Úrimë 2, 2965
They set out under a cool morning sun with the dew still bright on the grass, and the land rose gently ahead of them into rolling hills stood about with ancient trees. Nimroch went steady, his pale coat gleaming, and for a while the road was kind — birdsong, an unmarked way that asked Celenneth's sense of direction, a narrowing of the path where the slopes went to loose stone and bramble and she dismounted to lead the horse around the worst of it, losing little time. It was the sort of travelling she liked, and she had a companion now who was learning to like it too; Linnea rode easier every day, her eye going to the land the way Celenneth's did, picking up the habit of watchfulness without being taught it.
In the afternoon they crested a hill and saw a figure far off — a lone traveller in a patchwork cloak, walking with a weary, steady gait, a staff tapping out his pace. Linnea glanced at Celenneth, curious and wary both. But the traveller saw them and raised a hand in plain greeting, and when they came together he proved an old man with sharp eyes and a kind mouth, who named himself Eorlas, a wandering herbalist out after rare plants for his healing salves.
They slowed to his pace and fell to talking, and there was more to his wandering than herbs. He was bound for Dale with a message — the villages along the forest's edge had suffered raid on raid from goblins, and were desperate for supplies and allies, and he hoped the folk of Dale might answer. When they stopped by a shaded brook he unwrapped a bundle of dried herbs and showed Linnea how to know the useful ones, and his knowledge of the country ran deep: bogs in the north-east that swallowed the careless, ruins where the dead did not rest, and — this caught Celenneth's ear — a rumour of an orc camp near the south-western eaves of Mirkwood.
She pressed him on the orcs, for it fit too well with what Radagast had warned of. He had seen their smoke, he said, and heard foul chanting on his night-walks after herbs; frail as he looked, there was a sharp and steady competence in him, and Celenneth marked it. It was Linnea, taken with his herb-lore, who asked if he would travel with them a while — and then looked to Celenneth, half-afraid she had overstepped. But Celenneth only nodded, and Eorlas said, "I accept," and it was done.1
Before they went on, the old man pressed a sprig into Celenneth's hand — narrow leaves, a clean sharp scent. "Take this. Athelas — kingsfoil, some call it. No common weed. Bruised and steeped in boiling water, the very smell of it can lift the heaviness of despair from a heart the Shadow has touched." She thanked him and stowed it careful, and thought of the dreams, and of the cold the deep and the road had left in her, and was glad of it.2
As they walked he went on teaching — Elvenstar Blossom and how to harvest it, a thin spiky leaf that would dull pain if handled right and sting worse than a wasp if not — and handed Linnea a small satchel to gather samples under his eye. Linnea drank it in, her face alight, and Celenneth watched her and saw what it did for her: with every leaf named, every small competence gained, she was becoming a contributor to this road and not only a passenger on it, and she knew it, and it straightened her back.
The hills gave way to denser wood, the air cooling, the smell of moss coming up around them. Eorlas crouched over broken earth. "Boar," he muttered, reading the deep prints. "We'd best keep clear — they're ill-tempered this time of year." By dusk they came to the ruined watchtower he had spoken of, crumbled and overgrown but sound enough to shelter in, its stones still holding the day's warmth, and they laid their bedrolls in its lee while Eorlas coaxed a fragrant tea from the day's gathering.
Around the fire he spoke of his hopes for Dale. "There's strength in that people. But they must see what's at stake. Let the Shadow get a foothold in the south, and it won't stop there."
Celenneth nodded into the flames. "Dale must be warned. But Radagast spoke of more than goblins. Something greater's stirring."
The camp settled, the fire fell to embers, and Eorlas sprawled snoring gently on his bedroll while the wood rustled and the stars threw their faint silver over the broken stones. And Linnea moved quietly closer to where Celenneth sat working her whetstone along the blade, and knelt, and hesitated — and then, with a shy downward glance, leaned in and stole a kiss, brief and soft, barely a brush of lips. Celenneth's surprise melted to warmth, and her hand rose to Linnea's cheek.
"I'll take first watch," Linnea whispered, quiet but resolved. "You've carried so much already. Rest. I'll wake you at the first whisper of trouble."
The old instinct pulled at Celenneth — to keep the watch herself, as she always had — but she looked at the woman's steady face and let it go, and nodded. "Wake me if you hear even that much," she said, her eyes staying on Linnea a moment longer than they needed to. Linnea smiled, sat straighter for the trust of it, and took her place at the edge of the ruins; and she watched the ranger drift down into a sleep she had not had to guard alone, and the forest hummed its quiet night around them both.
Úrimë 3, 2965
The camp stirred at dawn — Eorlas stretching and wincing at the stone bed, Linnea humming as she repacked her herbs, Celenneth already up and reading the treeline out of habit. They ate quick and went on, the air cool and clean, and Eorlas led them onto a faint deer-trail that promised a swifter way through the wood. It kept its promise; the trail slid around the hard ground, Nimroch went easy, and the morning smelled of pine and wet earth as they wove between the trees. They passed an old stone marker whose weathered runes spoke of a road that had once joined Mirkwood to Dale — the bones of a busier age — and Eorlas stopped to name bright flowers against the green while Linnea gathered samples under his eye, surer with every lesson. By dusk the forest thinned and the rolling plains showed gold in the distance.
They camped in a quiet glade with the plains glowing in the last light and the wind bringing wildflower-scent off them, and while Eorlas set a small fire and hummed some old tune, Linnea came to Celenneth with a question in her.
"You've carried that bow since we met." She nodded at it. "I've watched how you use it. Could I learn?"
Celenneth smiled, the warmth breaking through the sternness. "Every ranger must know the bow. Come."
She named its parts, and let Linnea feel its weight, and drew an arrow and ran her fingers down the fletching. "The shaft straight, the feathers true. Everything working together, or it fails in the air." In the fading light she set the woman's stance with gentle hands. "Feet apart, steady. You don't just hold the bow — it should feel like an extension of your own body." Linnea nocked and drew slow. "Elbow high. Breathe with the tension. Don't think of the arrow — think of where you want it to go."
Linnea sighted a distant tree, breathed out, loosed — and the arrow sailed wide and buried itself short in the earth. She huffed; Celenneth laughed, low and kind. "No one strikes true the first time. It wants patience. Again." And again, and with each try the woman's form smoothed and settled, until Eorlas called from the fire, amusement in his eye, "A good teacher, and a stubborn student both," and at last an arrow bit the trunk with a solid thunk, and Linnea spun round grinning. "I did it!"
"You did." Pride, plain in Celenneth's face. "Tomorrow again. And the day after. Until it's as natural to you as your own hands."
The next morning began wrong. The birdsong was gone, and in its place black birds wheeled and cried overhead, their harsh caws breaking the dawn, and the sound of them put a shiver down Linnea's back as she rolled her bedroll. Eorlas sat with his staff across his knees and watched them, and the calm went out of his face. Celenneth came to his shoulder, hand at her sword. "What do you see?"
"Carrion crows." Grim. "But not just feeding. See how they hold the circle? Something in the land ahead is drawing them."
They broke camp quick and subdued and went on toward the birds, Celenneth ahead with her bow strung, Linnea and Nimroch close, Eorlas at the rear with his eyes on the sky. Where the path bent toward the wheeling crows she stopped and put out a hand. "Wait here. I'll see what draws them."
Linnea's face pinched, but she nodded. "Be careful."
Celenneth stroked Nimroch's neck once and slipped into the trees, and the crows' crying grew louder as she came to it. The wood opened on a small clearing and a shattered wagon lying overturned, its frame splintered as though struck by something with no patience — and around it three bodies, two men and a woman, clothes torn, the ground gone dark with old blood, the earth churned with the signs of a struggle. She crouched among them and read it. A few days dead, faces gone pale. And the wounds were wrong — not brigand-work, not beast: jagged, deep, deliberate, savage. And there was a deeper wrongness under that, one that raised the hair on her arms: the scavengers would not touch them. The crows cried over the dead and would not come down to feed.
She rose slow, and her eye went to the clearing's edge, where tracks led into the brush — orc-prints, unmistakable in their crookedness, and mixed among them something larger, clawed and heavy, and drag-marks in the disturbed earth where something, or someone, had been pulled away alive. The crows were not mourning. They were warning.
She went after it careful, all her senses up, following broken foliage and deep prints deeper into the wood until the canopy closed and the crows' cries fell behind. The trail brought her to a thicket, and she looked through it onto a crude camp: three orcs around a dying fire, harsh with laughter, and a great warg prowling restless at the edge of the light, its yellow eyes hunting the dark. And bound and gagged against a tree — a boy and an older man, bruised but living, their eyes wide and casting about the camp.
She breathed, and steadied, and marked the warg for the first shaft — the one threat that might scent her or run her down — and while the orcs laughed on, oblivious, she loosed. The arrow went through the beast's skull clean, and it dropped near the fire without a sound, and the orcs never turned. She held her place. One rose and moved off from the fire, and she drew again and put the shaft through his throat, and he crumpled, silenced. Then she came in on soft feet, and drawing her sword she stepped up behind the second and drew the edge across its throat, clean — and the last one knew her at last and snatched up an axe and swung it heavy at her, and she slipped the blow, the blade whistling past, and pivoted and let her sword arc round and find its mark. The orc fell, and the wood went still but for the fire's small crackle.1
The captives stared at her out of desperate eyes. She went to them and cut the bonds and looked over their hurts. "You're safe now. Can you walk?" The boy nodded, legs trembling; the older man grimaced at his ribs but rose with her arm under him.
She knelt by the man as he caught his breath. "Who were they? Why take you?"
"Orcs." A rasp. "Out of the hills. We were bound for Dale — merchants, my brother and his wife and the two of us." His voice broke; he gestured weakly at the clearing. "They killed them. Took what they wanted, dragged us here. I think they meant to — to eat us."
The boy, barely lifting his eyes, said, "They spoke of others. Bigger plans. Said their leader would pay them for bringing captives." He shuddered. "We thought we were dead."
Celenneth's frown deepened. Orcs this far east was ill news enough; orcs taking prisoners, for a leader, spoke of something larger behind them.
She had no time to ask more, for Nimroch nickered soft behind her, and she turned to see Linnea and Eorlas come into the clearing — and Linnea's eyes went wide at the sight of it, three orcs dead and the warg's bulk among them and the blood on the ground. "Celenneth." Horror in it. "What have you done?"
Eorlas took it in grim and went straight to the boy and the man, low-voiced, his hands already at their hurts. But Linnea came straight to Celenneth, pale with fury. "You went in alone. You didn't tell us. You could have been killed. What were you thinking?"
Celenneth sheathed the sword, and the guilt showed in her even as she answered. "I couldn't wait. They had prisoners. If I'd hesitated—" she nodded at the two survivors.
"That's not the point." Linnea's voice shook. "You gave us no chance to help. And if you hadn't come back? What would we have done then?"
The clearing went quiet but for the fire and the murmured thanks of the rescued. Eorlas glanced at the two women and kept to his work. Linnea's hands trembled where she crossed her arms. "You can't carry the whole weight of it alone, Celenneth. Let us help you."
And Celenneth met her eyes, and the hardness went out of her. "You're right," she said, low. "I acted rashly. But I couldn't let them die."
The anger bled out of the moment, and she took charge again, calm and sure. "Eorlas — take these two to safety. Make for Dale. They need care, and you'll go faster on foot."
Eorlas hesitated, glancing at the horse. "And Nimroch?"
She laid a hand on his neck. "He stays with us. We may need to move quick, if this turns dire."
Eorlas nodded, reluctant, and helped the boy find his feet while the older man leaned on his staff; and with a last look at Celenneth he began to guide them away. "Don't linger long," he said.
Úrimë 5, 2965
The anger had burned itself down in Linnea, and what was left in its place was steadier and more useful. "So," she said, wiping her palms on her cloak. "What's the plan?"
Celenneth drew the string a hand's breadth off the bow and let it home again, testing it out of habit. The dead lay cooling behind them; Eorlas and the two he had led away were already a good way toward Dale on foot. "We follow the rest of them," she said. "Quietly. I want their numbers and I want to know who holds their leash. If they're building toward something larger, I'd rather learn its shape here than ride into Dale carrying half a warning."
Linnea nodded and set her hand to Nimroch's neck, and the horse's calm passed into her the way it did — a thing Celenneth had watched her learn to draw on, this last while, without being told how.
They went into the wood on foot, leading the horse, and the deeper they went the less it felt like a wood at all. The trees stood wrong. Their branches reached and clawed where honest branches leaned, and the light came down grey and grudging, and the ground gave off a smell of old rot under the moss. Nimroch trod soft behind them, his ears working, trusting the two of them over the sense that told him to turn and run. Celenneth read the trail as she went — the crooked orc-prints, the heavier clawed track threaded among them, foliage broken at the height of a shoulder — and the land itself seemed to lean away from what she followed, as if it wanted no part of where the tracks were bound.
After some hours the trees opened on a second clearing, and she put out a hand to halt the others before she had finished seeing it.
A totem stood at its heart — a foul thing lashed together from bones and grey tatters of cloth, orc-runes gouged into the post at its foot, the ground before it dark and beaten flat. The stink of it reached her across the open ground. This was no raiders' rest. Celenneth crouched and read the churned earth, and what it told her tightened something behind her ribs. "This is a staging ground," she murmured. "They're gathering here. Ordering themselves."
Voices carried then — low, guttural, from beyond a screen of brush across the clearing. She signed for Linnea to keep down, and went forward on her belly through the undergrowth until she could part the leaves and see.
Half a dozen orcs squatted around a crude map scratched into a hide laid flat on the ground. One jabbed a claw at it and rasped over the others, and they answered, and Celenneth held still and let the broken speech come to her in pieces. She had never had much of the Black Speech — a hunter's smattering, no more — but enough of it snagged and held. A raid. A village, near, and soon: take captives, spread terror, leave a few alive to carry the fear outward. A name spoken like a lash — Grahnak — one who was drawing the scattered bands together across the region under his hand. And then another name, and the orcs' voices dropped around it the way men's voices drop in a graveyard: Dol Guldur. They spoke it with reverence and with fear both, as though their orders came up out of that place itself.
The word went through her colder than the wood's chill. She had heard it only in warnings, in Radagast's grim asides — the dark hold in the south of the forest, long thought empty, and never truly so. To hear it here, in orc-mouths, at the root of a raid, was to feel the size of the thing shift under her.
She eased back to where Linnea waited with the horse, and did not trouble to soften her face. "They mean to raid," she said low. "Soon. A village not far off. Their leader is Grahnak, and he's pulling the bands together — and they take their orders, or think they do, from Dol Guldur." She watched the name land. "If that place has a hand in this, then it was never only Dale. It's the Shadow reaching north through the whole of this country."
Linnea had gone pale, but she squared her shoulders against it, and Celenneth marked that too — how much steadier the fear made her now than it would have a month ago. "What do we do?"
Celenneth glanced back toward the brush and the guttural murmur beyond it. Part of her wanted to end them where they sat, before the warning could run ahead of her. But six was six, and Linnea was one bow, and there was the map. "We don't fight them," she decided. "Not for pride, and not for six when there's a hundred behind them. But that hide they're bent over — I want it."
She left the horse and the woman in cover and went back into the undergrowth alone, and this time she went the slow way, choosing each foot's fall, breathing to the rhythm of the wood's small sounds so that she made none of her own. The orcs had drifted from the map to their argument, three of them up and gesturing off toward the north. She waited out a long, held moment until the last of them turned his back, and then reached from the leaves and drew the hide off the ground in one unhurried motion and was gone into the green again before the space it left was noticed.1
She unrolled it flat between herself and Linnea, out of sight of the clearing. Hasty work, but not careless: the staging ground they stood near, a larger camp marked further east — Grahnak's seat, she guessed, or near it — and a rough scratch of a palisade and roofs that could only be the village, ringed and marked as a thing to be taken.
"What now?" Linnea asked, and there was admiration under the worry in her voice, and Celenneth chose not to answer either.
"The village first." She rolled the hide and stowed it. "They don't know it's coming. If we ride, we can put a warning in front of the blow. Then Dale — with this, and with what I heard, so the king can't wave it off as a farmer's nightmare."
Linnea was already swinging up behind her. Celenneth turned Nimroch's head, and they came out of the black wood at a gallop, the horse glad of the open air and the leave to run, his stride swallowing the rough ground where roots and stone broke the turf and Celenneth felt for the safe line at speed and held him to it. The map put the village within the hour if she pushed him, and she pushed him, and the wood fell away behind them and the light came back into the world by degrees as they rode.
Úrimë 5, 2965
Smoke reached them before the roofs did — not the black smoke of burning but the thin blue thread of cook-fires, ordinary and unknowing. They crested the last rise and there it lay: a scatter of thatched cottages among fields going gold, folk bent to the day's work, a boy driving geese, none of them looking north to the wood that meant to come for them.
Celenneth rode straight into the middle of it, and their urgency turned every head. A stout man came forward with a hoe on his shoulder and a frown already set. "What's this about, then?"
She swung down. "You're in danger. Orcs are coming — a raiding band, out of the forest. They'll be on you before the night's old."
The murmur ran through the gathering crowd like wind through the wheat. The man's frown deepened, but under it she saw the fear he was too proud to show first. "Orcs. Here. We've had the rumors, same as everyone. They've never come so far."
"They are coming," Linnea said, and she said it from the saddle, level and certain, and the certainty in a stranger's voice did more than argument. "Barricade your homes. Arm whoever can hold a weapon. There isn't much time."
The man — Aldric, he gave his name — took it in, and to his credit he did not waste breath on more doubting. "We've a few old blades and some hunting bows. Not much. But we'll not stand and be dragged off. Tell us what to do."
There was no time to send for help; there was only the making the most of what stood in front of her. Celenneth read the village the way she read ground — the little square at its heart, the gaps between the cottages, the low hedgerow at the field's edge that a charge would have to cross. Then she began to give orders, and found the people willing to take them.
"Everything with an edge or a point," she told them. "Axes, pitchforks, scythes, knives. Anything. Pile the carts and the barrels into the gaps between the houses — close every lane but the ones we choose to leave open." She set a party of the able-bodied to the hedgerow to scrape shallow trenches behind it and seat sharpened stakes in them, angled outward. "It won't stop them. It'll break their run, and a broken run is a target."
She led another band out along the likely approaches and showed them how to hide a snare in the leaf-litter, how to bend and lash a sapling so a tripped line would whip it across a shin at the run. The work was hard and hurried and imperfect, and it was enough to give the villagers something to do with their hands besides shake.
Linnea worked among the houses — nailing shutters fast, bracing doors, and more than that: kneeling to a frightened child, steadying a woman whose hands would not stop, turning panic into a task the way Celenneth turned it into a trench. By the time Aldric came back with the village's armory — two rusted swords, a handful of hunting bows, a quiver of mismatched shafts — the place had the look of somewhere that had decided to live.
Celenneth turned the weapons over and did not pretend they were more than they were. "Not much," she said. "It'll do." Overhead the sun went down red behind the trees, and the last light drained off the fields, and the waiting began.
Linnea took a bow up onto the roof of a sturdy cottage that overlooked the square — her own choosing; the height would give her the whole approach and keep her clear of the crush. Before she climbed, Celenneth caught her arm.
"You don't have to stand this," she said, quiet, only for her. "Take Nimroch. Ride for Dale, get a start on the road."
Linnea's eyes came round to hers, and there was no give in them at all. "No. These people need every hand. I'm staying." A breath, and then, gentler: "I can do this. You showed me how."
Celenneth held her gaze a moment, and let her go. "Then use what you learned. High and steady. Loose on my word, not before."
The village stood to its makeshift barricades, and the dark thickened, and every crack of a settling branch drew a flinch down the line. Then the quiet broke — a roar out of the treeline, and another, and the crash of heavy bodies coming through brush that did not slow them. The orcs came out of the black at a run, hulking and foul, crude iron catching the torchlight, and a moan of terror went along the barricade and a few began to give back.
"Hold!" Celenneth's shout nailed them in place. "Wait for the word!"
She let the charge reach the hedgerow. The first rank fouled on the stakes and the trenches, the run breaking exactly as she had meant it to, bodies pitching and snarling in the tangle — and into that she flung her arm down and cried, "Loose!"
Arrows went into the mass, ragged but plentiful, and from the roof Linnea's shafts came down among them with a marksman's placing, seeking the ones who found the gaps. The traps took their toll; the stakes took more; the villagers fought with the wild courage of people with nothing behind them to fall back to. But the line was thin, and it began to gape.1
An orc broke clean through and made for the square, where a boy stood rooted with a pitchfork he had forgotten he held, watching death raise a rusted axe over him. Celenneth was too far and knew it. But a shaft took the orc through the chest and staggered it a half-step — Linnea's, loosed without time to think or aim, driven true on nothing but the refusal to watch the child die — and in that bought half-second Celenneth was there, and her sword ended it. The boy scrambled back sobbing into the dark between the houses, alive. She spared one look up at the roof; Linnea was already nocking the next, white-faced and steady, and Celenneth gave her a single hard nod and turned back to the fight.2
The barricades held, mostly, until the last of them came — a great orc in scavenged plate, a spiked mace in its fist, and it did not go around the carts but through them, scattering staves and men. The villagers fell back from it. Celenneth stepped into the space they left and met it there.
It was strength against speed, and she had no strength to spare it. Each fall of the mace she took not on the blade but beside it, turning aside and letting the weight carry past, and it drove craters where she had stood. The village rallied at her back, keeping the lesser orcs off her flanks so she could give the brute her whole attention. She waited out its rhythm — the heavy overhand, the recovery, the half-beat when its guard hung open — and on the third she was not where the mace fell. She stepped inside the swing and put her sword deep into its side, under the plate, and rode the blade home as it staggered. The champion went down like a felled tree, and the ground shook with it, and a ragged cheer broke from the defenders that was half disbelief.3
It turned the night. The orcs that were left saw their strongest dead and their raid gone to ruin, and their nerve went with it; they broke and streamed back into the trees. The villagers, spent and bloodied and short of the ones they had lost, did not chase them. They came together in the square instead, staring at the dark where the enemy had gone, not yet believing they were the ones still standing.
It was Linnea who gave them the belief. She came down off the roof and stood among them with her bow lowered, and lifted her voice — steady, warm, carrying. "You held," she told them. "You stood on your own ground and you held it, for your homes and for each other. The Shadow tested this place tonight, and this place threw it back." She swept a hand at the broken barricades, the fallen enemy. "It will think longer, next time, before it comes to your door."
The cheer that answered began small and grew until it filled the square, and the villagers were gripping one another's shoulders, laughing and weeping at once, the terror of the night burning off into something like pride. From the square's edge Celenneth watched, and let the faint smile come. She could have marshaled them and rationed them and set their watch; she could not have given them that. Linnea had — had handed them back their courage as a thing they had earned and could keep.
They were given a room for the night, modest and clean, in one of the cottages whose door they had helped brace. The aches came on once the danger let go of her, and sleep came close behind, but Celenneth lay a while in the dark with Linnea beside her, both too worn to move and neither quite gone.
"I never thought I'd stand in something like that," Linnea said against her shoulder, low. "But you made it seem a thing that could be done." A pause. "Do you think it mattered? Truly? Will they come back?"
Celenneth found her hand under the blanket and folded it in her own. "I don't know if they'll come back," she said. "I think they'll count the cost first, now, which they didn't before. But that isn't the thing that matters." She turned her head to where the pale shape of Linnea's face was just visible. "You gave those people the memory of a night they won. They'll hold to that longer than any wall we built them. That was yours. I couldn't have done it."
Linnea was quiet a moment, and then Celenneth felt her settle closer, the last of the day's fear going out of her at last, and neither of them said anything more, and the dark took them both.
Úrimë 6, 2965
They ate a quick meal at first light and took their leave, and the whole village turned out to see them go — not with the wary faces of the day before but with thanks, and hope, pressed on them along with bread for the road. Celenneth carried it out through the gap in the barricade they had built together, and did not look back more than once.
They rode hard, and the land tilted them east and down, the open country giving way by degrees to the dark line of Mirkwood on the horizon that grew all morning until it filled the eye. By midday they came on Eorlas himself, walking the road ahead of them at his steady, tapping pace, and he turned at Nimroch's hoofbeats with relief plain on his weathered face.
"You made it," he said. "And whole, both of you. What of the village?"
"It stands," Celenneth said, swinging down to clasp his shoulder. "The orcs came, and it threw them back. But there's more behind the raids than we feared, Eorlas. We need Dale, and soon."
His face went grave. "Then we waste no daylight."
They came to the eaves of the forest together, and the light changed as they passed under it — not dimmed so much as soured, the sun's warmth left behind at the treeline like a coat hung by a door. Eorlas paused with his staff set to the moss and looked up into the tangled dark. "Mirkwood," he murmured. "Alive. It was never that it was dead. Only that its waking is nothing to take comfort in."
The wood closed over them. Nimroch picked his way among roots that broke the ground like the knuckles of something buried, and Eorlas stopped now and again to crouch over a pale fungus or a print in the mud, reading the forest as Celenneth read it, in a different tongue. The path led them down, and the down led into standing water — a slow black swamp where the trees stood to their knees in it and the air thickened until it lay on the tongue, and the drone of insects rose to fill the silence the birds had left.
Eorlas knelt at the water's edge. "The forest shifts here," he said. "What was a path yesterday is a bog today. We go slowly, or we do not go at all."
Celenneth took the lead. She read the water for the firm ground beneath it — the ridges where roots knit the mud, the deceit of a still surface over a drowning depth — and picked their line one careful step at a time, Nimroch trusting his feet to hers. Eorlas came behind, his staff probing ahead of every stride; Linnea kept close at the rear with an arrow on the string and her eyes moving. Twice the trail simply ended in flat black water, and twice Celenneth found where it took up again on the far side and brought them across without a soaking. It was slow, exacting work, and the light was failing by the time the ground rose under them at last and gave them a dry hummock to stand on and breathe.1
"Well done," Eorlas said, and meant it. "Many would be feeding the leeches back there."
"Mirkwood doesn't forgive the unready," she answered, already reading the way on.
They made camp in a small dry clearing as the last grey light went out of the canopy. Linnea sat near the fire scowling at the mud caked on her boots, and Eorlas lowered himself beside her with an armful of the day's strange gleanings and spread them on the ground between them.
"You've learned the healing well," he said. "But there's more to the craft than mending. Sometimes the thing that harms is only a cure that's been misunderstood."
"You mean poisons," Linnea said, half-wary.
He chuckled and lifted a dark, thorny leaf. "Yes and no. A poison is only a poison until you learn its measure. This one, eaten green, brings fever and griping. Boiled, and stirred with honey, it quiets pain better than anything sweeter." He plucked a sprig of red berries. "These will stop a heart, taken by the handful. Dried and ground, a pinch of them will steady one that's failing." He set a tin pot over the flames and worked as he talked, grinding, steeping, and Linnea bent close and copied his hands with her own samples, and when he poured off the cooled draught and offered it to her she eyed it a moment before she drank.
"You're certain this won't kill me," she said.
"Quite certain. Bitter — but it puts the tiredness back a while."
She sipped, and her whole face folded at the taste. "Awful." A breath later she sat straighter, the fatigue easing out of her shoulders. "But it works."
Celenneth watched from the edge of the firelight. "You've a rare teacher," she said. "There's not much of what Eorlas carries that can be had for coin."
The camp settled. Celenneth took the first watch and let it pass over her, the forest's oppressive hush lying close as a held breath, nothing moving that she could see or hear. When her hours were done she woke Linnea for the next and lay down at last, and let her body go loose toward sleep — and her mind went past sleep, down into a dark deeper than any the wood had shown her.
She stands on a barren hill, and the air is thick and will not fill her lungs. The sky above her is not sky but a slow churn of black and sickening green, and the land runs out from her feet cracked and grey and dead to every horizon. And out of the distance a fortress rises — spires like a reaching claw, black smoke pouring from it, and far-off voices that might be wind and are not. She has never seen it. She knows it in her bones. Dol Guldur.
A voice comes at her ear, low and coiling, close as a lover's. "You cannot stand against the dark."
She turns, and there is no one. The ground beneath her writhes; black tendrils come up out of the cracks and take her by the ankles and hold, and when she pulls against them they only draw her on, toward the fortress, an inch and an inch. The voice fills her skull. "You will fall, as all before you have fallen. The Shadow eats everything in the end."
Pain flowers white through her chest. She looks down and her own hand is closed around a black blade she does not remember drawing, and its surface crawls with a wet dark light, and it pulses in her grip like something with a heart of its own. The fortress swells nearer. Its malice presses the breath out of her, and the whisper melts to laughter. "You are nothing, ranger. Nothing at all."
She woke with a jolt, her breath tearing, her heart going like a hunted thing. And there was something cold and solid in her fist. She looked down: her own hand had closed around her knife in the dark, white-knuckled, the blade catching the last red glimmer of the coals. For a moment the dream and the waking would not come apart. Then her fingers sprang open of their own accord and let the knife fall, and the small thud of it on the moss seemed loud enough to wake the whole black wood.2
Linnea was at her side before she had drawn a second breath. "Celenneth?" Fear and care both in it. "What is it?"
"It was more than a dream." Her voice would not come out level. Her gaze dropped to the fallen knife. "The Shadow reached for me. And I — I had its blade in my hand."
Linnea did not ask her to explain it. She only settled at Celenneth's back and drew her cloak around the both of them and wrapped her arms over her, and said, very low, "You're not alone." Celenneth let herself lean into the warmth of her, and felt her own hand find Linnea's and hold it, and the shaking eased by degrees.
Eorlas had roused at the sound, and he watched her across the coals with a long, careful look. "It can reach you, out here," he said at last, quietly. "Its whispers are patient, and they are cunning, and they do not tire. But hold fast, ranger. A small light is not so easily put out as the dark would have you believe."
Úrimë 7, 2965
Linnea had learned to read Celenneth's back by now — the set of the shoulders that meant at ease, the one that meant do not speak yet — and all that second day under Mirkwood's roof the ranger rode with her spine gone watchful and hard. The dream had left its mark on her; Linnea had held her through the small hours of it and felt the shape of the fear even without being told. She kept close behind on Nimroch's rein, and Eorlas closer still, and the three of them went in a silence that the forest pressed down over them like a lid.
Celenneth's instincts carried them well — around a sinkhole hidden under bright deceptive moss, wide of a stand of mushrooms whose smell alone warned the throat. It was good ground made under bad, and it lifted their spirits by inches, until a sound came into the wood that had no business there.
A song. Faint at first, and then not — a voice rich and strange, threading between the trunks, lifting where everything in Mirkwood hung heavy and low. Celenneth's hand went up, and they stopped, and listened. The melody pulled at something in Linnea she could not name, a grief that felt borrowed and yet fit her own like a lent cloak. They followed it, careful, and it drew them to a clearing lit with a pale green light that came from no sun.
A tall figure stood at its heart, robed in flowing grey-green, hood half-raised, a slender staff in one hand and an old bow slung at the back. When it turned, the hood fell, and Linnea looked on the first Elf she had ever seen — a face angular and ageless, neither young nor old, eyes that took in the three of them with a curiosity edged in caution.
"You are far from the safety of the open lands," the Elf said, the voice as strange spoken as sung. "And deeper in the wood than most would dare."
Celenneth stepped forward, steady. "Your song carries a weight I can't place — though it stirs something in me all the same. What is it?"
The Elf studied her. "An old lament. My kin sing it for the great trees that stood where this forest now twists and rots — how the light went out of their leaves when the Shadow first reached across these lands. This was not always as you see it. It was Greenwood the Great once, and full of life. The song remembers what was lost." The pale eyes went distant. "And what might yet return."
The words settled over the clearing like a weight Linnea could feel on her own chest. She knew nothing of ancient histories, of Greenwood or its fall — and still the melancholy of it reached her, and she understood, without the telling, that she was standing in the ruin of something that had once been beautiful.
"You are a Ranger of the north," the Elf said to Celenneth. "Your people keep their own songs of defiance, though I think they are seldom sung now."
And Celenneth answered in kind. Linnea had never heard her sing. The ranger's voice was rougher than the Elf's and warmer for it, and the song she gave back was not a lament but a defiance — cold winds off the mountains, the hunter's horn ringing clear, the stag leaping and the rivers running free through a country no shadow had stained.
> Though tempests howl and the north wind blow, > our spirits, rooted, only grow; > in frost and flame we hold our own — > the light endures, the heart flies on.
When the last of it faded into the trees, the Elf's hard face had softened. "Your song carries the strength of the winds you sing of," it said, "and the endurance of those the winds carry. It is well that such songs still live. They remind us there is life yet, even in the bitter cold."
"That was beautiful," Linnea murmured — to Celenneth, mostly, and something in her chest was full and aching with a pride she had not expected.
But the Elf's gaze had turned grave, and it came now to rest on each of them in turn. "You go far through dark lands, and your resolve is strong. But Mirkwood holds more than shadow. It holds whispers. Things dwell here that speak not with words but with wanting." The light in its eyes sharpened like a drawn edge. "You may hear voices — calling to you, wearing the shape of what you most long for, or most fear to lose. They are not real. They are not, for that, without power. Follow them, and you are lost."
Eorlas shifted, both hands on his staff. "Spiders?"
"Worse. Wraith-things — shadows of the Shadow. They take no form your hand can find, but their voices go straight into the mind." The Elf lifted its staff toward the way ahead. "When you hear them — and you will — hold fast. Say your own name aloud, and your purpose, and the voices will falter. Keep close to one another, for they hunt those who wander alone. And know this above all: no road they promise leads anywhere but to their teeth. The way forward is the only way through."
"We'll hold to the path," Celenneth said, her jaw set.
The Elf inclined its head, and stepped back, and its grey-green shape thinned into the shifting light until it was gone. "May your journey bring some light to this wood," its voice came, already fading, "even if only a spark. Farewell, Ranger."
That night the dark lay so thick that the fire seemed to give more shadow than light. Celenneth and Eorlas slept, worn down to it, their breathing slow and even; and Linnea kept the watch, her bow across her knees, her back to the coals, listening to the small sounds of the wood.
At first there was only the rustle of leaves and, once, the far hoot of an owl. Then a voice came out of the trees, low, and it went through her like cold water, because she knew it.
"Linnea."
Her father's voice. Warm and deep and shot through with the same pride she had carried in her since she was small enough to sit on his shoulders. "Linnea. Come to me."
Her hands closed hard on the bow. She had seen his body. She had knelt beside what the bandits had left of him and closed his eyes with her own fingers. And here was his voice, whole and living, moving among the black trunks of Mirkwood, calling her name.
"I've missed you, my daughter," it said, and the longing in it opened a wound she had thought long scarred over. "Why do you wander in all this dark? Come home."
She was on her feet before she had decided to rise. Tears stood in her eyes. "Father?" Her voice shook on the word. "Is it you?"
The dark ahead moved, and thickened, and became — almost — a shape. Tall, broad-shouldered, a man stepping just out of the fire's reach, his arms opening to her. "Come, little one. We've kept the door for you. We're late."
The Elf's warning surfaced, far away and thin: stay close to your companions, for they hunt those who wander alone. But the voice was so real. It knew the name he had called her by, little one, that no one living knew. It had a hook in her heart, and it drew, and her feet moved after it, off the ring of firelight and in among the trees.
"Father," she breathed again, and stumbled forward, and the figure drew back as she came — always the same distance off, always just beyond her reach — and led her deeper. The rustle of the leaves changed as she went, softening into a low, wrong murmuring that seemed to come from everywhere. Somewhere behind her a horse stamped and snorted, sharp in the dark, and for half a heartbeat the trance thinned and she almost turned — but the voice swelled to fill the gap, warmer, closer.
"Just a little farther, my little one. I'm waiting. I've been waiting so long."
And under the warmth of it, so faint she could almost pretend she had not heard, something else moved — a thread of malice, a hunger wearing her father's love like a stolen coat. She should have known it for what it was. She could not make herself care. She stepped on, and the fire and the camp and her own name fell away behind her into shadow and whisper, until —
"Linnea!"
Another voice, and this one she also knew, and this one was real. It cut through the wood from behind her, hard and sharp with fear, and the sound of it caught in the murk of her mind like a nail. Celenneth.
The figure ahead of her flickered. Its edges would not hold. "Don't listen to them," her father's voice pleaded, and there was a fraying in it now, a note of something close to panic. "Stay with me, child. You're almost home. Don't leave me again."
Linnea stopped. She stood torn between the arms held open in the dark and the voice calling her back toward the light, and she could not move for the tearing of it.
"Linnea!" Nearer now, and then a crashing of undergrowth, and Celenneth came through the black trees at a run, and the sight of her real face — frightened, furious, alive — did more than any argument. "It's not real! Look at me — come back to us!"
Linnea turned toward her, and her eyes would not focus, and her father's shape wavered at the corner of her sight. "Don't leave me," the voice begged, and now the sweetness was curdling out of it, and beneath the fading shape she saw for the first time what it truly was — hollow, and grey, and reaching with a hunger that had never once been love.
Then Eorlas was there at Celenneth's shoulder, his staff raised, and his voice rang out flat and final. "Begone, shadow. You have no claim here."
The figure came apart like smoke in a wind, its whisper unraveling into a thin silence, and the pull on Linnea's heart snapped all at once and left her staggering. Celenneth caught her before she fell.1
"I thought it was him," Linnea wept, the words breaking out of her, her face pressed to Celenneth's shoulder. "It sounded so like him. It called me — it called me what he called me."
Celenneth held her, one hand firm at the back of her head. "The forest hunts our hearts," she said, low. "It went looking for the tenderest thing in you and wore it like a mask. That it fooled you is no shame. That you stopped — that you heard my voice and stopped — is everything."
They went back to the camp together, Linnea leaning into her the whole way, and she sat close by the fire and could not stop shaking for a long while. Eorlas brewed a tea from his pouch, something quiet and steadying, and pressed the warm cup into her hands. "This place tests all who cross it," he said gently. "But every test we come through leaves the light in us a little harder to put out."
Linnea wrapped both hands around the cup and drank, and let Celenneth's arm stay around her shoulders, and did not once, for the rest of that long night, let herself be alone.
Úrimë 8, 2965
The third day opened under the same lightless canopy, and Linnea was quiet with it — keeping to Nimroch's flank, her eyes going to Celenneth more often than to the path, the night's ordeal still on her. Eorlas hummed some old thread of a tune under his breath, low, as if to hold the silence off by an arm's length. They came into a tangled stretch where roots heaved out of the ground like the fingers of something buried and the branches met so thick overhead that what light there was seemed to come up from the moss rather than down from the sky.
Celenneth stopped. Something in the stillness had changed — an unnatural held-breath quality, the wood gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone in it means you harm.
"Careful," she said. "The ground ahead isn't right."
Eorlas knelt and laid a hand flat to the earth. "It's been worked," he murmured. "Disturbed and covered over. Tread soft."
The proof came almost at once. The soil shifted under Linnea's boot with a faint creak, and she threw herself back as a patch of it fell away into a pit — deep, lined at the bottom with jagged roots sharpened to stakes, and cunningly hidden under a lid of turf and leaves. She landed hard on her seat at the edge of it, white, unhurt.
Celenneth's eyes narrowed at the neat cruelty of the thing. "Orcs, most like," she said. "Or Elves, hoping to catch them at it." She read the trap and the ground around it, and led them on at a slower, deliberate pace, Eorlas tapping ahead of every step with his staff. A little farther, threaded between two great trunks, she found the next of it — a tripwire strung at shin height, and above it, cradled in the branches, a crude weight of sharpened boughs waiting to fall. She crouched and worked the wire slack with steady fingers until the mechanism hung dead.1
"That settles it," she said, rising. "Orcs. And not far off."
By evening they had picked their way clear of the whole cunning field of it, though the tension of the day would not quite let go. They camped in a small clearing walled about with dense brush that gave at least the feel of cover. The fire had barely caught before Linnea spoke into it.
"They were ready for someone," she said. "Was it us? Or is it anyone who comes this way?"
Eorlas shook his head slowly. "Orcs don't dig pits for sport. Either they're expecting travelers on this road — or they're guarding something they'd rather no traveler found."
Úrimë 9, 2965
The next day's shadows pressed close from the first step. Linnea had some of her steadiness back, riding closer to alert now than to fear, and Eorlas returned to his quiet reading of the wood — a print here, a bent stem there, the small tracks of what little still lived in this part of the forest. Then the air changed. It went unnaturally still, and a faint reek of sulphur rode under the smell of rot, and the trees around them had grown into shapes that hurt to look at, their limbs wrenched toward the dim light overhead like hands clawing upward.
Celenneth reined in. Something shimmered in the air ahead — a wrongness, a distortion, as of heat over a road, where no heat was.
"Wait," she said, a hand raised. "There's something here."
Eorlas came up beside her and looked long at the path, and his face closed like a door. "There's a working here. Old, and foul." He went ahead a few careful paces and came back grim. "A ward — a snare of sorcery, laid to muddle or to harm whoever crosses it unknowing."
Celenneth reached into her pack and drew out the pendant — the old eye-graven thing she had carried since the barrow-country, its metal cool and yet holding a faint warmth against her palm, and under the warmth a malevolence she had never quite trusted. She had wondered, more than once, whether a made thing of the dark might not answer the dark. She stepped toward the ward with it, tracing the sick shimmer in the air, and the pendant woke in her hand, a low glow rising off it to show the runes cut into the ground beneath the leaf-mould.
"A ward, right enough," she said, low. "Meant to turn a mind, or break it."
She knelt at the edge of the runes, the pendant held close over them, and spoke words of warding she had learned long ago and half forgotten, the pendant taking her intent and lending it a weight it should not have had. The dark work came apart slowly, the runes flickering and going dim like coals raked out, until with a last small gesture the whole of it guttered and died, leaving only a smell of scorched earth.2
Eorlas stepped onto the cleared ground and studied it, then studied her. "Well done, Ranger," he said, and there was concern threaded through the respect. "But that pendant is no common trinket. It carries the strength of the one who made it, and that one stood deep in shadow. Be wary what you lean on."
Celenneth slid it back into her pack. "It earned its keep today." She looked ahead into the dark. "Whoever laid this may be near. We move."
Úrimë 10, 2965
On the fourth day, for the first time, the wood relented. The oppressive dark thinned as they went; the mist that had hung about them lifted; and a patch of moss shone ahead, vivid green, faintly luminous in the filtered light. The very air came lighter to the lungs, cleaner, as though the forest had drawn one honest breath.
Ahead, an ancient tree stood alone, its bark furred with a glowing lichen that cast a soft gold light over the ground, and at its foot lay a small pool of water so clear it seemed to hold light of its own. The warmth of the place reached them before they came near it — not heat, but the warmth of an old kindness, a corner the Shadow had somehow never found.
Eorlas went forward with his face open in wonder. "This is a gift," he murmured. "A blessing out of the forest's forgotten years."
The tension eased from all of them at once. Linnea knelt at the pool's rim and let her fingers trail the cool water. "It's beautiful," she whispered. "How can it be here — in all this?"
"Because not everything the Shadow reaches for does it grasp," Eorlas said. He filled his waterskin with slow, reverent movements. "Drink deep. Water from a place like this puts strength back into the body, and into the spirit besides." They drank, and the draught went through Celenneth clean and cold and left her steadier than a night's sleep had for many nights — even the cold weight the dream had lodged behind her ribs seemed, here, to lie a little lighter.3
Eorlas settled at the pool's edge, both hands folded on his staff, and looked into the water as though it were a window backward. "This place is a memory," he said. "A shard of what Mirkwood was, before the Shadow took root — when it was Greenwood the Great, and the light lived in every leaf." And he told them of it: of the tall trees full of song, of the Elves who had walked under them without fear, of a wood that had been all the good the lament in the clearing had mourned. His words were bright with the beauty of it, and yet his voice under them ran sorrowful the whole way, for he told it as a man tells a thing he knows will not come again in his lifetime, and perhaps not in the age of the world.
When he had finished, none of them spoke for a while. The gold light held them, and the pool lay still, and the dark of the greater forest waited beyond the ring of it. Then Celenneth rose and shouldered her pack, because the way forward was the only way through, and the others rose with her; and as they left the clearing she looked back once at the glowing tree, and carried the small light of it out with her into the shadow, the way one carries a candle from a warm room into a cold hall — knowing it will not last the passage, and glad of it all the same.
Úrimë 11, 2965
Whatever grace the golden clearing had given them, the forest took back the moment they left it. The dark closed in again heavier than before, as though the wood resented the ground they had gained, and the path thinned and tangled until Celenneth was reading it a stride at a time. Nimroch put a hoof through a soft patch of earth that gave way beneath him, and only her hand on the rein kept him from going down. "The ground's rotten here," she said, low. "Slow. Feel your way."
A wall of twisted brambles blocked the trail not long after, and Linnea and Eorlas set to hacking a way through it, and by the time they had a gap the work had sweated them and eaten the morning. It was in the aftermath of that, when they were tired and strung out, that Celenneth heard it — a sound behind them, wrong among the wood's own noises. She stopped dead and threw up a hand.
"What is it?" Eorlas breathed.
Her hand had already found her sword. "We're followed. More than one."
Linnea set an arrow to the string, and her grip was steady where a month ago it would have shaken. Nimroch shifted, ears flat, and then the sound resolved into what it was: guttural voices, and the clank of crude iron, and a hunting party of orcs came out of the trees behind them at a jog and spread into a half-circle — six of them, jagged blades and spears, and at their center a brute in a spiked helm who showed his teeth in something like a grin.
"You've wandered too far, little prey," he said, in a Westron broken almost past sense.
And then Linnea did a thing that Celenneth would turn over in her mind for a long time after. She stepped forward — bow lowered, chin up — and spoke first, before Celenneth could, in a voice pitched to carry and to command. "You're making a mistake."
The leader's eyes narrowed. He cocked his helmeted head. "What mistake, girl?"
"We know Grahnak's plans." She let the name fall like a stone into still water, and watched the ripple of it cross their faces. "And his orders. Do you think he'll thank you for spending time and blood on travelers, when his target's elsewhere? Do you think he'll spare you, if you come back to him bloodied and empty-handed — or worse, if you've let his raid slip because you stopped to play with us?"
The orcs shifted, glancing to one another, their sneers coming loose at the edges. The leader's grip worked on his sword-hilt. "How do you know Grahnak's name?" he demanded — and there it was, under the growl: doubt.
Linnea smiled, and it was a cold, clever thing Celenneth had never seen on her before. "Because we've met others who serve him. And we're still here to say so."
For a long moment the wood held its breath. Then the leader snarled, spat an order in the Black Speech, and jerked his head at his band. "We've better things than you," he said in Westron. "Go. Cross us again, and it's your death." And they melted back into the trees, and their footfalls faded, and were gone.1
Linnea let out a long, shaking breath, and her hands began to tremble now that they were allowed to. Celenneth set a steadying hand on her shoulder. "I'm astonished that worked," she said, and heard the disbelief and the relief tangled together in her own voice.
Eorlas was looking at Linnea with new eyes. "A sharp mind and a sharper tongue," he said. "They've saved us today where no blade could have."
Úrimë 12, 2965
The next day carried a lightness that had nothing to do with the wood and everything to do with its ending. The canopy was thinning; the light coming through it had a cleaner quality; and once, faint and blessed, a breeze reached them off the open country beyond. They made good ground, and their spirits rose with every yard of it.
Then the wind changed, and brought a sound on it that stopped the breath in Celenneth's throat — a thin, mournful keening, at first no more than the creak of straining timber, and then unmistakably a voice, rising and falling in a wail that had no body to make it. She halted Nimroch, her hand at her sword.
"Do you hear that?" Linnea's voice had gone unsteady.
Eorlas gripped his staff white-knuckled. "A spirit," he said.
Ahead, the air over the path shivered as though seen through water, and a pale light moved among the trees without source, and the cold came down around them out of nowhere. The wail wound into the mind, past the ears, and Celenneth felt it reach for the low place in her where the dream still sat — but it was Linnea it took hold of. She saw it happen: the color draining out of her, the despair flooding in behind her eyes.
"I can't," Linnea whispered. "I can't do this—" Her legs went from under her; she caught at Nimroch's flank and missed, and slid down against the horse.
"Linnea." Eorlas turned to her, stern and not unkind at once. "The light ahead is real. Fix on that, not on this Shadow."
Celenneth stepped in front of her and took her face in both hands. "Look at me. This is a test, nothing more — a thing thrown at you to see if you'll break. And you won't. You're stronger than it." But the young woman's eyes rolled and would not hold, and then she went slack, and Celenneth caught her as she fell.2
There was no fighting a thing with no body. Celenneth got Linnea up and across Nimroch's withers and kept one hand fisted in her sleeve, and they pressed on through the cold and the wailing at a walk, Eorlas murmuring low words to hold the presence at bay, until the light overhead grew and the wail thinned behind them and at last fell away. They made camp at dusk in a small clearing near the forest's edge, and Linnea, come back to herself, sat by the fire and could not meet Celenneth's eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said, small. "I thought I was stronger than that."
"The Shadow tries everyone." Celenneth's voice was firm and warm at once. "What matters is that you're still here to be sorry."
Eorlas knelt at the clearing's edge, setting quiet wards against anything that had followed. "We rest here," he said. "The eaves of the wood are close. We're out of it tomorrow."
A tear slid down Linnea's cheek. Celenneth saw it and said nothing, only came and sat close and laid her arm across the young woman's shoulders — and that undid her. Linnea turned into her all at once and buried her face against Celenneth's chest, and the sobs came up out of her from somewhere deep, muffled at first, and then breaking loose past holding.
"I'm so tired," she wept. "Of the dark, and the fear, of losing everything I knew." Her hands twisted in the front of Celenneth's tunic and held on as if to keep from being carried off. "I miss him. My father. My home. Everything that made me who I was — and it's all gone."
Celenneth folded both arms around her and held her close and did not try to hush her. "You've lost a great deal," she said into her hair. "More than anyone should. But you haven't lost yourself. And you are not alone in it — not anymore."
"I'm frightened," Linnea admitted, the words half-drowned. "That I'll forget who I was. That I won't be enough for what's still coming."
Celenneth rested her chin lightly against the top of her head. "You talked six armed orcs into turning around and walking away. You've come through this wood, through all of it, still standing." She drew back just enough to find her eyes and brush a tear from her cheek with a thumb. "And you haven't only lost. You've found a thing worth holding to, as well."
Linnea's breath hitched. "You mean us," she said, very quiet.
"I mean us." Celenneth nodded. "We're making a new road, you and I. One we walk together."
A faint, watery smile broke through, and Linnea pressed close again, and this time the grip of her hands was not fear but something steadier. "Thank you," she whispered. "For being my light."
Úrimë 13, 2965
They broke camp on the last morning of the wood with the first true sunlight they had seen in days slanting down through a canopy grown thin and ragged overhead. Celenneth led with Nimroch, her guard not yet let down — Mirkwood had a way of keeping its promises late — and Linnea came behind with a lighter step for all her weariness, and Eorlas took the rear, his staff keeping its patient time against the earth.
Then the trees simply ended, and the world opened.
They came out of the shadow into open country and stood a moment struck silent by it. The sun was almost too much after the long dark, a clean gold pouring over grass that ran to every horizon, and the wind moved across it in long slow waves and carried the smell of growing things instead of rot. Linnea tipped her face up into it and shut her eyes. "We made it," she said, hushed, as if a louder word might take it back.
They stopped to rest a stone's throw beyond the eaves, and it was there, in the open light, that Eorlas turned to the two of them with a calm and settled look. "This is where I leave you," he said.
Linnea's eyes went wide. "You're leaving?"
He nodded, and gestured out across the grass to the east. "I set out for Dale to beg aid for the villages the goblins have bled — but you two are the better messengers, and the better tongues before a king. I'll turn to the eastern settlements instead, and ready them for what's coming, while you carry the warning where it will do the most good."
He set a hand on Celenneth's shoulder, and his gaze held hers. "You're a strong leader, Ranger. You brought us through the dark whole. I've no doubt you'll go on doing it."
Then he turned to Linnea, and the sternness in him gave way to something warmer. "And you — you've shown a great courage, even when the Shadow bent every trick it had to breaking you. Hold to that. It will carry you far."
"Thank you, Eorlas," Linnea said, her voice soft. "For all of it. I've learned more from you than I know how to say."
Eorlas reached into his satchel and drew out a small vial, and in it a liquid that held a faint light of its own, as if a little of the golden pool had been caught and stoppered. He pressed it into Celenneth's hand. "For your darkest hour," he said. "Brewed from the water of the blessed clearing. When your strength fails you utterly, it will give some back."1
He shouldered his pack and turned to go, and then paused, and looked back. "When you reach Dale," he said, his voice carrying on the wind, "find a woman named Elenna, in the market there. Tell her Farnath is safe. That Eorlas still walks. And that there is a light set against the Shadow yet."
"I will," Celenneth promised, fixing the name and the words in her memory.
"Thank you." A last glimmer of warmth crossed his weathered face. "Farewell." And he set off eastward across the grass at his steady, tapping pace, growing smaller against the vastness of the land until the shimmer of the horizon took him.2
The two of them stood in the quiet a while after he had gone, feeling the shape of the company changed, one fewer around the fire that night. Then Celenneth turned to Linnea, and her resolve came back into her. "We've a road of our own," she said. "Let's ride it."
Úrimë 14, 2965
With the wood a dark line falling away behind them, Celenneth set Nimroch's head toward Dale. It was still far — a long ride of open country — but the going was everything Mirkwood had not been: firm turf, clean wind, a sky uncluttered by any canopy, and away to the north-east, small and blue with distance, the Lonely Mountain stood up out of the plain like a landmark set there to steer by. Linnea rode easier with every mile, though she glanced back at the forest more than once. "It's strange to leave it behind," she said. "As if we've slipped away from something that wasn't finished with us."
The something proved her right. A figure came into view on the road ahead — a lone traveler, cloaked, moving in the lurching gait of the hurt or the spent, and as they closed the distance he dropped to his knees in the grass and lifted a hand to them in a plea he had no breath left to shout.
Celenneth reined in, her hand going to her sword out of habit; Linnea swung down with an arrow ready. "Who are you?" Celenneth called, firm, not unkind.
The man raised his head — young, hollow-eyed, his face slicked pale with sweat. "Help me," he rasped. "Please. They're coming."
Her gaze swept the horizon behind him. "Who is?"
His eyes rolled wild toward the way he had come. "Wolves. Not — not right ones."
The answer came off the land itself: a howl rolled across the plain, and then another, wrong in a way that raised the hair on her arms — too low, too knowing, the cry of something that hunted with a purpose. Linnea's eyes met hers over the kneeling man.
"What do we do?"
Celenneth was already moving. "Get him up on Nimroch. Quick." Linnea got a shoulder under the man and hauled, and he groaned but climbed, slumping forward over the saddle-bow with a weak grip on the mane. The howls came again, nearer, and now Celenneth could see them — dark shapes flowing over the far rise, low and fast, red eyes catching the light. Wargs. She swung up behind the man and reached down and pulled Linnea up behind her in one practiced motion. "Hold tight," she said. "And don't look back."
Nimroch surged. He had three on his back and he ran anyway, his stride pouring out over the grass, and the wind of it tore past them and carried the snarl of the pursuit close behind. Linnea's arms locked around Celenneth's waist; Celenneth gave the horse his head and only steered, choosing the flattest line, the ground that would let him stretch. A glance back showed the wargs strung out in a running line, lean and matted and tireless, their howling braided into one long chorus of threat — and for a while they held the gap, and for a while they even closed it.
But the open plain was Nimroch's country, not theirs. There was no thicket to turn him, no broken ground to trip him, only distance, and he was bred for distance and gifted beyond any horse she had known. Celenneth spoke to him low and steady under the wind, and he answered, digging deeper against the weight he carried, and mile by mile the wargs' fury began to tell on them where his endurance did not tell on him. The land tilted up into a rocky rise; the horse took it without slowing; and somewhere on that long grade the howling fell behind, and thinned, and stopped, the pack giving up a chase that led only away from easier meat.1
Nimroch slowed of his own accord on the far side, his breath heaving but even. Celenneth swung down and steadied him, and Linnea helped the stranger off, and he folded to his knees in the grass and gasped as though he had run every mile himself.
"Thank you," he managed. "I thought I was done."
Linnea knelt and put her waterskin in his hands. "What were those things?"
"Wargs," Celenneth said, her eyes still combing the horizon behind them. "And they were hunting him by name, not by chance. Which means they know now there are three of us."
She crouched by the man as he drank. "You've some explaining to do. Who are you, and why were wargs at your heels?"
He handed the skin back with shaking hands. "Taron. I'm a merchant — was one. I was headed south, trying to keep off the toll roads, and I took a wrong turning near the forest." He paused, and the color left him again at the memory. "That's where I saw them. Not just the wargs — orcs, a whole camp of them, arguing over something. I kept low, but — I think one of them marked me."
Linnea's brow drew down. "Arguing over what?"
"I couldn't make it out. But they were waiting on something. Or someone." His gaze went between them. "One of them said Dale."
Celenneth's face hardened. "Dale."
Taron nodded. "That's all I caught before the wargs got my scent. I ran, and they ran after me the whole way out of the wood. If you two hadn't been on the road—" He didn't finish it.
She traded a look with Linnea, and her jaw set. "If they're turning their eyes to Dale, then it's as we feared, and worse."
"Then we have to reach it," Linnea said, steady. "If they're readying a blow, we may be the only warning that gets there ahead of it."
Taron tried to rise and swayed on his feet. "I'll come with you. I owe you my life."
"You'd slow us," Celenneth said — bluntly, but not without kindness. "And you're spent. If you want to help, tell us everything you know now, and then make for the river, east. The open country's safer, and the roads there are kinder." She got him up with a hand under his arm and pointed him toward the far thread of water glinting at the plain's edge. "Keep to the open. Stay clear of the trees."
"There's little more to tell," he said. "Only — be careful. They were armed, and ordered, and there were a great many of them."
Linnea pressed a small pouch of dried provisions into his hands. "This'll see you to the river. Go well."
He limped off eastward, and Celenneth watched him until she judged him clear of any lingering danger. Then she turned back to Nimroch and swung into the saddle and pulled Linnea up behind her, and the horse, sensing the urgency in them, set off at a hard pace without being asked twice.
They rode into the dusk and through much of the night, stopping only to spare Nimroch what rest they dared, the Lonely Mountain growing larger and darker against the stars with every mile they put behind them.
Úrimë 15, 2965
As the sun sank toward the horizon, the walls of Dale rose out of the plain — sturdy grey stone set against the dark bulk of the Lonely Mountain, catching the last of the light along their tops. Smoke trailed lazily from a hundred chimneys, and the low hum of a living city drifted out to meet them on the wind. Peaceful, for now.
Linnea let out a long breath, relief and urgency tangled in it. "We made it," she said, tight. "But what now?"
Celenneth slowed Nimroch as the gates neared, her eyes going over the walls, the guards, the traffic. "We find someone who'll listen. Fast."
The gate-guards watched them come with wary curiosity — two women worn to the bone by the road, out of place against the ordinary business of the evening — but Celenneth's bearing gave them pause enough to hear her.
"We seek audience with the king," she said. "It's urgent. Dale may be in danger."
The guards traded a glance. "And who might you be?" one asked.
"A Ranger of the north. Dúnedain." Her tone left no room to haggle. "This is Linnea, my companion. We've come a long, hard way to bring this warning, and it won't keep."
The second frowned, but nodded. "King Bain holds court yet. If your business is what you say, I'll see you brought before him — but mind yourself. He's no patience for those who cry wolf."
They were led in through the gates and up through the streets, and Dale unfolded around them, loud and warm and alive: merchants crying their wares, children weaving shrieking through the alleys, smiths beating iron against the coming winter, and over all of it the Mountain standing watch like a promise the city had made good on. Linnea turned her head this way and that, wonder and unease at war in her face. "It's so alive," she murmured. "After Mirkwood it feels like another world."
"Let's hope it stays one," Celenneth said, and kept her eyes forward.
They were brought to a great hall at the city's heart. Within, on a throne more sturdy than grand, sat Bain son of Bard, young for the weight he carried and carrying it well. He rose as they came the length of the hall, and his keen gaze took the measure of their travel-ruin in a glance.
"You come in haste," he said. "So speak plainly. What brings you to Dale?"
Celenneth stopped before him and did not soften it. "Orcs. And worse behind them. They're on the move, and Dale is in their mouths. Whatever they mean to do, this city is part of it."
Bain's brow furrowed. "Orcs near Dale are no new thing. But you speak of something larger. What proof do you carry?"
Linnea stepped up beside her, and her voice held steady though Celenneth could see the nerve it cost her. "We took a man off the road two days gone — a merchant, Taron, running from wargs. He'd seen an orc camp near the eaves of Mirkwood, arguing over Dale by name. And these weren't wandering raiders. Their traps were laid with care; their numbers were ordered. Someone commands them."
"This was no raiding band scavenging for slaves," Celenneth added. "They were waiting on something. Or someone."
Bain weighed it. "If it is as you say, Dale must ready itself. But I cannot rouse a city to arms on the word of two travelers and a frightened merchant. Give me more than fear."
For answer, Celenneth reached into her pack and drew out the orc war-map. She stepped forward and unrolled it across the space before the throne with deliberate care, and met the king's eyes as she did it.
"This is no rumor," she said. "We took it from orcs in Mirkwood with our own hands. It marks their movements and their roads — all of them bending toward Dale. And toward Dol Guldur."
The name changed the air in the hall. Bain's face tightened, and he leaned forward over the map, studying it hard. "Dol Guldur," he said, low, as though the word had a weight he did not care to lift. "There is no one in this land who can hear that name and not go cold."
"We heard them speak of their leader — Grahnak," Linnea said. "Whatever they're building, Dol Guldur is at the root of it. We've seen how they're organized. They're gathering for something large, and this city is the target of it."
Bain straightened slowly, his gaze moving between the map and the two of them. "Your words carry truth in them," he said gravely. "And this map — if it comes from Dol Guldur's servants, the danger is greater than I had let myself believe." His hands closed on the arms of his chair. "That shadow has not stretched this far north in long years. If it stirs again, Dale must be ready. I will not turn from it."1
He rose, and the command came into his bearing. "I'll summon my council and set the defenses in hand. But I need to know the size and the strength of what's coming. If you're willing — you've the skill for it — scout their movements near Mirkwood, and a small force will follow at your word, should you find a host on the march." His eyes rested on them both. "You've shown yourselves brave and resourceful. Will you take this on? Dale may hang on it."
Linnea stepped forward, and her voice was clear, and honest about its own weariness. "We're willing, my lord. But we've ridden ourselves and our horse near to breaking to reach you. Send us out again tonight and you send us out to fail — and Dale can't afford our failure. Give us the days to recover, and we'll do the thing properly."
Bain regarded her, and something in his stern face eased. "Your honesty does you credit," he said. "You've spent a great deal to bring me this warning already. It would be poor thanks, and poor sense, to spend the rest of you now." He beckoned a guard. "See them lodged well, and their horse tended. They'll have what they need to mend." He turned back to them. "Rest. For when you ride out again, the fate of this city may go with you."
The guard led them back down through the streets to a modest, comfortable inn near the center of the city, where a stout woman with kind eyes greeted them warmly on a word from their escort. "Rooms ready, and a hot meal waiting," she said. "And your horse'll be seen to by the stablemaster, never fear."
Celenneth gave her thanks, and let the weariness show now that it was safe to — the danger set down, for a night. Linnea looked around the busy common room with a quiet wonder, unused after weeks of hard road to walls and warmth and the noise of ordinary people at their ease.
They ate — a thick stew, fresh bread, ale — and went up to their room, and the sight of Nimroch already snug in his stall as they passed the yard brought Celenneth a peace she had not felt in days. Linnea sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window at the lamplit street below.
"It feels strange," she said, "to rest here after all we've seen. As if the Shadow's only waiting past the walls for us to come out again."
Celenneth crossed and set a hand on her shoulder. "We're not only buying this city time," she said. "We're kindling something the dark can't easily put out. Rest. We'll need it."
Úrimë 16, 2965
They stayed in Dale some weeks, and the city gave them a gift they had not known how badly they needed: quiet. There was time to let the road bleed out of their bones, time to sleep without a watch to keep, and — spread across the sturdy table in their lodgings, weighted at the corners with cups — time to bend their whole minds to the orc-map at last.
It became, for both of them, an obsession. Celenneth's years in the wild told in the reading of it. She traced the web of trails that ran out from Dol Guldur and named where they led: to Dale, to Lake-town, even to the doors of Erebor. Some were old and worn smooth by long use; others were fresh, and it was the fresh ones that troubled her. "These are supply lines," she murmured, following one bold stroke with a fingertip. "But this — this one runs too straight to be a supply road. They're moving something along it. Or someone."
Linnea leaned in over the map's southern edge, where a cluster of marks sat apart from the roads. "And these? They aren't trails. But they're deliberate."
"Hidden camps," Celenneth said. "Or holds."
Linnea nodded slowly, drawing her finger along the parchment. "If they mean to come against Dale, they'll gather strength in places like these first. Which means we could use them against the orcs — if we knew where to strike." Night by night the shape of it emerged, and it was a grim shape: the trails converged, and the convergence pointed north, toward Dale and the Mountain. "These aren't roads," Celenneth said at last. "They're staging points. The orcs are massing, and this city is what they're massing for." Linnea's voice was quiet and certain. "Then we stop them." Celenneth rolled the map up with care. "We will."
Linnea spent the weeks sharpening herself against the day she would need to be sharp. She walked Dale's markets and sat with its herbalists, learning to know the healing plants of this eastern country and to draw tinctures from them for the common hurts, practicing what Eorlas had taught her until his lessons were her own. It was in the market, too, that she found the woman Elenna, and pressed Eorlas's words into her hands — Farnath is safe; Eorlas still walks; there is a light against the Shadow — and watched a stranger's face open with relief at a message she herself only half understood.
Under Celenneth's eye she learned other things: how to think past the moment, to read ground for its advantages, to weigh timing and position and the small edges that decided a fight before it began. Bain's council chambers, which they were now free to attend, taught her how a city was held — how walls and gates and the will of ordinary people were marshaled against a siege — and she took it all in with a hunger that made Celenneth quietly proud.
Her horsemanship grew, too. She spent her free hours in the stables with Nimroch, learning the stablemaster's craft, until her seat smoothed and her hands went quiet and she moved with the horse instead of on him. And in the training yards she drew her bow against Dale's own archers and against Celenneth's exacting standard, day on day, until her aim came true even with a heart racing and no time to think — the snap shot that had saved a child on a rooftop no longer luck, but skill.1
The evenings were theirs. When the city had gone quiet they would find a place apart — under the open sky, or by the hearth in their shared room — and let the weight of everything set itself down for an hour. Linnea hummed the melodies she'd picked up in the markets, and Celenneth listened with the guarded set of her face going soft, and one night, lying back on a rooftop with the stars thick overhead, Linnea rested her head on Celenneth's shoulder.
"Do you ever wonder what it would be," she asked, "to live without any of this? The Shadow, the danger. To stop somewhere, and just — stay?"
Celenneth was slow to answer. Her hand found Linnea's in the dark. "I've never known that kind of life," she said. "I wouldn't know the shape of it." A breath. "But with you, I think I could imagine it. I'm only not sure how long I could hold still before the road called and my feet answered without asking me."
Linnea grew bolder, those weeks, in the showing of what she felt. She brought Celenneth small things — flowers from a market stall, a song offered up to lift her out of a dark mood — and Celenneth, who had never learned to give tenderness in kind, returned it in the quieter grammar she did know: checking Linnea's gear before practice, seeing she was rested, being simply and reliably there when the self-doubt crept in. On the hard days she would set a hand on Linnea's shoulder and tell her, plainly, "You've come further than you think."
And for all the shadow beyond the walls, they let a little lightness in. Linnea teased Celenneth for her gravity and worked to coax the rare laugh out of her; Celenneth answered with a dry wit that caught Linnea off guard as often as not. One evening Linnea stole the ranger's cloak while her back was turned and swept it round her own shoulders and struck a scowling, stiff-backed pose. "Well? Do I make a Ranger?"
Celenneth's mouth curved. "You'd need to scowl a great deal harder."
But the peace of Dale sat heavier on Celenneth the longer it held. She was not made to wait behind walls while a thing gathered in the dark, and at last, with Bain's blessing and a handful of his most trusted scouts, she rode out to put eyes on the rendezvous points the map had marked near Mirkwood and the reach of Dol Guldur. The small party moved quiet through forest and broken rock, Celenneth leading them unseen where they would have blundered on their own, and the king's scouts, who had come out half-doubting a stranger's skill, learned quickly to follow where she set her feet.
The first camp lay in the shadow of a craggy hill — crude tents, a cold fire-pit, the ground beaten and trampled. Celenneth knelt and read the tracks leading east. "Gone a day or two ahead of us," she murmured. At a second site near the wood's edge they found the litter of a hurried leaving: cast-off gear, the acrid ghost of old fires. One of Bain's men turned up a snapped blade in the grass and held it out, grim. "They're rallying," he said. "These aren't raiding parties any longer."
Her unease deepened as the trails drew them south, converging, every line bending back toward the ancient stronghold like water running to a drain. One night, camped in the lee of an abandoned watchtower, she caught movement in the dark — orc scouts, a dozen or more, moving east, their guttural voices carrying across the still air. She and the king's men held to the shadows, silent, unmoving, and let them pass. "They're scouting us as hard as we scout them," she breathed. "We're running short of time."2
After several weeks abroad the party came back to Dale with what they had found, and Celenneth laid the map out again across Bain's table and traced it for him. "They're gathering strength near Dol Guldur," she said. "If we let them, they'll move north in force, and Dale and Erebor will be the first they come for." Bain nodded, his brow heavy. "Then we'll ready our defenses," he said. "But this is larger than one city. We'll need to send word to our allies — and pray they answer."