On the Starlit Sea by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 19: Cold/Magical Exhaustion

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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.