his son safe, Thavron could finally answer the call home.
~*~*~*~*~
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Beta: Red Lasbelin