On the Starlit Sea by Idrils Scribe

Chapter 2: Warm food

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He has been quiet and withdrawn ever since they left the Haradrim behind, but it seems Pellardur has turned his mind even further inwards, away from the world.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.