On the Starlit Sea by Idrils Scribe

Chapter 1: Stressed/ Silent Panic Attack

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Pellardur is as ugly as any Umbarian city. The eastern gate is a Númenórean monstrosity of green-veined granite, the friezes sculpted with scenes of conquest: ships the size of hills belch steel-clad soldiers while the lesser men of Middle-earth bring tribute, bowing beneath the Sea-lords’ lash. 

The Umbarians guarding it are keen-eyed and cruel, with grey gazes as sharp as their glaives. Elrohir lowers his eyes, brings a hand to his forehead in a gesture of submission, and somehow keeps it from shaking with fear. Despite all Glorfindel’s assurances that this sorcerous Elvish disguise will hold, every moment here is terror. 

Their journey into the Umbarian empire marks a sudden and profound change from their desert-roaming days. Glorfindel no longer needs Elrohir to tell him where to go and how to get there, and the Elf now considers himself firmly in charge of their strange little expedition. 

Glorfindel has business in Pellardur, and so they must enter the harbour city. Elrohir did not argue, mostly because he has nowhere else to go. Besides, he is an Umbarian now.

Before they emerged from the desert Glorfindel sang an Elvish song, soft and shadowy as nightfall, pulling layer upon layer of shimmering deceit over Elrohir. He has a different face now, an entirely unremarkable lad of perhaps seventeen, with dark brown eyes and an aquiline nose. He runs his hand through the wiry curls of this stranger’s hair, but somehow his own, smoother and shorter, is still there. Glorfindel has likewise disguised himself as a burly merchant from Umbar.

Elrohir is supposed to be Glorfindel’s slave, leading his master’s camel, and he is the one to kneel before the guards, offering the gate-toll in his outstretched hands. He begs entrance in Adûnaic with the accent of Umbar. Glorfindel, whose northern drawl is thick enough to get them arrested, is silent.

The guard barely takes note. He snatches the silver from Elrohir’s hand, and motions them into the open mouth of the gate.

Beyond, the streets teem with misery. 

Beggars cluster about them like blowflies on a corpse, chanting and pleading and pulling back their rags to show their mutilations - the empire looks unkindly upon vagrancy. 

Elrohir ignores the wailing tide of human debris, hurrying past the parade of cut noses, branded cheeks, hands lopped off at the wrist. The worst are those that clutter the wedges of shadow thrown by walls and awnings, the ones that rise no more. 

Mangy dogs roam the refuse, and Elrohir is glad he filled his pockets with stones before they entered the gates, so he can keep the curs from Ot’s legs with a couple of well-aimed hits. 

They emerge from the main thoroughfare into the shimmering heat and clamour of the great market. 

No slaves in the North, Glorfindel said, and by his look of stunned horror the trade is indeed alien to him. Elrohir knows it all too well. These wholesale dealers gather up prisoners with Umbar’s corsair ships and drive them to auction in the ports.

The best slaves - young, strong men and pretty girls with all their teeth, are prodded up onto the stands, around each neck a plaque praising their health and meekness. The emperor’s laws ensure fair dealings: customers must see what they are buying, and so the wares are naked. Under the imperial taxman’s watchful eye the din of haggling rises to the leaden sky. 

Seedier stalls deal with the dross of the trade: spindly little things, flawed, underfed and overworked, or simply ill-behaved. Runaways have the brand of recapture scorched fresh and angry into their foreheads. Even here the sellers are honest: the wares are chained together in lots, their faces stained with soot to show the buyer that these are tainted goods, fit for no other purpose than to suffer. They are for the temple’s altar, sacrifices to appease the Giver. 

The Temple of Mûlkher the Mighty, Giver of Freedom, looms over the square like a dark, devouring beast. They pass three red-robed priests driving a chained slave-train inside. Raided from Gondor, by the looks of them. Glorfindel stares at the weeping women dragged along by their neck-rings.These Northerners will not live long - smoke already rises from the temple’s great louver, and screams ring out across the square. 

Elrohir breathes through his mouth, glad for the thick folds of his face-veil. The city’s stench of piled-up human refuse is bad enough, but that tell-tale temple scent of incense and scorched flesh makes his skin crawl. It sets dreadful memories beating against the doors of his mind, but he pushes them down. 

His own fate will be worse, if Glorfindel betrays him now. Elrohir is a rebel, an enemy of the state. The prize on his head would buy all the goods in this square twice over. War rations left him lean as a whip, but his weight in gold is still a fabulous hoard. To say nothing of the favour of the Emperor of Umbar. 

Letting the Elf bring him here has been an act of either faith or folly. He will soon know which. He breathes through his terror, heaving gulps of hot stuffy air.

The pair of them make a strange sight - a mounted merchant and his slave-boy, frozen amidst the square’s bustle to stare at the sacrifices. A warrior in Umbarian livery turns to watch from beneath his tall helmet, and for a moment panic leaps at Elrohir’s throat. 

Will Glorfindel hail the guard? 

Elrohir can barely breathe, his sight swimming with bright flickers of light. What will he do, if Glorfindel’s mysterious business in Pellardur turns out to be collecting his reward? 

But Glorfindel’s eyes slide off the warrior. “Left!” he barks, in that harsh, half-bored tone of master to slave, and whacks Elrohir out of his stun with the driving stick. 

Elrohir obeys and dives into the fly-ridden shadows of another street, this one lined with brothels. With his eyes on the ground he navigates Ot through the throng of dead-eyed women and the men who hawk them. 

Glorfindel is silent, until the alley’s end. “Right!”

Ever deeper into the city’s bowels they go, past opium dens and sweatshops. The mud-brick hovels grow shabbier, the refuse piles higher, the stink of the tanneries heavy in their noses, until the crumbling walls on either side seem to touch each other overhead and the open sky is a distant dream. 

A fine place for an ambush.

Glorfindel does not relent. With some difficulty Elrohir leads their grumbling camel into the narrow alley. Ot is not used to close quarters, and it takes a sharp hiss and a tap with the driving stick to keep the beast from spooking. 

 A wooden hatch squeaks open overhead, but closes quickly when Elrohir looks up. 

Glorfindel motions for the camel to kneel, and steps down. He is tall and burly, and the grey eyes of his Umbarian disguise burn with a cool, cruel disdain. Elrohir recoils.

Slaves go unarmed. Elrohir’s sword and crossbow are packed away in the saddlebag, out of reach behind Glorfindel’s broad back. He closes his fingers around the hidden knife in his sleeve. 

At once, Glorfindel’s eyes flick over. Elrohir releases the knife, but Glorfindel never fails to notice a hidden weapon.

Even so, he seems fearless. He steps to, and his hand comes to rest warm and solid on Elrohir’s arm. All traces of the stern master are gone. 

“Elrohir, my brave one,” Glorfindel whispers in Haradi, soft as a breeze. His face may be strange, but Elrohir knows that voice. “Bear this place but a moment more, and I will never ask it of you again.”

Glorfindel’s golden voice is calm and kind, but it could strike courage into a dead man’s heart. Elrohir stands up straight, and forgets the knife. 

Someone emerges from the shadows of a doorway. Tall, slender. Dressed like a simple working man, a dockworker, perhaps. Elvish eyes beneath an Umbarian turban and veil.

Glorfindel smiles, speaks a string of merry words in that sweet northern tongue of his, and for a moment the dark alley seems to brighten. The Elf, too, is gladdened, from the way he looks at Elrohir with joy open in his eyes. Even so, his answer sounds hurried, an edge of concern beneath the words. Glorfindel replies in kind.

Then the stranger turns, enters the house once more, and is gone.

Glorfindel turns to Elrohir, who stands astonished. “Come,” he says, “My business is done.”

---

Chapter End Notes

I'm finally getting around to cross-posting this story to SWG. We'll call it fashionably late ;-) 

Comments make everything better, so if you have something nice to say about this tale, you’d make my day by saying it!

Chapter 2: Warm food

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The day’s heat still shimmers across the sere hillsides of sage-brush and gravel, but the sun already lowers into the western sea. Soon the stars will come out and the desert will spring to life. 

Down in the city, an albatross releases itself from the jutting forest of masts that is Pellardur’s harbour. Glorfindel keeps an eye on the great bird’s course as it sails away from the wheeling cloud of gulls, out over the waves, due west until its white wings melt gold into the sinking sun. 

Calear has sent his message. All they can do now is pray to Manwë that the bird will find the right ship.  

First, Glorfindel has an even more pressing concern. Elrohir has not moved since he sank down beside their small campfire an hour ago, his eyes on the flames and his mind far away. 

They should be keeping up their pretence of being master and slave - these wild hill-lands are not wholly deserted - but Glorfindel cannot bring himself to set Elrohir to the work of making camp. The boy sits motionless, cross-legged beside the fire Glorfindel lit and tended. 

A pot of tea steeps fragrant over the flames, but Elrohir has not shown the slightest interest in it, nor the pastries Glorfindel bought in Pellardur in hopes of enticing him. He keeps trying and failing to feed him anything more substantial than a handful of dates chewed in the saddle. 

Glorfindel unwraps one of the cakes, still warm from the oven. Honey and orange blossom waft from the fig-leaf wrapping. 

“Here. Try it,” he says, offering it on his open palm. 

Elrohir has sunk so deep into his own thoughts that he startles at the motion. 

No thanks.” Elrohir shakes his head. He is not hungry, has not been in weeks. 

He has been quiet and withdrawn ever since they left the Haradrim behind, but it seems Pellardur has turned his mind even further inwards, away from the world. Glorfindel makes a note to stand tonight’s watch himself. 

For a moment, fear closes over his heart. This is fading, a wound of the spirit. Grief and terror and loss are hacking away at the fine threads that tether Elrohir’s fëa to his body. He needs to go home, away from this wretched land. He needs his family, and he needs a healer. But first he must eat, or Mandos will have him before they can reach Elrond. 

“Eat.” Glorfindel’s order brooks no argument. He presses a pastry and a cup of strong, hot tea into Elrohir’s hands and sits down beside him, pointedly biting into his own.

Elrohir is a soldier. Use that particular tone, and he obeys. 

The taste of food seems to bring him back from wherever he has been. “Who was that man?” he asks once the first bite is down. 

“A friend. Safer for us all that you do not know his name.”

Elrohir’s eyebrow rises. “An Elvish spy in the heart of the empire?”

Glorfindel does not answer. Calear is Círdan’s man, and he is beyond brave to operate in a place like Pellardur. He does not deserve more needless danger. One day Elrohir will hear the names of all who risked their lives to bring him home. Not today. 

“He will arrange our passage,” he says instead.

Elrohir has fought against Umbar for most of his life, and knows better than to keep asking. All men have a breaking point, and once taken the Umbarians will swiftly locate it. A captive can only hold back what he does not know. 

“Where to now?” Elrohir asks instead. 

Glorfindel points away south, where the ordered farmlands around Pellardur peter out into wild desert that stretches dry and empty down to the sea. “A certain bay, an empty place far from all habitations. They will come for us, there.”

“Who will?”

“Our people, yours and mine.” 

Elrohir is silent while he finishes his pastry. 

Then, as he wipes his hands, “for a moment there, I thought you would do it.” 

No need to say what, exactly. Glorfindel shakes his head, a simple denial without the slightest trace of outrage, but Elrohir’s eyes are on the flames. 

“My weight in gold would buy a corsair’s fleet,” he says softly, almost to himself alone, “and the slaves to row it. You would become a magnate overnight.”

Glorfindel looks at the wounded child sitting beside him in the flickering firelight, and tries to imagine handing him over to the enemy. Elrohir has his mother’s eyes, and his smile - too rarely seen- is a young Elrond returned. That wry wit seems to be all his own. Glorfindel imagines him taken to torment, utterly broken before death. The vileness of the deed, the horror, the irreplaceable loss. All for mere coin. His stomach turns. Even Maeglin never sank so low.

“Elrohir.” His tone is formal, almost an oath. “I will die myself before I let them get to you.” Then, realising that in this place that promise is not enough, “and they will never take you alive.”

“Thank you.” Elrohir says quickly, his eyes downcast to hide the flicker of shame. 

Glorfindel has no words, but in answer he lays a hand on Elrohir’s shoulder and tightens it, brushing his own mind against Elrohir’s, all fondness and care. 

Chapter 3: Overwhelmed/”Say Goodbye”

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“Elrohir … it is time.”

Glorfindel has delayed as long as he possibly could, but their time draws short. The red sunset has faded to indigo over the western sea, and the stars are opening in the east. The deed must be done.

Elrohir does not protest. He rises from where he sat with that thousand yard stare in his eyes and his head leaning against his reclining camel, and for a moment of terror Glorfindel thinks he can see the light of Elrohir’s fëa shining through him as through cloth worn too thin. 

Elrohir unsaddles Ot in silence. With practised efficiency he unbuckles the cinch and lifts first the saddlebags, then the saddle itself off the camel’s back. He thinks for a moment, then heaves both onto his shoulder and carries them over to drop them in a pile at Glorfindel’s feet. 

Behind them the beach stretches white and empty down to the Great Sea’s sighing churn. Elrohir does not look at it. 

He takes the halter and the reins, slides them off Ot’s head, and drops them atop the saddle. Ot stares with those large dark eyes, almost understanding. Elrohir feeds him a date.

The hobbles come off last, the heavy leather leg-ties that keep the beast close to camp when he is left to graze. Now Elrohir unknots them, and for the first time in years Ot is free of all tack. 

He rises at once. Sand rustles down from his coat. Elrohir stands and watches, his hands still by his sides, but Ot does not turn away. Elrohir is one of those soft-spoken souls who take to all good beasts, and they to him. Ot loves his master, and he knows that this is goodbye. 

“Go, buddy!” Elrohir’s voice has gone rough. 

Through all they have suffered together, Glorfindel has never seen him cry. Now he is close. Over a cantankerous bastard of a camel. The only friend he has left. 

Glorfindel is heartsick with Elrohir’s grief. His arms ache to hold him, promise him that all will be well, but Elrohir is not the hugging kind, and nothing Glorfindel might say will make this any easier.

Elrond and Celebrían have a horse standing ready for Elrohir. The finest foal Asfaloth ever sired, a grey Valinorean charger with a loyal heart and a breathtaking gallop. He will love that mare, once he meets her. But for now all he has is a messy pile of hard-worn camel tack and a heart full of sorrow.

  The three of them stand there for a time, silent. The desert wind dies down in the sere dune grass, but to the west the rushing sea sings still, and the stars wheel overhead. 

Elrohir cannot bring himself to end the torment of parting. Glorfindel can do at least that for him, and so he steps forward and lays his hand against the war camel’s great dun head. 

“Go now, faithful friend,” he whispers in soft Valinórean Quenya. “Go with every blessing I can give. Be free and merry all your life.”

Ot draws away from him, and turns to nose at Elrohir's face. Elrohir stands very still, his eyes screwed tightly shut, but his hands come up to stroke Ot’s cheeks. 

“Go!” Elrohir rasps, running his hand down the soft velvet of Ot’s nose. Then he lowers it, and Ot turns and walks away. 

Elrohir remains, standing with his arms crossed as if trying to embrace himself, and watches until the pale shape is swallowed up by the desert night. He looks so young and so lost, utterly uprooted. 

Grief gnaws at Glorfindel's heart at the pain of this parting, this deed of cruel kindness he must inflict. He has torn Elrohir away from all he ever knew, and what will come instead is far away yet. 

“Come, dear one.” Glorfindel lays an arm around Elrohir’s shoulder and gently turns him around so his face is turned towards the sea. Elrohir lets him.

Side by side they walk down to the beach. 

 

Chapter 4: Breakdown/Comfort

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Their strange journey ends here, in the moonless dark on this deserted beach where the desert dies down into the sighing sea. 

For weeks, Elrohir has refused to think about their destination. He allowed Glorfindel to lead him, numbly setting one foot before the other for no other reason than it seemed better than laying down by the roadside and giving up. 

He slumps down in the sand, his face to the churning waves, and waits for whatever happens next. Behind him is nothing to turn back for. Before him only darkness and uncertainty. Life or death. He does not know, and is not sure that he cares any more.

Glorfindel sets their packs beside him. He has carried all their belongings down to the beach, including Ot’s saddle. The thing is nothing special - standard imperial issue, looted off a dead Umbarian - but Elrohir had it for many years and he is childishly relieved that it will not be left behind to bleach and crumble beneath the desert sun. 

Relieved of his burden, Glorfindel takes up a restless vigil, pacing up and down the waterline with the agitated energy of a caged lion. Even now he will not remove the Elvish glamour veiling their true faces. Some seabird screeches in the dunes behind them, and at once Glorifndel’s strange eyes dart this way and that as if he expects the Imperial Guard to fall upon them any moment. Not a far-fetched fear - they are awfully exposed on this empty beach. 

Despite his numbness Elrohir takes note. He has seen this Elf brave the deep desert, wage war against the Umbarian Empire, and defeat a Ringwraith. All of it done without faltering, without complaint, utterly fearless. Only now, at the very cusp of victory, it seems Glorfindel’s nerves of steel are spent.  

He sees Elrohir looking, and at once the tension uncoils. Even with his Umbarian face he somehow smiles that golden smile. “Not long now,” he soothes. “They will be here soon.” 

Elrohir has but the faintest notion of who, exactly, Glorfindel is talking about, or how the Elf would even know where ‘they’ are, but he finds he no longer cares. 

He digs his hands into the sand beside his boots. It crumbles warm between his fingers, the day’s sun-baked heat caught in the soft grains. He closes his fists around the only land he knows, and lowers his head to his bent knees, bowing beneath the knife-sharp pain of a sudden certainty: he will never return here.

This vast desert he knows so well, where lie the bones of so many friends. Her bones. He will never see it again. 

At a soft rustle of sand, he looks up to find Glorfindel kneeling before him. The Elf does not touch, but his voice is very gentle. “You are not alone,” he says. “You will never be alone again. You are so loved, even if you cannot see it yet. You will come home and be healed and become what you were always meant to be.”

Elrohir does not answer. A shapeless nothing sits inside his chest, a dark clump of pain that grows by the day. Hope and joy have been pressed out of him, like a grape beneath the press crushes to a formless nothing. Soon there will be no space left for heart and breath. 

Glorfindel lays his hands on Elrohir’s shoulders and leans forward singing. Elrohir has heard it before, this strange song Glorfindel hums into his ear, but he cannot say where, or how long ago. 

He has little left of that grey Elvish tongue, just enough for the song to draw him away from here, away into falling water and the clean scent of pines. In that place he can see Elladan’s face, clearer than ever before, and other, half-forgotten ones, a sweet promise of life and light and laughter. 

When the song ends Glorfindel remains, his hands warm on Elrohir’s shoulders as he watches the horizon and the beach behind them. 

The stars have wheeled in a bright arc overhead when at last he leaps to his feet. Elrohir looks up, stunned. 

Out in the bay, all sleek swan-shaped whiteness against the dark waves, Glorfindel’s improbable Elf-ship proves very much real.

A dinghy, foam-white and fair with its own birdwing carvings, releases itself from the ship. Feather-shaped oars go down, and the rowers are making good time indeed. 

The dinghy bears neither lantern nor light, and yet as they draw near a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the rim of the hills before it rises, seems to play about the Elves within, outlining their slender, grey-clad shapes against the night sky. The waves stir strange and silver-bright about the bow.

Fear falls over Elrohir’s heart. These are the White-fiends of song and story: bright-faced and fell-eyed and beyond human. They snag children and return changelings, turn strange the minds of men and possess the bodies of the unwary. Glorfindel has led him like a lamb to slaughter, and now these creatures will take him and turn him and whatever he will become at their hands will no longer be human. 

For a brief, terrifying moment he wants to run and hide in the desert like a rabbit down its hole, because dying of thirst might be a kinder fate.  

Glorfindel has taken off his boots and waded into the surf with Elrohir’s saddlebag. He passes it to the Elves, standing knee-deep in the water. Elrohir watches his belongings disappear swiftly into the boat. 

When Glorfindel turns to take the final pack, he sees that Elrohir has not moved. At once he drops it and comes, his face solemn but kind as he stands before him, barefoot in the sand. 

Somehow he sees Elrohir’s terror for what it is. “Take heart,” he says, all kindness and compassion, and holds out his hand for Elrohir to take. 

Glorfindel’s eyes meet his own, and within them his golden spirit shines bright and warm as the sun. Elrohir gasps, because Glorfindel drops every last one of his mind’s defences so Elrohir can see all of him, down to where the white fire of his heart burns fearless and full of joy. 

It is shocking to be so trusted, and Elrohir only looks long enough to see Glorfindel’s love for him written clear across his mind, without malice or deceit. 

Trust me. I will not lead you to harm.

The dark night seems to grow lighter, and Elrohir's fear lifts as if a heavy cloud has been withdrawn. 

His fingers close around a rock in the sand, a rough-edged thing the size of a grape. A piece of Harad. He puts it in his pocket. 

Then he takes Glorfindel’s outstretched hand, and is pulled to his feet. Glorfindel sings a single thrilling, silver note and Elrohir feels his Umbarian disguise dissolve like morning mist at sunrise. 

“Come,” Glorfindel says, smiling his real, unveiled smile, “let us go home.”

Chapter 5: Concern/”You can rest now”

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The Elf-ship is beautiful in its own alien way, its swan-wings outstretched to the sea-wind, each feather sculpted down to the foam-white barbs edged in silver. 

Before Elrohir reaches the top of the grey rope ladder, a pair of sun-tanned hands heave him up over the gunwale and set him on his feet on the white wooden deck. They belong to a strange creature. A bright smile in a young man’s face, and yet the long cable of braided hair is silver as starlight. The Elf wears the same sea-grey as his fellow sailors, but on his surcote’s breast shimmers a white conch-shell picked out in pearls.

“Elrohir son of Elrond,” he says in crisp, perfect Adûnaic, and bows politely in the Númenórean fashion, with a hand over his heart. “I am Galdor of the Grey Havens. This vessel is the Nemir, of Lindon’s fleet, and I have her command. You are most welcome aboard.”

Elrohir returns the bow - somewhat deeper and a fraction longer than Galdor’s, to be on the safe side. When he straightens, Galdor's eyes find his, and Elrohir understands that this Elvish sea-captain is anything but young. His gaze has the depth and gravity of a commander tried by many battles. 

Galdor looks Elrohir over as he stands there on the gleaming white deck of the Elvish ship, and a glimmer of sadness passes over him, quickly hidden. Only now does Elrohir think of what he must look like - road-stained, half starved and wearing a slave’s tattered garb. A low murmur passes through the Elves on deck at the sight. Elrohir blinks. His eyes feel full of grit. His last proper night’s sleep was weeks ago, before Pellardur. It is all he can do not to sway on his feet. 

“You will find rest and healing here,” Galdor says solemnly. Then, with a smile, he adds, “and as fine a table as we can lay.”  

Then he turns, because behind him, Glorfindel has lighty leapt over the gunwale. To Elrohir’s astonishment, Galdor salutes. “General, welcome once more. Out of great danger you return victorious.” 

General . Elrohir can only stand and stare. He already knows that there is more to Glorfindel than meets the eye, but the surprises just keep piling up. 

Glorfindel smiles, the depth of his relief open in his eyes, and salutes back. “Not entirely out of danger yet, old friend.” 

“Ossë sent us a fair wind.” Galdor's grin is sharp as a knife. “The Corsairs must learn to fly if they mean to catch my swan.” 

Elrohir swallows, his mouth suddenly dry when he understands that leaving dry land has only worsened the danger. Sailing an Elvish ship across Umbarian waters is a perilous proposition: the Corsairs are skilled seafarers, and they rule the waves with an iron fist. Only now does he notice how the Elf-ship is wreathed in darkness. Not a single lantern shines out over the waves to betray their presence. 

Not that these sailors would need lamps, even in the moonless dark -  they are more than human. Galdor calls out in the grey tongue, fair words that flow like the sea-wind, and from all around them the order is answered. 

Elves are everywhere - aloft in the rigging and at work on deck, where slender grey-clad figures have already winched aboard the sloop. Elrohir can feel them the way he feels Glorfindel, the touch of their minds bright and clear, an alien sense of presence that is neither sight nor sound. 

They seem friendly enough - wherever he looks, every young and flawless face bears a smile. One dark-haired woman up in the rigging overhead even gives a wave, grinning from ear to ear as if about to burst into laughter from the sheer delight of seeing him, Corsairs or no. 

Elrohir smiles back, astonished. 

Sails are hoisted in silence, silver-white against the stars, but then they snap and billow in a sudden stiff breeze, and the dark mass that is Umbar begins to fall away into the night. 

Elrohir turns around, his hands white-knuckled on the railing as he holds up his bone-weary body, watching all he knows in the world disappear beyond the horizon. He summons the last dregs of strength for this final, desperate vigil. His head spins, but his eyes dart back and forth. Is that a light, out on the distant waves? The tiny flicker might be nothing - a low-standing star, perhaps, or a simple fishing dhow. Or an Umbarian man-of-war on a ramming course. He squints into the distance, unsure of what he is seeing but desperate to know. 

“Peace, Elrohir!” Elrohir is dazed enough that he startles like a spooked horse when Glorfindel walks up behind him. Glorfindel lays a hand on his shoulder, eyes him for a moment, then gently turns him around and points up into the rigging, to the dark silhouettes high on the main mast. “Galdor has tripled the watch, and nothing escapes a Falathrim lookout.” 

He gives Elrohir a gentle pull towards the aftercastle. “Come. You had enough of the dark. Let us take care of you now.”

Down they go by a white wooden staircase, the railings shaped like wave-crests, into a hallway with doors all inlaid with mother-of-pearl and carved with sea-birds and leaping dolphins. One opens into a lamplit cabin. Glorfindel snicks it closed behind Elrohir, locking them in with the light.

This entire ship smells clean, as if someone just scrubbed down every inch of the woodwork. Judging from the polished shine, that is probably the case. Elrohir stands and looks, his eyes flicking about the room, searching and failing to find what it is that makes it seem so familiar. 

A wing-shaped window set with real glass, now covered with a shutter. In the daytime the white-walled space must be awash in light. Tonight lamps of silver and faceted crystal cast a golden glow. Two chests standing side by side, one carved with gilded flowers, the other with a frieze of galloping horses. A copper wash basin on a stand, engraved dolphins leaping around the edge amidst clean-lined waves. A padded bench lining the wall. Two berths made up with crisp linen and bright woollen blankets. 

He never set foot on this ship before, and yet he recognizes something about this room. He is strangely glad, as for some longed-for but nameless thing glimpsed from afar, but the feeling only sharpens into a bone-deep yearning he cannot name.      

He stands frozen, overcome with strangeness. The cabin is silent save for the sea’s endless sigh and churn beyond the curved wooden wall. 

Glorfindel breaks him out of his own mind. 

“Aha! Ulmo bless our dear Galdor!”  The Elf grins like a lion holding a kill as he hefts a steaming bucket of what appears to be hot water. “No offence, my friend, but you are in dire need of delousing.”

 

Chapter 6: It’s been a long day/Falling asleep on someone

Read Chapter 6: It’s been a long day/Falling asleep on someone

Glorfindel’s fingers have been itching from the day he first laid eyes on the unwashed tangle beneath Elrohir’s Haradi headcover. He could not bring himself to drag Elrohir into one of Pellardur’s shady bathhouses, knowing that every moment in that city of horrors was torment. No amount of grumbling about reckless water-waste will deter him now. 

The ship’s dwindling barrels will not permit an actual bath, but washing Elrohir’s hair will give him some comfort and dignity, and it is something to keep him grounded instead of withdrawing ever deeper into his own mind. 

Glorfindel lifts a crisp linen towel from the generous stack provided, tips some of both hot and cold buckets into the wash basin until the result is pleasant, and pulls up a stool. 

“Sit down”, he says with a flourish, “and tip your head back.” At Elrohir’s look of bewildered concern, he adds, “If we end up dying of thirst, do it without your lice.”

The task is a mighty one indeed, but when Glorfindel’s bar of good Imladrian soap is half gone and the third rinse runs clear, Elrohir’s hair is clean at last. 

The next stage of the proceedings brings more grousing about the merits of a proper haircut, but Glorfindel is merciless. 

“If we cut your hair even shorter,” he replies, his tone stern but with a smile to soften it, “you will look like a convict. Now let me comb it, or this tangle will draw nesting gulls.”

He wields the lice comb first. Thoroughly, but careful not to pull or snag. Elrohir’s hair barely falls down to his earlobes: pitifully short, not even enough for the simplest of braids. He looks like a convict indeed, or a thrall. He was one, not so long ago. Glorfindel recalls Pellardur, and his strokes grow even gentler. 

When he finds no more nits he switches to a soft-bristled brush and works Elrohir’s hair until it gleams smooth as a skein of dark silk. Elrohir sits very still, and lets him. 

Clean clothes are next. Celebrían has sent along a chest for Elrohir, a wardrobe for the journey home. Glorfindel lifts out an undershirt, and stills to admire her work. The lady’s power shimmers in the silken drape of the finest linen the weavers of Imladris can create. The collar and cuffs bear a delicate whitework pattern of beech-leaves, the stitches so fine that even Elvish eyes can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins - hours upon hours of loving labour, words of ward and blessing Sung into the very threads. 

He adds a grey tunic of feather-soft wool, leggings and underclothes, a silver-tooled belt and stout seaman’s boots. 

Elrohir eyes the growing stack with a pinched expression. “Glorfindel …” he begins cautiously, “I have some money, but I cannot afford -”

“These are yours.” Glorfindel quickly cuts off that line of reasoning, and holds out the clothes  for Elrohir to take. “Your mother made them for you. I beg you, do not ever try to pay her. She has sorrows enough as it is.”

Elrohir stands still, his head held at that angle when he is trying to make sense of something that eludes him.

Glorfindel understands, having seen Elrohir’s world with his own eyes. He proffers the clothes once more, and now Elrohir takes them, a pensive look in his eyes. 

Glorfindel turns his back, mindful of his Haradi sense of modesty, and has a quick wash in what remains of the water. Elrohir does not offer to comb him, and Glorfindel does not ask. Elvish manners will come later. 

The Nemir’s cook clearly feels personally offended by Elrohir’s half-starved state. The knock on the door comes a mere moment after Glorfindel brings out the used water, and what is carried in from the galley is a feast to tempt even a fading man: warm raisin-studded bannocks beside a generous pat of butter, a thick, spicy-sweet fish stew and a truly excellent bottle of Gondorian white that must have come from Galdor’s personal stash.

Glorfindel uncovers the serving bowls with his eyes on Elrohir instead of the bounty. Losing Ot has deepened that tell-tale transparency into outright fading, and breathless fear makes Glorfindel forget his own hunger. Elves resigned to Mandos will not eat. What will he do, if Elrohir is so far gone that he sees no more need for sustenance? 

“Would you like some?” he offers with deceptive calm as he lifts the cover from the plate of bannocks. Sweet-scented steam wafts up. 

Estë the Healer, Gentle Lady, have mercy… 

Perhaps Glorfindel’s prayer is heard, or else Elrohir has some lingering memory of Elvish food. He tears off a wedge of bannock, drags it across the chunk of soft butter, and tucks in. 

Glorfindel is dizzy with relief, but then his stomach unknots, and he ladles out two generous bowls of stew. Before this journey he used to wonder at the way mortals tend to relish even the simplest elvish food. Surviving on Haradrim war-rations granted him a deep compassion for the folk who must live their entire lives off such plain fare. 

They sit side by side on the bench, bowls and plates in their laps, and demolish the spread. 

“So,” Elrohir says eventually, between bites of thickly buttered bannock. He looks more solid with a hint of colour to his cheeks. “First you turn out to be an Elf, then a sorcerer, and now a General, too?” 

Glorfindel smiles, immensely relieved at this lighter mood, and refrains from telling him not to talk with his mouth full. He swallows his own mouthful of stew, washes it down with wine, and confirms. “That I am.” 

Elrohir’s eyebrow rises. “You did not think it worth mentioning?”

“You never asked.”

“Indeed.” Elrohir knocks back more wine. “What, exactly, are you general of ?”

Elrohir’s glass is nearly empty, and Glorfindel fills it again unasked. Let him sleep tonight.

“Formerly Lindon’s armed forces,” he says, pouring another ample measure, “currently those of Imladris.”

“They sent their general to Harad?” Elrohir seems genuinely baffled. 

Good . Let him understand that he is no trifle in his own father’s eyes. 

Glorfindel dares to shoot for that smile he has not seen in weeks. “Did you expect them to send their cobbler?” 

“Depends.” Elrohir pauses to shovel another spoonful of stew into his mouth. “Can the cobbler do that trick you did with the wraith?” His face breaks open into a wry grin, and Glorfindel could sing for joy at the sight.

He shakes his head, laughing, but his words are serious. “Few Elves can.”

This is food for thought, it seems, because Elrohir nods, and says nothing. 

He takes another sip of wine, and as Glorfindel looks on, his eyes fall closed and his head tips forward. He had nothing but short, haunted snatches of sleep since before Pellardur. He valiantly rights himself, has another bite of stew, but even as he downs the spoon he slouches sideways until his head rests against Glorfindel’s shoulder, and his breathing grows slow and even. 

Glorfindel smiles. Out like a light. Elrohir never likes to be coddled, but for a moment Glorfindel indulges in the warm weight against his shoulder, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. 

Better not leave him there for too long. He will be indignant.

Glorfindel wakes him with a gentle shake. Elrohir blinks, bleary-eyed, and rises only long enough to drape his tunic and belt over the chest before sliding into his berth. In moments he is fast asleep, sunken into the closed-eyed darkness of exhaustion. 

The sight is a burden off Glorfindel’s shoulders. His own bone-deep tiredness rears up like a drowning wave, and he sways on his feet for a moment. He has not slept in weeks, not since Elrohir’s spirit-sickness grew so bad he had to be spared the night watch. He has guarded Elrond’s son and cared for him, all his power and his will given to bringing him safely through war and death and the worst dregs of mankind’s cruelty. 

Now Elrohir is among his own people and he sleeps - real, restful sleep in a proper bed -  clean, well fed, and as safe as one can be while still in Umbarian waters. 

It is done. 

Suddenly his eyes sting. He swallows, passes a hand over them until his sight no longer blurs. Then he turns the lamps down to a gentle golden twilight, and finds his own bed. 

 

Chapter 7: Night time

Read Chapter 7: Night time

Glorfindel jolts awake in the dark. For a single heartbeat he thinks himself in Umbar still, and dread closes over his heart - where is Elrohir!?

The next, he hears his ward’s quiet breathing and the rush and sigh of the Sea against the ship’s hull. It is the shadowed hour before dawn, and the lamp has burned out, plunging the cabin into darkness. He takes a deep breath, and calms his raging pulse into the steady rhythm of Ulmo’s waves. 

Unease presses against his mind - the

Nemir’s

crew is all astir with restless vigilance. These are dangerous waters. 

Glorfindel can no longer find sleep. The night has not quite shifted to twilight yet when he rises and dresses, his movements smooth and silent in the narrow cabin. He thinks for a moment, then girds on his sword belt. Hadhafang’s familiar weight on his hip is a small comfort.

Elrohir has turned onto his back in the night, his mind sunken into the deep slumber of exhaustion. He lies sprawled, looking young and fragile. His waking gaze holds that world-wary sharpness brought by war and sorrow, but like this, with his eyes closed and his face relaxed into the softness of sleep, he is Elladan’s very image. 

As Glorfindel watches, Elrohir's eyes begin to flick back and forth beneath his eyelids in the restless chaos of dreams. His brow furrows, his breaths quicken, and then he moans, a small, miserable sound. 

Glorfindel is not Elrohir’s father, but Elrond is not here, and so for kindness’ sake he takes a parent’s place and gently touches his own mind to the flickering weave of Elrohir’s. 

Elvish, but not quite. There is something of a Mortal’s elusive, ever-shifting

otherness

, and beneath it all beats an alien rhythm, the inhuman shimmer of Melian’s Maïarin blood. In sleep as in waking, Elrohir is a foreign continent.

Glorfindel can see them, looming on the horizon of Elrohir’s mind: vast, crumbling cities of dark memory, lurking deep in lightless forests. What ghosts of half-remembered horrors dwell there, Glorfindel does not dare imagine. Elrohir avoids them with all his strength. He will have to face them, eventually, and master them lest they devour him. 

Not yet, however, and not alone: Elrond will walk beside him. Elrond, who had dark cities of his own, and razed them to the ground to build Imladris in their place. 

Glorfindel turns away, and plunges into Elrohir’s dream. A faceless shadow haunts the night, ever hunting, closing in. Fire and blood. Screaming. The bile-bitter taste of terror in his mouth. 

With utmost care he unwinds Elrohir from the nightmare’s clutching web, and in its place he sings a song of water falling over stones, the green scent of leaves, that soft grey light of northern skies.  

Sleep. You are safe.

Elrohir sighs, smiles, then turns onto his side and slides deep into dreamless dark. There will be no waking before dawn, and no more shadows. 

In silence, Glorfindel unshutters the window so Elrohir will wake to morning sunlight instead of darkness. Then he slips out the door and closes it behind him. 

He finds Galdor in the great cabin, bent over a gilt-edged chart showing the Bay of Belfalas, its currents drawn in myriad shades of blue. Both Umbar and Gondor are but roughly sketched suggestions, little more than rows of capes, inlets and harbour towns. 

Without a word, Galdor rises and opens one of the cabinets lining the wall. He returns with a crystal flask and two tumblers, into which he pours a finger each of Mithlond’s finest barrel-aged whisky. 

Glorfindel pulls up a chair, and cannot help a sigh of pure delight at the smoky-sweet burn of the first sip. 

“How is Elrohir?” Galdor leans back in his chair. Beneath his eyes sit blue shadows laid down by many nights of vigil. Clearly the

Nemir's

journey here has been no pleasure jaunt.

“As well as he can be, under the circumstances,” Glorfindel replies. He, too, is too tired for embellishment. “Clean, well-fed and sound asleep. My thanks for the food, and the water.”

Galdor nods. “Given gladly, and much needed, it seems. What happened to him?”

Glorfindel hesitates, and takes another fragrant sip to mask it. How much should he reveal? That the Captain of the Ringwraiths survived Sauron’s fall and has joined the war on Umbar’s side is disturbing intelligence indeed, and perhaps Elrond should hear it first.

Galdor drinks slowly, savouring the precious liquor, and gives Glorfindel a canny look over the rim of his glass. “My friend, unless I am very much mistaken, the Black Breath is on that child.” 

Glorfindel releases a long breath. Of course Galdor would know Elrohir’s illness for more than grief alone. The old salt was Círdan’s lieutenant at the Siege of Barad-dûr, and he has seen a few things in his time. 

For a moment they hold each other’s gazes, blue eyes meeting sea-grey ones, until Glorfindel leans back, glass in hand, and decides to open up. After months among strangers, it is a damned relief to find himself deftly freed from the cloak of secrecy by someone he can trust.  

Even so, wooden walls are thin, and he has no desire to alarm the crew even further. Still holding Galdor’s eyes in his he nods, once. 

It is enough. Galdor’s eyes flash with alarm. “What is going on in that Valar-forsaken desert?”

“Darkness and war.” Glorfindel says, and fortifies himself with another swig of Lindon single malt. “I found Elrohir among the Haradrim, fighting a losing battle against a dreadful foe.” He needs not speak the word Ringwraith aloud - Galdor knows them well enough, after the Dagorlad - but even so a shadow seems to pass through the lamplit cabin. “The victory was ours, in the end, but the price was high.”

“A bad wound indeed,” Galdor says, his sorrow clear to see. “The lad is halfway to Mandos.”

Glorfindel sighs. He severed Elrohir from his old life as gently as he might, but it was a cruel kindness nonetheless, and he feels stained by it. “I cared for him as best I could,” he says eventually, “but I am not Elrond. He needs a healer, and his own kin.”

“I have taken the liberty to send messages,” Galdor says, “but I fear there is more trouble to come before anyone can reach us.” 

Glorfindel looks up. “What is the matter?”

Galdor empties his glass, sets it down, and rises. “Come. I will show you.”

Up on the quarterdeck, the light has taken that pale blue of early dawn. The stars wink out one by one. In the east, where beyond the horizon Umbar must loom, the edge of the sea glows red as fire before the coming sunrise. 

“Report?” Galdor asks before they have fully emerged from the stairway.

His first mate, a knife-sharp, sinewy Falathrim by the name of Alphalas, gives her captain a crisp salute. “They are advancing, sir. Tacking against the wind, but they are gaining on us.”

She points, and now Glorfindel sees their peril. A low-standing star, it seems, a pinprick of light against the dark waves. Glorfindel squints, and can make out red sails, marked with the Black Eye. 

“What, exactly, is that ship?” he demands.

“An Umbarian dromond,” Alphalas replies with military efficiency, “and a fast one. Three rows of slave-pulled oars as well as four full-rigged masts for sailing. Under the personal command of the Prince of Pellardur, if the pennants are anything to go by.”  

Ai Elbereth! 

Glorfindel does not flinch. Not out here, with the crew’s eyes on him. “Armament?” he asks instead.

“A steel ram at the stern, Umbarian fire grenades, a boarding bridge, and at least three hundred imperial guardsmen ready to run across.” Alphalas likewise shows no fear as she sums up the grisly list, her hand on the cutlass at her hip. “Better for us if they never catch up, sir.”

Glorfindel can only agree.

“Those Corsairs have hounded us for days.” Galdor says. “We play cat and mouse with them, and I fear the only reason they have not intercepted us yet is that they wish to observe what business an Elf-ship might have in these parts.”

Glorfindel recalls that Elrohir is worth his weight in gold from the imperial coffers, and swears under his breath. The lad never divulged what he did to get such an exorbitant bounty on his head. It would take more than some desert skirmishing. Blinded by his care for Elrohir’s well being, Glorfindel has neglected that particular question. The answer is about to become very relevant indeed. 

“Were you seen taking us aboard?” he demands. 

“They followed as we approached the coast.” Galdor says dryly. “What for, they cannot know. Mortals are nearsighted, and they were anchored far away.”

“Can we take them on, if they attack?” Glorfindel asks in a whisper, his face turned to the sea so the crew cannot overhear.

Galdor’s face hardens, his eyes on the red sail on the horizon. “The

Nemir

is swift,” he says under his breath, “and my crew knows how to swing a cutlass, but we shall be outnumbered.” His gaze catches Glorfindel’s, a harsh little smile on his lips. “That, and they have oars while we can only sail. If the wind fails, we are sitting ducks.” 

The captain turns his back on their enemy to face the West, and bows with that superstitious reverence of sailors the world over. At once, Alphalas and every last soul on deck do the same. Glorfindel follows suit. 

When Galdor straightens, his expression is grave in the red sunrise. “All now depends on Ossë’s good will.”

Chapter 8: Hugs/”You better start talking”

Read Chapter 8: Hugs/”You better start talking”

Elrohir wakes to singing. 

Elf-song from up on deck washes around the cabin, mingling with the rush and sigh of the Sea’s waves. He cannot make sense of the words, but the music stirs the tattered remains of half-forgotten memories, and for a moment of what seems like madness he is sick with longing for some elusive thing he cannot name. It is a sweet, aching kind of yearning. Tears spring to his eyes, but he swallows them down. 

A good thing that he is alone. Glorfindel must have risen hours ago, judging by his neatly made berth. He did open the shutter before he left, and the wing-shaped porthole has the cabin awash in daylight. Elrohir sits up, rubs his eyes with his sleeve, and tries to make sense of this place. 

The room is narrow and compact, but intricate as a jewellery box. Walls of foam-white wood flowing in sleek, wave-like lines with carved dolphins leaping among the breakers. Elves have a taste for beauty, it seems. He eyes Glorfindel’s sea chest, bedecked in gilded flowers. Skillful work, and very rich, but perhaps a bit over the top. 

The one that is supposed to be his is more restrained: honey-coloured, lacquered wood with a frieze of entirely life-like horses in gallop, their long mane streaming in an unseen wind. He runs his fingers along the proud arc of a leaping stallion’s neck. 

Horses are Elrohir’s namesake, Glorfindel was quick to tell him almost as soon as they met. Elrohir has never owned one - not hardy enough for the desert - but he likes them. Even so, he does not open the chest: it feels like pawing through another man's belongings. That, and there is no telling what memories might lie buried there. 

The Elvish tunic still lies draped over the lid. He has never felt anything like this strange cloth: soft as the finest Khandian silk, but far sturdier and warm against the sea wind. When he pulls it over his head the sweet scent of the northern herbs it was packed with draws him into hazy memory once more. 

To keep from sinking into it he turns to the window, and staggers. Outside lies an alien world. A ceiling of scattered cloud above a shifting surface of silver waves. Without a fixed point of reference Elrohir cannot not tell whether the ship is moving, or how fast. For a terrifying moment he wonders if he would see the looming shape of Umbar’s desert hills, if the porthole looked east. 

“We are eighty miles from Umbar,” says a voice behind his left shoulder. 

Elrohir whips around, a hand on the dagger in his sleeve, but he releases it at once.

Glorfindel seems unaware of how uncannily silent he can be. Even holding a tray full of bowls and cups, the Elf has somehow opened the door without Elrohir noticing, and is now standing in the middle of the cabin.

“Good morning!” Glorfindel says with a sunny smile, politely pretending not to have noticed the dagger. “You look much better than yesterday. How are you feeling?” 

Glorfindel sets down the tray atop his sea chest, and Elrohir’s stomach awakens with a growl at the sight of honey-drizzled flatbread. The smell is warm-golden and full of a faded sweetness he knows, but cannot place. 

“I am well.” Elrohir is amazed to realise that today, his rote answer is the truth. He had his first decent night’s sleep in months, and it is a damned relief. 

Outside, on deck, the Elves are still singing. Bright and merry the song plays back-and-forth with the wind and waves, and for a moment his heart leaps.

Then his eyes meet Glorfindel’s, and he knows .

He has grown better at this Elvish way of seeing behind people’s eyes. Beneath Glorfindel’s cheerful manner lies something else entirely. 

Elrohir stands up straight, bread and song forgotten. “Say it.” 

Glorfindel takes a deep breath. His gaze holds something like regret as he lifts a steaming carafe off the tray with steady hands. “When we step on deck,” he says as he fills two cups with hot spiced wine, “you will see the Umbarian navy giving chase.” 

 

----

 

The words land like a gut punch. The blood drains from Elrohir’s face as what small sense of safety Glorfindel built for him crumbles like ill-fired clay. 

Glorfindel’s heart hurts at the sight. “Ours is the faster ship, and we need to outrun them only until we reach Gondorian waters.” he tries his best to sound confident. “We have a few tricks up our sleeve. Do not despair, Elrohir.” He offers him the wine. “We came through tighter spots, you and I.”

Elrohir’s eyes are wide and wild. “Who?” he demands, ignoring the drink. 

Glorfindel does not understand, at first. 

“Who is chasing us?” Elrohir insists. “What colours are on that ship?”

There is the shape of this sorry tale, half suspected like a sea monster lurking beneath the waves, and Glorfindel must drag it up. “The Prince of Pellardur,” he says, watching Elrohir’s eyes.

Elrohir’s mind is closed as a besieged fortress, but he swears under his breath.

“We do not know if he knows that you are aboard. He might be chasing us simply because we are Elves.” 

Elrohir nods a little too quickly. Sheer terror bleeds past his guard.

“But then, he might know.” Glorfindel adds, looking straight into Elrohir’s eyes. “Will you not tell me why you have the price of half a fleet set on your head?”

Elrohir cannot hold Glorfindel’s gaze. Silence falls, and Glorfindel lets it deepen between them. 

On deck, the Nemir’s crew is singing as they hoist the sails. Their merry sea-shanty seems a mockery as it drifts down into the cabin. 

Foam is white and waves are grey; beyond the sunset leads my way.

Beneath his feet Glorfindel can feel the ship leap into her long flight as the wind catches the sails. The chase has begun.

“I killed someone,” Elrohir says at last, his eyes on the floorboards. He speaks Haradi, as if he fears being overheard.

‘Someone’ is a definite understatement. Glorfindel has seen Elrohir kill scores of men with the seasoned indifference of a professional soldier. 

“Someone important, you mean,” he says, switching to Haradi as well.  

More silence. 

Shadows long before me lie, beneath the ever-bending sky, Galdor’s people chant on deck. 

“Important indeed.” The fight has gone out of Elrohir, and he folds himself down on the farthest corner of the bench, as far from Glorfindel as he can go in the narrow cabin. “Can we not leave it at that?”

“Elrohir…” Glorfindel pleads, “trust me, I beg you. Nothing you say to me now could turn me against you. Nothing. All I ask is that you tell me the nature of your predicament, so I may solve it. As things stand, your enemies possess knowledge that your friends do not. Take away their advantage.”

Elrohir hangs his head, rubs his hands across his face, and for a moment Glorfindel fears that he will refuse. Then he sits up straight, pale but dry-eyed, his father’s very image, and says, “I killed the Emperor of Umbar. The previous one, that is. Our prince’s father.”

Stars above! Glorfindel somehow manages to keep his dismay off his face. “When?” he asks, because surely this is not possible.

“Twenty years ago.” Elrohir‘s voice has gone rough.

“You were so young ...” Glorfindel tries to imagine under what circumstances such a thing might have come to pass, and draws a blank. “How?”

“Please-” Elrohir falls silent, swallows. “Do not make me speak of it. Is this not enough?” Behind his eyes looms a shadowed city, ghosts howling in the empty halls. 

Glorfindel does not have the heart to make Elrohir tread those paths. Not now. Let Elrond go with him into the darkness, when he is safe in Imladris. 

“It is enough.” Glorfindel says, glad he can afford at least this small mercy. “Do not be afraid. I made you a promise, and I stand by it. They will not get you.”

Elrohir does not answer. Glorfindel has seen him ride into battle without flinching, but this conversation has him at his breaking point. He is death-pale and his eyes stare through the floorboards at something beyond the waking world. He has begun to fade once more, the threads binding his spirit to his body worn gossamer-thin. 

Glorfindel cannot bear to see him suffer. He sets down the cup, hesitating for a moment. And then he crosses the width of the cabin, sinks down on the bench beside him, and takes him into his arms.

“They will not get you,” Glorfindel murmurs it against Elrohir’s hair, again and again. “They will not get you.”

A refrain and a promise, until Elrohir lets out a shuddering breath, closes his eyes, and lays his head against Glorfindel’s shoulder. 

Chapter 9: Comfort Item

Read Chapter 9: Comfort Item

“Redhron made this especially for you. A fine cook, but a temper like a dragon.” Glorfindel breaks off some of the honeyed flatbread, and presses it into Elrohir’s hands. “You will answer to him if you send it back untouched.” 

Glorfindel looks stern, but his eyes still hold mirth - a hollow threat then, merely a new tactic in his ceaseless struggle to get food into Elrohir. 

The Elvish bread smells delightful, but where Elrohir’s stomach used to sit a tangle of raw nerves writhes all the way up his throat. “This will keep until tonight.”

“Tonight you will have a hot meal.” Glorfindel sets a cup of wine down on the chest before Elohir with a soft click. Sweet-scented steam wafts up. “Elrohir …” he is openly pleading. “The Nemir is well-supplied, and you look so gaunt. Let us put some flesh on your ribs before Elladan takes fright at the sight of you.” 

A low blow, but it hits home. And so Elrohir forces down the wine and some bread. It really is very good, and after a few bites his stomach settles. He manages half the loaf, in the end.

Glorfindel’s relief is palpable. “Come now!” he says, rising. “Time to meet our shipmates!”

“Wait,” Elrohir says, and turns to his saddlebags, lying in a messy heap in the corner. 

He tamps down the sharp sting of grief -- where is Ot now? -- and digs for his scimitar. He unwraps the sheath from his stained and battered sword belt and girds it over the silver-studded Elvish one so the sword hangs on his hip in easy reach. The weapon’s familiar weight is a small solace. He has a knife in his sleeve, but now he takes out a second one and slips it into his boot.

Glorfindel watches these proceedings with something like sadness. “You need no weapons.”

At that, Elrohir raises an eyebrow. “Do I not, with Umbar in hot pursuit?”

Glorfindel does not answer, but steps closer, and tugs the collar of Elrohir’s undershirt until it sits flat and even underneath the tunic. “There. A proper Lindon seaman.” 

Up on deck, the open ocean is an ever-shifting dune-sea of azure and indigo, strewn with diamonds where the morning sun sparkles off the wave-crests and the Nemir’s foam-white wake. 

Elrohir breathes deeply, filling his lungs with the strange scents of salt and spray.  A desert indeed, and the Nemir a tiny swell-tossed haven amidst the vast and lifeless beauty of waves and clouds. 

High overhead snowy gulls and gold-dusted gannets perch on the ship’s yardarms. They dive from the yards into the water and dart up once more with writhing silver in their beaks. Elrohir leans his back against the railing and tips his head back to watch them flit between the white expanses of the sails. Even higher up, at the dizzying top of the main mast, flies a bright pennant, a white swan-ship sailing waves of blue. 

The ship is a hive of bustle and toil. Glorfindel leads him past clusters of Elves in shirtsleeves, busy painting, caulking or scrubbing the already spotless deck. Others are preparing for battle. They pass a weaponsmith bent over his grindstone, drawing across one sleek Elvish blade after another until the edges gleam keen and hungry in the sun. A circle of fletchers are sat on the deck. Their hands are a blur to the rhythm of their song, bundles of white-fletched arrows stacked all around them. 

Elrohir means to greet them but the smile withers on his face. Out there, where sea and sky meet, a red sail looms. Umbar is coming. 

Fear leaps snarling at his throat. He rushes to the railing to watch white-knuckled how the Black Eye billows in the stiff east wind. 

“Come,” Glorfindel will not let him linger there. A firm hand steers him away and up to the quarterdeck.

“Ah, Elrohir. A sight for sore eyes!” Galdor’s smile is wide and bright as he puts a fatherly arm around Elrohir’s shoulders. “Look, Alphalas! His mother’s image!” 

“I beg to differ, sir.” On Alphalas’ forearms a pair of tattooed birds swoop up into her rolled-up sleeves. The strange little creatures - bright cobalt blue and topaz - flit about in constant motion as she underlines her words with bird-quick gestures. 

She lays a sun-tanned hand against Elrohir’s cheek - not unkindly - and turns his face this way and that. “Fatten him up a bit, and he could pass for Elrond!” 

The first mate has mirth in her eyes as she exchanges wit with her captain. Galdor may run a tight ship, but it seems a happy one, too, and at these Elves’ pure and honest joy Elrohir cannot help but smile back. 

As it turns out, both Elrohir’s parents have served on the Nemir , or perhaps the ship Galdor commanded before this one. Galdor and Alphalas manage to amicably quibble about the details, but the pair of them wholly agree that Elrohir should head to Lindon for a navy stint as soon as his parents will let him. He receives this Elvish career advice with a polite bow, because what should he say?

The morning gets even more confusing when they step off the quarterdeck to meet the crew. Glorfindel takes Elrohir the length and breadth of the ship, a deluge of introductions. 

Complete strangers embrace him with tears in their eyes, gushing that he is this or that relative’s very image. A laughing sailmaker takes him below deck through one of the great grates, into a white-timbered hold to show him where his mother’s hammock used to hang when she was the bosun. Several people hike up their shirts to show him the scars of wounds his father once healed. 

All manner of gifts are pressed into his hands, so many that he has to stuff his pockets to bulging to hold them all, and then Glorfindel’s pockets, too. A bewildering collection of leaf-wrapped hard candy, seagulls carved of ivory, a vicious-looking metal implement - “here, lad, a marlinspike of your own!”, a silk scarf in strangely shifting, opalescent colours, and a grey hood apparently made of “good Lindon fleece, keeps those ears warm!” 

Glorfindel laughs his golden laugh as he keeps steering Elrohir up and down ladders and into the various holds. Elrohir thanks and greets and smiles until his cheeks hurt.

Without a doubt Glorfindel is in cahoots with the Nemir’s dragon-tempered cook, because he times their visit to the galley precisely at noon. The fearsome Redhron turns out to be a rotund fellow with a dimpled smile, sole ruler of his narrow, sweltering realm dominated by a black iron stove. He seems quite jovial, but he just happens to have an improbable serving of fried fish left, and isn’t Elrohir just the man to keep it from going to waste?  

He is belching a little behind his hand as they climb the ladder back to the main deck. Once he finds his feet again, a silver-haired Falathrim drops her rope-splicing work and rises from her seat upon a coil of cable. 

Elrohir is no judge of Elves, but even he can tell that this one is ancient. Her braid is white as ivory against her sun-tanned skin, and that fair face would look neither old nor young on a Mortal woman. Her eyes are a strange pale blue, and the eerie depth of her gaze leaves no doubt that here stands the oldest being on this ship. 

By way of greeting she takes Elrohir’s hand and lays in his palm a pendant on a string of grey Elvish rope. 

He holds the thing up to look at it. Green, gold-flecked jade, the size of his knuckle. Like all Elf-made things it is fair, but the shape is strange. A perfectly formed octopus with each curling arm sculpted down to the suckers, an unfathomable expression in its obsidian eyes. 

“This is a holy amulet,” the Elf-woman says in Andûnaic, barely understandable through her heavy Sindarin accent. “Wear it.”

“Why is it holy?” 

“In your tongue He is called Ossë. He can be kind, and then we of the Falas call Him Yssion, the Foam-lord, and show Him in the shape of a gull. But He has another face: Gaerys the Dreaded, Eight-armed Stirrer of Storms.”

At once Elrohir’s nose burns with temple-scent - incense and scorched skin. The jade grows heavy in his palm, and he battles a wild impulse to throw it overboard. “What sacrifices does the Stirrer command?” he asks, dread heavy on his heart. 

The old seawoman only stares in confusion, but Glorfindel understands well enough, and steps in at once. “We give the Lord Ossë our Song. He wants nothing more.”

Oh. Elrohir fumbles to salvage the conversation, “I thank you for this gift, mistress…”

“Falver.” At his look of expectation - Elves go by two names, he knows by now - she adds, “I cannot give you my mother’s name, for I have none. I awoke when the first Elvish voice Sang by the waters of Cuiviénen.”  

Elrohir bows deep and long. “Well met, Falver the Motherless.”

She bows back, and insists on slipping the string around Elrohir’s neck. She shortens it until the pendant hangs over his breastbone. Then her tanned face opens into a grin, and she hooks a finger behind his collar, deftly dropping in the stone so the cool jade comes to rest against his skin. 

“His good will be upon you, Son of Celebrían,” she says, and returns to her ropes. 

Chapter 10: “Why did you save me?”

Read Chapter 10: “Why did you save me?”

“This one is called a sextant,” Galdor explains, not without a hint of pride. The instrument glitters in the midday sun, a clean-lined, gem-set masterpiece of Falathrim craftsmanship. “It has a double mirror, see? The arc here measures the angle between any celestial object - the sun by day, or the pole star by night - and the horizon.” 

Elrohir nods along, rapt. His eyes have not left the sextant since Galdor began his lecture. Elrohir was a master at navigating the desert by the stars, and now the arcane art of determining a vessel’s position out on the open sea has him spellbound enough to drive the pursuing Corsairs from his mind. 

Galdor knows it, judging by his smile as he holds the sextant up for Elrohir so he can look into the eyepiece. Galdor, too, seems to be enjoying himself. Elves delight in children, and it has been long indeed since the Nemir’s battle-hardened captain last had one to teach. 

Glorfindel leans against the mizzenmast to watch the impromptu lesson unfold, and allows himself to relax. He can almost imagine that they are sailing Lindon’s friendly waters, that it is high summer and they are taking Elrohir out on a pleasant practice jaunt across the Gulf of Lune. Almost. 

“Now we release this clamp here,” Galdor lectures his eager student, “and shift the arc until the sun is at the horizon. Go ahead, turn the screw, you could not break it if you tried. There, you did it!” He is all but cheering. “We call this ‘shooting the sun.' With this angle and the precise time when it was measured, we calculate a position line on the chart. This gives us our current latitude.”

The chart in question lies open on the table, held by weights of wave-green sea glass. 

“So we are somewhere along this line?” Elrohir runs his finger along one of  the gilded meridians. 

“Indeed!” Galdor nods with a smile. “Now for the longitude, we need to measure the lunar distance. I will show you tonight! What we do is -”

Elrohir’s head jerks up. He has gone pale, his mind closed tight, but Glorfindel can almost see the cold shiver running down his back.  

The Umbarian ship has stalked closer, all her red sails billowing. Her oars, three stacked rows of them, are stroking back and forth like the wriggling insectoid legs of a millipede. Atop the main mast flies the black serpent on a field of scarlet. 

The very day seems to darken, and when Glorfindel looks west he sees storm clouds massing, grey and stern as moving mountains. 

“Look here, lad,” Galdor tries to draw Elrohir’s gaze away from the Umbarian. 

Elrohir will have none of it. He turns to the railing to watch white-knuckled how their enemies gain ground. “You are in great danger, all on my account,” he says, to no one in particular. “Why are you so kind to me?”

Galdor comes to stand beside him, his arms folded, almost relaxed. “We would be kind to anyone your age,” he says. “Elves delight in children.”

“Sir,” Elrohir turns to Galdor with the resigned look of a man facing the executioner. “With your permission-” he waits, eyes on the pearl-set insignia on Galdor’s tunic. Whatever else he may be, Elrohir is a soldier born and bred.

Galdor nods his permission. 

Elrohir’s eyes flick over to the Black Eye billowing on the Corsair’s sails, blood-red against the darkening sky. “Enough delight to take on the Umbarian navy?”

“Enough indeed, and plenty to spare.” Galdor’s grin bares his teeth. Glorfindel has seen that look before, in Mordor. Galdor can be a sly tactician, but when things come down to courage and cold steel, the man is a lion. 

“Sir …” Elrohir is baffled, but he quickly rights himself and points over the railing, “that is the Prince of Pellardur commanding an imperial trireme. You are outnumbered. Badly outnumbered.”

“I am aware.” Galdor stands up straight, his shoulders relaxed, one hand on the pommel of the cutlass at his hip.

Elrohir stares at him wide-eyed. Glorfindel cannot help but smile as he watches Elrohir’s shaky opinion of Elvenkind make a stellar leap. For this conversation alone, Elrond owes Galdor a cask of something rare and delicious from his private cellar, and Glorfindel will tell him so.

“He may be after me, personally.” Elrohir swallows, cannot look Galdor in the eye. “There is a  …  a prize on my head. Not a small one.”

Galdor nods. “So I have been informed,” he says, voice gentle and even. Glorfindel asked him not to pry, and instead Galdor points a thumb at the Umbarian over his shoulder without looking back, casually as if the great warship is a mildly interesting passer-by in the street. “Your old friend there will have a hard time collecting it.”

Had any of this been less desperate and dangerous, Glorfindel would have laughed out loud at Elrohir’s look of absolute bafflement. 

“Do you not understand!?” he exclaims. “He will not stop until he has my head stuck on his bowsprit, and yours behind it!”

“I know what he wants,” Galdor says, calm as a stone.

“Are all of your people this eager to die on my account?” Elrohir asks in a soft whisper, his back to the crew. Fear stands open in his eyes. 

“My crew are volunteers.” Galdor replies out loud, without a trace of doubt. “Old hands who knew what they signed up for. We have faced the Corsairs before, and we shall defeat them again.” 

Galdor lays a hand on Elrohir’s shoulder, then gently turns him to look him in the eye. “ You are why they are risking their lives. If I hand you over to Sauron’s errand-boy there, this entire mission was in vain.”

“What am I to you!?” Elrohir demands. “Why would you do this?”

“Because it is the right thing to do,” Galdor says. “You may be a son of a great House, but if Mithlond’s humblest deckhand stood in your place I would not surrender him.” Galdor’s hand remains on Elrohir’s shoulder, as if anchoring him to the Nemir’s deck. “Today is but one battle in a long war. An ancient war you know little of, though it has touched you deeply indeed. It will be another age of the world, perhaps, but one day our saving you, and saving your House the loss of you, will turn the tide.”

Glorfindel knows Galdor’s words for truth, and foresight. They will have battle indeed - the very sky looks wrathful: roiling castles of towering clouds now cover the sinking sun. The light has turned that strange, pale yellow before a storm. 

“Thank you, Galdor of Mithlond” Elrohir says, and bows deeply. “I will never forget this.”

Chapter 11: Defiance

Read Chapter 11: Defiance

“We must only outrun the bastards until the storm hits!” Galdor somehow summons a smile whenever he is in Elrohir’s view. “Alphalas! Hoist your hammock if you have to, old girl, but keep us ahead!”

“Yes, sir!” Alphalas calls out a stream of orders, answered by a chorus of ‘ayes’ echoing from up aloft. 

In mere moments, like a bud unfolding into a flower, all of the

Nemir’s

sails burst into full bloom. Stretched taut by the wind, they stand white and bright against a sky of slate-blue thunderheads. The wind picks up with a howl, and the

Nemir

leaps forward with a worrying creak. Galdor and Alphalas are flogging their ship for all she is worth. 

Elrohir stands with his back to the mizzenmast, the frantic bustle of the deck streaming around him, and lays back his head to watch the snow-white canvas snap and billow. He would have enjoyed it, perhaps, this delirium of flying foam and tearing speed, a wild delight like camel-racing or a joyous dance, had the cause not been such terror. 

Alphalas catches the thought when she appears beside him. “She is fast, isn’t she? When we reach Lindon we shall unfold every sail, and laugh with Ossë as we bring you home.”

Clearly the first mate is trying to cheer him up. Elrohir summons a wooden smile and an accented thank-you in the Elvish tongue. He has no desire to remind this poor woman that her odds of seeing her northern home again dwindle by the second. 

Length by torturously slow length, the Umbarians are closing in. Their figurehead looms ever larger, a snarling viper with empty obsidian eyes, the Eye of Sauron on its forehead. Elrohir can hear them now, the beat of the slavemaster’s drum marking the swish of the great dromund’s oars and the rhythm of their warsong. 

The Song he knows from other battles, an old terror with claws sunk into his very bones. It is a fell, fierce chant of fire and darkness, potent with the Singer’s dark power. The Prince of Pellardur is of the purest Numenorean blood. A true-hearted Kingsman, loyal to the old faith of Mûlkher, and he has learned well the dark arts of his House.  

The Elves Sing, too. Elrohir has heard them before, sweet and wistful and full of love for sky and sea and all that is in it. Today, matched to the howls of the swelling storm, their Song remains beautiful, but in the way of a well-forged blade glinting with a deadly light. There is something of Glorfindel’s white fire in it, and with a shudder he realises that these people are perilous indeed. Fell and fair, and absolutely lethal.

Between Elves and Umbarians, Elrohir can do naught but be dragged like a piece of luggage, and watch as they decide his fate. 

Alphalas senses that thought, too. “No use standing around here, lad. Come with me. I have something for you.” She leads him away from the railing, towards one of the great grates and its ladder that leads down into the hold. 

Glorfindel’s eyes flick over from his hushed talk with Galdor, but he does not follow. In Umbar, Elrohir could not take a single step without Glorfindel hovering at his shoulder. Glorfindel would guard him like a broody hen her chick, always worried and watchful for knives in the dark. Not here. Glorfindel trusts these Elves blindly.

Alphalas leads Elrohir deep into the hold, to the armoury. He almost  falls down the ladder, wobbling to find his balance as the wave-tossed ship rolls and pitches. Once he finds his feet and looks around, he cannot help his wide-eyed stare. Rows of racks holding swords and bows, shields and javelins, hauberks of Elvish mail, one glittering waterfall of blue steel after another, enough to armour every last soul aboard. He has never seen such riches. 

The mail glitters in the angled patchwork of light that filters down through the grate overhead. Each hauberk on its stand is topped with a helm, the slender cheek guards more like sculpture than something to be taken into battle and bludgeoned. 

“Where does all this come from?”

Alphalas shrugs. “Standard navy issue. We will lend you a spare one. A little large on you, but we can hold it up with a good belt.”  

A spare one, she says.

All this, and then more to spare. It boggles the mind.

Alphalas lays out a gambeson, thick layers of linen stuffed with horsehair. While Elrohir pulls it over his head and tightens the laces, she lifts the hindmost hauberk off its rack, the mail’s ringlets singing silver-like as it swings from her hand.

Elrohir swallows as the reality of the battle ahead closes in. 

To distract himself, he looks at the Elf-woman before him. Her wiry arms hold inhuman strength, because she lifts the heavy hauberk one-handed, like a linen shirt, while with her other hand she picks the topmost arming cap off a stack and holds it out to him.

The tanned skin of her forearms is that bleached brown of driftwood. Two tiny tattooed birds whirl across, swooping up into her rolled-up sleeves. Drawn with a master’s hand, they are lifelike enough to almost flit up and wing away into the open air. The little creatures are strange nonetheless - bright jade-green, cobalt blue and topaz with a metallic sheen to their inked feathers. 

“What do they mean, your coloured birds?” Elrohir blurts out as he takes the cap, already embarrassed at his own nosiness. “Something from a dream?”

Alphalas is not offended, because she smiles as she straightens the mail coif. “Not a dream. They are real hummingbirds from Valinor.” 

For a moment, the Elvish name boggles Elrohir. “Valinor … Amatthâni?” he mutters the name in Adûnaic, not out loud, because surely this Elvish sea-woman means some real place overseas he has not heard of. 

“Yes!” Alphalas smiles broadly as she helps him pull the mail over his head. “Amatthâni, in Númenórean. Lindon’s mariners ink a hummingbird in remembrance of a journey to Valinor.”

Elrohir settles the mail’s weight on his shoulders as he digs for polite words. “Valinor is a children’s tale,” he says eventually, his tone measured.

Alphalas has her back turned to him as she searches through a chest, lifting up one silver-tooled swordbelt after another and comparing their lengths. “As real as you and I,” she says simply.

Elrohir watches the braided cable of her dark hair swish behind her as she moves. Is she lying, or merely joking at his expense? It seems nothing like her, if he is any judge of Elvish character. 

“The tale tells that none who enter Valinor may return. How come they let you go?” 

Alphalas turns around, holding up a stout leather belt with a motive of silver kelp swirling along the length. The collar of her shirt sits open, and now Elrohir notes the Stirrer’s amulet hanging around her neck. 

“The Grey Ships of the Havens carry passengers to Avallónë,” she says, offering him the belt. “The crews may return to Middle-earth if we do not set foot upon the quays.”  

Elrohir is too stunned to take it from her hands. “Have you ever

seen

a Vala?” he demands, his own jade octopus suddenly heavy against his skin.

“No,” Alphalas smiles, “but I have met Maïar in many shapes.” 

When Elrohir stills, too stunned to take the belt from her hands, she simply bends forward to loop it around his waist herself. 

“What are they like?” he blurts out, standing there like an idiot as Alphalas dresses him for war. She does it with the measured skill of long experience, using the belt to divide the hauberk’s weight between Elrohir’s hips and his shoulders so he can move lightly. 

As she works, she thinks for a moment, but then the words come to her. “Bright,” she says decidedly. “Brighter than anything in Middle-earth. More real, perhaps. Certainly not less.” She straightens, her work done, and her gaze as she inspects his armour is sharp. “The Men of Harad have strayed from wisdom, if they believe that the Lords of the West are not real.”

“Why should we think otherwise?” Elrohir retorts, because he will hear no ill spoken of his people. “We have seen only Sauron, and none to oppose him.”

Her eyebrow lifts, and Elrohir belatedly realises that, to him, the Haradrim are no longer ‘we’. He manages to keep the bitter stab of grief off his face.  

“Sauron does not rule the world,” Alphalas replies as she passes him a helmet. Her gaze is bright, birdlike. She sees his pain and she cares, but there is no pity. 

Elrohir is grateful. He has been coddled enough. He puts the helm on his head, looking her in the eye past the Elvish face guard. “Sure looked like it, from where I was standing.” 

“Then look again,” she says, with a smile sharp as a whetted blade. “We shall prove it.”

 

----

 

“Beat to quarters!” 

At Galdor’s word, drums roar from the quarterdeck and the crew leaps into smooth, well-trained action. 

In mere moments, the

Nemir

is battle-ready. Glorfindel has done his share of troop inspections, and he can only approve of Galdor’s captaincy. All hands stand ready, armed and armoured. The decks are cleared and sanded, all flammable objects stowed in the hold. Archers leap up the ratlines, quick as squirrels to their positions high in the rigging, where they can rain down death upon the Umbarian decks. 

Elrohir has turned to the railing, his eyes on the approaching warship. Ice-cold hate burns in his eyes. Here stands a fighter. Battered and battle-weary, but ready to do whatever it takes. He knows well indeed that the Umbarians are merciless.

Glorfindel draws him aside, unpleasantly reminded of the last time they stood together like this before a battle. “You do not have to do this,” he says, in Haradi. “Stay below deck. This time, I will fight in your stead.”

“No!” In the darkening gloom before the storm, the light in Elrohir’s eyes is inhuman, ferocious. “I will not sit in my room while the crew get slaughtered!” Here stands no mere Elf, but something more, bearing an eldritch strand of Melian’s blood. 

Glorfindel no longer doubts that Elrohir did kill the Emperor of Umbar, and for a moment he is glad that the Peredhel is not his enemy. 

Even so, he is young, and so terribly wounded. Glorfindel’s task is to look out for him. “Elrohir… You have suffered enough. You do not have to do this.”

Elrohir shakes his head, frantic. “You will need all the help you can get! I have more experience killing Umbarians than all you Northlings put together.” 

No point in arguing with that. Elrond’s son is just like his father, the man who laid siege to the Black Tower. Wild, star-eyed, unstoppable like the Sea itself. 

“Last time I had to drag you away half dead.” Glorfindel can but try.

Elrohir does not flinch. “This time, there is no Mûmak.”

Chapter 12: Manhandled/Better me than you

Read Chapter 12: Manhandled/Better me than you

And then the Umbarians come close enough to hail. The sky of scudding storm clouds is almost black overhead, plunging both ships into a strange half-light in which the Umbarian torches throw circles of flickering, blood-red brightness. 

Lightning crackles overhead, and the mastheads and yardarms flicker with an eerie glow. ‘Ossë’s fire,’ the Elves mutter, and touch their amulets.

A long rolling of great drums booms like thunder in the mountains, and then a braying of horns that stuns the ears. 

“Elf-ship!” The Prince of Pellardur speaks the formal Adûnaic of Umbar’s imperial court, and the mere sound chases a cold chill of fear down Elrohir’s spine. “We are the Shakalzôr . Stand down to be boarded, in the holy name of Mûlkher and the Emperor, in whose waters you trespass!”

Elrohir’s teeth hurt, he is clenching his jaw so hard. Beside him Glorfindel moves a little closer until their armoured shoulders touch. 

Galdor seems wholly unafraid as he laughs into his loudhailer. “We are the Nemir of Lindon,” even now, there is pride in that fair Elvish voice, “and we will hack off any Umbarian foot that steps on our deck!”

“You harbour a brigand, a criminal fleeing his just punishment.” The Corsair’s face is barely visible beneath his high helmet, but he seems wholly unimpressed. “Are you willing to die for him?”

Elrohir swallows. His blood beats in his ears, loud as an Umbarian war drum. For a moment, Glorfindel’s gauntleted hand closes around Elrohir’s. His mind’s touch does the same, gentling the terror that draws over Elrohir’s heart.

“You are mistaken, Umbarian,” Galdor replies with calm surety. “There are no brigands on my ship.” 

“You lying cur!” The Umbarian bellows. “Is Glorfindel the Elf not aboard?” 

Elrohir gasps, straightens himself, then dares a glance aside at Glorfindel, but the Elf remains still, looking across to the enemy, his expression hidden behind the face guard of his Elvish helm. 

“Glorfindel slew my brother, the great General Arnûzir, at the Pass of Horns. Surrender him, and go free. Deny him to us, and we will destroy you!”

In the silence that follows Galdor and his officers cluster on the quarterdeck, their fair faces tense. 

“Valar!” Galdor is the first to find his voice. His eyes dart from Glorfindel to Elrohir. “Did you two down a prince each!?”

“Elrohir’s was an emperor.” Glorfindel’s dry wit has not left him, it seems. “Don’t get any ideas, lad,” he slaps Elrohir’s shoulder with a grin, “I got a Balrog once.”

Elrohir gives him a blank stare. “A what ?”

Galdor raises an eyebrow at Glorfindel. “A dead prince might have been worth a mention. And how do they know you are here?”

With a terrible lurch of his stomach, Elrohir realises Galdor is right. At the Pass of Horns the Haradrim slaughtered an entire Umbarian army, without survivors. How, then, did Glorfindel’s name reach Pellardur?

“Valar, no!” Glorfindel gasps, and grows pale, and Galdor with him.

Elrohir stands frozen, watching the pair of them share some terrible epiphany. It is but a moment before they gather themselves. 

“Challenge him!” Glorfindel says to Galdor, his voice tense.  “See how he responds.”

Galdor raises his loudhailer to his mouth once more. “Are the Umbarians so afraid of battle that they fall to haggling instead? Why should we hand over one of our own?”

The Umbarian laughs, a dreadful sound. “Ah, we know well the lying nature of the White-fiends! Conspiring with the traitorous Elf-friends, hatching plots and mischief! But this time you have stuck out your noses too far! See what comes to him who sets his foolish webs before the feet of the Emperor of Umbar!” 

He snaps his fingers at his attendants, and from one of the great iron grates leading down into the Shakalzôr’s bowels a pair of soldiers emerges, dragging between them a long bundle swathed in a ragged cloak. When they heave it up the ladder between them it utters a small, pitiful moan.

A mutter goes up among the Elves. 

The guards drag their load into the circle of torchlight beside the prince. For a moment the Umbarian stands still, his eyes on the Elves, relishing their fear. Then he yanks away the cloak. 

Underneath is a man, or what remains of one after an Umbarian interrogation. He is naked, and there is barely a patch of skin that has not been whipped, branded or bruised. The face is an unrecognisable mass of swelling, nose broken, eyes swollen shut. The hands are useless lumps of flesh, nails pulled out, bones shattered over and over. Even so, miraculously, he lives. He writhes and moans, blindly turning his face towards the Elvish voices. 

The ears are pointed. 

“Calear!” Cries of grief and anger rise from amidst the crew. The rage in Galdor’s face is terrifying.

Elrohir has no idea how anyone would recognize even their own brother in such a state, but then he feels it - the captive Elf’s mind against his own, all veils torn away by the pain, a raging storm of suffering. 

The Elvish spy from Pellardur. 

Alphalas, who stood behind Galdor, springs forward with a cry of grief.

“Silence!” Galdor says sternly, thrusting her back; but the Umbarian laughs aloud.

“So you do recognize him!” The Umbarian taunts. “A rat caught creeping about the streets of Pellardur. Oh, how he squeaked when we prodded him, names and all! It is plain that he is known to you. Do not dare deny it now!”

“I do not deny it!” Galdor says. “Indeed, I know who he is, and despite your scorn, foul thrall of Sauron, you cannot say as much. But why do you bring him here?”

“Maybe he is but a slave who you would not grieve to lose, and maybe not: one dear to you, perhaps?” That dreadful laugh once more. “If so, take swift counsel with what little wit you have. I have no love for spies, and his fate now depends on your choice!”

No one answers him, but he sees the Elves’ faces tight with anger and the horror in their eyes, and he laughs again, for it seems to him that his sport goes well. “Good, good!” he says. “He is dear to you, I see. Or else his errand was one that you did not wish to fail? It has. And now he shall suffer, as long and slow as our arts can contrive - unless you accept my terms.”

“Name the terms,” says Galdor steadily, but Elrohir can see the anguish in his face. There can be no doubt that he will accept.

“You unnatural things can bear much,” says the Umbarian, taking Galear by the chin to study the battered face. “This one will survive if I give him back to you now. As you can see all his parts are still attached!” He laughs cruelly. “Hand over Glorfindel, or one by one he will lose them!” 

And with that he draws a knife, and slices off Calear’s ear. 

Calear howls, his open mouth a black void in the swollen ruin of his face. With a quick flick of his wrist the prince launches the ear at the Nemir’s deck. It lands on the sand-covered planks at Galdor’s feet with a small, horrible thud .

“Be swift about it, or his nose is next!”

All eyes are on the grisly thing, but Glorfindel says at once “Lay a plank across. I will go over.”

“No!” Elrohir cannot help it. The thought of Glorfindel falling into Umbarian hands is unbearable.

“Elrohir.” Glorfindel lays a hand on his shoulder, a comforting touch, though he can barely feel it through the layers of mail and gambeson. “Whatever else Calear told them, he kept you safe. Despite all they did to him he has not uttered your name - yet. I will not leave him there until he breaks. He has suffered enough.”

“Only fools make deals with Umbarians!” Faced with this much Elvish naivety, Elrohir cannot contain his scorn. “They will hack your man to pieces whatever you do, and you beside him!”

“I will make them release him.” Glorfindel’s face is hard, his mind closed.

“They will tear you apart!”

Glorfindel looks Elrohir in the eye, and says only. “Better me than you.” 

Four short words, and yet they turn Elrohir’s stomach. “This is madness!” he exclaims, but  Glorfindel only holds his gaze in silence. 

Elrohir stands reeling, battling remembered horrors. He has seen too many people cut to pieces in slow stages on Mûlkher’s altars; he knows the sights, the stench, the dreadful sounds of evil death. Without a doubt Glorfindel’s fate will be the worst of all. The Elf will die screaming, and Elrohir cannot bear the thought. 

In his despair he turns to Galdor. “Captain, you must stop him!”

“Elrohir,” Galdor says, laying a gentle hand on Elrohir’s shoulder, moving him back and away from Glorfindel. “I would not order this, but Glorfindel volunteers. He may go.”

“No!” Elrohir twists, shaking off Galdor’s hand, and grabs a fistful of Glorfindel’s surcoat. “I will not let you!”

“Elrohir, lad. Listen to me.” Galdor’s tone remains calm, but there can be no doubt that the Elf means business. “I am the captain of this ship, and as such I command your obedience. If you hinder this, I will have you escorted to your cabin.”

Galdor sends him a wistful look, then turns away, already giving orders. 

For a moment Glorfindel and Elrohir face each other, Elrohir still with a white-knuckled grip on the grey wool of Glorfindel’s surcoat. He opens his mouth to protest, but Glorfindel cuts him off. “Please be careful while I am away. Do not make me explain to Elladan how you were killed in a scuffle.” 

Very gently, Glorfindel takes Elrohir’s hand and unfolds his clutching fingers. His eyes are wide and serious, the fear behind them now plain to see. He understands well indeed what horrors await on that red-sailed ship.

“Promise me!” Elrohir urges as he lets go of him. “Promise that you will take care!”

“The promise is given, Elrohir.” Glorfindel says simply. He draws his Elvish sword and wheels the blade into a bright arc of silver. “I will not make this easy for the bastards.”

Chapter 13: Caught in a storm/Prisoner trade

Read Chapter 13: Caught in a storm/Prisoner trade

Elrohir has seen fierce storms in the desert, but never anything like this daytime dark, the way the light turns sickly yellow beneath the roof of roiling cloud. 

All the world seems lit up in flames – the Shakalzôr with torches, the water with luminous particles, and even the very masts are pointed with a blue flame. The sea is so aglow that the wakes of both ships are marked by a fiery track. For a single, terribly bright instant the darkness of the sky is cleaved by the most vivid lightning.

Glorfindel’s mail and the point of his high helm flash bright as he steps onto the plank that leads to his death. At the other end Calear is prodded up with spear-butts, reeling and stumbling in pained confusion. 

Glorfindel steps forward. Calear is shoved, staggers, and then for a moment they meet in the middle of the plank, right between both ships. Glorfindel lays his hands on Calear’s shoulders. A muttered word, and he makes to turn so Calear can step past him and onwards to the Nemir . Hands reach out to guide him there, and for a moment Elrohir sees the battered face lighten with relief. 

Then, quite predictably, two Umbarians leap up and grab Glorfindel, and haul him in like a hooked fish. A third one tilts the plank sideways. Calear stumbles, and for a single heartbeat he teeters between sea and sky, his face a mask of terror. The next, he plunges down into the gap between both ships and is lost to sight. 

Calear is too weak to swim. With howls of grief Elves leap at the railing, but in the dark cleft between the hulls there is naught but churning waves. 

A crack of lightning flashes across the water. Thunder booms overhead, and for a mere moment the Umbarians cower. 

Glorfindel is hewing at them before he even hits the Shakalzôr’s deck. He is magnificent. Elrohir has never seen anyone fight like that, a whirlwind of gold and steel. Fast, deadly, but alone against many. 

The Umbarian deck is a writhing mass of red-clad marines, ever more throwing themselves forward to die on Glorfindel’s blade, pressing him in. He is a white light, a single point of radiance amidst the swelling tide of red, ever more Umbarians leaping at him. 

Glorfindel’s vambraces are red to the elbows with their gore, his grey surcote spattered, but they hem him in and push him back until his back is against the gunwale. 

“Release!” booms Galdor’s voice, and at once a rain of arrows whirs down like a cloud of angry wasps. The Elvish archers sit high on the Nemir’s yards, and they do not miss. All along the Shakalzôr’s deck, men drop like stones with arrows sunk into their eye sockets down to the white swan-feather fletchings. 

“For Lindon! For the Havens!” Alphalas’ battle-cry cuts through the din, bright as a silver horn. Like a silver wave washes over the shore, she leads a company of Elvish swordsmen swinging across the gap from the Nemir’s rigging. They land on the Shakalzôr’s deck light and limber. In a heartbeat their blades drip red. 

Elrohir remains forgotten on the Nemir’s quarterdeck, left to watch the silver and the red battle back and forth.

For a moment the tide of Elves strikes a gap in the mass of Umbarian marines, almost reaching Glorfindel, and Elrohir’s heart leaps. 

And then, from somewhere on the Shakalzôr’s forecastle a dark ball flies through the air and bursts into a runnel of liquid flame on the Nemir’s deck. 

Elrohir cannot help but shout as the grenade hits. Remembered pain shoots up his arm, where an old scar throbs like he is burning anew. 

Umbarian war-fire. 

It is a devilish alchemy of the Black Númenóreans, a waking nightmare of liquid flame that cannot be doused with water. Thick and sticky the liquid washes over the Nemir’s deck, setting flame to all it touches. 

The Elves must know of this dark artifice, because the handful of the crew who remain aboard do not try to pour on water. At once they run to with sand and vinegar, but the foremast has already caught flame. One of the firefighters comes too close, and his cries of agony as his clothes catch on fire cut Elrohir to his marrow.

Biting smoke stings his eyes, covering the ship until all he can see is the hellish glow of the fire and the dancing shadows of the Elves struggling to put it out.  Divided between the battle and the fire, the Elvish sally falters. 

Glorfindel still stands alone and at bay, unreachable amidst the Umbarian onslaught.

The realisation hits Elrohir, dark and bitter as bile: this entire battle is in vain. He need not fear that the Umbarians may board the Nemir . They will not bother. The Corsair prince has taken the one Elf he came for, and now he will simply burn the ship with all hands.

This will not happen. Elrohir will not allow it. 

He spins around, makes for the ratlines in a flat run, yanking off his helm as he leaps and grabs the grey Elvish ropes and pulls himself up hand over hand, ever higher through the bitter, billowing smoke. 

“Eru Allfather, have mercy…” He finds himself reciting a Haradi prayer as he clambers out over the yardarm. The height is dizzying, both ships rocking beneath him. Then, in the final heartbeat before the mad leap, he remembers Ossë’s pendant, and closes his fingers around the Elvish amulet. 

Chapter 14: Desperate measures/“This wasn’t supposed to happen”

Read Chapter 14: Desperate measures/“This wasn’t supposed to happen”

“Oi! Fuckers!” From up aloft, an Elvish voice calls out in Adûnaic with a deep, dark desert accent. 

Glorfindel hacks the foremost Umbarian clean in two before he dares to raise his eyes to the rigging. Horror leaps snarling at his throat, but it is too late. 

Elrohir has jumped across. He is standing on one of the Shakalzôr’s yardarms, his Elvish mail a bright glimmer of silver outlined against the dark ceiling of storm clouds. The boy is helmetless, utterly vulnerable with his tell-tale dark hair and the face of Eärendil’s house exposed, but he is shouting at the top of his lungs.

“I am Thanak of Harad!” Elrohir bellows, and at that name a low mutter swirls among the Umbarian soldiers. 

They murmur Elrohir’s Haradi name to each other, and something else: “Gold!” With their gazes they shape alliances and weigh competitors in who shall capture the regicide and earn the bounty on his head. 

The first gold diggers are already clambering up into the rigging, greed burning in their eyes, but Elrohir ignores them. Instead he turns his face to the quarterdeck, where the prince stands wide-eyed amidst the gold and crimson cluster of his silk-clad bodyguards. 

“Hail, oh prince!” Elrohir salutes him with a mock bow and a grin, all false bluster, but Glorfindel can feel the terror underneath, pressing sharp and sour against his own mind. 

Please, not this! Glorfindel begs, because he can do nothing else to stop the disaster unfolding before his eyes.  

Elrohir’s eyes find Glorfindel amidst the crowd. It is the only way. Forgive me.

“Your father, the old emperor, was a swine!” Elrohir shouts at the prince with a voice that is somehow steady, “and when I slit his throat he squealed like a piglet!”

For a single heartbeat Elves and Umbarians both stand stunned. The next, a roar of rage bursts from the throng of Umbarians. 

“Get him!” barks the prince, spitting with fury. “Take him alive! In the name of Mûlkher!”

At once his marines stream up the ratlines like a red spring tide. Men scramble over each other, bellowing with rage, pushing and shoving their comrades to be first to reach the wanted man - and the prize. 

Glorfindel remains at bay with his back against the gunwale, but his assailants falter, ill-pleased at missing out on their chance at fame and fortune. A few even turn away from Glorfindel to climb aloft after Elrohir. 

A few, but it is enough. Glorfindel whirls. Hadhafang cleaves the air in a swirl of silver too quick for Mortal eyes to follow, and the men fall bloodied at his feet. Glorfindel’s blade drips wet, his gauntlets are soaked, his sleeves red to the elbow, but he is free. For a moment he thinks, frantically - how to buy Elrohir the most time? 

He wants nothing more than to leap up into the rigging after him, but once they are both cornered high up on the yard, capture is certain. 

Then he remembers. 

The prince’s marines may outnumber the Elves, but they make up less than half the Shakalzôr’s complement. 

In the centre of the deck gapes a rectangle of almost tangible blackness: the dark maw of the great grate stands open. 

Glorfindel leaps down the ladder into the ship’s bowels. 

The topmost rowing deck is stifling hot and dark. A wan, grey light filters through the iron grates overhead. 

The slavemaster’s whip cracks at him the instant his feet hit the planks, but Glorfindel lets the braided leather lash wrap around his vambrace and yanks, making the man stumble towards him. He dies quickly, skewered on Hadhafang. 

As he wrenches his blade from the slavemaster’s chest with a wet crack, he draws a deep breath. A solid wall of stench makes his eyes water. He knows this smell, from being at Elrond’s side when the dungeons of Barad-Dûr were opened. Festering wounds, unwashed sweat and excrement: the stink of human misery. 

Glorfindel looks down the double lines of tightly packed rowers, noting the stained runnels in the floor leading filth down into the bilges as the chained slaves foul themselves where they sit; the dark manhole that leads down into the deeper rowing decks and the nethermost hell of the slave hold below; the great chain running along the aisle from shackle to shackle through rings bolted down into the ship’s timbers. 

The men sit bowed over their oars, five to a bench but a spear-length long. A few lucky ones possess the small dignity of a bunched rag around their hips, but most are entirely naked. The Umbarians must have run their thralls into the ground to catch the Nemir : every bare back is bloodied by the lash. 

Gondorian faces share their benches with dark-skinned Southrons, Dunlendings from Enedwaith, straw-haired Middle Men from the coasts of Anfalas, and not a few who might be Haradrim. Their foreheads all bear a branded G, for galley. 

Glorfindel has no time for pity, but he can do better than that. He takes hold of the great chain, a coil of black iron thick as a man’s wrist.

Aulë himself taught him this Song in the great smithing halls of Valmar, before he returned to Middle-earth. He Sings it now with a steady voice, calling the crystalline essence of the iron, once folded into the earth by the Great Smith himself when the world was young. Into the Music he weaves freedom, escape, the breaking of fetters. Soon the very metal groans, railing against the dark enchantments laid upon it for this foul use. 

White light forms around him, bright and sharp, and when at last he brings Hadhafang down upon the chain, the iron shatters like glass. 

The slaves sit stunned, then scramble off their benches to get away from him, terrified. 

“Fight!” Glorfindel roars, first in Westron, then Adûnaic, and in Haradi for good measure. “If you want to live, fight! Free as many as you can, and kill the Umbarians!”

A heartbeat of silence for his words to sink in, and then his cry is taken up in all these tongues and more. “Fight!” 

These men will never get another chance to escape this hellish half-life, and they know it. 

A mad rattle of chains fills the hold as the slaves pull themselves loose. The lower deck’s slave masters come running, wielding their lashes until blood spatters the planks, but soon they are strangled with their own whips. 

Some of the slaves leap down the open hatch to the lower decks, where more chains begin to rattle. 

Most fly up the ladder, towards the light. A stream of desperate men pours onto the deck, three or four to every Umbarian marine. Enough to leap and grab; hands around throats, fingers into eye sockets; tearing the mail-clad soldiers apart with bare hands before looting their blades and moving on to their comrades.

Glorfindel climbs up, shouldering through the chaos as he lightly holds his footing on the deck’s blood-slicked planks, ignoring the dreadful squelch of corpses underfoot. 

A single thought burns in his mind as he frantically scans the rigging.

Elrohir! Where is Elrohir!? 

The sky has gone dark as night, a terrifying mountain of clouds crowned with lightning. The wind whips. Blue fire crackles off the masts. The fire grenades stopped falling when the slaves tore the grenadiers limb from limb, but the Nemir is still aflame. Biting smoke billows over all.

There! 

A cry of sheer dismay wrests from Glorfindel’s throat. Driven at bay, Elrohir stands on the bitter end of the Shakalzôr’s yardarm as the Umbarians close in. One hand clenches white-knuckled around a rope, the other wields his bloodied scimitar. His eyes are wide with terror.

Galdor is battling to reach him. Alphalas is already up aloft, leaping from rope to rope light and quick as a squirrel, while skewering one Umbarian after another in a mad dash to Elrohir’s side. 

Too late! 

The foremost Umbarian reaches out and grabs Elrohir’s arm. Elrohir hacks at the man’s hand, severs it at the wrist, sending him plummeting into the angry waves below. For a moment hope returns, and Elrohir stands tall once more, bright and brave in his terrible peril, for at once another Corsair leaps to, and another behind him. 

For a moment, Elrohir’s gaze meets Glorfindel’s. Their minds touch, and Glorfindel can feel Elrohir’s fear as his own. He can bear much, but the thought of being captured has him near-mad with panic.

An Umbarian officer looms on the yardarm, a burly brute twice Elrohir’s weight. The Elvish archers desperately try to sink their flights in the gaps in his armour, but the angle is bad and their arrows plink off the black steel and scatter uselessly. 

The man laughs at Elrohir’s white-faced despair, showing teeth filed to points. He has seen his comrade’s demise, and instead of lunging within reach of Elrohir’s blade, he draws a throwing knife and launches it at Elrohir’s face. 

Glorfindel’s warning shout goes unheeded. 

"One hand for yourself, one for the ship." The lesson is drummed into any young sailor on their first climb aloft, and a thousand times after that. Not Elrohir. There has not been time.

Glorfindel can only watch, horror-stricken, as the hand without a blade jerks up from the rope, desperate to deflect the flying knife. With Elrohir distracted the Umbarian leaps forward with a shout of triumph, but his grabbing hands catch only air. 

In the single heartbeat when Elrohir released his handhold, the Shakalzôr hit a deep trough between the waves. The ship rolls sideways with a jerk. 

A stagger. A hoarse, cut-off scream, and then, before Glorfindel's very eyes, Elrohir plunges down into the sea. 

Glorfindel needs not look at the churning waves. Armoured men sink like stones, and Elrohir was wearing full mail. 

He stands reeling on the Shakalzôr’s deck amidst the din of battle, the world gone dull and dark around him, only partly aware of the wordless howl of grief that tears from his throat. 

His back shudders but no tears come. Not yet. Not here. 

He knows not how long, but then Galdor is at his side, his face equally slack with sorrow. A quick jerk of Galdor’s cutlass deflects a blow aimed at Glorfindel, and runs the offending Umbarian through. Glorfindel looks up wildly, and finds in his friend’s gaze that same shocked agony of the bereaved.

They have stood like this before, Galdor and he, side by side in loss and horror and defeat. Ost-in Edhil. The Dagorlad. Mordor. The time will come for tears and laments and regrets, but not today. Together they straighten, and in their hearts the grief sharpens to a fell, white anger. 

Glorfindel raises Hadhafang once more. The blade gleams silver and blue, its edge bright in the deadly dark. Elrond’s sword, forged in Gondolin. Glorfindel might be the last Elf in Middle-earth who remembers seeing it wielded by Idril’s own hand. Now he raises it and leaps lightly up the gilded stairs to the quarterdeck, Galdor behind him. Side by side they stand before the wall of steel that is the massed throng of the prince’s bodyguards. 

For a moment Glorfindel eyes them - their glaives and scimitars, their high Númenórean helms, the Eye of Sauron embossed on their cuirasses. Then he laughs, the sound bright and clear but terrible, and plants his feet, hefting the blade in both hands and spinning it into an arc of shimmering steel. At his shoulder, Galdor draws his long knife so he wields a blade in each hand, the Sindar way. 

"You owe us a reckoning, Umbarian," Glorfindel says, and though his voice comes out level, he knows by the way these battle-hardened men shrink back that his eyes are alight with fury, "for you have slain our friend, who was brave, and kind, and a better man than you will ever be. We will have justice for him."

Chapter 15: Running Out of Air

Read Chapter 15: Running Out of Air

He hits the water with a sickening slap, and he tries to kick himself up but his mail drags him down like a stone. Saltwater rushes into his mouth and nose as he sinks flailing into the blue depth. 

The last thing Elrohir sees of the world above is the leaping red flicker of the Nemir in flames.

All he knows is terror and the burn of his lungs and the painpainpain of salt in the knife-wound on his hand, trailing a red ribbon of blood through the water. 

This is how I die. 

The thought strikes him like a hammer-blow. Two score years are all he gets, short and violent; and now they are up. He will never see Elladan again.

He has neither time nor air left to weep, and instead he struggles to summon as his last living thought some hazy memory of his brother’s face, but the water’s pressure builds in his skull until he fears his eyes will burst like bitten grapes, and Elladan’s image flits from his grasp.  

He must breathe, but he cannot, and he battles his own body to keep from inhaling. Bright, blood-red spots dance before his eyes. 

It is a losing battle, and at last after a small eternity of torment he must give in and gasps. Water fills his chest. He can feel it flowing through his windpipe, cold as death itself. A great rush in his ears and all goes dark. 

 

----

 

When he opens his eyes, he is deep underwater. 

The world is blue and twilit. Silver shoals of fishes whirl about him amidst waving strands of feathered kelp, thick as Elvish hair. They disappear down into the blackness below, where dark shapes move almost beyond sight. He has no desire to learn what nameless things lurk there, hunting in the lightless depths. In the distance, constellations of luminous jellyfish float like alien moons.

He had imagined that the ocean would be silent, a vast emptiness, but all around him unseen creatures speak in trills, clicks, whistles. From somewhere beyond his sight comes a strange moaning song, so low that he feels it vibrate in his chest, and in those eerie tones lies a meaning he might understand like speech, if only he knew its warp and weft. 

Something keeps him from sinking further, and he hovers at the edge of the light. The water here is the deep indigo of a Haradrim cloak. 

For a moment he wonders, and then comes the realisation. 

He can breathe.

“Greetings, son of Elrond.” The voice is deep as the abyss. The sound echoes in the water, and inside his head, resonating through his very bones. 

He flails his arms and legs within the steel confines of his hauberk, struggling to turn his face towards the sound. He is no longer sure which way is up or down. 

When he rights himself a beast the size of a looming hill hovers before him. A kraken with great golden eyes. 

Eight arms thick as tree trunks wave in the water with eerie elegance. The very skin glows sea-blue against the dark water, bearing swirls of living light like alien calligraphy that pulses with the rhythm of the waves.

He should be terrified, but the certainty of death has carried him to a strange, remote calm beyond all fear. Instead of fleeing he meets the creature’s gaze, and is lost.

The pupils are horizontal slits. Within their depths lies an endless sky of wheeling stars. The light in those eyes is beyond sentience. This is no animal, no monster from the deep.  

“What are you?” Elrohir asks, because he sees and he knows but he cannot believe , and watches in wonder as his words form a trail of bubbles that float up and away from his mouth. 

“Your kind call me Ossë.” The great octopus waves its tentacles, and high above Elrohir’s head the Sea is stirred to foaming rage. “My true name cannot be spoken in your tongue.”

Spoken words, and yet they are Song. Within them lies the music of the waves, the crashing surf, the wind that sings upon the open waters, but also the crack of thunder and the howl of the ocean gales. 

The Stirrer.

“My Lord.” Elrohir folds himself in half as he floats, hoping it will look like a bow, and draws another impossible breath. Salt fills his mouth and the back of his throat, yet he is not drowning. 

“How-” he stammers, swallows a mouthful of brine only to breathe in more, and still he does not drown. “Why can I breathe?”

“I made it so.” A hint of pride beneath the words - Ossë is not wholly inhuman.

“Why are you helping me?” Elrohir blurts out, all politeness forgotten out of sheer wonder. 

“Because Lord Ulmo ordered it.” That strange blue light flickers once more, stripes and waves of radiance running up and down Ossë’s suckered arms. “He sent out all his folk to seek you. My brethren searched all the waters of the world and every vein and cave below. You were hard to find. So deep in darkness, where we rarely tread. But in the end all waters run to the Sea. Even those that well up in the desert.”

“It was you!” The revelation strikes Elrohir. “ You told Glorfindel where to find me!” 

Glorfindel has told Elrohir the tale of the captive Arnorian who somehow, against all odds, escaped both Umbar and the desert war to return home, carrying the tale of an Elven-fair warrior among the Haradrim all the way to Imladris. Elrohir had thought the man lucky. He was far more than that: a God’s hand guided his steps. 

“Not I,” says Ossë. “That was my Lord Ulmo. Your father Elrond is his friend and servant. He called upon the Lord of the Waters for your return, and my lord heard his plea.” 

Elrohir tries to imagine it. An Elf-lord calling upon the God of the Sea. Mere months ago he would have laughed at the very notion. Now stories have sprung to life and legends walk the waking world. If Ossë in all his terrifying might is but a vassal, Elrohir is glad to have escaped Ulmo’s personal attention. 

Elrond must have wanted him badly indeed, to ask such a perilous creature for help. Elrohir should feel awed, or perhaps grateful. Instead he finds himself quite detached from it all, as if the entire matter concerns someone else. 

In a way it does - Elrond asked Ulmo to return the Elf-child he lost. In its place he will get a grown man, a perfect stranger. 

A changeling.  

Elrohir would have laughed at the bitter irony, but he dares not imagine what will happen when the Elf-lord realises that his Sea-god has cheated him. 

Another curl of the mighty arm. Waves of light flash up and down its length, and Elrohir is jolted from his dark musings. Like the storms he commands, Ossë is wild and quick to anger. Offending him would be the last thing Elrohir ever does.

“I thank you, my lord,” he says, and makes another strange half-bow. 

Ossë’s movements calm a little. The innermost of his eight arms drift apart, revealing a pale shape that floats cradled between them. At first Elrohir thinks it some strange creature of the deep, but then he notes the shape of arms and legs.

Calear’s battered face is lit by that deep blue sea-light. He hangs limp in the great octopus’ grip, but fresh blood curls from his wounds and spirals up through the water like smoke. Like Elrohir, the Elf is alive and breathing water.  

“Lord, I beg you, spare him!” Elrohir pleads in the foolish hope that the kraken might release its prey. Calear remains still, floating insensate in the tentacle’s embrace. 

“Fear not,” replies Ossë, and something like a laugh ripples against the edges of Elrohir’s mind. “He is one of my Falathrim, and dear to me. He has faithfully done my bidding. To eat him would be poor gratitude.”

A supple undulation of arms brings Ossë closer to Elrohir. One of the limbs curls around him. Its suckers are white discs the size of plates. To resist is pointless, and so he lets the arm wind around his waist like a great cable, thick as one of the Nemir’s masts. He can feel the bunch of muscle beneath the flickering skin. Ossë could crush him like a mussel-shell, but the Stirrer’s touch is quite gentle. He is folded into the octopus’ mantle beside Calear. 

Once the Elf is in his reach Elrohir grabs an elbow and pulls him into his arms to keep hold of him as best he can without placing his hand over one of the myriad welts and burns. At the touch Calear’s eyes open to swollen slits. He does not speak, but the sight of Elrohir brightens the battered face into something like a smile.

“I have done Ulmo’s bidding,” rumbles Ossë at their backs, “and I grow bored of duty. The servants of Sauron dare to foul my waters. Now for vengeance!”

It strikes Elrohir that he has one, single chance, and this is it. “Lord, please,” he pleads, “do not sink the Shakalzôr !”

This astonishes Ossë. “Do you presume to command me? ”

“I dare not command. I only ask humbly.” Elrohir struggles for words, with so many lives hanging on them. “The rowers are but thralls, captured by the Corsairs. They did not come here of their own will, and they would drown for their masters’ wickedness. Will you not spare them?”

“The sea spares no one!”

The great tentacles thrash, and Elrohir can see the light of the burning ship above waver and shift as the waves roil and seethe. Down here, all remains eerily quiet.

“Lord, I beg you!” Elrohir could weep, knowing that his plea is pointless. The mere fact that he is alive to utter it is a priceless boon. Ossë will not grant another. 

“Storms do not hearken to a sailor’s begging! I have done much in guarding you, son of Elrond. Now I shall have my sport!”

“What would you have in return for their lives, Lord?” Elrohir demands, though he has nothing but the clothes on his back.

“I do not take bribes!” Ossë laughs. “The richest kings of Men have plied me with their treasure, and still I wrecked them. I am the storm!” 

“Hundreds will die!” Elrohir protests. Knowing Ulmo will not permit his servant to kill him, he risks some boldness. “Surely you are no murderer?”

“It is not murder,” Ossë replies, wholly undisturbed, “merely the nature of the Sea. Any Child of Eru who sets out on a ship risks a watery grave.”

“Those men are Eru’s Children indeed. Would you deny them the life He gave them? To live chained in a slave-hold and be drowned at the oar is a waste. Will you snuff them out, and call yourself a servant of the Light?”

His words strike home. “Do you doubt my allegiance!?” Ossë rages, the light on his skin flickering in mad swirls. “Do you think I would deal behind my lord’s back? In his own realm even!?” 

With a sickening jerk an arm winds around Elrohir’s middle once more to yank him out of the octopus’ mantle. It is all he can do to keep hold of Calear as Ossë drags them through the water with a great rush to hold them up before his eyes. 

Calear moans when the lash-marks on his back rub against Elrohir’s mail, but Elrohir clenches both arms tight around the Elf’s ribcage, lest he drop the poor fellow into the fathomless black of the abyss beneath. Elrohir’s wounded hand burns like fire, but the pain is a mere afterthought to the terror of Ossë’s displeasure. 

The light of Ossë's eyes is terrible, and for a moment Elrohir is convinced that the mighty arm that holds him will tighten and snap him in half like a twig.

“Mercy, oh magnificent Lord!” Elrohir bows his head low, hastening to soothe Ossë’s anger with fawning learned in Umbar’s court. “Spare us poor wretches. Your wisdom is beyond my ken, and Calear here had no part in my folly.” 

Something stirs the great arms. The slitted pupil rests on him, and its gaze is heavy to bear.   

“Not folly, child.” Ossë gentles, as if the sight of Elrohir’s fear has struck him with some strange insight. “Fear not. I turned from that path long ago. Harsh I may be, but you shall see that not all of my kindred are like Sauron.” 

Ossë’s arm unwinds from Elrohir’s waist, and Calear and he float free, suspended between the shimmer of the waves overhead and the dark depths below.  

Those great golden eyes contemplate them for a moment, and then the Stirrer laughs, the sound of waves leaping at the shore. Somewhere in the far blue distance, his whales sing an answer. 

“The slaves you plead for are free men already,” Ossë says, folding his arms beneath his mighty body. The light of his skin pulses in calm, lapping waves. “I shall leave the Shakalzôr afloat. Let Galdor take her for a prize! When you see him, tell him who granted it. He knows how to thank me.”

Elrohir barely has a moment to tighten his hold on Calear before, somehow, they both shoot upwards like corks. A wild rush of bubbles cuts off sight and sound, leaving him blind to all but the white fury of surging water, the strange pressure in his head, the burn of his lungs, hungry for air once more. 

The surface cannot be far, sunlight on the waves and sweet, sweet air, but the distance is too great and his body too frail. With his last, desperate strength he clutches Calear against him as darkness closes in.

Chapter 16: Confrontation

Read Chapter 16: Confrontation

His Imperial Highness Prince Bawbuthôr of Pellardur is a devout and god-fearing man. 

He knows well that divine favour must be paid, and the prince has never failed to give Lord Mûlkher his due. 

In Pellardur’s great temple the altar-fire never goes out. There has not been a day that the Giver of Freedom wanted for sacrifices. With every Sacred Agony, Bawbuthôr's prayers rise to the sky, riding upon their cries and the smoke of burned flesh.

Today is the day Bawbuthôr’s piety will be rewarded, his day of Freedom. Today he will vanquish death and regain the undying life stolen by the lying Powers in the West. 

Great Men take what is their right, even when the opposition is fierce. Beyond the shieldwall of his imperial guard, the white-fiends’ swords are a shimmer of flashing steel. Dreadful creatures. Bawbuthôr loathes the too-bright light in their eyes, their unnatural swiftness, the inhuman ring of their voices, singing blasphemy as they kill. 

They are devils, conjured by the evil Valar to test the faithful, and Lord Mûlkher will wipe them out like straw is burned in a firestorm. 

Beside Bawbuthôr, Mûlkher’s own anointed priest moans and clutches his holy knife, his forehead beaded with fearful sweat. Bawbuthôr turns a scornful eye at such small faith. Men of the cloth tend to grow portly and weak. Never seen on the training grounds, their only labour is cleaving the flesh of their chained sacrifices. Bawbuthôr glances sideways at the priest’s wide-eyed terror, the quiver of his rotund jowls. Soon, he will no longer need this intermediary. Soon Bawbuthôr himself will commune with the divine. 

He breathes deep of the smell of battle: war-fire, burning wood, and spilled blood. The White-fiends may struggle, but the King of the World will grant victory to His faithful servants.

So it must be: that very morning, the priest divined Bawbuthôr’s victory in the battle to come, reading favourable signs in the liver of a virgin slave-girlfrom the Prince’s own harem. The girl was a rare beauty - selected for her Elf-like elegance, exquisitely expensive. Bawbuthôr saved her especially for this day. A kingly sacrifice. The smoke from her body still spirals up from the ship’s altar. 

The White-fiend’s eyes rest upon it as he hacks into the line of bodyguards, and the sight seems to double his ardour. 

Beside Bawbuthôr, the priest whimpers. 

“Master yourself, Your Holiness!” Bawbuthôr hisses, lest the guards are put to rout by the sight of their priest’s wavering conviction.

Bawbuthôr does not fear the White-fiends. He is a Prince of Umbar, come to avenge his brother and father. He will wash the tarnished honour of the Imperial House in Elvish blood.

A potent substance. What a chance, to drink the very elixir of immortality! 

Grey streaks Bawbuthôr‘s hair, and when his slaves disrobe him for his bath the sight of his own sagging flesh drives him to terror. White-fiends are free of death, though they are heretics, unworthy of their immortality. They do not deserve their fair faces and smooth skin and strong, clean-lined limbs. Hate burns in Bawbuthôr's chest. Soon, he will get his due. 

Discovering an Elf in the heart of his own city was a sure sign of Mûlkher’s favour. Bawbuthôr took personal charge of the unusual captive. He ordered the Elf brought to the temple instead of the palace dungeon, and before Mûlkher’s altar he wielded the whip and the branding iron with his own hand. 

Marring so flawless a being with lash and brand struck Bawbuthôr with a sacred ecstasy, surpassing all his previous sacrifices. How smooth its unstained skin, how melodious its cries - so much fairer than the toneless howls of mortal slaves! Bawbuthôr had to rein himself in, a great act of his superior will, lest he kill the creature in his holy bloodlust. 

Such perfection is not for lesser men. Bawbuthôr alone drank the Elf’s blood; first let into a cup, then straight from the vein. 

O, what bitter disappointment, when he felt no improvement in his aching joints and wheezing breath! But Bawbuthôr did not give up so easily. Protracted interrogation revealed Lord Mûlkher’s true purpose for this captive Elf. The creature was but a serf, unworthy of Delivering a Prince of Umbar. Its only use was to lead Bawbuthôr to Glorfindel. 

The Giver desires this Elf-lord, eldest and most potent of them all, for His sacrifice. In return Mûlkher will allow Bawbuthôr, His loyal instrument, to drain Glorfindel’s essence and imbue himself with the white-fiend’s immortality. 

Glorfindel certainly is a worthy sacrifice. The Elf is a storm of gold and steel. Bawbuthôr watches as the finest warriors in Umbar fall like wheat to the scythe before this creature of starlight and iron. 

Bawbuthôr does not waver. He is a god-fearing man, and Lord Mûlkher never fails to reward the pious. This battle is but a final test of his faith, and he must not doubt that the hour of his victory, his immortality, is nigh.

The gift of life unending is not for all, but Bawbuthôr is one of the worthy, a man of might and pride and high lineage, a scion of the great Ar-Pharazôn, King of Kings. Such men do not brook denials, but take what is their due. 

And yet, the white-fiend fills him with terror. The stern light of its immortal eyes, the terrible rush of that voice, the cold shine of its blade. The way it cuts through the ranks of his guard, the elite of fighting men in the empire, pledged body and soul to their prince, as if they were but a gaggle of cowering, bare-handed slaves. 

Even the Imperial Guard are lesser men, of course. Their blood is muddied by the lowly slave-peoples of Middle-earth. Of all the men on this ship, Bawbuthôr alone is worthy of Glorfindel’s blood. How fitting, then, that he is destined to shed it, the ultimate libation to the Lord of the World.

All Bawbuthôr's life, his every prayer to the Ancient Dark, all of the sacrifices he bled and burned, have led him to this glorious victory. His scimitar slides from the sheath with a silken whisper. The holy name of Mûlkher glitters gold-inlaid on the blade.  

Glorfindel leaps over the crumpled bodies of the innermost circle of guards, and at last they stand face to face. 

Bawbuthôr's hour has come. 

“Mûlkher!” he calls out. “Oh Giver of Freedom, guide my hand!”

The Elvish blade rises. Behind the silvered steel, Glorfindel’s face is terrible to behold. Those light-filled eyes hold no fear. Only cool, determined fury.  

Bawbuthôr’s strike is viper-swift and lethal, but Glorfindel dodges, then whirls past his defence as if it were made of air. Bawbuthôr gets but a moment of terror, the brutal surety that here stands an opponent he can never hope to match. 

Glorfindel stabs forward with almost languid, insulting ease. The Elvish sword enters Bawbuthôr's throat in the tiny slit between cuirass and gorget. Steel slides through his windpipe, parting flesh and sinew like a ship’s keel cuts through the water. 

For a single heartbeat Bawbuthôr stands pierced like an impaled sacrifice. He is barely aware of the hot gush of his own blood jetting from the wound. 

His eyes meet Glorfindel’s, and then the Elf speaks. A calm voice - how is he not winded!? - but clear as a golden bell.  

“For Elrohir. For Calear. And for the others.”

A single thrust of that slender hand, and Darkness rushes in. All Bawbuthôr can feel is bitter envy.

 

Chapter 17: Breathing through the pain/Flowers

Read Chapter 17: Breathing through the pain/Flowers

The sun sinks into the West in a sky grey as grief. Ossë has calmed his anger, and the storm’s passing left only a light rain that turns the waves to silver glass. 

Elrohir and Calear’s last rites are a sad and sober affair. 

From the charred remains of the quarterdeck, Glorfindel watches the Nemir’s crew gather on deck in heavy silence. These hardened mariners are tearless, but grim. The drawn faces looking up at him hold more shock than sorrow, all stricken by the sheer wrongness of so young a life brutally cut short

The flame-scorched ship makes for a sombre backdrop. Charred ropes and torn sailcloth trail from the singed masts like mourning drapes. The stink of soot bites harshly in the nose. 

They all prefer it to the Shakalzôr. There can be no blessing aboard that ship of horrors. Even over here, Glorfindel’s mind is raw from the miasma of evil swirling about it, echoes of suffering and death leached into the very timbers. It is no place for the grieving. Even damaged, the Nemir feels clean. Galdor believes that she might be repaired at sea in mere days. But before they begin that work, they must say farewell.

How many Elves has Glorfindel buried? Too many, and he remembers each and every one. 

Death is alien to the Eldar, but Glorfindel has been a warrior through two long lifetimes. As Elrond’s general he has left a trail of scattered cairns, markers on the downward path of the Elves’ long defeat. He once believed himself hardened to the bitter bite of loss, having laid to rest the fallen of so many battles. Today shows him for the fool he is. 

After losing Elrohir he knows not what he feels - grief, or a white-hot rage so profound it makes him doubt his own sanity. Two lives he spent fighting this battle, and still it rages on. How much longer? How many more of his friends, his loved ones, will he lose before the end - whatever that end might be? 

Glorfindel failed to save Elrohir’s life, and even in death he has let him down. He can offer no wreath of flowers, and neither can he sit a night’s solemn vigil over his body. The hungry Sea has devoured it. He clenches his empty hands, desperately wishing he could have tended Elrohir like he did so many of his brothers in arms. 

There would be comfort in granting Elrond’s son the final dignity of what little finery can be found on board. Glorfindel should have bound Elrohir’s wounds, dressed him in the clothes his mother made, and laid him out with honour: pearls of the Falas braided into his hair and a grave-gift in his hands. Not his sword, but some fair and joyful thing - perhaps that little carving of a feisty gull that made him smile - so his empty hroä might rest in Ulmo’s depths unburdened by the tools of bloodshed. 

It is not so, and Glorfindel’s heart aches with that small grief heaped upon the greater one. 

He stands at attention and watches as the colours of Lindon and Imladris are lowered to half mast. The sight strangles his throat with a noose of bitter, boundless sorrow. Soon he will bring Elrohir’s family the worst possible news, and he cannot give them even a cut braid to be kept in a locket. 

Nothing of their lost son remains. Only memory and song. 

He cannot bear to think of Elrond. Elrond, whose kind heart bears the scars of loss heaped upon loss; who looks to Glorfindel with such boundless trust to help him fulfil the great task laid upon him. 

Elrond deserves all good things, every happiness Glorfindel could give him. But Glorfindel has failed, and he has nothing left to offer. All he can do is to build a cairn in some high and silent place overlooking the valley, so Elrond and Celebrían can climb there to sit with their son, even if his body is not there.

Glorfindel is pulled from his dark musings when Galdor begins his eulogy. He stands on the scorched planks of the quarterdeck as rigid and as still as a man bearing a mortal wound. A good captain takes every death to himself, and Galdor is a fine one indeed. He mourns for Calear, but also for Elrohir as if Elrond’s son were one of his own, briefly though he has known him.

With a calm and steady voice he names Calear’s deeds and praises the man he was. He makes a valiant effort to do the same for Elrohir, but what, really, can be said of one so young? It is madness. 

Grief sharp as a blade cuts Glorfindel’s heart, and he must breathe through it deep and slow lest he shame Elrohir and himself. 

He is glad when Galdor begins the lament. 

 

Who shall see a white ship

leave the last shore

the pale phantoms

in her cold bosom

like gulls wailing?

 

The ancient Falathrim elegy rings out over the restless waves. Glorfindel swallows his tears, fills his burning lungs with air, and adds his voice to those of the crew. 

 

Who shall heed a white ship,

vague as a butterfly,

in the flowing sea

on wings like stars,

the sea surging,

the foam blowing,

the wings shining,

the light fading?

 

In the west, the clouds part, and beside the setting sun Eärendil rises into the sky as they Sing his grandson’s final honours. Grief and beauty mingle into an aching sweetness sharp as swords. 

Over on the Shakhalzôr, the freed Mortals hear the Elf-song, and weep for their own sorrows.

 

Who shall hear the wind roaring

like leaves of forests;

the white rocks snarling

in the moon gleaming,

in the moon waning,

in the moon falling

a corpse-candle;

the storm mumbling,

the abyss moving?

 

Has Elrohir gone to Mandos? Distance is nothing to the Houseless, the journey quick as stepping through an open door. Glorfindel knows. He shudders at the memory of those Halls, where the naked fëa must confront the life it has lost. 

Not Elrohir, or at least not yet. First he faces the Choice of the Peredhel. Glorfindel can only hope that what little Elrohir has seen of Elfkind might suffice to sway him. 

Either way, no word of Elrohir’s chosen path will reach Middle-earth. His own kin will not know his fate until they sail into the West, and the uncertainty is its own torment. 

Will Elrohir await them on the quay in Eressëa? What would he look like as a man grown, healed and whole, with the light of Valinor in his face? Perhaps one day Glorfindel will see, and they will embrace as friends reunited. 

Perhaps not. Elros’ path lies wide open, and Elrohir’s feet were set upon it already. 

 

Who shall see the clouds gather,

the heavens bending

upon crumbling hills,

the sea heaving,

the abyss yawning,

the old darkness

beyond the stars

falling

upon fallen towers?

 

Glorfindel’s voice almost breaks, but he is a soldier. He keeps his eyes on the flags, his shoulders straight, his face arranged. 

 

Who shall heed a broken ship

on the black rocks

under broken skies,

a bleared sun blinking

on bones gleaming

in the last morning?

Who shall see the last evening?

 

When the song ends, many Elves weep openly.

Glorfindel’s eyes remain dry as Galdor begins the final roll call. There was no debate on the matter: Elrohir died in battle defending the Nemir . His name will be called as one of her crew.

“Calear of Lindon, son of Gelmir and Calithil.” 

Silence. Then a single roll of drums. 

Galdor swallows, hesitates, his eyes shiny with unshed tears. It is unconscionable. Not even half a long-year before Elrohir was snatched away. And yet it must be done. 

“Elrohir of Imladris. Son of Elrond and Celebrían.”

Silence. 

The drums roar with grief. 

Barely a dry eye on the ship when the hornsman plays the silver tones of the last salute. 

Glorfindel breathes, in and out, and stands up straight as a commander should. 

A moment, an eternity, and then it is over. The flags taken down and folded, the crew dispersed. Glorfindel wholly lost. 

What will he do with himself, without Elrohir to care for?

“Here, sir. Some flowers.” Falver’s venerable age left her gentle and gracious in her grief. 

Undemanding, she offers him a handful of dried elanor. As the ship’s surgeon she must have spared the herb from her precious store of healer’s supplies. A small kindness to a grieving guest. 

The petals are wrinkled, but the blooms have kept their pale golden hue. Their scent remains fresh and bright, and for an instant Glorfindel stands in the glades of Lórien on a shining summer morning. Only a moment - the next, he recalls that Elrohir will never see a mallorn. 

He cups his hand so she can tip the flowers in, shielding them with her other one lest the sea wind whisks them away too soon. When he searches her ancient eyes for some reproach, he finds only deep compassion.

With a small nod of thanks Glorfindel turns to the railing. He keeps his eyes on Eärendil’s star as he utters his final goodbye. 

“Fare you well, my friend. Wherever you may go.” his voice cracks, and he must swallow a wad of tears. “I am sorry. May we meet once more in brighter times.” 

The sun is sinking to the western sea, and with a wide sweep he scatters the flowers over the gold-tinted waves. 

Then the grief strikes him all at once, and he buckles beneath it. He turns, shoulders through the milling sailors and almost leaps down the stairs to his cabin, closing the door behind him. 

Elrohir’s sea-chest glares like an accusation. Beside it lies all that remains of him: the crumpled heap of his battered saddlebags. 

Glorfindel sinks down and pulls the thing against him, breathing Elrohir’s desert-scent of camels and coal-fires. 

He kneels there for a while, bent with weeping, his forehead pressed to the stained leather.

 

Chapter 18: “I’ve got a Pulse!”/Back from the dead

Read Chapter 18: “I’ve got a Pulse!”/Back from the dead

A silver peal pierces the fog of Glorfindel’s grief. At first he thinks that the ship’s bell is rung as some belated honour to the dead, but this is no measured eight beat count. The ringing is frantic and ceaseless, as if the lookout is wildly yanking the bell cord.

Valar! What fresh hell is this!? 

Have the freed slaves on the Shakalzôr turned against their Elvish rescuers? Or did the surviving Umbarians somehow stage a mutiny from their lockup in the slave hold? 

Glorfindel drops Elrohir’s saddlebags, passes a hand over his red-rimmed eyes, and dashes from the cabin, already gripping his sword-hilt.

Upstairs, the deck is clear. The crew crowd at the railing, pointing and staring at something off the starboard bow, but none have drawn their weapon. 

Glorfindel’s eyes flick to the Shakalzôr . On the defeated Umbarian all seems in order . Freed slaves in pillaged uniforms keep stripping the dead marines of their gear. One naked corpse after another is unceremoniously tossed overboard. Like strange bobbing buoys, the dead dot the waves before they sink. The sea roils with feasting sharks. 

Then he feels it: the wind has shifted into the West. The air seems lighter, as if a breath he has long held is at last released. The storm-clouds have scattered, and in the East the stars are opening. Eärendil rises against the evening sky, brighter than Glorfindel has ever seen him. The last rays of a red-and-gold sunset shine on his face, gilding what remains of the Nemir’s foam-white sails.

For a brief instant Glorfindel stands like a man waking from a deep sleep, who casts off the burden of some dark dream. He looks up, breathes the clear wind, and senses beyond any doubt that something has changed. Somehow the Song of the world has been altered, a thread shifted in Eä’s warp and weft by a power greater than what Elves or Men might wield. 

“Glorfindel!” Galdor waves from a cluster of officers on the quarterdeck, his tone almost frantic. “Here, look to starboard!” 

Glorfindel leaps up the quarterdeck stairs. Galdor and Alphalas make room for him at the railing. 

But a stone’s throw from the Nemir’s hull the water swirls, aglow with phosphorescence. The gleam is bright and eerie against the falling dusk. A circle of blue light bubbles up and unfolds like a strangely shaped water-flower, its edges silver-limned.

“What is that!?”

“Ossë’s hand!” Galdor replies, his eyes fixed on the shimmering waters. “I have not seen him act like this since the Fall of Sirion.” Galdor, too, seems strengthened. At the burial he looked defeated, but now a new hope shines in his eyes. 

"I know not how," he says, clapping a hand on Glorfindel’s shoulder, "but my heart tells me that not all is lost, my friend."

Glorfindel dares not share Galdor’s estel . Elrohir’s grandmother was once changed into a white bird as she plunged to certain death, but such wonders have not graced the world in these later years. 

Below, the waters churn into pearl-white sea foam. The scent of the ocean, fresh and salty, sprays into their faces. Sharks wheel circles around the glowing patch, a rim of slender silhouettes, but not a single one crosses into the stirring waters. 

Another gush of air bubbles up, lifting a dark shape into view. Glorfindel’s hands clench white-knuckled on the railing - can it be!?

Oh Nienna, Lady of Mercy take pity … 

The thing - no, two of them - shoot upwards like corks pushed underwater. They break the surface and bob on the waves. 

Mail glimmers in the dying daylight. A grey surcote. Dark strands of sodden hair plastered to a face pale as death. 

Elrohir is still in his hauberk, and yet through some impossible grace he floats. Calear’s battered shape bobs beside him.

A sharp cry tears from Glorfindel’s chest. Time itself slows and thickens, and he moves as if through mud when his hands claw at the buckle of his sword-belt. When at last it gives way he tosses it, scabbard and all. He does not turn to look where Hadhafang clatters against the deck, but pulls his tunic over his head while already bending to yank off his boots, flinging them wherever they may fall. 

He clears the gunwale in a single leap. 

The water’s bite is cold when it swallows him, but Glorfindel kicks himself up and launches towards Elrohir. He gives no thought to the sharks, nor to the carrion they squabble over as he speeds through the glowing waves. 

A slender shape shoots past him. Alphalas is a daughter of the Havens, and she is the better swimmer. A swift dash and she grabs hold of Calear, lifting his head above the water.

When Glorfindel reaches Elrohir he floats on his back, slack as a corpse. His eyes are closed and the waves wash unhindered over his blue-lipped face. Glorfindel lifts his head onto his own chest so his face is free, but Elrohir does not breathe. He hangs limp in Glorfindel’s arms. Glorfindel can do nothing but swim faster than he ever has, with great breath-draining strokes, and drag him towards the Nemir . 

The ship is but a stone’s throw away, and yet it seems an eternity. 

“Here, sir! Pass him!” yell a pair of deckhands, hanging from a rope with arms outstretched, but Glorfindel will not let go of Elrohir, and so they are hoisted up on the same line. Glorfindel’s bare back scrapes against the planks of the hull as he turns to shield Elrohir while the crew haul them up with great heaving pulls. Something warmer than water begins to trickle down his flank, but somehow he feels no pain. 

Galdor himself reaches over the gunwale, grabs Elrohir around the chest, heaves him over, and lowers him to the deck with a wet slap. 

Glorfindel scales the railing and drops to his knees beside the still form. Sea water gushes from Elrohir’s boots, streams from his clothes until he lies sprawled in a puddle, slack as a broken puppet. 

Nearby, Calear is hidden from sight, surrounded by friends and helpers. Elrohir, too, draws a cluster of pale faces and concerned voices calling his name, but he remains still, his skin cold and grey as stone.

Glorfindel reaches for Elrohir’s fëa and finds only silence and darkness. For a moment, panic strangles him. 

His hands scrabble over Elrohir’s chest, desperately searching for a heartbeat, but the layers of surcote, hauberk and waterlogged gambeson reveal nothing. 

Nearby someone keens, misery made sound, and then Glorfindel realises it is his own voice.

Suddenly Galdor is there, kneeling down on Elrohir’s other side. With a quick, sure motion the captain buries his fingers in the wet hair at Elrohir’s nape and pulls his head forward. Elrohir’s neck bends to his hand limp as a doll’s. Deftly Galdor unclasps the buckle beneath Elrohir’s collar and pulls off the gorget so he may feel for the great artery in Elrohir’s throat. 

Glorfindel does the same, but their searching fingers find only stillness beneath the clammy skin.

Nothing. 

“Valar, no!” Despair buries him like a monstrous wave swallows the coast, and he keens once more, folding in half beneath the sorrow until his forehead touches Elrohir’s unmoving chest. This cannot be! Surely Ulmo is not so cruel to return a corpse! 

“Quick now!” Galdor’s hand lands heavy on Glorfindel’s shoulder, pushing him away. His voice cuts through the fog of grief, all efficient business. “We must breathe for him!” He already leans forward over Elrohir’s face. 

With a jolt Glorfindel sits up, realises that Galdor is right. The knowledge of what must be done comes rushing back to him, cutting through his panic like a clarion call over the din of battle.

“I will!” he says, raising a hand to hold Galdor back. 

With courage born of despair Glorfindel breathes deeply, closes his hand over Elrohir’s nose, seals his own mouth over Elrohir’s, and blows.

Elrohir’s chest rises and falls. Water streams from his mouth - his lungs must be full of it - but he remains still, dark lashes throwing long shadows over his sunken face.

Glorfindel gives him another breath.  

There!  

A small, fading wisp of light for his fëa to touch; the gentle throb of a heartbeat against his searching fingertips.

“I have a pulse!”

For a torturous instant Elrohir lies still, and then a wheezing gasp bubbles through the seawater that pours from his nose and mouth in great horrific gushes.  

Like the sunrise after a night of pain, Galdor’s face breaks into radiant joy. Cheers rise all along the ship. Elrohir’s name, and Calear’s, too. Up aloft the crew are singing, an outpouring of jubilance and praise to Ossë, but Glorfindel pays them no heed. 

He grabs a fistful of sodden surcote between Elrohir’s shoulder blades and heaves him up, flips him over and holds him suspended, face down so the water runs out of him. Elrohir coughs and retches more brine over the deck, and to Glorfindel’s ears his gasps and heaves are sweeter than any minstrel’s song.

When it is over Elrohir’s chest rattles with a terrible, wet sound, but he is breathing. 

Glorfindel holds him, clutching tight, his own breath heaving as he drowns in sheer relief. 

Being held seems to ease Elrohir, and soon he draws steady breaths that bubble in his wet lungs. Glorfindel cradles him, holding on as if to sanity, heedless of the mail ringlets biting into his skin.

“Elrohir…” he mutters into Elrohir’s salt-caked hair, “You were …  I thought you were dead! Thank Ulmo, thank all the Valar, you are here, you are alive … oh, Elrohir.”

A rope-calloused hand moves into view and lifts Elrohir’s chin. Its mate touches Elrohir’s throat and his forehead, then splays over his chest. Glorfindel looks up into Falver’s eyes. Her gaze is full of both sympathy and grave concern. Galdor crouches beside her, holding out a grey woollen blanket.

Falver wedges an arm between them, trying to wrap it around Elrohir and lift him off Glorfindel’s lap.

“No!” Glorfindel clenches, refuses to loosen his hold. They must not take Elrohir from him. He will not allow it. 

“Sir,” the healeress says, very calmly but without ceasing her attempts, “he cannot stay out here. We must warm him up!” 

Falver’s words shock him out of his daze of relief. She is right. Ossë has no regard for the Children’s frail bodies. Glorfindel may not feel the chill, but Elrohir’s cheek is cold as stone where it lays against Glorfindel’s collarbone, and the sea wind whips at his wet clothes.

He scans the deck, bewildered to see Calear being carried below deck, his battered shape hidden beneath a blanket and a multitude of helping hands. Dusk has deepened into night. Surely but a moment has passed since the bell called him from his cabin?   

Glorfindel leaps to his feet, balancing his precious burden, and makes for the sick bay.

Chapter 19: Cold/Magical Exhaustion

Read Chapter 19: Cold/Magical Exhaustion

The Nemir’s sick bay is a hive of busy healers. Warm air hits Glorfindel's skin as he carries Elrohir inside. Falver’s aides have already lit the stove, heating the cabin to a swelter.  

Despite its sombre purpose, this room was made to ease the weary heart. The walls are white wood carved into breaking waves and skimming seabirds that look alive in the golden lamplight. No matter how far the Nemir may roam, her wounded will rest beneath the stars of home: the ceiling is a single painting of a striking northern sky. Every beloved star shines against the deep blue heavens, the Valacirca set in silver. The planks underfoot are scrubbed pale and sanded.

Glorfindel  lays Elrohir down on a surgeon’s table, averting his eyes from the one across the room, where the tally of Calear’s torments is made. 

Elrohir is cold beyond shivering. He lays still on the table, his breathing laboured. When Falver calls his name his eyes open, but they are wild with delirium and slide off her face without recognition. The pupils are black meres of nothingness in a narrow rim of grey. 

Glorfindel reaches for him, and Elrohir recoils, his face a snarl of horror. He is seeing phantoms, and he is terrified. 

“No!” he screams in Haradi, clearly convinced they are Umbarians, or something worse. The cry echoes through the cabin, the very sound of despair. Across the room Calear moans in fear. 

Falver moves at once. Swift as a swooping seabird she takes hold of Elrohir. One hand curls around his nape, the other gently covers his eyes. Before he can fight her she sings a single cantrip of sweet and dark oblivion, and deftly wraps him in sleep. He sags down on the white planks of the table like a hewn tree.

Glorfindel stands stricken with dismay, but Falver takes hold of the edge of Elrohir’s mail hauberk and begins to hike it up. 

“Raise him, sir,” she orders, her eyes on her patient. “We need to get these wet clothes off him!” She looks sideways at Glorfindel, and her eyes widen. 

Only then does Glorfindel realise how he must look - barefoot, half dressed and wholly soaked. He should go find his tunic or a shirt, at least, but he cannot bear to leave Elrohir for even a moment. 

He holds her gaze, and shakes his head. Falver yields to his will, and she nods. At her signal some aide whose face he does not register hands him a healer’s smock. He dons it over his sodden breeches.

Together they begin the work of stripping Elrohir of his soaked gear down to his skin. This, at least, Glorfindel knows how to do. It is not his first time prying a wounded man out of a mail hauberk, nor even his tenth. Gentle hands but sure ones lift and pull and remove layer after sodden layer. 

Rivulets of seawater run down the table to the sanded planks below. Between garments they must stop to let Elrohir catch his breath and hack up ever more brine in great heaving coughs. His breathing is harsh, his lips blue, and despite the cabin’s oppressive heat his skin remains cold as the sea. 

Surcote, hauberk and gambeson slap down into a sodden pile on the planks, and someone takes them away. Elrohir’s tunic, undershirt and breeches follow. Celebrían’s fine work is stiff with blood and salt. 

Elrohir is left in nothing but his octopus pendant, and Glorfindel could weep at the sight. There is no trace of the child he once was. The slender shoulders speak of hunger and harshness, all wiry muscle over jutting, underfed ribs. 

In the muscled part of his thigh sits a puckered white circle - a barbed crossbow bolt dug out with a knife. Whoever did the digging was either clumsy or in a rush, and probably both. The scar is a hollow gap in the muscle underneath. Shoddy work even for a Mortal healer. Glorfindel tries not to imagine Elrond’s dismay once he catches sight of it. 

Elrohir has another puncture wound on his back, thin and white from long ago. The starburst of a warhammer blow on one shoulder. A serrated line runs across his belly, as if someone tried to gut him. Glorfindel has no idea when or how Elrohir came by any of them. 

Falver has seen much in her long life, and she does not speak, but there is a gentle compassion in the way she pulls a clean linen shirt over Elrohir’s head. 

Glorfindel is quick to wrap him in a blanket and lift him off the table to one of the beds lining the walls. The pillows are stuffed with fragrant herbs, so the wounded crush them as they move and sleep amid the sweet summer-scent of dried athelas.

The cook must have fired up his stove the instant the bell rang, because the hot stones arrive by the bucketful. They are swiftly wrapped in cloth and divided between Elrohir and Calear, packed all around them before they are covered with layers of linen and woollen blankets. 

Falver liberates Elrohir’s hand from the pile of blankets, and only then does Glorfindel recall the knife-wound. He winces at the sight of the white tendons laid bare in Elrohir’s palm.  Falver lays the torn hand on a side table, probes it with some surgeon’s tool, and carefully moves each finger before threading a curved needle with catgut. Elrohir gives no response to being stitched. 

Glorfindel sinks down on a stool on Elrohir’s other side. “Falver …” he draws a heavy breath, hesitant to let her see his fear. “Tell me he will heal?” Another breath, while he gently strokes Elrohir’s salt-soaked hair back from his forehead. “Say he will not die from this?”

Falver sighs, a deep sadness in her eyes, but she is honest, as a healer should be. “Elrohir’s  peril lies not in the water. If he were hale in spirit, at home with his kin to strengthen him, by now he would have stood up laughing and walked away.”

Her eyes dart over to Calear, whose bed is surrounded by his own people. Indeed, the man is awake and breathing well despite his ordeal. Alphalas is feeding him sips from a steaming cup of mulled wine. 

Beside the bed one of the coxswains sings in the ancient Telerin of the Falas. Glorfindel barely understands the words, but somewhere in the undertones silver-grey waves murmur upon a starlit beach.  

“Elrohir suffered much sorrow, all alone,” Falver says as she ties off a stitch. “It mired his spirit in darkness. He yearns so deeply for light, for peace. He was already turned toward Mandos before he ever fell into the sea.”

“What can we do?”

“Call him. Remind him of the light that is here, in Middle-earth. Perhaps he will turn back.”    

Glorfindel is a warrior and his hands are freshly bloodied. Estë’s grace is stretched thin so soon after killing. Elrond might wield it in full, but Elrond is not here. Glorfindel will have to do, though the lives he took in violence sap his power.

He wraps Elrohir’s good hand in his own, and takes a moment to look . Elrohir’s form has begun to fade, the threads binding his spirit to his body worn gossamer-thin. Sword-calloused hands are left cold by the fading fëa. A battered and battle-weary soldier, come to peace after a war so long its end must seem beyond belief. 

He raises his hand and lays it against Elrohir’s face with a soft, soothing hum of Song. He lets his fingers curl gently around the angle of Elrohir’s jaw so he can feel the leaping pulse, the fëa’s silver song stirring beneath the skin. 

He draws a deep breath, and with as light a touch as he can muster, plunges his own spirit into Elrohir’s like a kingfisher dives into a clear stream. 

He soon finds the grief that strangles Elrohir like a noose, the fear, the unrelenting agony that is Elladan’s absence. He suffers for himself how Elrohir’s body calls out in pain from being ill-used and underfed. The dragging weariness of it all, a bone-deep yearning to lay down and let himself sink and give the burden to Mandos. 

Elrohir’s wounded fëa battles its unhousing by estel alone. Not much longer now, and it will fly free and wing into the West. 

Already he wanders far away, lost in a land of echoes and grey twilight, where every shadowed path leads down to the sable doors of the Doomsman’s domain. Glorfindel can almost see Námo’s pale form hovering, ready to call Elrohir’s fleeing spirit like a hawk to the hand.

Elrohir may be wandering, but he is not yet lost. There is always a choice. 

Come to me! Glorfindel calls into the dark. Elrohir son of Elrond, turn from this grey road you are walking, and come to me. I will bring you home.

Glorfindel reaches down into the very core of his being and pulls up power like a flood of liquid golden light. He should husband his strength, perhaps, but he cannot bear the thought of Elrohir lacking anything he is capable of giving. 

He takes the thrumming, coruscating essence of himself, lets it shimmer for a moment like a flood rises to the dam, then pours life and light and healing into Elrohir’s wounded spirit and his battered body. Elrohir needs it like parched land needs the rain.

Glorfindel does not share Elrohir’s blood, so the touch is strange, but Glorfindel is skilled in osanwë and his fëa burns strong within him. The dark roots of this hurt he cannot mend; that will take time and Elrond’s care, but for now Glorfindel gives and gives, expending all he has, heedless of a healer’s distant reserve. 

Elrohir’s breathing eases, and from his lips falls a soft sigh of sheer relief.

When Glorfindel withdraws the world wavers, strange and hazy. Flecks of light wriggle across his vision from the effort. 

Glorfindel has spent but a moment entangled in Elrohir’s spirit, but somehow Falver has already closed the wound and bandaged it. She now sits in a chair at the bedside, her eyes on Glorfindel. That grey-eyed gaze pierces him to the core. 

“I will tend to you now,” she says. It is not a question. 

Glorfindel shakes his head. “I need nothing.”

“You are bleeding, and chilled to the bone. And unless I am very much mistaken you have not been this spent since you carried Elrond from the field in Mordor.”

“The healthy look after themselves, Falver,” he says, with a gesture at Elrohir. “You should tend to the injured.” 

“You are one of them.” She looks him in the eye, unfazed. “Either you let me do this now, or in a moment, when I have sent for the captain and he commands it.”

Glorfindel is a soldier. He knows when a battle is lost. 

Falver rises to stand behind him. She takes the hem of his borrowed smock, and Glorfindel raises his arms so she can pull it off over his head. The fabric is stuck to his back, and when she lifts it free liquid warmth drips down his flank. Only then does he recall being scraped against the ship’s hull as they were hauled up. His stomach bears a livid bruise in the pattern of Elrohir’s mail ringlets. 

The pain strikes him, then. All small abrasions that will heal in a day, but nonetheless he begins to shiver. It is no longer the cold, but grief and exhaustion catching up with him. 

A cup of warmed wine appears. “No sleep draught," he protests over the rim, knowing Elrond and his sly healers’ tricks. “He needs me awake.”

She nods. “Agreed, my lord. This cup will brighten your mind.”

And the drink does just that while she wraps him in a bandage. 

She must have sent someone to his cabin, for a change of dry clothes appears unasked. When at last Glorfindel settles in for a long night at Elrohir’s bedside he sits wrapped in his own cloak, warm and dry. 

 

Chapter 20: Bedside Vigil/Holding hands

Read Chapter 20: Bedside Vigil/Holding hands

A hand is curled around his own, the fingers folded over his. The weight of it lies warm against his skin. 

He tries to open his eyes, but he lies sunken beneath dark water. The cold of the abyss bites into his bones, and tatters of half-forgotten dreams grasp him like the tentacles of sea monsters, dragging him down into nightmare’s depths.  

Hamalan stares at him, her face waxen-still, gilded by the ghost-light of a dead sun. All around her, a dark wasteland stretches cold beneath the moon. He can hear demons hunting in the shadows, sniffing out his living blood. Not hers. Not any more. 

“I am sorry,” he says, because he knows not what else to tell her. “I should have died in your place.”

She looks at him, her head held at that angle when she is thinking. “You never do,” she says.

He knows that it is true and yet he cannot bear it, so he reaches out to touch her, but she twists away from him. He grasps at the hem of her robe, to keep her with him. She snarls and her beloved face peels away to reveal the Ringwraith’s shrivelled skull-mask. The jaw unhinges, baring double rows of serrated teeth. 

When he screams his terror, his lungs burn in agony. The cold has sunk its claws into him, and he cannot stop shivering. 

There is a refuge, a place to flee where darkness holds only the peace of a starless night, stillness without shadow. 

The road runs like a ribbon of glowing silver-grey, ever downwards through the shadowed wastes to a massive gate, black as obsidian. What hunts him cannot enter the silent halls beyond that towering arch. This he knows, with absolute certainty. But once he sets foot upon the grey path, there can be no return. 

“Elrohir.” Glorfindel’s voice, but whether in mind or speech, he cannot tell. 

He remembers the hand, clutches at it, and it gently closes over his own. The touch anchors him to waking, pulling him up to the light. 

Another hand, on his head, stroking his hair.

“Wake up, Elrohir.” Glorfindel cannot be here, in the shadows at the bottom of the sea, and yet his presence folds itself around Elrohir like golden lamplight pours into a dark room. The demons scatter into the distance. He floats in the light for a time, and knows not where he is or what to do. 

“Open your eyes,” Glorfindel suggests, and only then does he remember them. 

When he obeys, the world is too bright. The light hurts, and the pain drags him out to sea like a leaf riding a rushing wave. 

A lamp shutter clicks. Blessed twilight descends. He blinks. Overhead a sky of silver stars pulses gently with his heartbeat.

“Shhh,” the sound is in his head and his ears both, all gentleness. “You have a fever. Here, drink a little.” 

The rim of a cup presses against his lips. Warm, sweet liquid trickles into his mouth, and only now does he recall being thirsty to the point of torture. The honeyed wine hides a bitter tang of healers’ herbs, but the drink is the most blessedly wonderful thing he ever tasted. 

When the cup is empty, he blinks, and the glare dissolves into Glorfindel’s face. 

“You are alive…” Elrohir croaks through cracked lips, astonished by this much good fortune.

“I am.” Glorfindel smiles, his fair Elvish face bright as the sun. “And so are you.”

“Did we win?” Elrohir rasps.

“Fear not, my friend.” Glorfindel says, setting the cup down somewhere beyond sight. “We won.” 

“Calear?” 

“Alive, and healing.” Glorfindel’s face is bright with joy. His hand curls, weaving the fingers into Elrohir’s hair. Elves like hair, and Glorfindel now seems to be indulging where he has held back before. 

“Ossë, he …” Elrohir’s voice falters. He cannot speak for the terror and strangeness of it.

His hand hurts, but when he raises it to look he finds only a cream-white Elvish bandage. The memory of the Umbarian and his knife assaults him, and he shudders with the sharp jerk of weightlessness as he plummets off the yard once more, the stunning shock of hitting the water, the terror of drowning.

“I know,” Glorfindel says, with almost painful gentleness, and his honest compassion is enough to make Elrohir regain his voice. 

“Ossë is an octopus,” he says, his breath hitching, “luminous, the size of a hill.” He draws a shuddering breath, and soldiers on. “I had to breathe, but it was all water and it flowed into me. It was so cold. I thought I had died, but He made the water like air. I could talk, but He was in my head too. He looked straight through me.” 

He shudders at the memory of that golden-eyed gaze. 

Glorfindel makes a soft, encouraging sound, his eyes on Elrohir’s face. 

“He wanted to sink the Shaklhalzôr! All those poor oarsmen. I told Him they were slaves but He did not care. His anger is … terrible. I thought He would snap me in half, and Calear, too, but then He laughed. He knows Galdor’s name, said that Galdor knows how to thank Him.” Elrohir pushes himself up, frantic, though the effort sets the half-lit cabin to spinning. “You must tell Galdor, Glorfindel! He must thank Ossë, or He will …” 

Elrohir’s good hand clutches the blanket as if the silk-soft Elvish cloth might ground him, but he cannot say more, because his breath has run out and sitting up has him swaying. Blood-red spots wriggle before his eyes.  He must breathe slowly, but somehow he cannot stop these great wheezing sobs that tear from his burning lungs. Glorfindel’s face goes hazy when he blinks away tears.

“Ai, Elrohir…” Glorfindel leans forward and embraces Elrohir, pulling Elrohir’s weight against himself. One hand rests warm and solid around his shoulders, the other cups his head and gently strokes his hair like he is a child.  

No amount of anger or reproach could have driven Elrohir to tears, but Glorfindel’s gentleness proves his undoing. He must stop crying, but he cannot. Glorfindel’s tunic is wet with tears. 

Glorfindel lets it happen, singing under his breath, and the song is all comfort and half-remembered warmth. 

When at last Elrohir’s breath evens and he raises his head, he cannot look Glorfindel in the eye for the shame of it, but Glorfindel presses a kiss to Elrohir’s forehead, then reaches out to gently lift his chin. 

“Not all tears are an evil,” he says softly, and lowers Elrohir to the pillows. 

Elrohir cannot help a sigh of sheer relief at lying down once more. From a side table Glorfindel takes a piece of linen, wets it with cool, clean water. 

“The Ainur are alien. They surpass our Elvish understanding,” he says, his expression pensive as he wipes Elrohir’s swollen eyes. “Sometimes They clothe Themselves in Elvish form, but even then They burn brighter. When arrayed in shapes of their own devising, They can be … too much. Especially Ossë.”

“Have you ever seen Him?” Elrohir asks, eager to change the subject.

“He once agreed to guide my ship on a long journey. A wild ride that was, leaping from wave to wave on the wings of a storm. At times I saw Him in His Stirrer’s shape, a light in the deep, or great golden eyes amidst the waves. He made me uneasy, though I knew that He meant me well. You had no such certainty. There is no shame in being shaken by the experience.”

Elrohir does not answer. His head hurts from crying, his wounded hand pulses with sharp pain and his body slumps against the pillow, boneless with exhaustion.

“Sleep. Tomorrow, you will feel stronger.” Glorfindel passes a hand over Elrohir’s eyes, and at once his pain eases, leaving behind a deep, wholesome tiredness. He gladly sinks into it, and consciousness flits from his grasp. 

Chapter 21: Anger Born of Worry/Stumbling

Read Chapter 21: Anger Born of Worry/Stumbling

Night covers the Great Sea when Galdor at last climbs over the Shakhalzôr’s gunwale, down to the tender that will return him to the Nemir . He had a long work setting things right aboard the captured Umbarian. 

The freed slaves fought bravely, but pitting unarmed men against mail-clad marines has left a carnage’s worth of wounded. Falver’s staff have turned half the Shakhalzôr’s deck into an improvised field hospital. Rows of straw mattresses line up under sail cloth tarps. White-smocked Elves move between them, tending the wounded and comforting those beyond aid as they pass out of Arda. 

Galdor has allowed none of the Mortals aboard the Nemir . His mission to retrieve Elrohir came a hair’s breadth from failure, and now that he is secure Galdor will risk no strange Men anywhere near him.  

He salutes the prize crew, all doughty volunteers from the Nemir’s complement. They are to sail the Shakhalzôr to Gondor, where a captured Umbarian man-of-war will bring a rich reward. A perilous proposition: keeping the former galley slaves from slaughtering the Umbarians locked in the slave hold will be no small feat. 

For now, the twin miracles of Glorfindel’s breaking of their chains and Elrohir and Calear’s rising from the deep have the Mortals stunned with wonder. Most are up on deck beneath the open sky, praying or singing hymns to the Valar together with the Elvish crew. Morgoth’s altar stone is long smashed, its bloodstained rubble tossed overboard. Galdor straightens himself, rubbing a smear of stone dust from his sleeve. 

A runnel of moonlight cuts across the still surface of the Sea. Ossë has tempered his wrath. He offers them a placid night to regain their bearings, like a repentant child brings a handful of wildflowers after some petty mischief. 

Tomorrow this moonlit idyll will end. The Men will remember their differences, and violence may erupt despite the promise of prize money. Already there are struggles and altercations among them. Southrons against Haradrim, Gondorians against Dunlendings, and some who no longer remember what or who they were before they were chained to the oar. 

Galdor has taken advantage of the distraction to remove the stores of rum from the Shakhalzôr’s hold. Things are volatile enough without soaking the Mortals in liquor. 

He joins the barrels in the sloop being rowed to the Nemir . The casks are branded with both the Eye of Sauron and the striking viper of the Prince of Pellardur. The liquid sloshing inside is strong, bitter alcohol, meant to numb the prince’s men against the misery of their circumstances. The marines, that is. The slaves would not get even that small mercy. 

The Nemir’s swan-white hull towers over them as they approach. Galdor is the first to climb the grey rope ladder.

On deck, all seems in order. The watch is doubled, but most of the crew feel no need for sleep tonight. They sit under the stars, talking or singing softly. No celebration yet, not with two of their own still hanging in the balance, but there is a distinct lightness in the air. 

Galdor dives down the stairs into the aftercastle. Inside the sick bay the lamps are turned down to a gentle golden twilight. Falver stands over Calear’s bed, a soft song of mending on her lips. Her ancient face is all sharp focus as she applies splints to the broken hands splayed out atop the blanket. Galdor is no stranger to bloodshed, but his stomach twists and he must avert his eyes from the shattered ruin of Calear’s fingers, swollen and blue-black like those of a waterlogged corpse. 

Calear lies insensate under her ministrations. Beneath the bruises his face is white and sunken. His eyes are closed. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest shows that he lives still. 

Grief closes over Galdor’s heart. Have torture and maiming turned Calear’s spirit to Mandos?

At his concerned glance, Falver looks up from her grisly task. “Drugged to the gills, sir,” she whispers. “He will live.”

Galdor nods, and notes that she does not say whether Calear will ever use his hands again. Elrohir’s rescue came at a terrible price. 

Across the cabin the lad is asleep. Real sleep. That unnatural pallor of the dying has lifted. His cheeks have colour, and there is no trace of blue on his lips. Galdor lays a hand against his forehead, and finds it warm. 

Glorfindel slumps in a chair at the bedside, long limbs folded so he might lean across to rest one hand on Elrohir’s head. The hand stroking his hair is almost transparent with white light. 

When Glorfindel looks up at Galdor he is pale and drawn, his eyes unfocused with exhaustion. All his golden well of Maia-like power is drained into Elrohir like wine poured from a cup. 

Galdor feels some of that soul-deep weariness in himself. Nothing leeches strength from the spirit like taking life, and the battle has sapped him. There was a price, for prying the blackened husk of the prince’s fëa from its desperate clutch on this world. For Glorfindel, the fight was but the lesser of his labours.

Even so, Glorfindel’s smile is the widest, most perfect expression of joy Galdor has seen from him since the fall of Barad-dûr. 

“He woke up, and spoke with me.” Glorfindel tries to rise, but he is pushing himself up against the bed’s edge as if his legs cannot hold him. “The fever broke an hour ago, and he is breathing better!”

“Careful,” Galdor says, and steadies his staggering friend. 

“Give me a moment, and I will be well.” Glorfindel sinks back down into the chair. Blue shadows pool beneath his eyes, and he closes them for a moment, but never raises his hand from where it rests on Elrohir’s salt-caked hair.  

Galdor does not argue, but pulls up a chair and sends for a drink. His own Lindon whisky, not the Mortal rotgut. Much to be said, and they might as well do it here. The wounded are out cold, and Falver will tell no tales. 

When the flask arrives he pours generously - both of them have more than earned a stiff drink. 

The liquor returns some colour to Glorfindel’s face. Galdor takes the glass from him, and pours him another two fingers unasked. 

“What is Ossë’s message?” Galdor asks after his first smoky sip.

“The old hothead would have sunk the Shakhalzôr . Elrohir had the fright of his life pleading for the poor souls.” Glorfindel shakes his head, outraged on his ward’s behalf. “Ossë wants you to thank him.”

“Of course he does.” Galdor sighs, and knocks back some more. “I suppose he has earned it. I happen to have found him a perfect gift.”

Glorfindel raises an eyebrow. 

“You will see. He will love it. With luck, it will make him forget about the Shakhalzôr long enough for her to get away.”

“Where to?” Glorfindel asks at once. Clearly he still has his wits about him, even in this state. 

Unstoppable . Galdor smiles. 

“Pelargir,” he says with conviction. He spent the evening thinking about his next move, and his mind is made up. “We will split up as soon as we are safely in Gondorian waters. The Shakhalzôr is to be delivered to the Royal Navy. They will deal fairly with the freedmen, and pay them their share of the prize.”

Glorfindel nods, relief open in his gaze. Deep down he is a tender soul, and the horrors of an Umbarian rowing deck have him rattled. 

“The Nemir will head to Mithlond without delay,” Galdor continues. “I have no desire to learn what trouble Elrohir might get into in a foreign port. Ossë willing, we will be home before midsummer.”

Ossë will prove willing indeed, for this. Glorfindel is silent, but his agreement is clear. For a moment they sit in quiet companionship, their eyes on Elrohir’s sleeping face, and let the reality of it sink in. 

“We did it,” Glorfindel says at last. “He is going home.”

“If he does not throw himself off a yard again before we make port.” Galdor replies dryly. He sends Glorfindel a sharp look. “I will keep a closer eye on him, from now on.”

“Do not be harsh,” Glorfindel says.

Galdor has dreaded this talk, knowing how his friend treasures this child, but hard truths must be spoken. “Harshness is called for,” he replies, his earlier anger stirring anew. “I told him to stay put .” 

When Elrohir wakes he should hear a stern lecture about insubordination and following orders and how he behaved like a suicidal idiot. In Elrond’s absence Galdor will gladly deliver it, as a safety measure.

Glorfindel shakes his head, determined. “He is not one of your crew.”

Galdor scoffs. “He should have obeyed the captain nonetheless.” He sends Glorfindel a sharp look. “Overindulgence does children a poor service.” Raising two headstrong daughters taught him that lesson. Glorfindel is wise, but in this matter Galdor considers his own wisdom the greater.

The painful truth sits unspoken between them: Galdor is a father while Glorfindel is not, and will never be. 

Glorfindel’s gaze is a cool reproach. “Elrohir expects you to give him the lash. Do you not see why he defied you anyway?”

For a moment Galdor is baffled. The next, his cheeks heat with the anger of insult. The very notion is absurd - the Nemir carries no such despicable thing. He would have to send to the Shakhalzôr for a whip, and his own crew would clap him in chains before he could lay a single stroke.

“Does he think me some crude Mortal!?” he fumes. “He is young and brash. I have seen too many lives lost to recklessness. Condoning it will do him no favours.” 

A sharp sound rises from Falver’s corner, and when Galdor turns to look, her ancient eyes pierce him to his core. 

“I rowed the tender that picked them up from the beach,” she says quietly, while bandaging Calear’s shattered hand. “When that boy laid eyes on us, he was terrified . Scared enough to run straight back into Umbar.” 

She glances at him, her head held at an angle, almost bird-like. “Glorfindel had to gentle him into the boat like a spooked colt. All Elvendom meant nothing to him. Glorfindel is his only friend in the world, all he knows of his home. He saw Glorfindel walk to his death, and so he saved him. By any means necessary.”

Galdor recalls the boy’s look of wide-eyed terror as he first came over the gunwale that strange night. The sobering realisation hits: Elrohir is alone among strangers, and Glorfindel is indeed his only friend in all the world. A friend he would not lose. 

“Sorrow is heavy on him,” Glorfindel says softly. “He might break under it if he finds that we have turned against him. He should not wake to reproach. Forget your dented pride, my friend. Show him kindness. He has received so little of it.”

Galdor rubs his eyes. “Valar,” he sighs, and empties his glass. The fiery tang of whisky burns down his throat. “He will do Elrond proud, one day. A lion’s heart he has in him.”

“And all the common sense of a kitten,” Glorfindel adds with a small, apologetic smile.

Galdor laughs, glad of his friend’s great heart. “You will train it into him, eventually.”

Elrohir stirs, caught in some dark dream. A shadow of fear twists his sleeping face. 

Glorfindel moves at once. “Sleep, Elrohir. All is well.” He passes a hand over Elrohir’s eyes.

Galdor watches Glorfindel scrabble for the final, desperate dregs of his strength. He drains himself until Elrohir settles once more, his mind lapping with the placid ebb and flood of dreamless sleep.

As Galdor looks on, Glorfindel's eyes droop, then fall closed where he sits. Galdor rises in silence and lifts a blanket from an unused bed to drape it over Glorfindel’s slack form. 

Elrohir lies very still, his face calm. Irmo’s blessing settles upon them both, deep and wholesome, the best of healers.

Chapter 22: Quality Time

Read Chapter 22: Quality Time

Elrohir wakes to the morning sun pouring gold into the cabin. He blinks against the brightness, but soon settles for watching the light play along the carved wave-crests that cover the wall. Simple sunshine has become a marvel, after believing he would never see it again. 

His head is heavy, his thoughts syrup-slow. Whatever Elvish concoction Glorfindel gave him last night must have held a good dash of poppy. Even so, he hurts as if he has been trampled by a mûmak. His head, his chest, his wounded hand. Every breath is a struggle. 

The thirst is the worst of it.  

He turns his head to scan the room. Some kind of healer’s ward. Several beds. Only one is occupied. The hands resting atop the blanket are bandaged so thickly he can barely discern their shape. He cannot see the face because the head, too, is partly wrapped in a cream-white dressing. 

Calear. They cut off his ear.

Elrohir’s stomach drops and he needs to swallow, but his mouth is too parched. At least the poor Elf seems alive and awake. 

A white-smocked Elf-woman - Falver - stands over Calear’s bed. She is speaking to him, her voice low and gentle, but Elrohir’s head feels full of sand and he cannot grasp her lilting flow of Sindarin. He has not the heart to interrupt whatever it is she is doing for Calear.

Looking around is slow and difficult. Once he manages it he finds Glorfindel’s tall shape, folded into a chair beside him. He is covered in a grey blanket and his cheek rests on the backrest. His open eyes are glassy with some Elvish dream. 

Elrohir watches for a time. He has not seen Glorfindel sleep before. He must be exhausted. 

Elrohir does not mean to wake him, but on the bedside shelf sits a cup, and he is thirsty enough to drink whatever he can find. He tries to be silent, but the instant he raises his unsteady hand, Glorfindel blinks. 

Elves are never clumsy, not even upon waking. At once Glorfindel notes Elrohir’s eyes on the cup, and deftly lifts it for him.

Elrohir’s one good hand is shaking, but he balks at the indignity of having Glorfindel bring the drink to his mouth. Glorfindel hands it over, with his hand lingering over Elrohir’s to steady him. 

Cool, clean water with only the barest taste of tar from the barrel. 

“There. You must be parched.” Glorfindel laughs his golden laugh as he refills the cup, and Elrohir drains it thrice over.

 

----

 

Glorfindel cannot help but laugh, allow the bubbling fountain of his joy an escape lest he burst with it. The relief is too immense. 

Elrohir’s eyes are open. He has emerged from the oblivion of Mortal sleep, that alien foretaste of death, deeper and darker than Elvish rest. 

Barely a day ago Glorfindel stood on deck singing Elrohir’s burial dirge, longing for the bitter consolation of a corpse to tend to. He cannot contain his stunned delight at having him alive instead. 

At the work table in the corner Falver looks up from her log, joy open in her eyes, and even Calear turns his bandaged head towards the sound of Glorfindel’s laughter with some lopsided thing that might be a smile brightening his battered face. 

Once Elrohir has drunk water and some broth, the poppy loses its grip. His gaze grows clear, and behind it his mind is present once more.  

He has many questions, and Glorfindel answers them without saying too much. The Nemir and her crew are safe. The Shakhalzôr remains afloat. The prince is dead, along with most of his marines. The slaves are free. 

In the other bed, Calear has turned onto his side to listen, sea-grey eyes bright amidst his bruises.  

When Glorfindel falls silent, Elrohir smiles - thank Manwë and Varda for the sight! - and promptly falls asleep once more. Glorfindel settles back into his chair, and takes what rest he can find.

 

At midday, Elrohir awakens with a start. 

“No!” His face twists in dismay. “I lost it!” His eyes are wild, and his breathing quickens with genuine fear.

Glorfindel leans forward, alarmed, and lays a hand on his shoulder. “What did you lose?” 

“My sword!” Elrohir lifts himself off the pillows. “I let go of it in the water!” 

Glorfindel recalls seeing him plunge into the sea with the scimitar in hand. Ossë has not seen fit to raise it up from the abyss; when Glorfindel undressed Elrohir after his ordeal, he found his scabbard empty.

Elrohir’s lost sword was Umbarian army issue. He must have looted it off some dead Corsair. A utilitarian lump of steel, utterly without beauty. Glorfindel had tested it once, to be sure Elrohir had a good weapon, and found malice in its make. Elrohir had filed away the Eye insignia on the blade, but the iron still carried a cruel Song of bloodlust, a twisted pleasure in causing pain and ending life. Let the accursed thing crumble to rust on the bottom of the Sea.

“You need it no more,” Glorfindel says, his voice all calm reassurance. “Our battles are done.”

It is as if he suggested that Elrohir walk around naked. 

“I can hardly go without a sword!” Elrohir looks as if he has half a mind to go diving for it. 

There it is. Elrohir has not the slightest expectation that this deluge of violence that was his life thus far will ever end. Peace is a thing beyond imagining. Glorfindel vows to give it to him.

And so he says, “you will be given another one later, at home.”

It is a half-truth. Elrond will indeed give Elrohir a sword, but not until some glad day of feasting many years from now, when Elrohir passes the trials and takes his oath as a knight of Imladris. 

The trials are for full-grown Elves who have spent a long-year in training. Glorfindel is a harsh taskmaster, because he must be. And he will not inflict any of it on a half-starved lad of less than fifty with ghosts behind his eyes and the spectre of fading hovering over him. It will be long before Elrohir carries arms again. 

He eyes Elrohir’s hands, covered in tell-tale scars and calloused by the rough leather hilt. Elrond will make sure that they soften, wrapped around pens and books and harp strings. 

“For now we have no spare to give you,” Glorfindel says, decisively. And then, remembering how to distract any lad of fifty, “would you like a story instead?”

Harad taught Elrohir to endure what cannot be changed. He settles back against the pillow. “Tell me about the Balrog?” he says, innocently.

Calear eyes Glorfindel with a startled air. Falver’s head shoots up, her gaze a warning.

Glorfindel smiles. This is what he gets for bragging. 

Elrohir does not know yet that Glorfindel has died, and his spirit returned to life in a renewed body. To the Men of Harad, revenants carry the reek of necromancy, of the Houseless hungry for bodies, of Sauron’s blackest arts - precisely the sort of thing that would strike terror into Elrohir even now. Glorfindel must hold that particular story back until later, when Elrohir is stronger and more settled against the strangeness of it. 

“I will not darken today with that tale,” he says. “Would you like to hear about Fingon and the dragon?”

Elrohir hesitates. “Who is Fingon?”

Falver has grown used to Elrohir’s stunning ignorance about vast swathes of common knowledge, but Calear eyes him with genuine shock. 

“Fingon is the son of Fingolfin and Anaïre,” Glorfindel explains with a smile. “He is both your great great great uncle on your father’s side, and your first cousin twice removed on your mother’s.” 

Elrohir gives him a panicked stare, desperately trying and failing to commit this to his fever-fogged memory. 

“Fear not. One day it will seem like you have always known him,” Glorfindel reassures, and moves on to the dragon.

It is a tale from those bright days when the Noldor held Morgoth at bay behind the leaguer and Beleriand lay fair and green beneath the newborn sun. 

He makes it a riveting victory: the noble prince Fingon and his brave knights; sunlight glittering off their shining armour, the splendour of their banners, the white shimmer of great warhorses with gem-braided manes. 

Elrohir is staring wide-eyed, and even Calear, who is old enough to have seen the glory of the Noldor with his own eyes, and all of it brought to utter ruin, has a glimmer in his eye. 

A warmth like a good fire settles in Glorfindel’s chest as he watches them turn to his voice, their eyes bright and free of pain as they hang on his every word. 

Glorfindel carries them to the wide green plains of Ard-Galen, a sea of waving grass stretching beneath the sky onto the horizon, where the dreadful towers of Thangorodrim loom.

Elrohir gasps as the indemmar move before his mind’s eye. Mere months ago he would have gone pale with terror and grabbed his knife. He is growing used to them now, and leans back as he lets the story play out. 

Glorfindel smiles. Trust, at last.

In his eagerness to keep Elrohir’s smile, instead of slime and horror and flesh-melting flame he makes Glaurung a creature of golden scales and leaping fire. 

The knights confront, encircle, confound the dragon with a hail of white-fletched arrows shot from horseback. Tearing speed and cool wind in their faces and the joy of battle and skill of arms. 

Elrohir has turned onto his side to face Glorfindel, his bandaged hand stretched out before him. The wound is forgotten as he listens, rapt.

Fingon moves in for the final strike. 

Glorfindel’s audience barely breathes. 

The brave duel. The bright-mailed prince against the golden dragon. Stroke and harry. An arc of roaring flame caught on Fingon’s white shield. 

Elrohir and Calear gasp as one.

The mighty spear-thrust. The dragon pierced, bleeding, fleeing in disgrace. 

Both faces break into smiles.

Fingon himself set that battle to song, and Glorfindel sings the final verse, all joyous triumph. 

His listeners are beaming, their hearts glad for a moment, free of the memory of their pains. Elrohir looks better than he has since Glorfindel pulled him from the sea. Falver in her corner gives him a nod of rare approval. 

Elrohir smiles. “You are a bard, Glorfindel!”

“I am not,” Glorfindel laughs. “But I have heard many a good one at work.”

“I could see it happen! Was it your memory? Were you there?” Elrohir asks, his eyes wide. 

“I was elsewhere at the time,” Glorfindel says, trying not to think of Gondolin, “but I have learned both tale and song from one who was.”  

“Fingon?” Elrohir asks eagerly. 

Glorfindel barely manages to hide his wince. When last he saw Fingon, he was no longer that merry, dragon-defying prince, but the stern and warlike High King of the Noldor, commanding the field at what was to become the Nirnaeth. 

“Now, Elrohir,” Falver arises from her work table and comes to Glorfindel’s rescue, clearly eager to distract Elrohir from this grim line of questioning. “I should give that wound another look.”

Chapter 23: Game Night

Read Chapter 23: Game Night

Elrohir’s bandage is not clean. 

Glorfindel is a brave man, but at the sight of the rust-red blotches, cold fear closes over his heart. Three entire days of meticulous care since Elrohir was injured, and still the cream-white muslin comes away bloodstained. 

Falver is silent, her face grave as she unwraps Elrohir’s sliced-open hand. She does not meet Glorfindel’s eyes. 

A wild hope springs up - perhaps this is normal. Is healing not always slow for those with Mortal blood? Glorfindel knows little about the inner workings of Mannish bodies. Surely Elrohir’s strange slowness to mend is some Peredhel quirk.

For a moment Glorfindel allows himself the fancy, but soon he remembers, and his heart sinks anew: Elrond heals like an Elf. Glorfindel has seen ample proof of it over two war-filled ages. 

Elrohir has more Elvish blood than his father, and yet this knife-wound, shallow enough that by now it should be only a pink ridge where the flesh knitted itself back together, is still bleeding. 

Falver shakes her head, and now her ancient eyes find his. It is not because he is Peredhel. It is because he is fading.  

Elrohir has his face turned away from the sight of his own marred flesh, and so he does not see the blood drain from Glorfindel’s face. The arm that rests on the surgeon’s table is wiry and underfed still, and Glorfindel imagines the pale skin a mere veil, barely containing the light of his fading fëa. 

Elrohir makes no sound, but when Falver’s tincture touches the wound his arm twitches. His eyes remain tightly closed. From the open vial wafts the scent of athelas, the golden fields of Valimar in bloom. Elrohir’s breath hitches.

“Almost done,” Glorfindel mutters, his voice all tenderness, and sprawls his own hand, wide and well-muscled, over Elrohir’s wrist in a gentle touch of comfort. By the time Elrohir turns his head, Glorfindel has arranged his face into a smile. 

From his bed, Calear watches them in silence. 

 

----

 

“Let me take you outside. You have not seen the sky for days!” Glorfindel pleads as if Elrohir is about to starve. Elves cannot bear the dark. 

Calear has been whisked upstairs already. Elrohir, too, is expected on deck, but he has no desire to make a spectacle of himself. He can barely stand upright without his cough-wracked lungs wheezing like a bellows, and he much prefers to lick his wounds in hiding.

That, and he dreads the Sea. The rush and sigh of the waves against the ship’s hull are a constant reminder of the abyss that yawns beneath. The sound fills his head with fearful relivings of cold water rushing down his throat, of being a mere speck in the vast blue depths lurking beneath sunlit waves. 

“You will not fall in again.” Glorfindel has this Elvish way of looking into Elrohir’s eyes and seeing his heart. 

Blood rushes to Elrohir’s cheeks at being seen unmanned by mere salt water. He lowers his eyes, away from that Elvish gaze that pierces like light. The floor is of some pale Northern wood, every straight and even plank sanded to whiteness. 

Glorfindel is silent for a moment. “Do you know how to swim?” he asks, softly. 

Elrohir only shakes his head, too ashamed to point out that the Great Southern Desert holds precious little to swim in .  

“Ai, Elrohir...” Glorfindel’s voice holds no scorn. “Forgive me. I should have spared you all this.” He falls silent, and from the corner of his eye Elrohir sees him make a sweeping gesture at the sick bay, or perhaps the sea beyond its wooden walls.

He swallows, then lays a hand on Elrohir’s shoulder. “When your wound is healed, I will teach you.”

At that, Elrohir’s head jerks up to send Glorfindel a look of unmasked horror. “If I never touch saltwater again it will be too soon,” he says, from the bottom of his heart. 

Glorfindel smiles that golden smile, all fondness. “We shall start with a sheltered beach. You will find it easier without the chainmail,” he laughs with such deep and honest eagerness to see Elrohir laugh along with him.

Elrohir manages a wan little smile. 

Glorfindel shines like a sunrise at the sight. “Come,” he says, rising from his bedside chair and lifting a grey woollen sailors’ cloak off the back. “Leave the shadows down here, and sit in the sun for a while.” 

Elrohir knows that tone: Glorfindel will not let this go. The Elf will be a cheerfully stubborn, single-minded bastard about it until Elrohir is sitting on deck, whether he grumbles about it or not. 

Some things cannot be helped. 

Even so, Elrohir draws the line at being carried. He lets himself be wrapped in the cloak and shepherded upstairs slowly so he can catch his breath between steps.

Up on deck there is sunlight and a sailing wind that bears the scent of salt. The sea glitters like rippling glass, and foam flies snow-white before the Nemir’s swan-shaped stern.  

It is indeed beautiful, a balm to the soul. An Elvish thought, perhaps, but a true one. 

The Elves have set up an awning of sailcloth beneath the mizzenmast for their wounded. Glorfindel helps Elrohir down on a blanket beside Calear. 

The Elf is comfortably installed, his splinted hands propped up on folded blankets, a cup of watered wine nearby. In the light of day, his injuries are somehow less horrific. A white bandage covers his severed ear, but it is almost hidden beneath the dark fall of his hair, washed and braided with a string of seed pearls. His nose has been set, his eyes are open and his bruises have bleached to yellow and green. 

“Well met, Elrohir!” Calear says with a wide smile that is only slightly lopsided. “I am glad to make your proper acquaintance at last.” Another smile, bright amidst the bruises. The Umbarians thoroughly worked the poor man over, but somehow he still has his front teeth. “We were a tad rushed, the first time.”

He speaks Adûnaic, with the Umbarian drawl of the coastal working folk. Perfect, accentless, indistinguishable from the real thing. 

For a moment Elrohir sits stunned with wonder at hearing words in a language so familiar falling from an Elf’s mouth. Prince Bawbuthôr was right about one thing: Calear is a spy indeed, and a good one, too. 

Then he lays a hand on his heart and makes a strange half-bow as best he can while sitting, deep enough that his forehead almost touches the grey blanket covering the deck planks underfoot. 

“Sir, I owe you my life,” he says, battling another coughing fit as he straightens himself. “If there is aught you would have of me in repayment, name it and it is yours.”

Calear smiles once more. “There is one small thing,” he replies, giving Elrohir a clever look, “if you are feeling especially grateful.”

“Anything!” Elrohir blurts out. 

Calear’s gaze is sharp as it rests on him. “You come from the eastern desert, yes?” 

“I do,” Elrohir nods without meeting Calear’s eyes, wary of what the sharp mind behind them might perceive.

“Do you play Tâb?” Calear’s tone is casual. 

“Of course.” This is no great revelation - everyone does, in Harad.

“Splendid!” Calear smiles like a contented cat. “Brought your board?”

Elrohir nods.

“I left mine in Pellardur.” Calear says with a wry grin. “No chance to pack.”

“It is yours!” Elrohir blurts out, hiding his dismay. The battered wooden game holds glad memories. He will mourn the loss, but it is a small repayment for Calear’s suffering, and Elrohir prefers his debts settled. 

“Valar, no!” Calear laughs at once. “All I want is a few friendly matches to pass the time! The Haradrim are said to be fiends for Tâb.” He raises an eyebrow at Elrohir, an unspoken challenge. Despite his bruised face it looks merry, somehow. “Prove the rumours true.”

The game has languished at the bottom of Elrohir’s saddlebag for months. It must still be on the floor of Glorfindel’s cabin where he left it when he stepped out to watch the Shâkhalzôr’s approach. But a few steps down the aftercastle stair, and yet utterly beyond reach. 

Standing up has him wheezing, and then he is wracked by a coughing fit that brings tears to his eyes. When he blinks them away Falver is before him, her hands on his shoulders holding him up. 

“Calm now, lad. Deep breaths, one at a time.” She leads him back to his seat, and he has not the strength to protest.  

Behind her back, Glorfindel emerges from the stairway carrying the saddlebag. 

Elrohir digs his Tâb game from the very bottom, where it sat unused since the Ringwraith tightened its noose around the Haradrim. His mood darkens further at the thought, but Calear is eyeing him with such honest and cheerful anticipation that he cannot bring himself to spoil the poor fellow’s fun. 

And so he lays out the board and the wooden dice and cowrie shell pieces. 

“Now,” says Calear, sounding positively cheerful. “What shall we stake?”

Elrohir watches him, hesitating. Players normally bring their own money to the table, but Calear came off the Shakalzôr naked, without even a shirt on his back.  What, then, does he mean to bet with? 

“Use my shells,” Elrohir says quickly. His purse is fat enough for them both. One advantage of play cut short after a winning streak. 

“No, my friend!” Calear laughs, sounding as if they are old mates meeting over a jug of beer. “I am not playing you for your own coin!”

Elrohir has lived a soldier’s life. “Half tonight’s ration?” he asks, the standard arrangement for such matters. 

“Ai, no!” Calear laughs and eyes the galley in mock terror. “The cook will have my head if I come between you and your dinner!”

“What would you have then?”

“Sing with me.” Calear says, and leans back against his pillow. “The winner picks the song.”

Ah, the Elvish obsession with song. The Nemir is never silent. The crew fill their days with it, and even at night the voices of the watch ring silver between the sails, weaving threads of song back and forth between them until the very air thrums with the star-sharp beauty of it. 

“Join us!” the crew cajoled each time Elrohir set foot on deck, “teach us a song of Harad!” Elrohir never did. He has not sung since Hamalan’s burial dirge. 

“I am not much of a singer,” he manages demurely, his eyes lowered to where he is counting out piles of white shells and black ones. It is not wholly a lie. Not compared to the current company.

“Are you not?” Calear asks with well-played astonishment. “Your saddle had a bard’s tassel, when you came to Pellardur?”

Shit.

Glorfindel’s head shoots up from his conversation with Galdor. He is doing his all to not be caught staring, and being an Elf he manages it well, but it is abundantly clear that he is watching the proceedings with interest.

Elrohir arranges his face while swearing inwardly. No point in denying: the saddle with its tell-tale tassel of red wool is sitting in Glorfindel’s cabin. He should have cut the thing off and bagged it before riding into Pellardur. Glorfindel was none the wiser - he loves all things colourful, no questions asked - but Calear knows its meaning. 

“You are the guest of the Lindar, and we have not shared a song together,” he makes it sound like an outrage. “We should make amends.” 

Caught . Calear is a clever bastard, but Elrohir can hardly refuse him - his debts are piled high indeed. “It will be as you say, Calear,” he says solemnly, and bows again. 

Elrohir picks up the long dice, meaning to hand them to Calear for the opening throw. Instead of Calear’s palm his gaze meets a shapeless bulk of splints and bandages. Ai, fool! His cheeks grow hot. Calear will not be moving his own pieces. The poor fellow cannot even go to the head without help.

Calear lets it go. “Throw,” he says simply, and Elrohir does.

Calear must have done much of his spywork in Pellardur’s wine-houses, because he plays a deviously clever game. 

All Elrohir’s world narrows to the battered wooden board and his opponent beyond, to Calear’s face as he sallies forth into Elrohir’s half with a near-suicidal boldness that may or may not be bluster. Elrohir shores up his battered defences, and thinks no more of the sea’s churning waves, only of the click of the dice and the rattle of shells moving up and down the rows.

Elrohir is losing ground fast. He is out of practice - it has been months since he last had a mind for play. Back then he had a different name, and his opponent was a human being. 

Calear’s eyes narrow. “Black to the fourth row,” he orders dryly when Elrohir commits yet another folly. 

Elrohir does, and surveys the wreckage of his defence. 

“I concede!” He deftly picks a handful of shells from the board, and offers them to Calear on his open palm, hoping the man might forget all about songs at the prospect of money.

Calear does not pick them up, and then Elrohir remembers that he cannot. His heart sinks. 

“Do you know ‘Flower of the Western Sea’?” Calear asks, kindly and without a trace of smugness.

Elrohir nods. A wistful Númenórean folk song, full of bittersweet longing for lost paradise. It loosens tears and tips from bear-soaked crowds at any singalong from Harondor to the Far Harad.   

Calear smiles, leans back against his pillow and softly sings in a silver-limned Elvish voice,

 

There lingering lights do golden lie

On grass more green than in gardens here,

On trees more tall that touch the sky

With silver leaves a-swinging clear

 

Elrohir finds it hard at first to breathe in, fill his unwilling lungs, shape the words and force them past the ball of grief stuck in his windpipe, but a debt is a debt and a promise a promise. 

 

There draws no dusk of evening near,

Where voices move in veiled choir.

Or shrill in sudden singing clear.

And the woods are filled with wandering fire.

 

His voice comes out rough and strange to his own ears, but Calear seems content, because suddenly there is a brightness to his battered face. He takes up the counterpoint, smooth and effortless like a seabird in flight, and so they weave the music back and forth between them, tears and joy in equal measure like a web spun of sweetly ringing silver light. Each line of Song hangs shining in the sea-air for a single heartbeat before fading and being remade, bright and wondrous and somehow more real than the world around them.  

When the song ends, Elrohir feels strangely tired. Empty in a wholesome way, as if he has run or danced all day, and he can breathe more freely. 

He looks up and finds that the daylight has shifted to gold. The sun is a ball of fire low on the western horizon. 

Glorfindel crouches beneath the awning. His eyes rest first on Elrohir, and for the first time that day, his smile reaches his eyes. When his gaze meets Calear’s, he makes a gesture between a nod and a small bow. 

Calear smiles, and nods in return, as well as he might without using his hands. “My pleasure, general.” He gives Elrohir another lopsided grin. “I bid you good evening, son of Elrond. I hope you will play me again tomorrow?”

 

Chapter 24: Thanksgiving

Many thanks to Grundy for her invaluable beta-read, and to the clever minds at Vinyë Lambengolmor for providing me with some made-to-measure Adûnaic words.

Read Chapter 24: Thanksgiving

Elrohir warily eyes the laden tender, bobbing on the placid waves in the golden light of sunset. 

To the East the first stars are opening over the pine-draped spike of Tolfalas rising from the waves. Behind the island, the hills of Belfalas shimmer in the far blue distance. 

Gondor, at last. No Corsairs have entered these waters since the kingdom’s founding. 

The

Shakhalzôr

is flying a white flag of parley. The captured Umbarian looks bedraggled, with the Eyes of Sauron on her sails painted over with tar.

“Come now, lad!” Calear is careful not to jostle his splinted hands, but he gives Elrohir a firm nudge with his elbow. “I cannot climb down, so you must stand for us both.”

Glorfindel meets Calear’s eyes, and a quick smile passes between them. 

Asking Elrohir to assist him was a stroke of manipulative genius on Calear’s part. Glorfindel wholly approves of the arrangement. Much like his father, Elrohir is someone who needs to be needed.  A wounded friend to tend to has grounded him more than coddling ever could. 

Calear’s gentle bossing has Elrohir up on deck all day, in the sunlight and sea wind, singing beside the crew. He remains quiet and reserved beneath his burden of old sorrows, but his Sindarin improves by leaps and bounds, and his wound is closing itself at last. 

Today for the first time, Elrohir looks something like an Elf-prince, grey-clad with the star of Eärendil stitched with silver thread on his tunic’s breast. Celebrían had even thought to pack him a formal circlet. Glorfindel knows the jewel as Elladan’s, a sprig of Niphredil wrought of silver and pale emeralds. Glorfindel has set it on Elrohir’s head for the occasion, both in Ossë’s honour and to keep his jaw-length hair from his face in the sea-wind.

Elrohir lifts a hand to feel for the clasp at his nape, clearly afraid of losing the circlet, but at Calear’s urging he steadies himself, and begins the climb down the grey rope ladder. Glorfindel follows suit. 

Down in the tender, Elrohir settles on a bench in the middle of the boat, as far from the water as he can get. His lip curves in disgust at the barrels of Umbarian rum. Some are fine sanded wood, destined for the prince and his entourage. Most are rough-hewn, and the drink sloshing inside is eye-wateringly bad.  

The red Eye of Sauron glares from every single one. 

“Will Ossë be content with grog this nasty?” Elrohir asks, knowingly.

“The taste matters less than the origin.” Galdor assures him as he and Glorfindel sit on the bench on either side of Elrohir. “Ossë holds an ancient hate against the Eye, and he delights in spoils.” 

Galdor’s eyes dart around, quickly catching the gazes of his crew. He is on his guard. 

One of the

Shakhalzôr’s

tenders lies nearby. The Mortals have chosen leaders among themselves, and these Men are permitted to attend Ossë’s thanksgiving. 

Galdor vetted them before he let them off the

Shakhalzôr

, but he is taking no chances. The Mortals’ longboat is rowed by his own sailors, age-old fighters with knife-sharp eyes and perfect aim. They are dressed for peace, but their bows are at hand and they have cutlasses in their belts. A wrong move in Elrohir’s direction would spell swift death. 

The Mortals do no such thing. They sit stunned with wonder and fear. 

“Greetings, Yssion, Lord of the Coasts!” Galdor stands facing West, and bows deeply as he lightly balances himself on the wave-tossed boat. His voice is solemn. “We come to pay our thanks for your aid in our dire need.”

Silence descends, deep enough that the smallest of sounds - the wind whistling in the

Nemir’s

rigging, the creak of the oars in their locks - ring like drum beats. 

Then the waves’ rush quiets down as the Sea itself goes smooth as glass, a mirror of indigo, and Glorfindel can feel that bright sense of

presence

that portends the coming of the mighty among the Ainur. 

Elrohir has gone pale, and Glorfindel moves closer to him until their shoulders touch in a wordless gesture of comfort. In the other boat, the Mortals sit wide-eyed and trembling. 

The wind stills, the very Sea seems to brighten, tendrils of blue light curl and shimmer beneath the water, and from their pulsing heart rises Ossë. 

He wears the fána the Falathrim call Yssion. An Elvish shape, but taller than even Maedhros was, and his skin shimmers iridescent like fish-scales beneath his mother-of-pearl armour. Ossë stands upon the waves as if on solid stone, foam sloshing about his webbed feet. 

Only his eyes recall his Stirrer’s shape, for they remain great and golden.  

“Greetings, Galdor of the Falas!” Ossë laughs, in a voice like a gale-wind, clearly most pleased with himself. 

“Oh mighty Storm-lord!” Galdor knows Ossë’s mercurial temper, and he pours on the praise as thick as he might. “Two of our own fell into your domain, and you returned them to us safe and sound. You struck down our enemies and granted mercy to their thralls. For all your fearsome deeds, you have our deepest gratitude!”

Ossë seems to grow even taller, revelling in the praise.

“As our thanks, we now lay before you the wealth of Sauron’s servants.”

Elrohir has been told his duty. Like a man stepping up to the executioner’s block he stands up in the boat. Glorfindel can hear the frantic hammering of his heart.

Galdor hands him a silver cup, brimful of the late Prince Bawbuthôr’s finest liquor. Elrohir’s fingers clench white-knuckled around the stem, but as instructed he turns to Ossë, bows, and proffers the cup with outstretched arms.  

“My deepest gratitude, oh Sea-lord!” he utters in painstakingly practised Sindarin.  

Ossë approaches, walking on the waves’ gently lapping surface as if on smooth ground. His golden eyes rest on Elrohir.

Glorfindel can feel the dull roar of Elrohir’s mind awash in terror, how he presses it down so he can remain standing, his hands barely shaking, and bear Ossë’s presence.

Ossë, grinning like a swordfish happening upon a particularly fat school of sardines, takes the cup from Elrohir’s unsteady hand and quaffs its entire eye-watering contents in one draught. 

“Ahhh!” he groans, almost Dwarf-like, “Mairon’s booze! A worthy gift, Galdor! My lady Uinen and all my folk deserve to share in it. Fear not, child,” he says to Elrohir, his mood clearly softened. “I am done with my sport! All your house are friends to me, and so are you.” 

Galdor grins. “Now, let us treat your folk as well!”   

The crew Sing Ossë’s praises as they throw the barrels overboard. Some are only half-full, and they should be floating, but every last one sinks like a stone. 

Ossë dives down after them. His laughter lingers for a while, a sound like rolling thunder that makes Elrohir and the Mortals turn white and cling to their benches. The Falathrim only laugh along.  

Then it is over, and the rowers begin to turn both tenders around to head back towards the waiting ships. Both boats are driven together by the waves, though the oarsmen extend their oars to push them apart. 

The moment is brief, but Elrohir’s eyes alight on the Mortals in the other longboat. One of the Men is Haradrim, wearing an improvised turban and veil atop his salvaged Umbarian uniform. 

Elrohir greets him in polite Haradi with a smile on his face, but this man whose language Elrohir speaks as his own does not return his greeting. Instead he lowers his eyes and shrinks back into a deep bow when Elrohir tries to catch his gaze.

Elrohir pales. Now all the Mortals in the boat stare at him with frightful awe. Glorfindel can see it in their eyes: Elrohir is hallowed, exalted, and wholly set apart. 

“Nimirphazân,” they whisper behind their hands: ‘Elf-prince’, and “Avalôzîr”: ‘Vala-touched’.  

The words hit Elrohir like a punch to the face. His eyes widen, though he gives no other outward sign of his shocked sorrow. 

He sits very still and straight, and is silent as the tenders drift apart to they turn back to their respective ships - the Men to the

Shakhalzôr

, the Elves to the

Nemir

.

 

----

 

Elrohir flees as soon as his feet touch the deck. 

The

Nemir’s

hold has filled up with the shifting of stores between both ships. Amidst the stacked crates of hardtack and the coils of spare rope is a dark corner where he can be alone with his thoughts. It is not the desert - no light and space and clear, windblown heights beneath the stars - but he is alone with the rush and sigh of the waves against the hull. 

There the terrible weight of it strikes him: he will never again be a Man. Until now he has, to himself, pretended that this journey with Glorfindel was a strange interlude, and that somehow, someday soon he would return to the life he knew.

It will not happen.

Now that he is out of the Elves’ sight, he cannot pretend for a moment longer. He claws at the circlet, jerks it off his head. His hair tangles in its long-lined silver swirls, but he yanks it away, pulling out some clinging strands. The small pain grounds him as he sinks down on the floor leaning against the curve of the hull, his back to the sea that murmurs beyond. 

The Elvish jewel in his hand shines with a soft light even in the dimness below deck. For a moment all is dark rage, and he wants to throw the damned thing through the hold, send it clattering between the stacked water-barrels to disappear from sight. 

He does no such thing - it would be pointless, so he closes his fist around it until the silver petals of some pale northern flower bite sharply into his palm. 

He must not cry. He has long ago mastered the trick for it: to disappear inside his own mind and walk paths all his own, leaving behind his body as a thing he might distantly observe. It is his only escape from this  place, and he gladly sinks into it.

Hamalan awaits him there, and a sharp, clean pain of longing cuts through his chest. 

He did bury her in the end, though many days had passed since her death. He insisted on seeking her amidst the charnel of the battlefield, adamantly refusing to leave with Glorfindel until she lay in a proper grave. Glorfindel indulged him. 

It was a long and bitter search, slowly weaving back and forth across the carrion-strewn valley with Glorfindel hovering at his shoulder, their veils tight around their faces against the stench and the cloud of biting flesh-flies, stopping every few paces to throw stones at growling packs of scavenging jackals. When he found her nothing recognizable remained of her face, but he knew her by the scarf he once gave her, and the stitched beading on her belt. 

Ot refused to go near the charnel-stench, and so they had to wrap her in a cloak before they could carry her, up into the hills where the air was clear and they could build a cairn over her to keep off the wild dogs. Glorfindel sang some Elvish song over it, and Elrohir one in Haradi. 

He sensed nothing of her spirit. Perhaps she had already left the world behind, like a snake sheds its old skin, to pass into Eru’s hand as the Haradrim believe - and the Elves, too, it seems. The Umbarians say that Mûlkher grants life to the soul while the body is preserved, and so they embalm their dead lords to stave off decay. He remembers the fly-bitten ruin of her, and shudders. If this is true, she is wholly dead.  

And yet, he wants to go back to her, to the bright and stark beauty of that ochre hillside beneath the desert sun, and sit by her cairn, for a time.

He could do it, maybe. Stow away in the

Shakhazor’s

hold and remain there until they are halfway to Pelargir. The freedmen will not dare refuse him, of that he is sure. He imagines stepping onto the quay in some harbour town of South Gondor. 

A free man, wholly unbound. What will he do, once his pilgrimage to her grave is done? Where will he go? 

Then he remembers. 

Elladan

. 

The thought brings him out of his indulgent self-delusion. His brother is the lodestone to which he must turn. There is nowhere to go but North, though he dreads the strangeness of it. 

He draws in his knees, sinks his forehead down onto them, and closes his eyes. He will stay here for a while, in the twilit silence of the hold, and let the

Nemir

carry him away.

 

---

Chapter End Notes

We're almost there. One more chapter left to go!

Ossë gets his present at last, and now that all of the swashbuckling action is done, Elrohir must face some hard truths about his situation.
Of course I'd love to hear your thoughts on his predicament. What will be next for him? How can Glorfindel help him through this?

Meanwhile, I'm working on the first chapters of the upcoming sequel, in which the Nemir reaches her destination. I'd love some ideas, suggestions or requests from readers about what could happen there.

See you soon,

IS

Chapter 25: Comfort

Read Chapter 25: Comfort

In Harad, Elrohir always left when his thoughts ran away with him. Alone, he turned to the clear open skies, the bright stars and solemn silence of the desert. Aboard ship there is no solitude to be had, save here in this dark hold away from the light, where he sickens further. 

Glorfindel finds him dry-eyed, but he looks so terribly faded, his spirit shining out from his form like a lamp through misted glass. That blank stare goes straight through the dim hold and its stacked rows of crates, fixed on matters beyond this world.

Glorfindel takes the circlet that dangles from Elrohir’s hand and puts it away out of sight. He runs gentle fingers through Elrohir’s hair until it lies smooth once more, then coaxes him up and onto the ladder. 

On deck, night covers the great sea, and the sails stand pale against the starlit sky. High up in the rigging, a lone voice is singing in the silver-grey tongue of the Falas, and despite everything the song lifts his heart.

He leads Elrohir up onto the aftercastle and sits down beside him, their backs against the mizzenmast. The water is dark beyond the banner of spilled moonlight, and the stars span bright above the sea. 

They watch for a time as the Shakhalzôr grows smaller and her lights disappear behind the dark bulk of Tolfalas, on her way to the Mouths of Anduin and Pelargir beyond. 

When the stern lantern at last is lost to sight, Elrohir’s breath hitches. In his face is a sharp, sorrowful longing. 

Glorfindel speaks the words out loud, to lessen the pain in them. “You would rather have sailed to Gondor with those Men.” It is not a question.

“Not Gondor,” Elrohir looks straight ahead, to where the waves foam silver-white in the Nemir’s wake. He is shaken enough to lower his guard. “I would have gone on, back to Harad.”

Elrohir has no clue of the diplomatic chaos that would unfold when the Lost Elf-Prince, Elros Tar-Minyatur’s own brother-son, Scion of the House of Eärendil, were to step onto the quay in Pelargir; of how breathless tales of how he slew the Emperor of Umbar and was raised from the Sea by Ossë’s own hand would leap before him like wildfire, all through the city’s marble avenues and up into the royal citadel. 

Instead of quietly joining a caravan to Harad, as he now imagines, Elrohir would find himself whisked off to court and fêted as King Cemendur’s guest of honour. Glorfindel imagines him standing amidst the gilded splendour of the royal reception hall, dressed in his simple grey sailor’s tunic, looking stunned and harrowed among the circling crowd of silk-clad courtiers. It would not end well, that much is certain.

Glorfindel thinks for a moment, desperate to spare Elrohir, but honesty alone will do, and so he speaks plainly. “You cannot return to Harad, Elrohir.”

Elrohir does not deny it. He is no fool. The veil of anonymity was slipping before Glorfindel ever laid eyes on him, and he knows it. 

At forty-eight years old, to Mortal eyes Elrohir still looks like a slender lad of twenty summers. His father may have Mortal kin, but his mother is an Elf, and her blood shows in him. Some among the Haradrim were already giving him strange looks. Only the shield of war protected him from their scrutiny, for a time.  

Another fifty years will see the lean lines of Elrohir’s bones broaden into the fullness of manhood. By then he will be almost a hundred. The Haradrim will cry sorcery long before that.

Glorfindel has seen that people’s wariness, their bitter hatred of the Enemy’s artifices. Elrohir’s death would not be a kind one. 

If Sauron does not take him first. 

Glorfindel could not kill the Ringwraith, only drive it away, maimed and wailing, but well aware of what and who Elrohir is. No doubt it carried word of Elrond’s desert-dwelling son into dark places. If Elrohir returns to Harad, he will be hunted. 

Elrohir knows all these things well indeed, and so he says, “you are right, Glorfindel.” 

The dull despair in his voice makes Glorfindel’s heart contract in his chest. 

“Elrohir … I never meant to cause you pain.” Glorfindel pleads, desperately. “There truly was no other way.”

No other way. For good or ill. 

Glorfindel recalls the jumble of Ot’s tack lying forlorn in the corner of his cabin, and he is afraid. They share but the most distant of kinships by blood, but a far tighter thread has been spun between them. Even now he feels the bond between their spirits, tied when Glorfindel poured his own strength into Elrohir. Could he bear it if Elrohir severed it; if he should come to despise Glorfindel for ripping him from the life he knew? 

Elrohir says only, “I know,” but his voice is not unkind. Then, after some thought, “would you stop me, if I tried to leave?”

Glorfindel’s heart tears in two. “I will not lay a hand on you in violence,” he manages to utter. “But neither will I leave you alone. Wherever you go I will follow, and protect you from danger.” He turns to look at Elrohir, but the boy’s eyes are fixed on the starlit waves. Glorfindel asks the question nonetheless. “Do you truly wish me to row you out to some deserted beach in Gondor and abandon you there, like unwanted cargo?”

Elrohir swallows, and shakes his head.

“What is it you want?” Glorfindel pleads. “I will grant it, if possible.”

“I want to see Elladan,” Elrohir says, slowly. “After that … I do not know.”

“Sorrow is heavy on you. You cannot see past it now.” Glorfindel wishes he could reach Elrohir’s hands, balled in his lap. “Let me bring you home to Elladan. You will find many reasons to remain, and I hope …” he hesitates, his voice rough. “I hope they can sway you.” 

Glorfindel desperately needs him to understand. “I am not leading you into darkness. Your father is an honourable man, and he is kind as summer. Your life with us will be a good one. I promise.”

“At what price!?” Elrohir draws himself up, his voice a snarl of rage. “Do you think me blind? Those freedmen, the crew, even Galdor and Falver - they all look at me wide-eyed with expectation. Now out with it, Glorfindel! What are they seeing?”

Glorfindel considers Elrohir, and sees him cling to his anger like a drowning man to a buoy. 

A deep well of grief is feeding this rage. Tears would drain it before it festers into cruelty, but Elrohir will not cry - not unless he is on Mandos’ very doorstep, drugged out of his wits. One more thing he must learn anew.  

Honesty alone will do, but Glorfindel’s voice is gentle when he answers. “A son of the House of Eärendil, who shall one day lead the battle to bring down the Dark Lord.”

Elrohir shakes his head. His body coils like a spring, and for a moment it seems he will leap to his feet and storm off. 

“You are all mad,” he mutters, as if to himself alone, but then he folds in upon himself, his head resting on his knees. 

“Elrohir…” Glorfindel says softly, and now he does raise a hand to stroke Elrohir’s shock of night-dark hair, still so pitifully short. The pale column of his neck is bare and vulnerable above his collar. 

Elrohir does not move, but neither does he shake off Glorfindel’s hand as he would have but a few days ago. 

“All these things are true,” Glorfindel whispers. “By Ulmo’s will you were saved. As was your grandmother Elwing, and Eärendil your grandfather, and his father Tuor, and Turgon before him. This is the blessing of your House, and its doom.”

“This is why you are here.” Elrohir’s head shoots up with the abrupt insight. His eyes are wide and bright. 

“It is how I first came to serve your House,” Glorfindel replies with more blunt honesty. “I have remained out of loyalty, and love.”

Elrohir is not buying it. “Why!?” he demands. “Why attempt this madness? What keeps you from your golden land in the West? The crew sings of little else. Why linger here in darkness, picking fights with foes too great for you?”

Glorfindel cannot help but smile. “Elvendom in Ennor in a nutshell.” He grows serious, “because we love this world, and we will not abandon it to Sauron. One day we must depart, but first we will end him so the Men who come after us shall have clean earth to till.”

“Selfless of you,” sneers Elrohir. 

It hurts, seeing the shield of cynicism wielded by one so young. 

“And for vengeance.” Glorfindel says, plainly. “A sentiment I believe you are familiar with?”

He hesitates for a moment, but dares not mention the Haradrim woman they laid in her desert cairn. There is something there, the shape of which he can barely make out. Elrohir is unwed, that much is plain to see in his eyes. And yet he mourns her so deeply that he cannot even speak her name. 

“Indeed.” Elrohir says nothing else, but there is dogged determination behind the word.

“I have my own scores to settle with him,” Glorfindel offers, cautiously. None of them are fitting subjects just now. “We all do. Whatever our differences, we battle a common enemy.”

“Eru above!” with a bitter laugh, Elrohir raises his eyes to the stars. “Kill the Dark Lord? An actual God!?” He hesitates, and now his fear stands plain in his eyes. “I am a simple soldier. My father will find me quite useless at his God-slaying business. You had to rescue me from a mere Ringwraith.”  

“Nothing ‘mere’ about the Captain of the Nazgûl.” Glorfindel replies at once. “He is a terrible foe. You were brave to face him as you did.”

Elrohir shudders. “It made no difference. They all died. I would be dead, too, if not for you.”

“It mattered,” Glorfindel says, and layers the strength of his own conviction beneath the words. “I have seen great lords flee before his face, and yet you rode to meet him, spear in hand. You are young, but a child to our eyes. You will grow into your strength. But first you must be hale and whole once more.” 

Glorfindel looks him in the eye. “Now is not the time to fight anymore. Now is the time to heal.”

Elrohir holds up his hand to show the pink line of raised scar crossing his palm. “I am healed.”

“In body, perhaps, though getting your lungs full of saltwater did you no favours. In spirit you are torn and poisoned. Your father can help, if you let him.”

“I am not ill,” says the hollow-eyed child beside him, and Glorfindel can almost see the edges of him blurring into light.

”Like a wound will fester if it is not tended, so does grief without healing sicken the spirit.”

Elrohir gives no reply. In his hand he holds a small, red stone, which he turns over between his fingers, watching it intently.

Glorfindel understands at once. Elrohir must have taken the pebble from the beach and kept it. A memento, a piece of Harad’s red desert.

Glorfindel took a plain grey stone once, in Araman, from a wind-blasted rock needle sticking from the frozen crust of snow. He clenched his gloved hand around it and pocketed the tiny piece of Valinor before stepping onto the Grinding Ice. 

He carried his homeland with him, a comfort and an accusation all at once - onto the ice floes that groaned and creaked underfoot, to the encampment in Mithrim, to Vinyamar, to Gondolin. He wore the stone sewn into his shirt beneath his armour at the Nirnaeth, and when he died on the Eagles’ Cleft it was there, against his skin.

Where is it now? Somewhere in his first body’s grave, buried beneath the seafloor, never to be found again until Arda is unmade.

Elrohir’s face twists with helpless rage and he raises his hand as if to cast his pebble away, over the railing and into the waves. Glorfindel is faster, and with a quick grab he stays Elrohir’s hand.

Elrohir looks sideways, astonished. Glorfindel looks at the stone on Elrohir’s palm, then gently folds Elrohir’s fingers around it.

“Keep it. The past should not be thrown away.” He releases Elrohir’s hand, and says, his eyes still on the pebble, “when we come to the Havens, I will ask a jewelsmith to set this in a pendant so you can wear it. It will remain with you, always.”

There will be a strange, rugged beauty in the red unpolished sandstone caught in a fine Elvish filigree. A fitting welcome gift.

“Thank you.” Elrohir’s voice is strange and hoarse. “You are kind, Glorfindel.”

Glorfindel pulls him closer, an arm around his shoulders. Elrohir’s breath hitches, but he lets him. When their minds touch once more Glorfindel pours in warmth like a good fire, light, song and joy. An endless well of strength, gladly given.

“The Havens are fair in summer,” he says very softly. “The sea sings with the west wind, and the meadows are in flower. Can you imagine a land without shadow? Lindon is such a place.” He smiles. “When you are rested we will ride to Imladris. It is a fair road through the green hills of Arnor. We will be home before the leaves turn. Elladan will be so glad to see you. Will you not come with me?”

“I will,” Elrohir breathes, the barest of whispers. His voice cracks, his shoulders shake, but he draws a ragged breath and says once more, “I will.”

It is a victory, of sorts, but Glorfindel can take little pride in it. Elrohir’s pain is sharp and present, and Glorfindel finds it just as painful. He utters no empty words of appeasement, but only holds Elrohir while he composes himself, mindful of his stoic Haradrim dignity.

Night deepens over the lapping waves, but now it holds no danger. This darkness shelters, profound as a blessing. For a long time they are silent as the stars wheel overhead. The lookout up in the rigging sings on.

Elrohir’s head tips onto Glorfindel’s shoulder and his breathing slows into the steady rhythm of sleep, exhausted from the day’s emotion.

Glorfindel sits with him, until out over the Great Sea, the Morning Star rises against the dawn. 

 

---

Chapter End Notes

We’ve reached the end of this adventure! 

First of all I owe many thanks to Grundy, my wonderful beta and brainstorming partner, for her clever contributions and eagle eyes for plot holes. 

OtSS is the first time I’ve ever “pantsed” a story. All of my other works were written following outlines, and they were complete, or very nearly so, by the time the first chapter was posted. Having a tale grow as it is told turns out to be fun!

 Of course Elrohir’s odyssey is nowhere near finished. There will be more adventures, both on the way and at home. The first chapter of the sequel is taking shape, and will be posted soon, so keep an eye out.

And, of course, thank all of you for reading and for letting me know that you enjoyed what you read. Support from readers is a fic writer’s greatest reward. Your kind, clever and enthusiastic comments have kept me going through the rough patches. Now that the story is complete I’d love to hear from you one more time: what do you think of the tale as a whole? And what’s next for our heroes?

See you soon for the next one,

IS