They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod

In the years immediately after the war, there was not much for an animal leech to do but to go out into the hinterlands and see if one might find a small portion of that purpose and, strange though it may sound to say it, harmony which had attended the army of the Valar.

As I bumped along the country roads north of Alqualondë on the backboard of the egg cart — all cushioning and clever springs were dedicated to the protection of the produce — I considered ruefully that there might have been only a smattering of positions available in Tirion, Alqualondë, or even Eressëa or Valmar, and those positions lacking what I loved most in leeching, but at least I would not have wasted days of my time in traveling to an admittedly scenic back end of beyond, only to be rejected.

What I loved most in leeching, then as now, was horses. In fact, all members of that family delighted me: swift and affectionate horses foremost; but also clever, charming donkeys; sensible and forthright mules; even the cantankerous but winsome wild ass I had operated upon in the grasslands of what is now, I hear, called Hollin. I did enjoy the ease of operations on dogs and cats, the satisfaction of straightening out a mixed-up lambing, and even the pride of getting a cow’s milk going once more – but none could compare to the care, however trivial, of a horse.

The promise of farm work dangled the potential of a great deal of horse-leeching tantalizingly before me. However, the driver of the egg cart, a verbose sometime-professor of speechcraft at the university in Alqualondë on sabbatical, had made it known to me that the proprietor of the practice I went to interview at loved one thing and one thing only: the fairest fowl, the wondrous chicken.

I had not previously had much to do with chickens, and the advertisement I had come upon in the Tirion student circular had not mentioned anything about them.

Sought, it had read, A junior partner for an agricultural practice in Merrilosto to the north of Alqualondë in the region of Ránanandë. Applicants must be comfortable treating illnesses and injuries of all sorts in all creatures great and small. Duties will include assisting Doctor Helwáriel in complex surgeries, conducting independent operations in the clinic and on outlying farms, and preparing and mixing medicines. Practitioners of Vanyarin, Noldorin, or Falmarin leecheries will be considered equally. Room and board provided. Wages competitive. Experience with marine life neither required nor sought.

Not a thing about chickens in it. I had been attracted by the broad-mindedness indicated by the explicit invitation to various schools of leeching, and including even potential Noldor, by a Telerin leech. My own training, which started in the Vanyarin pastures of my girlhood, continued on the remarkably mixed and educational battlefields of Beleriand, and was finished in the great university in Tirion, might well be an asset to such a person, rather than an affront. The opportunity to be abroad in the countryside about Alqualondë, which was proverbially beautiful, was attractive as well — as were, I had to admit, the room and board and the wages, which, while not competitive in Tirion, would go much farther in a small town.

Most of all, however, I had been desperate for any position not yet filled by others of the army — in the most literal sense — of returning soldiers looking for a new path in life. I had sent out many, many responses to similar advertisements since my graduation, and been rebuffed each and every time. Friends of mine had taken unsatisfying work, hoping that in a century or two, Aman would have readjusted to its fullness and the usual free-handed approach to one’s life’s labor would have returned.

To hear from this egg-deliverer that Doctor Elquessë was a devotee only of hens, roosters, and chicks, and would most likely be supremely disinterested in a horse-mad ex-shepherd and ex-soldier, was a blow.

As I pondered this possibility, quite insensible to the glorious, rolling hills around me, the egg cart rattled into a small town of tile-roofed, white-plastered adobe houses, arranged neatly around a central square with market stalls and little shops. The driver pulled to a stop before a slightly ramshackle three-story affair with a closed balcony of elaborately carved dark wood and a few red tiles missing from the graceful roof. On the wall hung a beautifully lettered plaque, hanging slightly crooked, that read “Elquessë Helwáriel, P.A.L.”

“Here you are,” said the professor of egg delivery. “The door is usually open; she keeps her waiting room in the front of the house.”

Thanking her, I dismounted the cart, rubbing a little at my thighs, my heart suddenly pounding. I had seen plenty of action in Beleriand, though the horse-doctors were largely kept behind the lines, but this whitewashed building, with its air of slightly disreputable aristocracy, sent a faint sweat prickling over my body. I took a deep breath and let my fëa course through my body, settling it, as I would a fractious horse. I waved to the driver, hoisted up my hopeful bag of instruments, and entered through the front door.

The waiting room was quite empty. It was a gracious sort of hall, with hexagonal terracotta tiles on the floor and handsome archways leading into what looked like a neat surgery, a dispensary room, and a passageway to the rest of the house. Prettily carved, though somewhat banged-about, wooden benches lined the walls, and a fine secretary’s desk practically exploded with bits of paper, knotted message-strings, and a gorgeous enameled pot stuffed to overflowing with twists of powder and pills. Out the window, a lovely formal courtyard garden in the Alqualondë style emanated a tranquility only increased by the fact that the orange trees were overgrowing their pots and the jasmine lining the arcades was making inroads on the upper stories. The entire impression, as from the outside, was of a beautiful and refined tree let go rather to seed. I rang the slightly dented bell on the untidy desk, which had a pure, silvery tone, and settled on one of the benches to wait.

It was not long before rushing footsteps in the passageway made me clutch my bag nervously.

Whatever I had expected of a lady animal-leech in an agricultural backwater, it was not quite what presented itself when the good Doctor Helwáriel — to whom I shall henceforth refer as “Elquessë,” for that is how we, dear friends all these years later, speak among ourselves — hurried into the room.

She did have the silver hair to which I had unconsciously ascribed her, though it was dressed in a manner I had never seen before, shockingly short and disordered at the front, and long and flowing as expected at the back. The fineness of her hair fought with the scandalous brevity of the cut, flopping over her eyes and in all directions from the crown of her head. Meanwhile, she walked bent forward with her hands clasped over her forearms behind her back, but her head up to scan out the path in front of her. When she saw me, she cocked her head to the side, fixing unusually dark eyes on me quizzically. The whole effect, I remember thinking to myself with a sort of dizzy hilarity brought on by nerves, was undeniably gallinaceous.

“I thought you would be Alparenë with the dropping samples for the fecal testing,” she rapped out, without a greeting.

“No,” I stammered, “I am Hyamessë Heriel. From Orvambo.”

Elquessë looked at me patiently, as though not understanding why I should expect her to react to my introduction.

“The applicant for your advertisement?” I added.

Elquessë clapped her hand together. “Of course!” she exclaimed. “You come in good time; I have not yet begun my rounds.” She looked me up and down with a quick motion of her head. “Are you dressed for work?”

Decades soldiering followed by years supporting myself as a university student in Tirion “from the tithe to the pot,” as they say there, had not left me with ample income for fancy clothes, though I prided myself on general neatness befitting a military leech. Anything I wore might as well be a work garment. I nodded.

“Very good!” cried Elquessë, in what I was to come to discover was her general attitude of great enthusiasm. “Come with me.”

So saying, she swept out the door to the courtyard garden. Clutching my instruments, I hurried after her as she picked her way expertly across the worn gravel paths, by a running fountain with only one rogue valley arrowhead blooming in the basin, and into the stables hidden behind the graceful arcades at the far end of the garden. The slight shabbiness of the rest of the building was not in evidence here: brass nameplates shone from the two spacious boxes currently in use, and the happy, dusty smell of straw and horse lifted my anxious spirits at once.

A velvety nose poked itself curiously out of a stall window, and Elquessë chirruped at it. It whuffled in a friendly manner in reply, and the rest of a handsome liver chestnut head emerged.

In a trice, Elquessë had the gelding — an absolutely princely Morikáno, if I were any judge, which I was — out, tacked, and hitched to an equally smart dogcart with wicker baskets beneath like those used by hunters for pheasants or dogs.

Once I was seated on the dogcart, slightly dazed, and Elquessë had snapped the reins and set us off at a flashy trot, she began to quiz me about my references, education, and so on.

I explained my background — that I was born in one of the little Vanyarin transhumances that ranged the slopes of Taniquetil, found a talent for mending the wounds of my goats and sheep with the Vanyarin facility for song-healing, then went to war in the train of Ingwion. I had promptly been stuck in the horse-lines with the Nandorin and Sindarin experts and found from them a love of horses and a great body of knowledge of Beleriandish horse-leeching, with their potions and formulae. Then I returned to Aman at war’s end: a toe lighter, as poor as ever, and possessed of a burning desire for a university degree from Tirion, where all the new surgical techniques for horses, sheep, cows, cats, birds, and all the feathered and four-footed friends were developing before my very eyes.

Elquessë listened closely, head cocked in that attitude which, now, if I were to see it from across a city square, would still identify her to me.

“That is all very good,” she declared, as the dogcart rattled across the country lanes, vineyards and pastures flashing by. “Practical experience: yes, though perhaps still a little green! Education: yes, and from many fonts! We are behind the times, out here, or the times have overtaken us. Now that Alqualondë is full again, fuller than it ever was with cousins from across the sea, there is great demand for what Ránanandë can give — wool, milk and cheese, grapes and wine, eggs.

“The eggs,” she went on, a fire in her eye, “are my main occupation. There is much to be learned from the common or barnyard chicken!”

She then launched into a disquisition upon the intricacies of egg formation, which would so advance the understanding of fetal development for all spined animals; of inheritance of traits, likewise; of the relationship between environment and development. All this, I was given to understand, was her true passion, and, being surrounded by large farms given over to the breeding and keeping of chickens to supply Alqualondë with eggs, she had found full scope for her enthusiasm, and wished to dedicate herself more fully to it. I held tightly to the sides of the cart and listened, eyes watering slightly against the breeze of our passage.

“That,” she concluded, “is why I need you. I have nothing against farm horses and dairy animals and the like, only they do impede my research. The practice really does need two leeches to serve the area; one could divvy the cases up evenly, but one could also simply give to one partner all things winged, and to the other, all else!”

The first hint of anxiety I had yet seen entered her face, just as a large, low-lying farmhouse came into view.

“I do know others like a bit of variety,” she said, then, reassuringly, “Your work would include a great many horses.”

I almost wanted to laugh, the anxiety of the day, the dogcart, the tests ahead jittering through me like bubbles in wine. I certainly would not mind a bit of variety, especially in this gloriously lovely country, especially with, it seemed, a supervisor who was more than happy to employ an assistant without one particular school of practice, or more experience than could be got in a war-trench. I hastened to assure her of this, trying not to sound over-eager.

Elquessë nodded firmly, then set about slowing the gorgeous Morikáno to a cooling walk, so we proceeded into the large open farmyard at a dignified pace. As she swung down to greet the farmer, she told me, “This is a monthly call to a family farm: chickens of course, goats, working cobs and dogs, and a mule. Let us see you at work.”

While she greeted a farmhand in rapid-fire Telerin dialect, I took a look around the farm, the first-met of that type with which I would later become so intimately familiar. The family’s house of white-painted adobe looked amiably upon a neat double-row of stables with the same red-tiled roofs. The stalls were refitted for a variety of animals — some covered over with wire for, I assumed, chickens, others with the connecting walls knocked in to house chipper nanny goats, and some left as they were for the currently absent cobs and mule. Off to the right, showing prettily in the late spring sunshine, flashing ribbons warned the birds from five or so acres of grapevines. All around were olive trees, small white blossoms just beginning to open. I had never been around so many at once, and could not place the aniseedy scent until I walked straight beneath one.

Elquessë finished her chat with the farmhand and beckoned energetically.

“Come along, Doctor Heriel; let’s put you through your paces!”

Swallowing, I followed Elquessë and the farmhand into the first stable block, where it seemed the animals needing attention had been set aside to await our arrival.

Our first patient was a handsome black-and-white billy goat. I saw no immediate signs of ill-health until he gamboled up to us and exposed his left side, where his horn had grown awry so that the point threatened to pierce his cheek.

The farmhand explained, “We spend half our time shaving the tip off, but the horn always grows back this way. One of these days, he’ll be out in summer pasture and it will grow straight through his cheek before we notice. Is there something more permanent you could do?”

Elquessë looked at me expectantly. I put my hands behind my back and cleared my throat. Dehorning an adult goat could be quite a difficult procedure, with a risk of hemorrhage and tissue death. There were ways, however, and I blessed my time in Tirion where these kinds of surgical innovations were at the cutting edge.

“I would suggest banding the horn,” I said, trying to sound confident. “It is much less violent than sawing it off, and there is less chance of dangerous complications. You could simply use the same bands you use to castrate the young bucks.”

“Won’t it hurt him, though?” asked the farmhand. “The other way, at least it would be quick.”

I glanced at Elquessë, but though she looked on with keen interest, her face gave nothing away.

“He will feel pain while the band is on,” I admitted. “If he were only a kid, I certainly would not recommend it. But with older goats, the horn is full of blood vessels, and the surgery to remove it is quite a major one — it would require sedation, which is dangerous on its own, and it would leave a much larger and more complicated wound. No, I would recommend the band, and remember that after a few weeks, it will be done with, and it will pose no more danger to him.”

The farmhand nodded, but looked to Elquessë for confirmation.

“I quite agree,” she said, bobbing her head. “I will leave a numbing salve with you to rub around the band, and that will help ease the discomfort. Send for me again once the horn has fallen off, and I will ensure the site stays clean and healthy.”

A shiver of relief passed through me as she spoke, then dug through her own bag to find the appropriate equipment and place the band.

The goat’s crooked horn seen to, the farmhand led us to the next box, where the comforting sight of a horse’s head greeted me. The sturdy bay cob, like the goat, did not immediately appear hurt or ill, until the farmhand picked up one of his lightly feathered feet and the distinctive odor of thrush reached me.

Elquessë gestured me forward, and I replaced the farmhand, holding the hoof between my knees. It was not a terrible case, all told — the black, infected parts of the hoof were not as extensive as I had seen in the terrible mud of Beleriand, and when I tapped gently on the hoof wall, I could feel no hot spots or tender patches. Nevertheless, untreated thrush was a promise of worse later.

I told the farmhand that it was a minor case that I could treat right then, if he would bring me warm water. I pulled the various necessities out of my own bag, blessing the forethought that had encouraged me to bring it along to the interview.

Replacing myself over the patient cob’s hoof, I picked out the remaining dirt from around the frog, then set aside the pick and scrubbed the whole base of the hoof thoroughly with the water and mild soap. The foot was generally well-kept, but I trimmed away a few ragged flaps of hoof until the healthy horn showed through and touched the clean air.

At this point, I looked over to Elquessë, who only looked more eccentric for my upside-down glance.

“What would you normally do to prevent recurrence?” I asked.

Elquessë replied, “I would give it a good whistle to keep the tissue healthy — it works wonderfully, but I do have to come back regularly to check on it.” Her eyes twinkled. “What are the hatchlings in Tirion doing these days?”

My heart gave a little skip. “They do still use the singing charms,” I said. “But only once, at the beginning. Then, you can pack fine clay mixed with a little of that new iodine over the affected areas, and reapply as needed. Then you don’t need to bring the leech out every week to make sure it stays gone.”

Smiling, Elquessë turned to the farmhand to ensure such a newfangled practice was acceptable. Hearing that it was, she took over the hoof, whistled her charm over all four, and gave me instructions to write down the recipe for the clay. The ingredients, she said, would be easily available in Alqualondë, even the iodine — for it was one of the great cities of the Eldar, no matter what the Noldor said.

I patted the patient cob’s neck — he had not leant on me even when it would have been more comfortable for him to do so! — and followed Elquessë to my next task.

It was clear even before we came in sight of the box that a more serious problem was at hand. The stall radiated the tension which I associated with the sick of any species, and the stablehand’s face was grimmer than it had been.

Inside, three large lambs, perhaps three months old, did not frisk or gambol, or stand to nudge at their mother’s udder. Their heads were up and their eyes were bright, but all of them lay in strange attitudes upon the straw. When the farmhand unlatched the door, the ewe stepped forward, bleating and hopeful for food, but the lambs stayed put.

Elquessë pressed her lips together.

“What has happened here?” she asked.

Before answering, the farmhand gently placed his hands under the nearest lamb’s belly and lifted it to its feet, then let go. Immediately, the lamb’s back curved, the hind legs trembled, and it went down again in a tumble of limbs.

“It started like that just a day or so ago,” he said. “I noticed that some of this year’s lambs were a little shaky, but not all of them were, and these ones were getting along all right until just the other day. We didn’t call you sooner because we knew you were coming today.”

Elquessë shot me a look, the twinkle in her eye much diminished. There are few creatures as charming as a lamb, and to see them in such a state was sobering. She pressed her lips together.

“What do you think, Heriel?”

My heart in my throat, I knelt beside the lamb the farmhand had raised up. Though I knew it was unlikely, given that all three lambs seemed to be in the same state, I ran my hands through the light, soft fleeces, checking for injury. I lifted each little cloven hoof in turn and found them unblemished. I whistled up a small light and watched the animals’ pupils contract evenly.

I stayed crouched beside the lamb, my mind working frantically, very aware of Elquessë standing behind me.

In the corner was a pile of lamb droppings, and I searched through it for signs of worms or ticks, and found nothing. It was not parasitic paralysis, then. It could not be spinal abscesses, not in all three little animals. That left swayback to explain the floppy curve of the spine and the immobile legs.

There stood the mother, hind limbs firm and back straight.

“Have her other lambs had this problem?” I asked.

The farmhand shook his head. “This is only her second lambing, but the first were fine young sheep; easy sellers in the market. We’re at a loss; we don’t have much to do with sheep in the normal way. We mostly keep the ewes for a bit of extra spinning, and to help the goats eat down the grass and weeds in the vineyards.”

It was not inherited swayback, then. What could its cause be? My nerves, and Elquessë behind me, kept my heart jumping in my throat. Even so, something itched at the back of my mind. Those vineyards we had passed coming in – they had followed the rolling hills so elegantly, long snaking lines of greenery over the reddish dirt of the well-drained hills.

My eyes widened.

“Is the soil up there all sandy?” I demanded. Elquessë made a humming noise in the back of her throat. The farmhand nodded.

“It’s good for the grapes.”

I braced my hands on my knees and stood up. “It’s copper deficiency,” I said decisively. Then I stole a glance at Elquessë. “Or I suppose it could be cobalt deficiency; I would have to test their blood to be sure… but it is much more likely to be copper. You said you had them eating the grass between the vine rows?”

The farmhand nodded again. I went on.

“Sandy soils with much iron often lack copper. If the ewe only ate that grass, these three could have started sickening before they were even born. Swayback often hides for a while, even months, before progressing to this state.”

Elquessë gave me an approving look. “That seems likely,” she said. “Did she graze on those slopes with the previous litter?”

“No,” said the farmhand slowly. “We bought her already pregnant.”

“Well,” Elquessë said. “I think we can assume that this is a good working theory, though I should like to take some blood from these three to confirm. You should not feel afraid to let her graze on those hills in future – only add a little copper to her food, or rotate her through different pastures more often while she is lambing.”

A high-pitched bleat sounded by my knee. The prostrate lamb butted its head against my knee. All the pride I felt at solving the puzzle cooled and drained out of me, leaving only a sick sense of dread.

Just that moment, the farmhand asked the awful question: “How will you treat this lot, then?”

I looked back at Elquessë, who met my desperate glance sternly. This was to be part of the test, I realized.

Swallowing, I said to the farmhand, “There is no treatment for a progressive case of this severity.” His eyes went wide, but I kept speaking, as though I were delivering a report to General Ingwion himself. “Already they cannot follow their mother to suckle, and the paralysis will worsen until they cannot move at all, even to swallow, and they will starve or suffocate. The kindest thing to do is to give them a good death now.”

Opening his mouth to protest, the farmhand turned to Elquessë, but she was nodding decisively, a practiced expression of solemn resolve on her face.

“I will take a blood sample from each of them,” she said. “This will confirm Doctor Heriel’s surmise, and I will send you the results by pigeon.”

She looked sorrowfully down at the lambs. “However, regardless of the cause, this is swayback, and it is clearly progressive, from your description. Doctor Heriel is right to recommend putting an end to their suffering.”

The farmhand put up no resistance after that. Elquessë led the mother sheep out of the pen, singing softly to calm her and dry her milk. I did the same with the lambs, singing them down into deep sleep, where no pain or distress could reach them.

Too much killing weakened a healer, and some of the more traditionalist Noldor said the effect was particularly strong for women, but I had never noticed any lessening of my abilities after administering mercy killings, clean and painless, to animals too ill or wounded to go on living. If anyone had asked, I might have said that some death was part of life, and no one asked Oromë if his hunts diminished his might — that perhaps murder and the muddy hell of war were harmful in a way that helping a few small lambs, who would die regardless, out of the world in a warm box stall was not.

Even so, it was a joyless procedure, and I regretted the three little white bodies on the straw.

Elquessë returned without the ewe and laid a hand on my shoulder. She did the necessary business with the farmhand, and helped him bear away the lambs to the butchery to ensure their lives were not wasted.

In the dogcart returning to Merrilosto proper, Elquessë chirruped to the gelding, then wrapped the reins around her wrist, sighing.

“I’m damned sorry about that, Heriel,” she said, with sympathy warming her rough voice. “I did not expect that visit to include such a case. You handled it well, if it is any consolation.”

I looked over at her earnest, aristocratic face. The war had been a never-ending parade of death, it seemed, and I was well used to far harsher loss of life than this. Any animal leech who put their own distress ahead of the needs of an animal in pain would not last long. Nevertheless, I had not expected the visit to include such a lethal puzzle either, and my enjoyment in the glorious countryside was dimmed. Thrush, a horn banding, and then killing three lambs: it had hardly been a great show of my qualities.

I thanked her, but could find little else to say.

Elquessë hummed, and we drove on in silence until the first outlying buildings of the town came into view. Then she spoke again.

“In a way, I am glad I was able to see you handle it. You were gentle, matter-of-fact. You did it swiftly and kindly. Many would not have kept their heads so level, and it would have been worse for everyone involved. It is no battlefield here in Ránanandë, but farm work is hard work, as I am sure you know, and ‘also in Valinor I am,’ and all that.”

She took the gelding down to a walk, and went on. “On that basis, and on the basis of your other leechwork there, I would very much like to take you on. What do you say?”

Suddenly, the spring day regained some of its vitality. I had not ruined my prospects after all! I had, after all, cured where I could, and ended pain where I could not. And how beautiful, I thought, were the rolling vineyards and glossy oaks, and how kind Elquessë had been to reassure me.

“I would be thrilled!” I said. “Really? I mean, yes, certainly.”

Elquessë made a fist and thumped me jocularly on the thigh, expertly maneuvering the dogcart into the courtyard with one hand. The Mórikano, clearly used to this sort of thing, did not so much as flick an ear.

“Very good, Heriel! I don’t suppose you could start tomorrow?”

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All told, it took me about a week to move my scant affairs from Tirion to Merrilosto, with one day given over to celebratory carousing in Alqualondë, where I took it as my duty to familiarize myself with wines sent into the city from Ránanandë, which were many and, I could now confidently say, of high quality.

Then I found myself plunged precipitously into the irregular life of a country leech, which has brought me so many pleasures. When I look back at the time I recount in these tales, I smile at that Hyamessë who thought she would take a century or two to let Valinor settle into its usual lazy pulse after the war, then trot back to Tirion, where naturally it seemed like all bright sparks should go.

Even in those early days, though, I found myself absorbed in the work, which was filled with variety the battlefield had not taught me to expect. During the war, a particularly diverse month might have brought mange, frostbite, burns, galls from the saddle, and a variety of exciting lamenesses, plus any number of noble beasts whose ailments I could not attempt a cure for at all, and could only ease on their way beyond the circles of the world.

Some of those ailments of the front — the co-presentation of frostbite and burns, for example — were entirely absent in Ránanandë, while the others were the fare for a single week, all mixed together with the multitudinous afflictions of farm dogs, barn cats, dairy cows, sheep, and, of course, the chickens.

Elquessë’s intent was to take on all the avian work for herself, but she wanted me to be well-rounded and able to respond should she be indisposed or away. I believe she also thought — and thinks — that a leech who cannot tend ably to a chicken is not worth her eggs. Those early weeks, therefore, saw me accompanying her in the smart dogcart to the region’s various egg operations. These jaunts were also my first introduction to some of Ránanandë’s most peculiar characters, who were to so enliven the tapestry of my life. I remember particularly my first meeting with Vercaván, who sold me my beloved Quildatal.

Vercaván Laicondiel ran one of the grand wineries nearer to the coast, where the cool climate favored the black-pine grapes, and did very well at it. She had some family connection to Elquessë which I still cannot claim to understand, but which expressed itself mainly in an ardent devotion to the kind of show chickens which make one wonder at the breadth of Yavanna’s infinite imagination.

On this particular day, her prize cockerel had broken a blood feather, and nothing would do but that Elquessë come all the way out to the west county personally to see to it. My understanding was that a broken blood feather, where a half-grown pinion with the blood vessels still close to the surface breaks off, was quite serious enough that the bird might bleed out well before Elquessë could arrive, however smartly her lovely Mórikano could trot.

“Oh no, she will have it well in hand,” Elquessë assured me, boosting me up on the dogcart’s box. “This cockerel remembers the Darkening; it won’t let a little spat like this slow it down.”

I pondered that remark as we dashed along the scenic road to Vercaván’s estate. Animals in the Undying Lands lived strange and elastic lives. They died, of course — Valinor would have drowned beneath a furry tide of rabbits, otherwise — and yet, some did not. This mostly, though not entirely, occurred with animals who spent a great deal of time with Elves and developed a particular relationship to them. A wild doe in the thick taiga of Araman would live a relatively short span, then return to the earth, leaving new deer behind her. A favorite housecat, however, whom an Elf-child had loved and cosseted from a kitten, might continue to slink about the house and destroy upholstery for as long as it saw fit. A particularly beloved cockerel might well outlast the Trees. Yavanna and Mandos were shiftily tight-lipped about how this worked.

Quickly, however, I was distracted from these existential musings by the thought that my one-month’s training period was almost up, and I had meant to spend today searching out a mount for riding my circuit. Elquessë needed her handsome Mórikano gelding, and while she kept another horse, he was a miniature animal whose primary purpose seemed to be sharpening the hairdressing skills of Merrilosto’s children.

As the dogcart rattled along, I considered the distances I would need to travel, the lodgings likely to be available, whether I could afford a cart of my own. The answer to the last was, firmly, no. Whether I could afford a horse at all was an open question: I did not have any large stores of useful goods, or small stores of useless but fungible ones, and the problem with offering my labor in kind was that I was liable to be called to dash across half the county to deal with hurt chickens at a moment’s notice.

Beside me, Elquessë let out a sharp, “Aha!”

Down the sun-dappled road, a mule was coming. It came on rather like I imagined the wave had come on Beleriand: inexorable, deceptively fast, and full of poky bits one would never expect from the type, flailing dangerously in all directions. Incongruously, it wore a hackamore bridle.

Atop the mule was a lady in an awkward two-point seat, clutching a red-and-white bundle that resolved, as she neared, into a bloody chicken swaddled in a sheet.

“Hail, Vercaván!” cried Elquessë, while I was still integrating the image. She reined in the Mórikano, swung down from the cart, and unfastened her bag of instruments from the basket beneath. I hurried down after her, and followed her instructions to pull down the backboard of the cart and spread a clean white sheet over it, making a kind of impromptu surgery.

By the time I was done, Vercaván had drawn up even with the cart, clutching the rooster in one arm while she hauled at the reins. The mule halted, or at least found its angle of repose, much like one of the small avalanches of my Pelórian youth. Vercaván swung down and waddled at speed towards Elquessë, holding out the bundle of rooster.

“Left wing, fifth primary,” she barked, and the resemblance to Elquessë became clear as Elquessë rapped back: “Clotted?”

“No, but stanched with pressure. The quill’s all torn up at the base.”

Without further ado, Elquessë took the bird in her arms and laid it on the covered backboard. I sang a quick rhyme of sterility, and she gave me a terse nod of approval before beginning to re-swaddle the rooster to allow access to the left wing.

At that moment, a prickly, rubbery, moist substance touched the back of my neck, and I instinctively fell to my knees, reaching for a long knife I no longer wore. Thankfully, no one paid me any mind, because the bewhiskered orc my mind conjured up was nothing but the mule, who had somehow snuck around behind me and lipped at my collar.

We looked at each other in puzzlement for a moment, before Elquessë said, “Heriel! Tweezers.”

I pretended my crouch was to better reach the bag of instruments by Elquessë’s knee, and brought out the sturdy, flat-tipped tweezers. Elquessë took them from me, then asked that I hold the other primaries apart so she could see what she was doing.

A broken blood feather can produce a truly remarkable amount of blood, and even large birds like chickens can bleed out quickly. As I parted the feathers of the wing, I could see that this one was worse than the usual, relatively clean, snap. Instead, the base of the quill was jagged, almost shredded. I could not imagine how the bird had managed to injure it in such a way — perhaps the feather had been closed in something, and the bird had tugged it free?

Out of the corner of my eye, a long, dark ear came into view. The mule was craning its neck over my shoulder, looking down at the bird with lively curiosity. I knocked my shoulder into it as firmly as I could without jostling my hands, and the mule withdrew, looking somehow injured.

Back on the table, Elquessë had pulled out a small scalpel and was making a tiny incision to find a section of whole quill to tug. The rich blood still welled out of the wound, making it difficult to see the skin. Elquessë whistled softly, and the blood rolled away from the incision, like waves parting before a wind. Just beneath the surface, the quill was whole again, and she quickly grasped it in the tweezers, and with one decisive pull, removed it. Immediately, I shifted my hands to put pressure on the wound.

“Well done,” Elquessë said, and ducked to pull a packet of styptic powder out of her bag. She placed a carefully measured pinch of the powder on the feather follicle, then gestured for me to resume pressure. As I watched carefully to see the clotting begin, I felt again the strange sensation of someone tickling the back of my neck.

The mule lipped at my collar, then at my short, clubbed hair. It snuffled around the back of my ears, sending waves of ticklish, grassy breath down my neck and jaw. I reached back with my leg and tried to push it away, and it went willingly, only to come at me from another angle, this time searching my pockets. I cast about for help, but Elquessë and Vercaván were deep in conversation, discussing the rooster’s continuing care.

Having satisfied itself that I carried no peppermints or apples with me, the mule began to crane its nose towards the rooster once more.

I clucked scoldingly at it. Vercaván turned at the sound of my voice, and threw her hands up in exasperation.

“Quildatal! Away!”

The mule swiveled a long, thoughtful ear and took one measured step backwards.

Vervaván put her hands on her hips and glared. “I do apologize for the mule, Doctor…?”

“Heriel.”

“Doctor Heriel,” Vercaván repeated, “My apologies. I would not have brought her but that she was the closest mount when I found my dear Sóralúpo injured.” She glared at the mule. “She was payment in kind for a cask of ten-year Black Pine, and I would rather have the wine back.”

I glanced at the mule, who pricked her long ears charmingly.

Elquessë cleared her throat. “I have some of that lovely ten-year left at home, Vercaván. An excellent vintage! Wonderful grainy tannins. If you would like to take Sóralúpo to the surgery, followed by a glass…?”

“Delightful idea, my dear,” Vercaván responded. “I would feel so much better after that.”

She retrieved the rooster, whose cocky spirit was beginning to revive, and bundled him up tightly again, careful of his wicked spurs. I packed away the bloody linen and instruments needing cleaning in the appropriate basket beneath the cart, then stood, somewhat at a loss, as Elquessë helped Vercaván up into the two-seated dogcart.

“I don’t suppose you could follow us back on the mule, Heriel?” she called down. “It will be much more comfortable for the rooster this way.”

Vercaván nodded enthusiastically. “It was the Long Journey all over again to carry him like that!”

I gave an incoherent sort of protest, but Elquessë appeared not to hear me, snapping the reins and sending the dogcart rattling back off down the road towards Merrilosto.

There I stood in the paradisiacal vineyards of Ránanandë. The mule, Quildatal, peered down the road after her reluctant owner, then turned to me, twitching an ear as if to shrug and say, “Well, here we are, then!”

The prospect of riding the mulish equivalent of the breaking of Utumno all the way back to Merrilosto was not particularly appealing. The alternative, however, was leaving her to wreak curious havoc across the farmland and walking the distance.

“All right now,” I said confidingly, raising a hand towards the mule. “Quildatal, is it? Your feet don’t look all that quiet to me, but I am certain we can get along.”

Rather to my surprise, Quildatal did not take the opportunity to make mischief, but came willingly towards me, ears winningly forward. She stopped neatly about an arm’s length away, and I approached carefully. A light, friendly blow into her nostrils received an amiable response.

Men in Beleriand made much of the Elvish way of riding without saddle or bridle — but a mule’s withers are no laughing matter. So the saddle was unsurprising. The bridle, bitless as it was, was more puzzling. Vercaván was clearly an indifferent rider, from what I’d seen, and Quildatal headstrong, but headstrong enough to need reins, with an adult?

“Will you behave if I take this off?” I asked, and Quildatal whuffled noncommittally.

Carefully, I checked Quildatal’s legs and hooves for stones or lameness, then dug under her saddle in search of sores or burrs. Finding nothing, I knotted the reins on the saddle horn as a kind of compromise, then mounted up. Quildatal stood obligingly, craning around her shoulder to watch me settle in and adjust the stirrups.

It was only when I clucked to urge her forward that the trouble began. Quildatal stuck her head straight out and surged forward with such jarring suddenness that I threw myself forward in the saddle to keep my balance, which only urged her to go faster. I began to see the temptation of the reins. She was far enough out of frame to make sitting her gait rather like keeping one’s feet aboard ship in a storm. Using my heels and calves to shape her up, I discovered, would only encourage her to go into a canter, which was smooth enough but too fast for long distances.

With some effort, and a seat heavy enough to make my hipbones twinge, I brought Quildatal back down to a standstill. I swung out of the saddle and checked her legs and hooves again for any small injury or defect in conformation. The roughness of that gait was not simply a bumpy ride; it was quite outside of my experience, rocking and rolling and striking out in all directions. Quildatal stood helpfully still, peering down at me as I went around her legs.

I stood back and, hands on my hips, surveyed her. Nothing seemed wrong from down here, but something was off.

Unknotting the reins from the saddle horn, I worked the leather keeper on the left rein out of its loop on the noseband, fashioning a kind of short, makeshift longe line.

Quildatal flicked an ear at me but took the impromptu schooling in good stride. I clucked her into a walk, which looked fine, then attempted to urge her into a trot.

There was the avalanche-gait. Without a poor rider in the seat, and from my vantage point on the ground, I could see that it was not as wild or rangy as I had suspected. Instead, each of her hooves struck the ground rather like a woodpecker tapping an oak, until she fell out of frame reaching after her nose, tripped, took a normal trot-type step for a moment, and then resumed her tapping.

What in the world could be causing that? She showed no sign of lameness and she was not out of frame due to old injury or some problem with the tack. I watched her flail about in her tight circle for another moment more, thinking back to her arrival with Vercaván on board and Vercaván hauling her to a halt.

Now there was a thought. Perhaps Quildatal was expecting a harsh, nervous tug on her bridle and was pushing preemptively against it, throwing herself out of frame. That at least could fix the balance issues. I played out a bit more slack on my makeshift line and snaked it a bit, trying to get Quildatal to relax her neck. After a few go-rounds and whispers, she finally did, falling into a more even position.

I watched her jabbing feet a while longer, feeling an itch in the back of my mind. The canter had been reasonably smooth; her walk was unremarkable. She would trot for a few steps, but then fall into this strange pattern again.

Rolling up my sleeves, I walked over to Quildatal’s left and clucked her into her disastrous middle gait, jogging alongside her down the road, one hand pressed to her neck to remind her to keep it soft.

The quiet buzz of her mule-being rubbed softly along my mind. The russet road beneath our feet vibrated softly as we struck it, and the air flowing through our nostrils heated and cooled as we passed through patches of sunshine and shade. If I concentrated, I could feel her happiness at the pleasant warmth, her curiosity at the bright ribbons tied to the grapevines to ward off birds, her gentle attention to me at her side. Concentrating harder, I could just sense the patterns that went towards directing her feet.

They were certainly off in some way. Even as Quildatal looked around with interest at the scenery, she kept shifting back and forth between patterns, as though she were catching herself.

Perhaps if she would simply pick one, I thought. Concentrating hard enough that I was concerned about my own feet, I singled out the pattern that felt most stable and sent a positive torrent of encouraging noises and thoughts towards Quildatal. She snorted a little and rolled an eye at me, but kept gamely beating on. Slowly, after a few tries, she kept to one pattern for longer, then longer yet.

When she stayed in one long enough for me to separate, I drew back slightly and took a long look. That woodpecker-like tapping persisted, but it was far more even now, distinguishably four-beated and lateral. It all came together in an instant.

It was not that Quildatal was cursed by a Maia of clumsiness or was herself a personification of a slip-strike fault, but that she was gaited, and had lately been ridden by a near-novice who was afraid of speed. Her ambling, quick-stepping pace certainly looked strange and did not feel like anything close to the standard gaits — an inexperienced rider who was unused to gaited horses, let alone mules, might well be dismayed by it.

I brought Quildatal back down to a halt and lavished her with praise. She seemed slightly nonplussed, but quite willing to accept me rubbing her poll and ears and laying wild compliments at her neat, gaited feet.

There remained just under two miles to go before Merrilosto. Quildatal and I looked at each other measuringly, and in the end, I swung up into the saddle again and gave her her head.

After a bumpy start, Quildatal seemed to understand what I was asking for, and lurched into what turned out to be a beautiful amble, smooth as butter or silk or polished marble. I laughed in delight, and Quildatal flicked her ears back at me and went even softer.

I let her glide for perhaps a mile, then swung down again, so as not to tire her or set any bad habits. We walked peaceably together into town, my arm slung across Quildatal’s withers, her nose periodically drifting towards my pockets or a particularly toothsome box of geraniums.

At home, I put her up in the guest box in the stables, then ventured into the house. The waiting room and the breakfast room were empty, but the sounds of raucous conviviality echoed from the surgery itself.

Elquessë and Vercaván reclined in white surgical robes made quite a bit less professional by the large glasses of pigeon’s-blood wine in their hands. On the table, the rooster, freed from his swaddling but still woozy, was little more than a red-and-white lump on another clean sheet.

“Heriel!” exclaimed Elquessë. “We were just toasting to your deft hands.”

I suspected that they had been toasting to a great deal else, as well, but smiled and nodded nonetheless.

“I am so glad you made it back with the mule,” Vercaván added, stately tone at odds with her excessively relaxed pose. “I should really compensate you for the time taken.”

She gasped, sloshing the wine in her cup. “And Elquessë, my dear! How can I repay you for the help you have tendered Sóralúpo?” Her eyes, bright with wine and Treelight, gained an extra gloss.

“He has been with me through thick and thin,” she went on, her voice thickening. “His hens – never once taken by a fox. His chicks – good layers, all.”

Elquessë laid a hand on her forearm. With the intense solemnity of the drunk, she intoned, “Not at all, cousin; I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise.”

“But all the trouble you went to, coming out to meet me! Your poor assistant, coming back with that devilish mule after going to such lengths for Sóralúpo! I could not repay you in a century.”

The words came to me unbidden. “You could give me the mule,” I blurted.

Elquessue and Vercaván both cocked their heads to just the same angle. The rooster remained more or less boneless on the table.

I had not quite meant to say it, but I stood my ground. Quildatal was good-hearted, spirited, and had a gait like a dream, even if I would have to work her significantly on the longe line to get rid of lingering bad habits and build up her stamina and form. And if Vercaván would accept a mule worth rubies in exchange for a barrel of wine, then ride her with a bridle, she clearly wouldn’t know to value her higher than some easy work on a blood feather.

“Oh, my dear! You would do that for me?” Vercaván’s eyes grew an impossible degree brighter.

I crossed my hands behind my back and gripped hard. “Of course, madam. I believe we bonded on our trip back to Merrilosto.”

Elquessë gave me a slightly fishy look, but gestured expansively with her wineglass and said nothing.

“Then be welcome to her!” cried Vercaván. “I shall be forever in your debt. Come, won’t you have some wine to seal the deal?”

“It’s an excellent vintage,” Elquessë added. “Wonderful grainy tannins.”

So we each had a glass of wine — or another glass of wine — in the surgery, and I could not even begrudge that I would have to spend half an hour sanitizing it again in the morning. I had a mount of my own, and a special one at that!

After my own glass and a final glimpse at the fine chicken slowly regaining his strength and temper on the table, I stole back out to the stables. Quildatal poked her head out readily when I clucked to her, ears pricked and eyes bright.

I stroked her soft nose and pushed her away when she became too interested in the end of my clubbed hair. Some faint carousing echoed from the house, but in the stables, all was quiet but for the munching of hay and shift of hooves.

In Beleriand, I had ridden a mule as well, up and down the lines and between camps. She was of Valinorean stock on her dam’s side, and of the clever, dainty donkeys of the Haladin on her sire’s. She had been badly burned in one of the final battles, her whole hindquarters caught in dragonflame. I had not let her suffer more than a minute.

Quildatal lipped at the back of my neck again, and I started, then laughed.

“I will have to teach you to stay away from my instruments when I am operating,” I told her, and gave her cheerful, furry ear a companionable tug.

I do not think it will spoil my readers’ enjoyment to say that we managed well enough.

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Ránanandë quickly grew used to the sight of me and Quildatal appearing over the gently rolling hills. At first the vintners and shepherds ribbed me for being green, but my enthusiasm for everything that was not chickens soon endeared me to them.

At the same time, I fell in love with the land itself. The mountains of my childhood were beautiful in a way that was almost punishing: great crags, ultramarine distances, drifts of spring wildflowers that echoed the drifts of winter snow. The sheer scarps drove families through the twisting nets of hollows that made the highlands as the soil, the grazing, the rockfall, and the avalanche demanded, while the crystal water and the piercing sky drew the eye and the heart higher.

Ránanandë was quite the opposite. I had arrived in late spring, and the summer spread itself out before me like a picnic blanket laden with ripening grapes, frisking lambs, gangly foals, lingering blossoms, and generously crowned oaks above gilded hills. The people were broad and expansive as their farms, rooted to the places their parents and grandparents knew, tending carefully to their patches of wild wood and neat orchard with generous patience. The glorious weather brightened even the most perplexing cases I was called upon to attend, and limned the easy ones in an aura of extra pleasure.

In those early summer months of my career in Aman, I was amazed at how many easy ones there seemed to be. In Middle-earth, animals and Children alike suffered horribly from diseases entirely unknown to the Blessed Lands. The terrible coughs and sickening infections that clung to wounds simply did not occur here. The Sindarin and Nandorin Elves of Beleriand had concocted wonderful treatments for these ailments and painstakingly taught me every one of them, and they figured not at all in my new life.

Instead, my caseload consisted of injuries, reproductive troubles, the puzzling illnesses where the body seemed to turn against itself, malnutrition in its various guises and ends, parasites (which somehow qualified for lives in Valinor when the minuscule germs that caused strangles did not), and accidental poisonings. At times, it seemed almost relaxing to stitch together a nasty wound or set a broken limb, knowing the putrid specter of infection would not come to trouble my patient.

Then again, there were the puzzles that would never in a millennium have troubled the shores of Middle-earth. Such was the question of Sister Turkanta’s milch goat.

Ránanandë prided itself on its vines and wines, and many of the larger vintners would take small storefronts in the little towns that dotted the county, even if their grapes grew miles away. These served to attract visitors from as far afield as Eressëa and Valmar, to sample the wares and make profound statements about nose and tannins and body, without stirring more than a mile outside their attractive plazas and spas.

Filitambo was one of these towns, an old port on the Russanaira River in the deep redwoods. It specialized in catering to melehesti ever since a group of the Siblings of Eternal Extravagance, devotees of Irmo, took up residence soon after Arien’s first rising. The trees and the silty soil prevented the growing of grapes in the town itself, but they certainly did not prevent the full flowering of attractive vineyard storefronts from beyond the floodplain.

It was to this pretty tourist village that I was called while doing a round just upriver. My circuit of Ránanandë took two weeks, running widdershins from Merrilosto up the Russanaira to Aireresta on the seashore, then down the coast and inland again. The inhabitants knew that if I was within a day’s ride, I would see to emergencies outside my usual loop and stay an extra day in a town to let those with housepets bring them in. The usual procedure was to set up shop in the town hall and wait for people to carry in their cats and rabbits and so on. It was not to be accosted by a Noldorin man wearing more jewelry than cloth and a look of pure panic.

“It’s Sister Turkanta’s goat, Doctor!” he gasped. “I’ve killed her!”

I jumped up from my seat in one of those charming storefronts, where I had arranged myself to advantage. Filitambo saw more melotorni than meletheldi, but enough women of my kind came to drink wine and participate in the melehesti’s yearly rodeo to make my advantage quite advantageous.

This was not apposite in the face of a dead or dying goat, and I hurried to follow the panicked man out of the center of town. On the way, I managed to extract his name — Orneleo — and his situation — that he had whimsically decided to decorate the little tree in his host's front garden with the various gems and chains his friends had left behind to go boating on the river, and managed to get it glittering, only to realize that said host’s nanny goat had followed him into the garden and was munching on the leaves. Orneleo was half-heartedly attempting to dissuade the goat when suddenly she keeled over stiffly and began to choke and paddle her legs. Orneleo noticed that his friend’s shawl with the agate brooch was missing, put two and two together, and burst out in search of the leech he had seen that afternoon from the wineshop.

Such was the situation as I found it, with the addition of a tall, white-painted Sister who could only be Turkanta, humming a mode to keep the goat calm and holding its head down towards its chest to keep the airway open. Whenever she paused for breath, the goat would splay out its legs again, gasping and gurgling in its efforts to swallow and find air. The staff of the small lodging house stood around her, some humming counterpoint, all looking with unfriendly eyes at Orneleo. To his credit, he stood back and let me drop my bag beside the goat and kneel, disinfecting my hands as I did so.

“Can you keep that up?” I asked Sister Turkanta. She nodded without pausing in her mode, and I began to hum myself, a scale from Orvambo to fill in the gaps where she breathed.

I took a Fëanorian lamp from my bag, pried open the goat’s mouth, and looked for evidence of the obstruction. There lay the tongue, still pink but beginning to pale alarmingly. There the entry to the esophagus, whole and unlacerated. There the ribbed windpipe, somehow not visibly occluded.

I broke off my humming and waited for Sister Turkanta to take a breath. The drone of her voice ceased, and the goat choked hard, tongue curling and breath wheezing. With as much force as I dared, I kept her jaws open and stared into her throat, watching the flutter and seizure of the airway. Sister Turkanta began to hum again, and the goat relaxed, though that awful whistle in her breath continued in sinister counterpoint.

Mind racing, I ran a hand down the outside of the goat’s throat, searching for lumps or heat that might indicate an internal wound. There was nothing. Returning my Fëanorian lamp to the goat’s mouth, I stared as I waited for Sister Turkanta to run out of breath again.

This time, I was ready for the goat’s convulsion and kept the light steady. There—

Gleaming in the fleshy dimness of the epiglottis was the tiniest sparkle of a gemstone, more like a pin than a brooch, suspended from a silken red fringe emerging from the esophagus. As the goat gagged against the cloth, the contraction of the muscle made it bounce into the windpipe, where her desperate attempts to suck in air only held the stone fast. When Turkanta began her mode again, the forcible relaxation of the goat’s muscles allowed the stone to fall away, back towards the stomach and invisibility, until her gagging brought it back up, and the cycle replayed.

It was not a pretty sight. It seemed I would have to catch that tiny cabochon, now coated with spit and mucus, right as it sprang back out of the stomach, without dislodging it and sending it properly down the windpipe. Drawing the sash back out of the stomach would be nothing compared to that trick.

Ilmarë, I thought to myself.

For the first time, I looked up at my audience. The staff, all Lindar, had circled around Sister Turkanta to stand between us and Orneleo, who stood by the tree wringing his beringed hands.

“Who here has a steady grip?” I asked Sister Turkanta. Without breaking her mode, which was beginning to grow slightly ragged, she nodded her head to an alnerwen in a cook’s apron.

“Thank you. Please, come here and hold the mouth open wide, like this.” I demonstrated my grasp on the goat’s upper and lower jaws. “Do not readjust and do not lean in; I will have my own hand inside and need space. She might struggle, but you will not hurt her worse than if she suffocates, so hold her firmly.”

The cook nodded, their eyes wide but their chin set. I looked to Sister Turkanta next.

“I am going to count down from four, and on zero, you should stop humming entirely, pick up the knife from where I rest it, and hold it out to me.”

Sister Turkanta nodded, and I signaled that the cook should assume their position. I reached into my bag and took out one of the small, sharply hooked knives Elquessë and I used for autopsies. I made sure the cook’s hands were secure and would not slip, then began to count.

On four, I slid my right hand, as steady as I could make it, into the goat’s throat. On two, I angled the Fëanorian lamp so it cast a steady light that would make the agate glitter. On zero, Sister Turkanta ceased her song, and the goat gagged again, striking out with her legs. One of her sharp cloven hooves grazed me in the thigh, but I ignored the sting. The cook, with their strong bread-kneading arms, kept the goat’s head steady, and I moved the lamp from side to side, searching for that gleam.

There it was. The little pin popped out of the esophagus, still mercifully tangled in the fringe. As quickly as I dared, I pinched it between my fingers, then dropped the Fëanorian lamp and held out my left hand for the knife. Sister Turkanta was at the ready, and I sliced through the fringe. The agate fell into my hand, and I withdrew before I could drop the slippery thing down the wrong pipe. Instead, I dropped it on the ground, then reached back into the goat’s mouth for the shawl. The goat, still struggling and retching, was nonetheless breathing easier, that dreadful whistle gone.

Carefully – indeed, agonizingly slowly – I pulled the silk out of the esophagus inch by inch. Eventually, the goat gagged hard, and the last of the fabric, and a horrible quantity of other material, emerged of its own volition.

I sat down from my crouch on the groundcover and barely refrained from lying all the way down.

“That is all of it, I think,” I said, then looked past the screen of lodging-house staff to where Orneleo looked rather faint. “Is this everything? Was there any more to it?”

Silently, he shook his head, then nodded, then found his words and said, unsteadily, “That was all.”

Reassured, I turned back to the poor goat, still lying on her side in a way that anyone familiar with goats would find immensely distressing. The cook was still kneeling by her head, and after I cleaned my hands a third time, I asked them to open her mouth again. There were no wounds, so far as I could see by the light of my lamp — perhaps Ilmarë really had been listening — but the whole entrance to the esophagus was inflamed from the friction of the fabric and the tissues of her mouth were slightly swollen.

“All right.” I stood. “There does not seem to be any lasting damage. You were very, very lucky,” I said to Orneleo. “If that pin had come off the shawl, or pierced anything, that goat would be dead.”

Sister Turkanta, who had still not yet said a word, rose and unflinchingly shook my hand, still slimed with goat spit. When she did speak, her voice was deep and even, but threaded through with tension.

“Thank you a hundred times, doctor.” She pressed my hand again, the paint on her face making her expression seem all the more intense. “Will she be all right? Is there more to be done?”

“Her throat is irritated and swollen,” I replied. “It is nothing life-threatening, but it is surely painful, and she will have a difficult time eating forage or hard scraps. If I may, I would like to use your kitchen to make a decoction to numb the inflammation and speed healing.”

Sister Turkanta nodded briskly and placed a hand on the cook’s shoulder. She turned to Orneleo, and I think only I saw the flash of suppressed anger in her eyes, quickly buried.

“Brother,” she said. “You will be paying this leech from your own pocket, and you will take your finery down from my tree at once.” Her tone was calm, but it brooked no argument — not that Orneleo looked likely to proffer any.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry! I did not expect—”

I shook my head. “You should always be careful around animals, especially clever and curious ones. When I return with the decoction, we can discuss payment. For now, I would like to prepare it as quickly as possible.”

Sister Turkanta swept me into the half-subterranean kitchen, cool despite the cookfire in the southern wall. Preparations were underway for a large meal, but the cook cleared me a space near the butter churn and set the herbs at my disposal. Sister Turkanta leaned against the counter beside me and sighed.

I eyed her while I mashed fresh mint and dried kingsfoil together.

“Sister,” I began tentatively, “Will you sing a little soothing into the herbs? A devotee of the Sleeping One must surely have a greater power than I in this area.”

Sister Turkanta tugged her ear, then grimaced as her face powder came off on her fingers. One of the cook’s assistants, edging past with a tray of loaves, handed her a cloth.

“I do not feel soothed,” she said. “It was a silly occurrence; I will laugh about it tomorrow.”

I scraped the sides of the mortar and added salt. Sister Turkanta watched the motion of the pestle and sighed.

“If that sparkly young fool had killed my goat, Filitambo would have thrown his whole group out on their ears and probably sent a complaint to King Olwë. I can see the broadsheets – ‘Noldo kills Irmoan votary’s beloved pet with agate stone.’ ‘Meletorno refuses shelter to young Noldorin pleasure-seeker after boardinghouse accident.’”

Dipping a pinky into the mixture, I tasted it and decanted it into a pitcher of water with honey.

“I am glad we could avoid that,” I said, unsure of what else to say. The Vanyar were little accustomed to the currents of resentment that still flowed between Tirion and Alqualondë, and Lindar did not come to Tirion for tourism.

“Let this steep for twenty minutes, then strain out the herbs, ice it until it is cold, and feed it to the goat while singing the same rhyme you might use for your own throat after a concert. I will leave the recipe, in case she still seems sore tomorrow.”

Sister Turkanta nodded, and I felt certain she would follow my instructions to the letter. Dreamy Irmo might be, but his melehesti devotees could not afford to be so.

We walked back out into the summer sunshine, where Orneleo wrung his hands next to the hastily denuded tree.

“Please accept this for your troubles, Doctor,” he said, and held out a handsome enameled pendant in the shape of a comet on a gold chain. “I thought you might like to keep the agate, too; my friend will not mind when he hears of the trouble it caused.”

I smiled at him and accepted the (cleaned) jewelry, which I could easily trade in Alqualondë on my next day off. Orneleo then turned to Sister Turkanta, inhaling deeply.

“Sister,” he said, “I beg your pardon for my carelessness. I am not used to farm animals being loose, and so almost caused a great injury. I understand if you would rather I find other lodgings. Regardless, please accept this on top of my fee.”

So saying, he held out a lovely, deep-colored amethyst carved into a simple ring — purple being the color of Irmo and his worshippers.

Sister Turkanta looked surprised, then touched, beneath the face paint.

“Thank you for your apology, Orneleo,” she said. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, and I know you did not intend any harm. Please do stay out the rest of your holiday here, though I ask you leave the garden alone.” She looked at the ring, wistfully, I thought. However, she continued, “There is no need for an extra gift.”

For the first time, Orneleo smiled, and I thought I saw a glimpse of a wicked charm. “But Sister,” he said, “It suits your lip-color so well. Won’t it bring out those nice blue undertones in your eyes too?”

Sister Turkanta laughed, and I turned to the goat, smiling. It seemed any crisis had been averted, and my patient was resting on her chest, breathing normally, looking around with some of her natural caprine curiosity. Unless it got her into any further scrapes with gemstones, I thought the whole household would do quite well.

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Another of these cases unique to Aman began during the first autumn of my life in Merrilosto. I was called out by pigeon early one morning when unseasonable heat quivered behind the eggshell morning like a full and fragile yolk ready to spill. The message was in a large and emphatic hand, insisting on the presence of the “young horse leech” at once. It mentioned that it was an obstetric problem, but not the nature of it.

Happy enough to be on my way before Arien unveiled her full and scorching glory, I packed my bag, saddled Quildatal, and set off towards the farm in question, which lay just beyond the last cottage in Merrilosto. It was a prominent breeding operation for pleasure and sport horses and took pride in having sent beasts to Middle-earth during the war. That ended quickly, given the conditions, but I still felt a certain warmth towards the mistress of the place, whom I had only seen from the shore of Beleriand, leaning on the railing of a Telerin ship while her horses were unloaded.

Quildatal and I made good time — still enjoying the smooth showiness of her fine gait — and a farmhand pointed us to one of the outer fields. I tied Quildatal firmly to a hitching post in reach of hay and water in order to avoid her over-inquisitiveness with a horse friend, who might well kick, and enjoyed the brisk walk through the paddocks. Grand horses of all colors cocked sleepy ears at me as I passed by, or gnawed thoughtfully at their buckets in anticipation of breakfast. Crows gathering for the coming winter flashed their glossy jet feathers as they winged over the paddocks in search of their own breakfast.

The owner stood alone in the last field before a small patch of oak woodland, radiating fury even from a distance. This field showed more signs of hard use than the others, the last of its dry grass trampled down and the dust raked up in horseshoe drifts, rather like a commons after the market has passed. Next to the owner stood a fine blue roan mare who looked none the worse for wear, with one lazy hind hoof cocked and her lower lip hanging down.

I pushed through the white gate and hailed the owner, who gave me a stiff nod.

“Ruanel,” she said, by way of introduction. “Doctor Heriel, I have quite a serious problem here.”

I nodded to show my willingness, though I was puzzled as to what could be wrong with the mare, who hardly twitched her tail at the flies.

“Oromë’s hunt passes through my wood,” she said, nodding over the white fence to the carefully maintained patch of oak woodland that balanced the cleared pastures of Ruanel’s operation.

“They keep the deer down; they leave a haunch or a skin in thanks. They bless the wood, and I have never had any quarrel with them, for they are great lovers of horses.”

Ruanel seemed to swell with rage. “And then, I am roused from my meditation in the small hours by a trumpeting to wake the whole town, and I come out in my nightdress to find some gold-shod spawn of Oromë mounting my best broodmare, whom I put out here specifically so she would not attract any of the stallions during her heat!”

A Maia of Oromë mounting an ordinary horse? I glanced again at the mare, who seemed, if anything, more relaxed than before. Any sign that she might be the crux of a tricky theological question about the debatable incarnate nature of Ainur was absent. Even Melyanna had courted her incarnate husband, if centuries of eye-contact could be labeled courting. Asking her about her experience was certainly out of the question; the rumor was that she had yet to regain a semblance with a human larynx.

“Can you tell yet if she is pregnant?” Ruanel asked, breaking into my incredulous musing.

If she was mounted last night, she might not yet have even conceived, I thought. I relayed as much to Ruanel, who scowled harder.

“When would you be able to tell?” she demanded.

“Perhaps thirty days, or thirty-five,” I replied. “Manually, that is — if the sire is, as you say, a Maia of Oromë…”

I trailed off, and Ruanel, impressively, made an even more sour face.

“I tell you, Heriel, I had plans for this year! A new foal by Maldanar for those good straight legs and depth of chest, with Ulofánë here providing the cleverness and temper, and now– what? The most beautiful foal in all Ëa? Will it sing and dance before the Doomsman for the quality of its oats?”

Finding no answer within myself, I provided the mare — still calmly watching the proceedings — with a strengthening draught and fled.

Ruanel was not to be put off, however. Between my first visit and the second at thirty-three days, I received at least one pigeon a week detailing the infinitesimal changes Ruanel saw in Ulofánë’s appetite, attitude, and vaginal discharge. On that thirty-third day, I returned to the farm, palpated Ulofánë’s uterus, and concluded that she was indeed pregnant. The mare herself seemed entirely well, while Ruanel was nigh-apoplectic with ire.

I prescribed exactly the same course of treatment that I would give to any other mare in foal: extra feed, gentle exercise, and some precautionary vitamin courses. Ulofánë was young and thus not quite at the level of the storied Rochallor or the steeds of Oromë’s hunt, who had lived long lives beside their Elven riders and grown wise in their company, but she was already cleverer than your average run of horse. Whenever I met her, I received the distinct impression of smugness.

As the autumn wore through its gold, I began to receive other impressions as well. The first clue was the seeming rapidity of the pregnancy, or at least, of its sensible signs on Ulofánë. She was not a small mare, but she began to walk heavily and show a bulge in her barrel far more quickly than I would have expected. The second clue were the flowers, and they might have been the first, except that Ulofánë and her retinue of loyal broodmares — who might have been, in their devout admiration, the third clue — ate them almost as soon as they sprang up. They were not entirely unlike coltsfoots in their cheery yellowness, and not entirely unlike orchids in their bewitching scent, yet they appeared entirely new to me, and they seemed to lend a gloss and vigor to the mares who ate them. Most distinctively, they formed only in the hoofprints of Ulofánë, or in the short grass she had cropped.

The autumn passed into winter, and between my other cases, I returned to Ruanel’s farm and looked in on Ulofánë whenever I had the chance. The sense of health and vigor that radiated from her seemed stronger every time, and the flowers in her wake thicker. Even so, I worried over the heaviness of her gait and the size of the foal I could feel when I examined her. Every so often, I would come across the imprints of horseshoes in the field, where the broodmares grazed unshod. Once, I crouched to place my hand over the imprint, and found that even my long fingers did not span from caulkin to caulkin.

To hear bards tell it, every prince is the tallest Elf who ever lived, and every lady the fairest sight under the stars — but watching golden flowers spring up to shine in the winter rain from the hooves of an ordinary mare reminded me of the look in the storytellers’ eyes when they spoke of Elwing of Sirion and of Lúthien Tinúviel. What did it mean that a small god of horsekind had approached a mare in a field? What should we expect from the foal? How was I in any way qualified to make decisions in this case?

I did go about my business and treat other patients while Ulofánë’s foal grew, but my mind remained always on her. Ruanel insisted that the matter be kept quiet, so that gawkers and devout sorts would not crowd the farm and disturb the horses, but I itched for advice. When, one clear and chilly night near the new year, I heard the horns of a hunt blowing through my third-floor window in the garret of Elquessë’s home, I sat bolt upright.

The habits of the war had not yet left me. My boots sat where my feet fell upon rising from bed, and my clothes were the work of a moment. Quildatal laid her ears back at being woken from her mulish dreams, but a Fëanorian lamp and a frost-sweetened winter carrot convinced her to amble towards Ruanel’s farm, ears pricked towards the haunting strains of horns and the belling of hounds.

We went straight to the broodmares’ pasture, where yellow torchlight flickered at the stars. Elves and horses milled about the fences, crunching in the frost, their buckskin and knives a strange contrast to the neat white-painted boards. They cast me glances that did not linger, a light in their eyes that could not be explained by torches or Trees. A few had braces of jackrabbits slung over their saddlebows, while others knelt around a stag, his throat cut, carefully separating the meat and hide.

Quildatal did not flinch at the smells or sights, but followed some sense of her own through the hunt. I kept my eyes between her ears, unnerved despite myself by the atmosphere, both like and unlike the war camps I had known. The Elves moved with a special lissomeness in the shadows, while the air thrummed with an urge to run and keep running beneath the stars shining overhead, picking out the points of the fallen hart in unsparing silver.

Eventually, we reached the fenceline. The herd of broodmares that usually followed Ulofánë stood in the corner nearest the gate, quiet and calm but alert, circled together. Ulofánë, her sides swollen, stood nose-to-withers with— well.

There is little more peaceful than the sight of two horses grooming one another in a field. There is little more terrible than the sight of a warhorse bearing down, turning one’s body into the tightening peg of a drumskin to resound at each iron-shod footfall. The stallion standing by Ulofánë, still as he was, reminded me of the cavalry charges I had withstood when I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. I swung down off Quildatal, but hesitated to move into the pasture. My body screamed danger at me.

As I stood pressed against Quildatal’s shoulder, an Elf came to stand next to me. She wore her black hair in twin braids tucked through the belt that held her quiver, a short recurved bow slung over her shoulder.

“It is like watching the bear lumber out of its den when you were just picking toyons in the thicket, isn’t it?”

I nodded dumbly.

“He is Nahar. He sang cavalry at the Hunter’s side, in the time before time.”

“What does he want with a fine sport horse, now that Thangorodrim is broken, and all evil is ended forever?” I whispered.

The Elf next to me hummed. “Hounds may mob a wolf from its den, but the pups may hide until the dogs are gone. My lord foresees more hunts, and riders to ride to the horn. Riders need mounts.”

I watched the spirit of the cavalry charge lip at his mate’s withers. Ulofánë looked calm as ever, but I worried sorely about her foal — and about the wolves of the world.

A tap on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. The huntress had walked to the party skinning the hart, and now returned with his antlers. Wondering, I saw that what I had taken for the silver glint of moonlight on horn was in fact pure silver, branches and points gleaming blue.

“From my lord,” the huntress said. “One for you and one for Ruanel. Come, take it.”

Slowly, I reached out and grasped the antler at its base, then gasped. On a broad plain before a white city rode a white figure on a white horse, white light streaming against a cloud of darkness. The image faded, though I blinked my eyes in dazzlement. The antler, heavy, shone against the skin of my hand.

In the morning, bleary-eyed, I decided to stop ignoring the situation. I told Elquessë everything and asked for leave to travel to Tirion to consult with the professor of equine anatomy who had overseen my education. Elquessë, after she had overcome her shock and hefted the silver antler in her hands, gave me permission, and I set off the next day on the river ferry.

Professor Lelyalma was pleased to see me and overjoyed to explain the latest innovations she had made in horse midwifery to an interested audience. For three days, she took me to the public stables where the dray horses and omnibus-drawers rested, and we delivered a multitude of foals in more ways than I had dreamed possible. In the evenings, I watched the medical students in the anatomy theater at the University of Tirion, refreshing my memory of the layers of muscle and skin and flesh.

I returned with the spring seemingly at my heels, prepared to swoop in like the departing swallows when fall rolled around. However, a few scant months later, almost a year to the day since I arrived in Rananándë, Ruanel pounded on the door to Elquessë’s practice near midnight. Elquessë, who slept on the ground floor, came up the stairs to my attic room in a tearing hurry and shook me out of bed and into my boots.

As Elquessë hurriedly harnessed her Mórikano to the dogcart and I gathered up my Sindarin and Nandorin draughts and my Noldorin surgical instruments, Ruanel explained that she had come upon Ulofánë straining in the pasture, a good two months before her time. I was not entirely surprised — indeed, I had meant to go out the very next day to see her, for I was concerned by the apparent size of the foal. A premature foal was only more concerning.

In the dogcart, Ruanel cantering alongside us, Elquessë and I discussed how to proceed.

“You are by far the more skilled with horses,” Elquessë said. “You should lead, regardless of what we find.”

The thought of directing my employer about a foaling alarmed me slightly, but I had ordered around princes of my own people when they thought to concern themselves with my battlefield surgeries. I sketched out a plan of attack. Ruanel’s farm was all that was professional; if she had called for the leech, she had already tried stacking Ulofánë’s forequarters, repositioning the foal, and manually tugging with the contractions. Time would be of the essence when we arrived, if the foal was still alive, and this was not a spontaneous abortion brought on by the death of the fetus.

As I had expected, Ruanel led us to a spacious loosebox with a ramp in the corner. Ulofánë, however, was not on the ramp, but lying on her swollen side, dark with sweat, straining fruitlessly. Elquessë and I exchanged a look. I stripped to my breastband, washed my arms, and went to investigate.

The foal was not breech, at least, but as I followed the legs and feet through the birth canal, my heart sank. The little muzzle, which should have rested between the knees, was absent. Instead, I felt the chest wall, and, straining to reach, the torsion of a neck twisted backwards along the little animal’s spine. Each time Ulofánë’s uterus contracted, the pressure on the neck increased. Not only was the foal as large as I had feared, the malpresentation made delivery almost impossible. I could, perhaps, get a noose around the jaw and pull the foal’s head around, providing counter-pressure against the chest, but considering the time we had taken to arrive and the time Ulofánë had been laboring before Ruanel found her, we were certainly out of time for any games of tug-of-war.

My jaw clenched. If the foal were already dead, the best thing to do would be a grim kind of surgery: dissecting the foal in the uterus so Ulofánë could deliver. As I groped along the torqued neck, however, I could feel slight movement, a flutter of a pulse in the neck veins. There was a possibility the foal could be delivered alive, if we were quick about it.

I withdrew and washed my arm, watching my hands steady on the soap. I would have thought they would be shaking, but I felt eerily calm. The vision of the white rider on the white horse floated in my mind’s eye, and a steadiness suffused me that felt half-alien.

“Ruanel,” I said. “Please make ready a large table covered in a clean sheet. I am going to conduct an operation the Haladin of Beleriand called a Harethan section. It is a large and dangerous operation, but it improves the chances of the foal and the mare living, instead of at least the foal certainly dying.”

I did not add that I had never performed one, nor even seen it done on a live animal, only a dead woman, searching for clean water too close to a battlefield. But I knew the anatomy of a horse inside-out, had performed abdominal surgeries for colics and twisted bowels, and I had clean cloths, good instruments, a quiet barn — all the things I had lacked during the war. And I had the drive of the battlefield too, not to let one more creature in my care die than I had to.

Elquessë looked grim, but did not gainsay me, and readily followed my instructions to charm clean the table and prepare the instruments while I gathered the various draughts I needed. It took all three of us women singing to get Ulofánë onto the table with her legs up, where I poured a potion taught to me by one of the cowherds of Talath Dirnen down her throat so she ceased her contractions and slept. None of us had the attention to spare for a song of sleep or of muscle relaxation.

Elquessë shaved a wide swathe of flank and belly and placed a clean drape, and I took a deep breath to steady my nerves as I palpated to find the position of the foal. My heart beat hollowly in my ears, but my hand holding the scalpel remained miraculously steady.

Ilmarë, I thought, out of habit, then checked myself. Oromë Horse-Master, I prayed instead. Steady my knife; guide my aim. You want this foal so badly; help me get it.

The first slice revealed I had not forgotten my anatomy. Ruanel, who had been steadfast until then, broke into a sweat and turned away. Elquessë whistled, her trick to part the blood like waves, and I reached into the incision, past the layers of muscle and fat, to the uterus, where the outline of the foal’s hind legs told me where to cut again. Every part I had seen in dead horses in the operating theater and in the detailed engravings in my textbooks flashed before me. Two strokes opened the uterus, which gushed forth blood in a quantity that made my heart leap.

“Lord of Horses, so help me, you bastard,” I muttered, and kept cutting, my fingers steady.

The foal was visible in its caul. Had I made the incision large enough to pull it out? I thought so — hoped so. The hind legs were in reach, a safe place to pull. The foal was as heavy as a grown Elf, however, and slippery, and I swore.

“Ruanel, you have to turn around and help me pull it free,” I panted, and to her credit, she did, sallow and moist as a cheese, but strong in her grip as we hauled at the legs and Elquessë gently ruched and guided the edges of Ulofánë’s flesh around the body.

We wrestled the foal free at last and Ruanel and I gently lowered it to the stable floor. Immediately, Ruanel set to pulling loose the caul and clearing its nose and mouth of fluid, rubbing it down with a twist of straw. I turned back to Ulofánë, who needed my attention far more than the foal, which at first glance seemed healthy, though as unconscious as its mother from the sleeping draught.

Without the goal of the foal, the wound in Ulofánë’s belly somehow looked worse than ever. The sweat rolled down my back, but my hands remained steady. The placenta had already detached and so could be removed easily. With my finest needles and yards of catgut, I sutured the layers of the uterus, then the flesh and skin, leaning as close as I dared to keep the stitches tiny and even, while Elquessë held things in place and poured the cleansing and healing libations I had learned from the Sindar over at my command, to counteract the inevitable contamination of the abdomen from the opened uterus. At last, the last stitch placed, Ulofánë’s flank looked no worse than if she had cut herself on a fence, only a neat sewn line to show where we had wrestled out the foal.

With Elquessë lifting her head, I gave her another draught by mouth to keep her sleeping and promote healing. Then I turned to the foal -- a filly, I saw.

Ruanel had remained silent while Elquessë and I focused on Ulofánë, but when I turned, she motioned urgently for me to come.

Had I not known, I would not have guessed the foal had arrived two months early, so large and well developed was she. She showed none of the usual signs of prematurity, nor any obvious deformity or injury that might have caused the early labor. She was not yet awake, however, and her breathing was stertorous and slow. That pulse that had alerted me that she yet lived could be seen in the swollen veins of her neck, weak and uneven. Ruanel blew into her nostrils and pressed on her chest to no avail.

Elquessë continued tending to Ulofánë while I took Ruanel’s place. Whistles and snatches of song did not revive her. Her pulse and breathing grew ever slower, ever fainter.

I swore under my breath between blowing, then gave up on propriety.

“You gold-shoed nag, you rawboned keffel; come here, you crowbait screw, you warg!”

As I pressed again on the foal’s chest, a bugle sang out. My heart, already pounding, had no way to react further, so I simply kept swearing, a litany of all the foul words in four languages I had learned in Beleriand and a few more childhood favorites. With my fëa, I pushed hard at the flicker of spirit in the little scrap of horse, as though I was singing true songs of healing. The foal’s heart kept beating, just.

Ruanel gasped. I kept at my labors, though all my hair stood on end and my ears flattened despite themselves.

The curvet and the caracole had somehow lifted the latch of the loosebox and stood in the stall, radiating dread.

“Stop that, or at least do something to help,” I snapped, and almost fainted when cavalry itself nudged me aside with his muzzle.

The great stallion touched his nose to his foal’s and whuffled, the most familiar noise in the world. He nosed at the little body, still wet and scrawny, gave it a rough lick, and nudged again. The foal’s ear twitched, then her forefoot, still in its golden slippers. I gasped. Nahar licked at her poll like a mare, his tongue spanning almost her entire cheek, and snorted warm air into her nostrils again. This time, the foal opened her eyes.

“Oh, Ilmarë,” I whispered. Nahar flicked an ear at me. “Master of Horses,” I corrected myself.

The warhorse himself kept licking at the foal’s head and neck, pushing at her with his enormous head. I could have watched forever, but Ulofánë still lay on the table. While Nahar worked on his foal, I worked on her, until I felt confident she would rise up from her sedation no worse than wildered.

Elquessë put her hand on my shoulder, and I looked up to see her nodding at the corner of the loose box. As Nahar pushed, the foal finally got her gangling feet beneath herself and made a wavering attempt to stand.

From then, all went better than I could have dared hope. Mare and foal alike seemed to take no ill effects from the traumatic birth. Ulofánë required some targeted singing to prompt her milk to come in, but come it did, and the foal prospered on it. Elquessë and I monitored her incision carefully, bathing it, dressing it carefully, and singing over it almost daily until it closed. As with all roans, the hair over Ulofánë’s wound grew back solid, a black stripe across her belly that marked the site of healing. The yellow flowers no longer filled her hoofprints, but her pasture was thick with them nonetheless where her foal, blue roan like her dam, but already showing signs of graying like her sire, followed her.

As often as I could, I continued to visit Ruanel’s farm. Each time I returned from my rounds, I would mean to go out on a fine morning, only to awaken the very night I arrived to the sound of hunting horns. A silvery glow always lit my hands as I laced my boots, emanating from the antler that hung on the chimney. Quildatal would wend her way through the gathered Hunt, and I would stand and watch Nahar and the foal investigate one another under Ulofánë’s watchful eye. They would run under Tilion’s light, the foal as fast as a grown racehorse, thundering beside her sire, and I would marvel at them and wonder at her purpose.

One evening, when the foal was grown to a yearling filly nearly as tall at the withers as her mother, the same huntress who had given me the antler tapped me on the shoulder. I started, broken from my reverie, but the huntress held her finger to her lips when I tried to ask her what was towards. Instead, she nodded her head to where other hunters field-dressed another stag. I turned and saw the fleet hounds gnawing at the offal, the bones carefully separated, the antlers silver in the moonlight, the cuts of meat already hanging over fires. I saw too when the bones gathered themselves back into a frame, growing cartilage and veins, delicate as a textbook engraving, followed by the tidal roll of muscle and fat, a dissection in reverse. Dun skin and white hair spread across the flesh and deep eyes sparkled beneath proud antlers in what had been a skull, moments before. I swallowed hard.

The stag stepped, light as leaves, away from the fire, and the hunters, many with deer blood smearing their mouths and hands, knelt in reverence. As the stag passed through the hunt, he grew until he was more massive than the largest charger. In the pasture, the horses and the Maia of mounted warfare bowed their heads. Oromë passed through the fence without seeming to notice its presence and lowered his muzzle to the foal’s.

The huntress, her hand still on my shoulder, leaned in to whisper in my ear.

“He has come to take her to the Eastern Lands, where her line shall never fail, no more than the line of Lúthien the Brave, though it stand against evil itself. Dyrstig, He has named her, the daring one.”

“I do not know that tongue,” I murmured, and the huntress laughed.

“It has not yet been born, though it has been sung.”

The foal — Dyrstig — butted the great stag gently, then took a step towards him. Ulofánë whickered, then neighed, tossing her head, but did not follow. The stag lifted his head and began to run. Around me, the Hunt sprang to its feet, stowing meat and weapons, taking up the leashes of dogs and swinging onto horseback. The horns sounded again, almost drowning out the thunder of hooves as Nahar and Dyrstig followed the stag in his caracole. Oromë again passed through the fence as through a barrier of mist, but Nahar leapt it, and Dyrstig followed him, almost floating over the tall white planks. She tossed her head on landing and pranced, a blue shadow among the others. The stag kept running, flashing pale between the trees. The hounds and riders flowed after him, a river of belling and trumpeting. In but a moment, only Ulofánë, Quildatal, and I remained by the pasture.

My hand rose to my throat, as though to make sure my heart still beat. The night seemed stiller than still, more silent than silent, in the wake of the Hunt. Ulofánë heaved a heavy sigh. Stiffly, I climbed through the fence and went to her, stroking her ears and neck. I do not know who took more comfort from it.

From that night, though I hear the horns of the Hunt betimes, they no longer wake me. Once in a great while, however, I will dream of a far green country of rolling hills, where herds of horses run below flashing banners, and open my eyes to that untarnished antler gleaming on the wall.

Chapter End Notes

(Just in case anyone is wondering, the damline of Shadowfax starts out Ee/aa/Rr/Gg.)

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While I was away in Tirion to refresh my equine obstetrics with Professor Lelyalma, Elquessë hired a temporary assistant to take on the inland portion of my rounds. At least, that was the original plan. Upon my return, the assistant and I overlapped for about a week, and it became clear that there was more than enough work in Ránanandë to employ three leeches.

In particular, while the assistant saw to the inland half of my circuit, I found myself with some few extra days at the end of my own round where I was able to assist Elquessë in the clinic in Merrilosto where the town-dwellers brought their housepets. While the farmers who lived on the coast did draw more on my time when I had more of it, they were fundamentally accustomed to being slightly remote and had some skill in healing livestock that limited the number of occasions a leech was called for. The shopkeepers, teachers, dressmakers, and other inhabitants of the town had fewer such skills and more cosseted pets. The benefits of having a greater presence in town were clear.

One morning when I was in Merrilosto, two weeks after the departure of the assistant, Elquessë came into the breakfast room. I hastily stood from the table, as I always did, and Elquessë waved an impatient hand at me, as she always did, before settling down to compose her own plate. The fire blazed against the midwinter chill, and the cook who “did for” Elquessë and the neighboring house had provided great slabs of cheese and bowls of warmly spiced stewed apples to keep us hale on the road.

“Hyamessë,” Elquessë began after she had carefully arranged her bread, cheese, and apples to her liking, “What did you think of Alparenë?”

“Um.” I was a little tired still from my traveling rounds and floundered a little for a response. In the one week I had known Alparenë, we had not, precisely, gotten on.

Our first meeting had taken place as I was removing my boots and bathing my feet in the courtyard fountain after seeing to Quildatal. The fountain’s water stung bitterly cold, but I had not yet lost the hardiness of my mountain youth and the front. The long final ride from the last family farm on my round to Merrilosto was a muddy one in winter, and I had not wanted to tramp muck up three flights of stairs.

Behind me, someone had made a muffled noise. A woman, very beautiful in the classic Falmarin way – straight black hair, tawny skin, and leaf-shaped eyes accented by shells in her hair and piercings – stared at the gap where the second toe of my left foot had been. A patient waiting for a pet in surgery, I thought at the time. She had recovered herself quickly enough, and with a frankness I grudged, despite decades of shifty glances in bathhouses, asked, “Was that an occupational injury?”

“My name is Heriel, the junior leech at this practice,” I had replied, calmly enough. “A wartime injury, as it happens, so yes and no.”

Her mouth had tightened at the implied censure — I thought -– but we might have left it there, had I not followed that up with, “Are you looking to train in leeching? I would not be too concerned about your bodily integrity; the profession can be dangerous, but not usually to the point of amputation.”

Her sea-colored eyes had flashed. “My name is Alparenë, Doctor Alparenë Banilómiel. I am the replacement leech Doctor Helwáriel hired while her assistant is in Tirion.” She pronounced “Tirion” rather like someone might say “open-air midden.”

And we were off. As my readers have likely surmised from her name, Alparenë is a native of Alqualondë, born very soon after the massacre that turned her parents from simple ropemakers to activists. This I learned from Elquessë, for Alparenë had gone off in a huff, leaving me to dry my nine cold toes alone. Subsequently, as we rubbed testily along, we had spoken little. When forced to address me, Alparenë had called me ‘lieutenant’ — the rank given to irregular healers in Finarfin’s army — rather than my name, though Elquessë and I pointedly used informal language with one another. It turned out that she was one of the type who thought that the Noldor should be left to sink into the sea, or not, without the merest aid of Alqualondians, and the fact that I had shipped over in a repurposed fishing boat owned by a fisherman from the very wharves from whence the Swanships had been reaved tarred me with a very sticky brush.

As I flashed through the memories of that chilly week, Elquessë observed me over the lip of her mug of cocoa.

Weakly, I came up with, “She was very… competent with the birds.”

That had, it turned out, been her occupation and her connection to Elquessë in one — she was one of the dedicated leeches for the massive pigeon-homing system that served for post in the lowlands.

Elquessë nodded with enthusiasm. “Indeed! It is not so common a skillset as one might hope. Even your own education did not entirely cover the subjects I would consider necessary…”

Sipping her chocolate, she went on, “We took in a great deal more custom while she was here, mostly townsfolk with their small pets, whom I usually see to in the afternoons. Minor things, mostly — colds, a dog with his snout trapped in a stirrup cup.”

She looked around the room, which was much in keeping with the rest of the house in its slightly shabby grandeur. Comfortably upholstered furniture in slightly scuffed dark wood stood about the solid, scarred table from which we breakfasted. The beautifully tiled, if slightly sooty, fireplace kept it warm despite the gracious, if rather smudged, windows looking out onto the winter-sleeping courtyard.

“That poor dog,” I said, seeing the way the wind was blowing, and hoping I might break it slightly. Elquessë had mentioned to me that she would not mind hiring on the cook full time to act as a general-purpose housekeeper, but had not the funds to make it worth her while.

“Oh, he is a silly creature!” she replied. “If it’s not a cup, it’s a jam jar or a wine bottle. He used to be in practically every week, before the family learned to close their kitchen cupboards. He is the most food-motivated dog I have ever met, and that is saying something.” Taking another bite of breakfast, she shook her head and resettled on the matter at hand.

“I have invited Alparenë to stay for a trial period of three months,” she said, to my dismay. The soft apples looked suddenly rather unappealing.

I must not have hidden my feelings well, because Elquessë looked warmly at me from down the table. “A trial, I said, Hyamessë. She is a good worker, but this practice serves all the county, and she is a city pigeon at heart, with a city pigeon’s opinions. We might not suit each other. And after all— you were here first.”

With that reassurance, I had to be content.

At least Alparenë did not move into the attic room across from my own, instead taking rooms in town. Seeing her at breakfast, which had previously been a merry occasion to start the day, was bad enough. She was not a morning lark, which is not a moral failing, but it was hard to feel that way when she glared balefully at my and Elquessë’s attempts at conversation. Running into her in the small washroom at the top of the stairs would have been too much.

At first, we tried dedicating Alparenë entirely to the clinic, while I resumed my former rounds with an extra week on the road added in, but it turned out that there were not in fact enough local cases to justify it. As I have mentioned, Ránanandë had been very used to Elquessë’s one-woman practice and farmers tried their own medicines before calling for the leech. Generally, this was something we tried to discourage, but changing their expectations was slow going. In the meantime, I mourned the loss of my biweekly days at home, where I could repair my gear, wash my clothing, and sleep in my own bed. Moreover, my absences interfered with my ability to check in on Ulofánë.

Returning to the circumstances of my educational leave worked better. Alparenë took the inland half of my route, while I stayed out on the coast for a full two weeks before returning. Elquessë, as usual, managed the large egg operations in Merrilosto and saw patients at the clinic in the afternoons, and all three of us would see local patients when at home. This seemed to be equal to the needs of our various patients and myself — and I had to admit I loved the rough, redwood-crowned glory of the coastal regions and was happy enough to spend more time in them.

The fact that Alparenë and I did not have to see each other for two weeks at a stretch did help, but when we did see each other, we could not seem to get along.

I am not terribly outgoing. Vanyarin shepherds seldom are; if one enjoyed the company of people above all else, one would not choose to spend days on end in the solitary splendor of the mountains with goats. Even so, I do not think myself a balrog. Alparenë evidently did not agree.

She took the kinds of broadsheets that Sister Turkanta had feared — the genre that would have trumpeted ‘Noldo kills Irmoan votary’s beloved pet with agate stone’ from its flimsy front page. I subscribed to the circulars that still went around in the ex-army of Finarfin, with his emblem prominently displayed in the mastheads. Whenever we took out our reading material at the table, I would feel her sharp glances straight through the paper.

Elquessë liked for me to lead the complicated surgeries at the clinic while she assisted, due to my recent education at the University of Tirion, where such techniques had reached their fullest flowering. Alparenë was a highly skilled singer-healer in the Falmarin tradition, and so was always the one to send the animals to sleep or whistle charms for cleanliness and healing. She felt her skill as a hands-on healer was being slighted, while I missed the ability to use my own charms without clashing with another singer.

I liked to compound salves, draughts, and pills according to Nandorin and Sindarin recipes, for I believed that they had reached the pinnacle of that art in Middle-earth, where they relied so completely on their knowledge of the land and dealt so much more often with mortal health and sickness. Alparenë saw no use in these innovations when a sung incantation would do as well and save the leech the trouble of forcing a pill down a cat — even when they did not do as well, needing frequent refreshment or a longer period of treatment. I believe she also felt that, as I had learned them in the trenches of the war, they were somehow tarnished by the whole enterprise.

In short, she felt I was a vainglorious Noldorin partisan who scorned her as a backwards Teler, and I felt she was a volcanically tetchy princess with a narrow mind.

Such was the situation when the chandler Linyahísë brought in her little cat Nícahalë to get her teeth cleaned. Nícahalë is, to this day, the most adorable feline in Aman, in my broad experience and excellent judgment. Hardly larger than a nine-month-old kitten, round-faced, short-haired, and soft as a gray spring raincloud, she is also wonderfully affectionate, even to us leeches, who never do anything but chip at her teeth and force her to submit to uncomfortable tests on a cold marble table. She is surprisingly robust for such a delicate-looking little scrap, but her teeth are terribly prone to plaque.

Elquessë, who was normally very much a woman of the chicken, had nonetheless raved about her, and when Linyahísë came to the clinic with Nícahalë in a wicker carrier, I felt very fortunate to be at home to tend to her.

That sense of good luck dissipated at once when Elquessë declared, “Hyamessë, Alparenë, I believe I will leave this one to you. I have not seen you take a case yet without me. That is an important thing to check before we take you on permanently! What if I should be called out on an emergency, and you had to handle a surgery alone? I shall observe and provide critique once you are done.” Clapping her hands together once, she strode off to prepare the surgery.

Alparenë and I shared a horrified glance, then looked away quickly.

While Alparenë fetched her surgical robe, I rushed to lay out the dental instruments in my own reach, thereby winning the first battle. Elquessë, done preparing the table, grasped my upper arm lightly and murmured, “Do try your best to get along with Alparenë this time, will you not, Hyamessë? I would so like for this to work out.”

Returning from the laundry, Alparenë saw the tray next to my elbow and scowled, but turned away and whistled to sterilize the surgery. Elquessë took up a seat well out of the way next to the instrument cabinets.

Poor Nícahalë cowered a little when Alparenë set her on the towel spread over the cold table, but gamely licked my wrist with a raspy tongue as I checked her temperature, pulse, and reflexes. My heart melted. Elquessë exclaimed, “What a good girl!” almost involuntarily. Even Alparenë looked charmed and let herself be licked as well, rubbing under Nícahalë’s round cheeks. Elquessë took a note on her pad of paper.

The preliminaries done, it was time to put Nícahalë to sleep. If this seems extreme to Elvish readers well accustomed to seeing tooth-healers wide-awake when the time comes to shed a set of teeth, then I invite my audience to try fiddling around in their own cats’ mouths for an extended period. I recommend protective gloves.

Alparenë won this round. Before I could reach for my precious syringes — still a somewhat newfangled Sindarin introduction to Aman at that time, and thus a source of real pride — she opened her mouth and sang one of her beautiful tunes of painless sleep, full of rippling descending phrases. From the corner of my eye, I saw Elquessë nodding approvingly.

Alparenë sang again. I flicked her a glance, wondering if she was showing off. Then I noticed that, although her ears and tail were in more relaxed positions, Nícahalë looked quite awake. Both of us slid our eyes towards Elquessë, who was taking notes. I thought I had the opportunity to show Alparenë that I was perfectly capable of sending a little cat to Irmo!

“Thank you for the pain-killing charm,” I said, with all the courtesy I could muster. “I will inject her with the sleeping drug now.”

Indeed, Nícahalë did not flinch at all when I slid my needle into a bunch of skin by her shoulder blade. Or at least, when I tried to. The needle, which was wonderfully slender and which I kept quite sharp, met significant resistance. It was Alparenë’s turn to peek at me under her lashes. As gently as I could, I pressed firmly enough to inject a cow, and felt the needle slide home. Depressing the syringe, I gave Nícahalë her carefully measured dose.

Then, we waited. Nícahalë stretched out on her side, fully relaxed now, but she still blinked slowly up at us.

What in Ilmarë’s name? I thought to myself. Elquessë tapped her quill against her pad. Alparene and I shot each other a look, and simultaneously opened our mouths and sang out Alparenë’s tune together, giving special emphasis to the lowest note. At last, Nícahalë’s eyes closed completely, and I could feel in her fëa that she slept deeply and without sensation.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I gestured for Alparenë to gently hold open Nícahalë’s mouth. My beloved instruments, on which I had spent the entire bonus given to departing army officers, glinted welcomingly. I selected the convex mirror and steel scraper and set to gently removing the plaque and other material on Nícahalë’s tiny teeth.

The first few went smoothly, Alparenë helpfully angling Nícahalë’s head to allow for the appropriate approaches. I managed to avoid irritating her gums, slightly inflamed by the dirty teeth, any further. However, as I nudged the mirror deeper into Nícahalë’s mouth to address the back teeth, which were in the worst repair, it clacked on something unexpected. I paused, then gently pressed the little cat’s lower jaw further open, feeling a definite sense of misgiving.

Peering in, I saw, of all things, an extra tooth. Short but sharp, and also covered in plaque, it thrust through the roof of Nícahalë’s mouth near the rearmost tooth on the right. I looked up at Alparenë to see if she saw it too, and found her looking quizzically down at it. Our eyes met, and for once, all we communicated between us was puzzlement.

Leaning closer and exchanging my scraper for a small, stick-mounted Fëanorian lamp, I looked at the tooth again. It did not appear to be irritating the lower gum or impeding Nícahalë’s eating, though it could not be comfortable poking into her tongue. Alparenë and I eased Nícahalë onto her other side to examine the whole of the tooth. From this side, though slightly obscured by the normal teeth, I could see that the tooth had a brown crack running through it. I winced. A broken tooth could be horrifyingly painful, and though surely Linyahísë would have brought Nícahalë in at a run if she had shown any signs of such agony, a deep crack like that was trouble waiting to happen. It would have to come out.

With a somewhat forced calm, I said, “I see a supernumerary tooth, seriously cracked. I would suggest removing it to prevent breakage and subsequent pain and illness.”

From her corner, Elquessë said, “Yes! I concur with that course of action.”

Alparenë took a deep breath and sang a very emphatic snatch of sleep and painlessness, just in case. I nodded to her — who knew what other strange circumstances this examination would turn up? — and a shimmer of surprise crossed her face.

Systematically, I probed all the gums and teeth to ensure that nothing else was amiss, before swapping my mirror and probe for a tiny scalpel and my smallest dental drill.

Alparenë set up a constant, tuneful whistle as I cut a flap into the gum and roof of the mouth around the cracked, extraneous tooth, keeping the blood and saliva at bay. I went so slowly I felt my back begin to cramp, terrified of impinging on the other, healthy tooth snuggled so tightly near to the broken one.

Once the jawbone was exposed, I saw with relief that the tooth had only one root, and said as much.

Unfortunately, when I tried to fit the drill to wear away the bone and expose the whole of the root, it simply would not fit beside the undamaged teeth. Intensely aware of Elquessë watching behind me, I looked up at Alparenë. She blinked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes with a tiny sigh.

“I would like to try a new tune,” she said. “It is most usually used to heal broken bone, but I expect that, if inverted, it would cleave it cleanly. Will you permit it?”

Gratitude suffused me. “Please, be my guest!”

Perhaps that was too much enthusiasm, but it made Alparenë crinkle her handsome eyes. She sang a rather dissonant melody, and I watched the bone part with wonder.

“That is elegant,” I said, half-conscious of it, and Alparenë flushed with pleasure.

“I am glad to have my supposition proven,” she replied.

Once the cavity was made, I was able to carefully fit my tools into its confines and break the ligaments holding the tooth in place. They were weak and already rather loose, presumably because the tooth was aberrant. As slowly and carefully as I was able, I twisted Nícahalë’s perplexing tooth loose.

All that remained was repair. Alparenë began to sing the inverted version of her bone-parting charm, but I held up a hand.

“I would like to lavage the area with a potion that will clean it thoroughly,” I said. “I have found it to be conducive to speedier healing, even though in Aman infection is rare.”

Alparenë hesitated, then jerked her head. “Very well,” she assented, and although it was not the most gracious approval, I was glad for it.

I washed the removal site with my disinfectant potion, which I had learned in a foxhole from one of the last Iathrim living on eastern shores. Alparenë stepped in and sang the bone shut, then the flap of gum. I rubbed a numbing salve against the site in case of lingering soreness despite the healing, then straightened my spine with a crack.

Alparenë carefully rinsed Nícahalë’s mouth with clean water, then closed it gently, massaging the hinges of her jaw. Our eyes met across her little gray body, and we smiled at each other — I think for the first time — out of sheer relief.

Elquessë stood, the suddenness of the movement making us both jump.

“Excellent work, doctors!” she cried, visibly pleased. “I will go tell Linyahísë that Nícahalë is done and recovering.” So saying, she strode out of the room, hands locked behind her back as ever.

Alparenë and I watched her go, then slumped against the same table where Nícahalë slumbered blissfully.

“What was that?” I gasped. “Her skin was as thick as an oliphaunt’s!”

“I have never had an animal resist my sleeping charms,” fumed Alparenë. “She is smaller than a loaf of bread!”

“I think she is a narwhal,” I said. “A whole extra tooth… Ilmarë!”

“I’ve heard of narwhals,” Alparenë said wistfully. She looked down and began checking Nícahalë’s fëa, ensuring that she would wake peacefully when the potion and songs wore off. “Alpalondë is far too warm for them.”

I stroked the cat’s ribs, feeling her steady heartbeat and the delicious softness of her fur. “I saw them once,” I said quietly. “There was not much left living in the far north when the army arrived there, but the sea was always safer. The narwhals would come in pods, like dolphins, and joust in the waves.”

There was a silence in the surgery while I prepared the instruments to be boiled clean and Alparenë carefully placed Nícahalë back in her wicker carrier. As I rubbed down the marble table, Alparenë, her back to me, murmured, “That sounds a rather lovely sight.”

“It was,” I agreed. “I loved to spend time on the ships, where I could see such happy sights, rather than the sights of war.”

Alparenë did not respond, and I washed my hands and left the surgery.

In the waiting room, Elquessë and Linyahísë were laughing together. I walked along the passage towards the sound, then heard Elquessë chuckle, “They finally had to take out that supernumerary tooth of hers! It took them a while to get her down first, though.”

Linyahísë giggled in response, and I ran the last few steps to the doorway.

“You knew about all that?” I half-shouted, before checking myself to a more decorous attitude in front of Linyahísë.

“Oh, I am sorry, Hyamessë,” Elquessë said, turning to face me and not appearing all that repentant. “This cat is a mystery for the ages. I can never get her to sleep on my own without a full ten minutes of singing — and I saw you had a hard time getting the syringe in this time! That one is new.”

I felt Alparenë approach and stop short so close I could feel her warmth on my shoulder.

“You were aware of the difficulties?” she said, more quietly but also more tartly. Elquessë had the decency to put on some slight contrition.

“You two did very well together, as I hoped,” she told us, and I sighed. I had to agree. Alparenë sighed too, and I felt an unforeseen flash of solidarity.

“That is what she is always like,” I told her, speaking out of the side of my mouth, and Alparenë muttered back, “What joy.”

The next morning, when we sat down to breakfast, Alparenë brought a novel to read. I turned a page of my medical journal from the University of Alqualondë and felt a little easier in the bright winter sunlight streaming into the room.

I wondered if the housekeeper would tackle the windows first, or the tile on the fireplace.

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Once Elquessë hired Alparenë permanently and Ulofánë was delivered of her magical foal, I found myself spending significantly more time on the coasts, visiting the smallest fishing hamlets to which previously I had been unable to tend between the larger towns.

The coast of Ránanandë is, if such a thing is possible, even lovelier than the interior. North of Alqualondë, the land sprouts thick forests of crooked cypress and everlasting redwood, broken by bright grassy meadows trailing down the slopes. Roads hug the sides of the continent as it falls spectacularly to the waves, which glint steel-gray, then ultramarine, depending on the side of Arien’s face she has turned to us below. In the cold, rich waters, kelps feed sea urchins like spiny amethysts, eaten by fierce little otters, harried in turn by seabirds of all feathers. Hardy cows make rich winter butter on diets of seaweed, while farmers grow salt-loving beets on the cliffsides and the ever-present grapes in sheltered valleys.

Those cows made up the bulk of my work out there, for there was a prestigious cheesemaking creamery on one of those rugged, beautiful points. It owned several hundred heads of milch cows who were always calving, going dry, tearing udders, and so on. I tried to time my visits so I could spend the night, because the creamery’s guest room inhabited the lighthouse on the point.

From the top, I could lean out into the stiff, cold wind which twisted the cypresses into dancing poses and stare across the Belegaer, dreaming I was an Elf of old, staring at the starlit sea before the Sun and Moon. On clear nights, as the light — a great work of Finarfin, using carefully arranged mirrors and a massive accumulation of his brother’s lamps – swept its warning across the whitecaps, I could see the Star of High Hope rise from its moorings even farther to the north.

I had timed it well the sweet November I came after ceding the inland circuit to Alparenë. The creamery ran on a split calving system to ensure milk year-round, and the autumn crop of calves was well underway when I arrived. Ilimmállë, the chief cheesemaker who also oversaw the breeding, was most concerned with the heifers. Dairy cows are particularly prone to milk fever, a sometimes-catastrophic drop in calcium right after birth, as the mother lets down her milk for the newborn calf. Before the huge leaps in alchemy and machining that followed on the heels of the war, when the kindreds of Elves mingled once more and exchanged their knowledge, it was a mystery why the best milkers, having given birth easily to healthy calves twice or even thrice, would weaken, lie down, and die, no matter what songs or charms the farmer used. When I took up my post with Elquessë, I was of the first generation of leeches to stand on the shoulders of two great innovations: the syringe, as I mentioned previously, and the isolation of calcium. I was, and am, marked by the joy my teachers expressed upon approaching a down cow, slipping a needle under her skin to let calcium salts flow into the blood, and watching the cow — dull-eyed, cold, too weak to stand — get up and nose into her hay within half an hour.

It was with similar joy, therefore, that I went among the new calves and their mothers with my gleaming needles and bulging pouches of calcium solution. Since my time in the War, I have always found a particular pleasure in those arts of the leech which require no song, no power, no special heritage — only tools that anyone could use, given the right equipment.

Ilimmállë followed me, eyes shining, as I ministered to the four or five cows who had fallen prey to milk fever, equally as touched. Her duties demanded she go before I turned to my other patients, but she pressed my shoulder before she left and insisted I eat with her family in the farmhouse that night, rather than going into the small town up the point.

Dinner was early, as nightfall came quickly so late in the year, so we had a beautiful sunset view of the small orchard of the famous Graystone apples of Ránanandë that Ilimmállë’s sister Vanimorva kept. These apples have a wonderful honeyed aroma which keeps not at all on the long journey to Tirion or Valmar — a special treat of the region which I was coming to love so well. That night the family had committed delicious sacrilege against one of their famous cheeses: the ash-rinded “Eärendil’s Drake” baked in pastry and served alongside the apples, beautifully stewed, with good country bread and more new cider to wash it down.

We spoke of apples, cows, cheeses, the market for fresh milk and the difficulties of transporting it off the point, while Arien dipped her toes into the Belegaer and gilded the orchard. Vanimorva was holding forth on the perfect composition of a Tarte Tatië when the huge brown bull who kept the cows in calf lurched into view among the trees.

Ilimmállë leapt to her feet in a rattle of dishes. “How did he get in there?”

Vanimorva rose as well, squinting against Arien’s darts. “And why is he walking like that?”

He could really hardly be said to be “walking” at all. It was more like a Vanyarin reel performed by an Orc. With much crossing-over of legs, swaying side to side, and elaborate stumbles, the bull blundered about in a delirium.

Vanimorva exclaimed as he hit an apple tree hard enough to send showers of yellow leaves and fruit raining down on him. Ilimmállë was already running from the room, calling for the cowhands. Apparently vexed, the bull clumsily backed up and rammed the tree again, as though it were a young steer wanting discipline.

I followed Ilimmállë, regretting very much the plate I left behind, but already running through the possibilities in my mind. Autumn grass staggers was not out of the question, though it was far more common in cows than in bulls. The bull’s head was high; he was apart from the herd; he was treating innocent apple trees like romantic rivals; that staggering gait was entirely typical. Luckily, because grass staggers was so common in nursing cows, I had brought bags of Efsír salts alongside my solutions of calcium.

Outside, the cowhands cautiously dared the bull’s swinging horns and attached new leads to his nose ring. For all the bull shook his head and pawed at the ground, he was too unsteady on his feet to put up a fight, and submitted to being tied at last. I had the cowhands face him into a corner to remove the threat of those sharp, healthy horns, but almost had cause to regret it when the bull pitched forward into the fence.

I ran a hand over his twitching hide — muscle spasms, I thought, another hallmark of staggers. It could progress quickly and fatally, but as with milk fever, its cure could be almost miraculous. What luck that I had my salts!

I gave orders for a bucket of clean, warm water and mixed in the salts when it came. With a measure of difficulty, I got the mixture down his throat, not without some undignified splashing. Then I stood back, hands on my hips, waiting for my miracle.

The bull’s hide twitched. He tossed his head, forcing one of the cowhands to duck. He ground his teeth and bellowed. After five minutes, I began to wonder if I had not administered enough Efsír salts. After ten, the bull still bawling and twitching, staggering when he shifted his feet, I reached out to check the color of his gums, only to startle him so badly that he wrenched free of the cowhands and tossed his horns like a pair of scythes. One of the cowhands was trapped between him and the fence, liable to be gored at any moment.

Battlefield instincts rushing to the fore, I shouted a single strong note, entirely flat but sufficient for my purposes, at the same moment the other cowhand yanked hard on the remaining lead attached to the nose ring. The bull crashed to the ground, fast asleep. Panting, my throat sore, I knelt down beside him, apologizing profusely to Ilimmállë in concert with the cowhand.

“No, not at all,” she said, “He almost got Alvesko in the neck! He is never so aggressive; he is one of the gentlest bulls I have ever bred. What can be the matter with him?”

“With that staggering, I imagine it is, well, staggers — grass staggers. It is far more common to see in cows, like milk fever, but autumn is its season. Has he been out to pasture with the others?”

Ilimmállë nodded. “Yes, most of the day, with the young steers he can order around. But the grass has been so dry this year that we are feeding him seaweed already, not relying on pasturage.”

I frowned. The same minerals that leeches used as Efsír salts were found in abundance in kelp. Running my hand along the sleeping bull’s neck and shoulders, I checked his pulse — fast — and his temperature — normal. I sent a tendril of thought and will out to the bull, as I would with Quildatal, but there is not so much between a bull’s ears that I found the exercise fruitful, except to let me know that the bull had not hurt himself on his way down.

A cow with staggers might go from staggering to frothing at the mouth and dying within an hour. The bull, clearly, was not convulsing or in imminent danger of death, despite his fast pulse. I listened to the sounds of his stomach — not the deathly silence of a dying beast, but a boisterous gurgle punctuated by loud whistling noises. That was not quite what I expected, but then, I had just poured a full gallon of salts down his gullet and then done the next best thing to knocking him on the head. I scratched my jaw.

“Well,” I said reluctantly, “He seems to be in no immediate danger. Those magnesium salts work wonders, just like the calcium. I will sing him a song of health, but he seems more or less all right, now that he has calmed down.”

“Far down,” noted Ilimmállë, and I felt my cheeks heat, grateful for the darkness of my skin that would hide a blush in the day’s last glimmerings.

I sent her and the almost-gored cowhand away and waited with the other in the gathering night for the bull to wake. Someone — Vanimorva, I assumed — had hung little Fëanorian lamps like blue apples in the trees, which lit with their soft glow as the stars came out. Far away in the north, the Star of High Hope lifted into the heavens.

“Aiya Eärendil, elenion ancalima,” I whispered, and the cowhand repeated after me.

After perhaps forty minutes, the bull cracked an eye open. Gratefully, for we were growing chilled, we urged him to his feet and led him back to his nighttime stall. His staggers were gone and he carried his head very low. He seemed almost embarrassed. Halfway between the orchard and the barn, he cocked his tail and let loose a stream of loose scour, which I attributed to the magnesium.

Once he was safely stowed in the deep straw, I went back to the kitchen, where dinner was long-since cleared away. Vanimorva had saved me a piece of tarte, however, and I ate it gratefully before retiring to the lighthouse.

In the morning, I checked on Quildatal – happily communing with the creamery’s drayhorse – then proceeded to my patients.

One of the cows needed assistance with a breech labor, a sweaty, muscular job. Then there was another milk fever case, which provided a bracing glow of accomplishment, followed by an experienced milker rejecting her new calf, which provided an immense amount of frustration as I tried to sing her into temper.

By the time the bell rang for breakfast for the hands, I was already caked in muck and sore from head to toe. Before I could tuck into the workers’ breakfast of fresh-harvested oats in just-gathered cream, Vanimorva came running into the courtyard where the trestle tables stood, waving her hands.

“Doctor Heriel, Doctor Heriel, he is staggering again!” she cried.

Dropping my spoon, I followed her at a run past the tall pile of windfalls waiting to be made into cider and into the steers’ pasture. Sure enough, the bull was in the same state as the day before: head high, feet unsteady, temperament unsweet. The cowhands knew what to expect this time and had a bucket of water ready. I pulled a packet of salts from my pocket, wrestled the draught down the bull’s throat, and wasted no time singing him into a light standing drowse, having learned my lesson thoroughly.

It was not unusual for staggers to reoccur, but within a timeframe of a handful of hours, not almost fourteen. I had also watched the bull eat seaweed that very morning, which should have provided him with plenty of magnesium.

“Would you please put him back in his stall until I come to let him out again?” I requested. The bull seemed to be in no immediate danger, and I still had other patients to see.

As I stitched a long tear in an old cow’s low-hanging udder — cows are forever stepping on each other’s udders, which makes me grateful for bipedalism — I dwelled on the bull. The symptoms were archetypical grass staggers, I thought in frustration. So, why had the magnesium not worked its magical transformation the way the calcium did? Why had the bull stood around for twenty minutes the night before, faring no better and no worse, rather than recovering speedily or dying equally promptly? Why had he sickened again in the morning, right before I had eaten my beautiful porridge? My stomach rumbled, adding to my foul mood.

Out of my ingrained sense of responsibility, for which I received many commendations during the war and deserve great approbation, I checked on the bull before lunch and found him relatively alert. Once again, he hung his head, looking almost shamefaced, squinting in the light. I squinted back balefully. In the stall, another pile of liquidy dung spoke to Efsír salts’ other uses.

Warily, I opened the stall door and let the bull out. Normally, it seemed Ilimmállë let him wander about like an overgrown puppy, trusting the fences and his sweet nature to keep him out of the way of the cheesemakers, cows, and calves. I had seen little enough of that apparent docility, so I kept a careful distance between us. The fences did not seem that good, either — had he not broken into the orchard last night?

A thought flickered fleetingly like a trout in a stream.

Looking sidelong at it, and at the bull, I trailed the animal as he went plodding stolidly about the barns and dairy buildings. He was steady on his feet, but he still moved gingerly, rather like Elquessë after a night at Vercaván’s. He poked his nose into a few outbuildings. A cowhand gave him a scratch on the rump, which he followed up with a good rub on a fencepost. I began to feel ridiculous, following a bull through a creamery like a scout tailing a warg.

Then the bull lifted his head, looked about himself, and set off at a decided pace towards the farmhouse. I followed after at a trot.

We passed the buttery, a salt lick, and the steers’ pasture. The bull ignored several tempting patches of newly sprouted winter grass reaching for the sun after the season’s first rains. He went straight for the corner where the orchard met the steers’ pasture and shouldered his way through into the apple trees where I could see a plank had come loose.

“Oh, you demon,” I muttered, and broke into a run as the bull picked up the pace, fairly cantering towards the pile of apples destined for cider.

“You demon!” I shouted as he reached the pile and lowered his head, crunching the fallen fruit with foamy relish. “Get away from there! Get!” I slapped and pushed ineffectually at his shoulder. The bull paid me less mind than a gnat, chomping away at the browning windfalls at an incredible rate, releasing their sweet, fermented scent.

From the building that held the racks of aging cheeses, Ilimmállë poked her head out.

“Doctor Heriel?” she called. “What is it?”

“I need help!” I shouted, and threw my whole weight against the bull, to as little effect as if I had tried to shift Taniquetil with my shoulder.

Ilimmallë ducked back into the building and emerged a moment later divested of her clean robes and gloves. Together, we hauled the bull away from the heap of apples, much to his displeasure. He was already unsteady on his hooves, tripping around like a Man in Menegroth, I noted in disgust.

“That bull is… he’s a sot!” I exclaimed, waving my hands. Ilimmállë eyed me. “It was never staggers,” I went on in exasperation. “He keeps getting into the windfall apples, eating bushels of them, and getting himself drunk, the cursed creature!”

Ilimmállë looked at me yanking at my hair club, at the gently weaving bull, and at the tower of apples gleaming in the late autumn sunshine. Then she bent over and made a sound like a laboring cow.

I glared at her, infuriated with my own stupidity, until the Valar-damned bull gave an enormous belch perfumed with the honey of Graystone apples. Then I had to laugh as well, putting the pieces together until I had to lean against the tipsy bull, holding my ribs.

“What a great idiot I’ve been, forcing him to drink a gallon of Efsír salts a day,” I gasped. “Ilmarë, no wonder he has been scouring and falling asleep on his feet. No wonder his stomachs sounded like an orchestra.”

Ilimmállë straightened from her helpless crouch and gave me a companionable thump on the shoulder. “And you so proud of your potions and pills from across the sea, Doctor,” she said, though she was smiling as she said it.

“For milk fever–” I protested, and Ilimmállë shook her head.

“I’m only teasing,” she said, and gave one last chuckle. “My bull, drunk as Vána! I would never have imagined. So he’s getting into the orchard somehow?”

I explained about the loose board, then abruptly sobered. I peered at the bull’s eyelids and gums and pressed my ear to his belly again to hear those alarming burbles and squeaks.

“You should keep him fenced in until that board is fixed,” I told Ilimmállë. “It is funny, but it is almost the same thing as grain overload, what happens if you turn a young calf out to clean up a field of leftover wheat or beets. It isn’t staggers, but it is a kind of poisoning, and they can die of it, or more likely go terribly lame, ruin their stomachs, and then die of it.”

Ilimmállë nodded seriously. “Yes, I’ve seen that,” she said. “But is he all right now?”

“He seems to be,” I replied. “I advise keeping him from any water for the rest of the day — and, actually, magnesium might help, if injected so he does not drink anything more.”

So in the end, I did use my prized new syringe and medicines on the bull, to make him defecate all the apples he had eaten and prevent him from swelling up like a bullfrog. It was surely a less glorious victory than the milk fever cases. Even so, when Quildatal and I rode out the next day, having eaten my fill of sharp apples with gooey cheese and drunk fresh yellow milk warm from the cow in my morning tea, I could laugh about it. The memory of the bull jousting with the apple tree would make a good story to tell Elquessë over breakfast.

As we passed through the final gate, Vanimorva called out from behind me. She ran up to me and Quildatal, who stuck her nose in her hair and generally made a nuisance of herself. Vanimorva laughed and shoved her away, then handed up a large drinking gourd.

“It’s from the very first autumn pressing, ready this morning,” she said. “Drink it in good health, but keep it to yourself! Our cider is too good for the cows.”

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“Hyamessë!” Elquessë called from the breakfast room. Juggling my bedroll and several spare pairs of socks, I wobbled into her presence.

“Good morning, soldier; I’m glad I caught you,” Elquessë said, sipping her chocolate. “I have a favor to ask.”

I sighed and dumped my burdens on one of the empty chairs. It was my habit to leave for my two weeks of rounds in the early morning, taking only some waybread and apples for my breakfast. Elquessë rarely rose so early, unless she had been called out on a case the night before and chose to take Elvish sleep rather than settle into her bed.

Elquessë pushed a basket of rolls towards me and looked sympathetic. I took one, still cheered by the novelty of daily bread since we took on the cook full-time.

“I have a case in the outskirts which I would rather you take than Alparenë.” Elquessë took another sip. “I would take care of it myself, except that you will ride directly past this morning.”

I looked inquiringly at her, and Elquessë shrugged. “It ought to be simple: it is a garden farm, just a few animals. The pigeon message was not entirely clear, but it did not seem urgent: two donkeys with a malaise.”

Delicately, I began, “I am sure Alparenë—”

Elquessë interrupted, “The donkeys are donkeys; their owner is a Kinslayer.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Quite,” Elquessë said. “You see…”

“I do,” I agreed. Alparenë would never, I was sure, neglect an animal because of its owner, but all the same, perhaps it would be better not to subject anyone to her.

The Kinslayer’s home was indeed directly on my route northwards to the river ferry towards Filitambo, where I always began my new rounds with a residency in Sister Turkanta’s boardinghouse. I would miss the earliest ferry, but the noon ferry would do, although it would mean there might be more mounts on board, which was always slightly chancy with my friendly and curious mule.

Said mule and I ambled northwards, enjoying the nip in the air and the frost gilding the carved balconies with silver. Merrilosto’s neat houses thinned. We passed the sprawling fields of Ruanel’s horse farm, then the scattered patches of oak forest, spangled with melting frost like jewels in a carcanet. When Arien’s lower curve finally crested the hills, we came upon an isolated adobe home nestled in a small grove of valley oaks, tall and imposing against their shorter black oak sisters. A small stream ran behind the main structure, invisible from the road except as a line of thicker tree growth.

I had passed this house every two weeks for almost two years now, never really paying it any mind. It was handsome enough, but not particularly remarkable. I dismounted, told Quildatal firmly (if somewhat hopelessly) to stay where she was under the shade of one of the oaks, then walked up the long path to the front door.

It was heavy and unusually plain and rang with a hollow sound when I rapped upon it. There was a pause. Another rider went by on the road at a trot without stopping to hail me or the house. Some winter robins sang in the invisible stream. At last, the door opened a crack with the distinct sound of a bar lifting.

“Who is there?”

“Doctor Hyamessë Heriel, of the leech practice of Elquessë Helwáriel. I am responding to a call about a donkey,” I said in my most professional voice. The cracked-open door opened fully at last.

A very normal sort of person stood there. Roughly my own height, with rusty hair and skin almost the same shade, wearing a few gold earrings and a single gold chain with an onyx bead at the center, gray-eyed and really notable only in the expression of absolute neutrality of his face. Those eyes had none of the gleam of Treelight. He might have been any of the Noldor I had fought beside. There was not a look to Kinslaying, I had learned quickly. Unless, I supposed, one was the only Noldo in a hundred miles, in which case, perhaps your look became the look of Kinslaying.

“A star shines on our meeting,” I said, when it appeared no greeting was forthcoming. The man in the doorway startled slightly.

He repeated my greeting, voice rasping slightly, as though it had not been used in a while. “I apologize,” he said. “I did not think anyone would be along… until later in the day. I am Urundil.”

Bowing shallowly, I said, “May I see the patients?”

The reminder seemed to enliven him. He nodded emphatically and opened the door wide, beckoning me to follow. I followed him through the house, which was long rather than broad and chock-a-block with wooden furniture. Tables, chairs, stools, cabinets, bedframes, and all sorts of household wares gave off powerful, yet pleasant scents of resin and varnish. Passing farther into the house, the objects became less finished and the spice of sawdust began to fill the air. I looked around as I trailed after Urundil, running a surreptitious finger along the arm of a dark-stained oak chair. It was smooth as glass.

At the back of the house was a broad kitchen garden, mostly mulched over for the winter. A persimmon tree blazed with the last of its winter fruit in one corner, while opposite it stood a neat run shaded by a majestic oak, with two small donkeys looking out towards the stream, cooling their hooves in a rivulet that ran along the back fence for nearly its full length before turning downwards towards the creek.

“Here they are, Doctor,” Urundil said. “That’s Netyalalmë and Netyalótë.”

I gave him a surreptitious look, for I had not pegged him as the whimsical type. He did not see, however; he gazed at the donkeys and chewed his lip in consternation.

Whistling a tune of calmness, I climbed into the pen. The donkeys, clearly well accustomed to contact, sniffed me amiably and allowed me to check their mouths, eyes, feet, and temperatures without protest.

“I do not see anything particularly concerning at first glance. What made you call for a leech?”

He glanced sidelong at me. “They are off their feed,” he said. “Four days running, they have not finished their grain, and they pull at their hay but do not finish it. They usually play a little when Arien rises, but you saw them today, standing still. They simply seem off.”

I studied the little donkeys, who studied me back with their long-lashed eyes. Lungs, guts, and heart sounded clear and easy in their work; their spoor was normal, if a little loose. Urundil recited their feeding schedule and its contents in a quiet voice when I asked: also fine. Having exhausted the external signs of illness, I reached out with my fëa. The donkeys were clever little beasts and highly attached to Urundil. Searching in the spirit, I could sense a slight sluggishness, like the fire that ran in them was banked.

Urundil broke into my reverie. “Their hay grows here, but in the winter I buy grain from Linquefas with silver.”

There was an urgent edge to his quiet voice. I eyed him speculatively. It was strange that he bought grain outright — that was, and is, much less usual in Aman than in Middle-earth, where exchanges across kindreds meant the need for standard currency was greater. Then again, the kind of centuries-long relationships of mutual gift-giving and trading that characterized most transactions in a community must be hard to come by as a Kinslayer.

“Do they eat it happily?”

With an unhappy twist to his mouth, but without explaining it, he assented.

“Well,” I said, “They seem just a little off, as you said. Perhaps a small sickness with the changing season. If anything frightened or disturbed them recently, that could also have put them off their feed. I will sing to them to cheer their spirits, and perhaps tonight you could give them a mash or some extra vegetables to tempt them.”

Urundil looked uneasy but did not protest. So I sang until their fëar radiated happiness in my own spirit, the dimness overcome. I felt a little wearier than usual afterwards, but attributed that to my lack of breakfast. As I left, Urundil pressed a silver coin into my palm, not waiting for a bill from Elquessë.

My rounds were uneventful, though a cold rain followed me and I spent far longer standing in puddles and currying the road surface off Quildatal than was my wont. The discomfort was paid for by my patients and their keepers, familiar after my second year in Ránanandë. The towns and farms on my circuit knew me and Quildatal and accepted us into the rhythm of their lives for the day or two we spent with them. I performed my leeching, then enjoyed the generous offers of hipbaths and warm acorn pancakes (and sometimes a nip of the winter perries and ciders). Not only did I provide services for which the farmers and riders and rabbit fanciers of Ránanandë were grateful, I transited half the county each month and took the circulars from Tirion. (No one would subscribe to them themselves, but they did always want to hear the news.) In short, I was a vital link in the Lindar gossip network.

I was also its victim: by the time I reached Ilimmállë’s creamery, I had been asked several times, with varying degrees of subtlety, what I had been doing at Urundil’s house. Link in the news chain I might be, but I had dwelt in Ránanandë only two years, and the intensity of the scrutiny — the fact that sheep farmers twenty miles away knew and cared that a Kinslayer lived just outside Merrilosto — surprised me.

Ilimmállë was one of the more subtle. Her opening gambit was a discussion of buying grain for cattle feed from Linquefas. As the creamery thrived on its own hay and kelp, I was surprised, then quickly came to realize that she was prodding. A spark of indignation made me open my mouth.

“You are fully the twelfth person to inveigle gossip out of me about that man. He had two sick donkeys. Did the county expect that he would murder me as I checked their hooves? Nobody warned me, if so!”

Ilimmállë had the grace to look chagrined. I sighed gustily and turned back to the cow whose blocked teat I was massaging.

“Apologies, Ilimmállë. But it is really such a fuss over nothing, to me. If I had turned my nose up at Kinslayers or those who followed them in Beleriand, I would not have been able to so much as eat my bread.”

The cow leaned her flank into me, and Ilimmállë shoved her back, a practiced gesture. “I had not thought of it that way,” she admitted. “I confess he is the only Kinslayer I have ever met. I do not go into Alpalondë — Vanimorva deals with the restaurants and shops — so I suppose I find it… interesting.”

“Interesting?”

Ilimmállë considered that, stroking the cow’s hipbone. “Interesting to me that he did his restitution in Alpalondë, like all of them did, but instead of hieing back to Tirion, like all of them did, he came out to the hinterlands and set up a furniture-making business. He has been here for thirty years; he was practically the first of them to be released from Mandos, after Prince Findaráto. Even though everyone hates him.”

I frowned. A final tug on the cow’s teat sent a jet of white milk splashing against the barn floor, the blockage cleared. “That hardly seems healthy.”

“Oh, it must be the guilt, or some such thing,” Ilimmállë said — but I had not meant Urundil. In Beleriand, a Noldo had reached into a fuming crevasse which had opened up beneath the baggage train and hauled me out by the arms and hood. We had lain next to each other, panting, bleeding where the jagged ground had torn our flesh. I learned later he had been in the train of Celegorm until the Second Kinslaying.

The gossip and memories depressed me, and when I had passed my off week in Merrilosto and set out again, I decided to pause again at Urundil’s house.

He took even longer to answer the door this time. I had to insist several times that I was stopping by uncalled-for in order to check my work before he led me through the house and into the garden. I had come mostly out of stubbornness, but a look at the donkeys made me glad of my impulsive choice.

Their malaise was back, and worse. Donkeys, horses, and mules can drop weight terrifyingly quickly when something is wrong, and these donkeys’ ribs were more visible than I liked. As I checked their mouths, noses, and temperatures again, one of them, I thought Netyalalmë, released some loose scour.

When I checked their fëar, I found the same dimness as before, but more pronounced. When I tried to sing it away, it took a solid half-hour of dedicated effort, quite a bit more than the last time. I stood back, watching them crop enthusiastically at the new grass poking through the carpet of oak leaves and acorns.

“Are they working any more than usual?” I asked Urundil, who had hovered throughout the procedure.

He shook his head. “I bought them to pull the delivery cart, but there have been no more orders than usual.” I wondered how many that was. He continued, “Mostly they simply keep me company.”

“Any difference in their feed?”

“Well…” he hesitated long enough to make my ears perk up of their own accord. “Well,” he said again, “I bought more winter oats from Linquefas two weeks ago — a week after you visited. That is the only change.”

I frowned. “May I see the oats?”

They appeared to be well within the normal range of oats. I lifted one to my lips, then hesitated.

“For now, move them to another pasture, just in case it is something about their location. If you place a small number of oats in a pigeon envelope and send them to Doctor Helwáriel, she will test them for… mold or other infections.”

Urundil nodded, looking sidelong at me. I said no more, only left several bottles of strengthening draughts and the promise to return again after my circuit.

The circuit was once again aching for news of the Kinslayer in their midst. Once again, each artful inquiry left me unsettled and irate. Irmo was unkind those weeks. Even my at-home week in Merrilosto was plagued with perturbing dreams. Alparenë looked me over one morning and breakfast and sniffed, for I had foregone true sleep for days, and my fëa began to show it.

“Your oats came back unsullied,” she said. It took me — eating my own oats — a moment to decipher her meaning: the oats I had told Urundil to send in for testing.

I set down my spoon. “Ah.”

Alparenë raised a slender eyebrow. “Did you hope for ergot?”

Glaring halfheartedly at her, I replied, “I hoped they would be clean, although it leaves me a mystery.”

Alparenë hummed (sharp, I noted), and returned to her breakfast. I stared at my bowl and pondered my reaction. Profound relief, foremost: the oats were not poisonous whether by design or by error. Irritation, with myself: the ugly paranoia I believed I had left behind me in the wreck of Beleriand was an unwelcome houseguest. Guilt: given that the only person in the region besides myself who had ever killed anyone was Urundil himself, why had I been so willing to believe a neighbor might seek to poison his donkeys? Bemusement: what, if not the feed, could be making those donkeys so mysteriously sick, with no other obvious symptoms?

My puzzlement and gloom remained when I arrived at Urundil’s home (he let me in after only a handful of minutes this time) and beheld the donkeys worse than ever, despite their new pasture along the feeder streamlet, nearer the persimmon tree. The grass of early spring grew up to their fetlocks, triumphing over the acorn and oak leaf carpet, but they only cropped listlessly at it. As before, their mucus membranes and temperatures were normal, but a thick, doughy edema had settled on their lower bellies. A brush through their bodies in the fëa revealed a weakness in the kidneys that I did not like at all, still less when their urine showed rusty. Malaise was within the realm of individual song-healing, but organ failure began to look like a multi-leech proposition.

I gave Urundil a cross-examination about their feed and exercise that would have made a Tirion advocate proud, but to no avail. He had stopped buying grain from Linquefas, and the donkeys had been living on forage, but they were worse than ever. He seemed, if anything, more bitter to be wrong about his unspoken theory than pleased that his neighbors were not poisoning his companions, and I felt a twinge of real dislike — until I noticed the brightness in his un-Treelit eyes and the tightness in his voice that did not come from reticence.

This time, I needed his help to cure the donkeys with song, and I rode away with a heavy heart, knowing the two little creatures would be ill again upon my return.

Early spring meant lambings, and I did find a great deal of joy in separating out the mixed-up twins and triplets, watching the fuzzy little creatures stagger about after their mothers, dotting the green hillsides like frisking clouds. It meant a great deal of time out in the frigid, damp spring nights rather than in the common rooms of inns and farmhouses, which meant less time for questions, also, and my spirit felt lighter as Quildatal and I sped down the last stretch of road towards home.

We were snug in the handsome stable, enjoying some mutual quiet as I brushed her, when Alparenë — who kept her mount at her own home and so was rarely in the stable — leaned against Quildatal’s stall door. Quildatal had learned quickly that she did not like inquisitive nibbles or nuzzles, so rather sulkily turned her back. I ducked under her neck and looked curiously at Alparenë, whose mien was very sour.

“I received an urgent pigeon message for you this morning,” she said. “It is an emergency, so I was going to take it, especially once I noticed it was in my circuit territory. It seems there is a pair of donkeys out on the ferry road who have been ailing mysteriously, and neither you nor Elquessë have said a word about it.”

My heart beat rather loudly in my ears. I began to speak, but Alparenë cut me off with a sharp gesture.

“I do not want to hear it,” she said. “Two sick animals, on my rounds, failing slowly, and not a peep from either of you.”

“You do know–” I started again, and Alparenë’s eyes flashed.

“I daresay I know better than you,” she said. “I was burning that man in effigy when you were still herding goats on the slopes of Taniquetil. Just like he burnt the docks of Alpalondë on his own recognizance, which explains why he was stupid enough to tangle with Prince Daintáro and drown alongside him.”

“Well, so–”

“Do shut up,” she snapped. “Leaving two sick animals to suffer because of their allegiances — what am I, a Kinslayer? Get back on that damned inquisitive mule of yours and let us be gone.”

Tension ruled the ride to Urundil’s home. Quildatal, usually so willing, skipped and danced, continually falling out of her amble and resuming her jarring trot. Alparenë, her jaw set unpromisingly, clenched her hands on her thighs as she rode her fewspot stock horse beside me. A few times I opened my mouth to say something — to explain — but I always closed it again. As we drew near, Alparenë asked me in clipped tones to describe the symptoms, and I did so meekly.

Alparenë’s presence shocked Urundil enough that he actually looked us both in the eye for several seconds before dropping his gaze again. With utterly flat professionalism, Alparenë introduced herself. It could hardly be called friendly, but it was not hostile either. She kept her eyes front as Urundil led us through his workshop and garden to the back pasture.

Netyalalmë and Netyalótë were skeletons with donkey fur, except where the edema thickened their drooping bellies. I hissed through my teeth, and Alparenë shot me a look of profound displeasure.

“You were just brute-forcing the effects of whatever poisoning this is out each time?”

I nodded, feeling defensive. “I have checked and checked again. It is not the oats, or the well water, or any wood or varnish from the shop. The ground is not poisoned, so the grass is not poisoned. The oak trees are normal oaks, so it isn’t the oak leaves and acorns. It is not lead, cobalt, copper — no metal or mineral. Urundil has been propitiating the Maiar of the stream and forest. I have looked at everything, but it has grown worse each time!”

Alparenë looked up into the green mist of buds and young acorns in the overhanging valley oak. Quietly enough that I thought Urundil, hovering nearby, might not be able to hear, she muttered, “Vanyar are always like this.”

I flushed. “Whatever do you mean?” I snapped, taking less care to be quiet.

“Oh, the Lindar are so irrational, so fixated on their grievances; they cannot possibly be trusted with the leeching they trained for!” Alparenë clenched her fists again. “We noble Vanyar will have to swoop in and clean up the mess again, because we know better, even though we never saw a leaf-shedding tree until we skied down from our lofty heights.” She turned on me, rage spots burning on each cheekbone.

“You tested the acorns for poison? The acorns are the poison!”

Stung, I retorted, “They do teach us things in Tirion, you know — I know about oak toxicity, and I watched them for hours to see if they ate the leaves and acorns. They don’t touch them.”

Alparenë jabbed a finger at the donkeys. “It is absolutely classic. The edema, the rusty urine, the scour, the inappetence: it cannot be anything else. They are getting oak from somewhere.”

Before I could reply, Urundil, for the first time, spoke without being spoken to. He looked angry, I thought — the first time I had seen him look anything but uneasy and withdrawn. He folded his arms, unlit eyes snapping.

“If you two are quite finished,” he said. “Please, would you heal these two first and then go looking for the cause?”

I felt immediately abashed. Arguing like that in front of a patient! It was shameful, and the blood burned the hotter in my cheeks. Even Alparenë looked briefly at her feet.

“Certainly,” I said in a calmer tone. “Alparenë is the master here.”

The merest brush of my fëa against the donkeys’ revealed that Alparenë’s presence was a necessity; I could not have forced out the poison myself unless I wanted to drain my spirit utterly. The kidneys in particular struggled, and the donkeys were weak as newborns. Alparenë, also engaged in a diagnostic sweep, looked more certain than I felt.

“Let me draw upon you, like a student,” she ordered me. I held out my hand, unprotesting. The physical symbolism of it helped, sometimes. Alparenë took it and placed our linked hands on Netyalalmë’s neck. She sang.

The Lindar are truly named. They teach their children to sing from the moment they can control their breath, and every moment thereafter. All Elves sing, of course — it is what we do, and all know of Maglor Fëanorion, aping the Teleri on his far shore — but not all Elves sing like they merely dropped the thread of the Music and are picking it up again. The Lindar learn to do so.

Alparenë’s song was not the effective but blunt force of my own songs of healing learned in the university, nor the coaxing, light tunes that I knew from my mountain childhood, but a swirling cascade of notes like a stream over stone. I felt the power in the melody trickling through the donkeys’ tissues, spreading out into their veins, their bladders, the stiff swelling under their bellies, spreading liquid fingers of music wherever poison worked its damage, reminding flesh of its place in the song of things. Deftly, she tugged my own spirit’s fire from me, like a piper breathing in a circle. I breathed through the sensation, watching as the donkeys’ eyes cleared and their stances relaxed. Alparenë’s song ended with a skirl. She staggered slightly. My own limbs felt stiff and heavy, tired from the borrowed effort.

Urundil let out a breath of relief as Netyalótë broke into a shambling trot and butted him with her fuzzy head, searching for treats. Netyalalmë dropped her head to the ground and cropped at the soft spring grass. Alparenë watched the donkey eat. She nimbly avoided the oak leaves and acorns, and I knew we were both wondering what the source of the oak poisoning could be.

After scratching gladly at the donkeys’ ears and feeding Netyalótë a wizened winter apple from his pocket, Urundil turned to us, his face set in stubborn lines.

“I have a song of my own which I use to get nails out of salvage. If you are sure it is oak poisoning after all, then I will sing it, and tune it to the tannins.”

Alparenë, a little pale around her nostrils and lips, nodded, and I gave my assent.

Urundil rubbed between the donkey’s eyes, then took a deep breath and began to sing. His tune was one of those work songs one hears wafting onto the streets of Tirion from workshop windows: rhythmic, major-key, with the words at least as important as the melody. Fitting in “tannic acid” where “iron” should be caused a few metrical problems, but Urundil managed his rubato well. As Alparenë and I listened, we became aware that the ground beneath our feet was humming along. Or, not quite: the carpet of old and new oak leaves seemed to tremble, vibrating like plucked strings. Above us, the valley oaks added a surprising resonance to the song.

Bypassing the leaves and acorns, the fallen branches and twigs, the piles of donkey manure, and even the alarmed donkeys themselves, all shivering finely, I looked for something I had not yet considered. Beside me, Alparenë scanned the pasture too.

Unexpected motion caught my eye. The little rivulet that fed the stream below the house quivered, as though rain fell upon it and disturbed the surface. I ducked through the fence and jogged to see it. The tiny rill flowed smoothly from one corner of the pasture to about halfway through the rear fence, where it bent around a small lava boulder and made a pool, which jumped like a pot about to boil with the motion of the oak leaves at its bottom shivering and shaking. I dipped a cupped hand into the pool and poured a thick stream of water from my palm. In the spring sunshine, it fell brown like tea back into the stream.

Urundil had followed me and gave a soft, understanding sigh. “They do drink from the stream,” he murmured.

I called for Alparenë. She took in the situation at a glance. “You give them well water,” she said, “They must not prefer it to the flowing water.”

Urundil shook his head. “I will move them somewhere where they cannot get at the creek, and build them a bigger trough. But in the meantime, what can I do to stop them from drinking it?”

I had not precisely covered myself in glory with this case, but convincing a donkey not to drink except from its bucket was something I could do, even in my slightly enervated state. When I was finished, Urundil stepped forward once more, apparently emboldened by his success.

“Just in case,” he began, and with no other explanation, began his song again. This time, the trembling limited itself to the leaves and acorns on the ground, which shifted alarmingly underfoot and streamed towards Urundil in a stinging cloud. A pile of mast grew rapidly beside him. I found I was reminded that this timid, awkward man had ridden in the vanguard of Fingon’s force, one of the first to draw a sword against any living creature — surely for a reason. Alparenë’s hands once again clenched into fists, and the pinched lines around her mouth grew deeper.

After that, I made it my aim to leave quickly. With rapid instructions about moving the donkeys, feeding them gentle but substantial foods to build up their strength and mass once more, and the necessity of refreshing the water in their eventual trough, I propelled an unresisting but sullen Alparenë back through the workshop-house and to the front door. There, Urundil stopped me, holding out as always silver coins.

Alparenë, who had been silent since his song, gave her characteristic sniff.

“I do not know why you settled out here,” she told him, and I winced, but she went on, “But you might at least make an effort.”

Urundil looked taken aback. Alparenë, visibly pulling composure on like an ill-fitting robe, said, “You buy from Linquefas with silver, fine. But you know Linquefas keeps pigs for market, and here you have all these acorns, which everyone knows make the best pork. Next time I go help one of his farrowing sows, I want to hear that you are trading him acorns for fodder. There is a right way of doing things among the Lindar, not that I expect you would have learned.”

With that little speech concluded, she turned on her heel and marched to collect her horse. I stammered something, Urundil stammered something back, and I at last could leave that place and that case behind.

The ride home, though less coldly distant, was still unpleasant. Alparenë clearly felt much disturbed, over and beyond her still-burning anger with me and Elquessë. Tentatively, as the roofs of Merrilosto came into view, I inquired what the matter was.

She snapped at me. “All the Lindar know that song. My parents told me. They came, they demanded, they saw that we would defend our Swanships with what fishing spears and harpoons and boathooks we had. So they sang, and all the iron flew from our hands. Then they killed us.” She exhaled hard through her nose. “Yet I still treated those donkeys better than you did.”

She nudged her horse into a canter, and I let her go. All around, spring in Ránanandë turned its lovely face to me, but I felt very much a stranger.

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The following weeks were tense ones for Elquessë’s practice. Immediately upon arriving home, Alparenë had made her displeasure at Elquessë’s dishonesty very clear. I was ashamed of myself for missing obvious clues and not asking for help where it was clearly needed, and embarrassed by being shown up in my own area of expertise. Elquessë apologized, and I believe felt genuinely remorseful for not at least discussing the case with Alparenë, but also felt irritated that Alparenë had berated Urundil when it came to it, then phrased her complaint to Elquessë in terms that implied Elquessë felt the wounds done to her and Alparenë’s people less keenly than Alparenë did. The interruptions of our rounds would have been a relief, except that Ránanandë’s energetic gossip network meant we were all forever being asked about Urundil. In our days together in Merrilosto, Alparenë stopped joining us for breakfast, though board made up part of her salary, the same as mine. I wondered if Alparenë would leave us once more and go back to the dovecotes in Alqualondë.

One such morning, when only Elquessë and I sat at the breakfast table, Elquessë sighed heavily and put her chin in her hand.

“This cannot go on, Hyamessë. I have apologized as sincerely as I know how, and I know you have too. It was foolish; I should have known better, and I certainly should not have made you keep the secret too.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. My one great rebellion, the only one I have ever truly committed, I think, was to stay in the lowlands after my return from war. Otherwise, the discipline of army life had suited me, a faithful Vanya, well, and now that I was a junior partner in a practice, it seemed only meet that I should do as Elquessë ordered. Yet we had both been wrong.

“I have tried my best to make amends,” I muttered, and indeed I had, until I had reached the point where I had realized that if I kept insisting, it would be for my own benefit and not Alparenë’s.

“Yes,” Elquessë sighed. “We must simply wait. She may choose to leave, and that would be her right. If she chooses to stay, though, we must come to some accord.”

Accord was not yet in evidence when I left for my rounds, where at least the gossip had died down. It was high summer in Ránanandë, when the green grass of winter turns to burnished gold and sways on the hillsides when the wind runs its hand over it. The final wildflowers starred the meadows when I stopped to graze Quildatal: rosy clarkias, bell-like salals, the last ultramarine lupines. A few of the blackberries ripened in the sunniest spots; the rest hung like garnets from a netted snood. Turkey vultures rode the hot thermals, wobbling but never falling on their vast, dark wings. As ever, the countryside soothed me. Riding through the palace-like columns of a redwood grove, where the trees were older even than I and graced travelers with fragrant coolth in the summer heat, it was easier to come to terms with my mistakes.

Summer meant relatively easy rounds, the calm after the lambing and the better part of the foalings, but before the autumn calving and the problems of cold. At last, everyone seemed to have squeezed the last drops of gossip about their local Kinslayer out of me, and conversations turned to the hay, the berries, the acorn crop. Elemmírë had her twelfth song cycle serialized in Minaret that summer, the nice lightweight one based on folk tunes, which everyone wanted to hear and which I received a week earlier than anyone else from my cousins in Orvambo. Therefore, it was with a much lighter spirit that I returned to Merrilosto for my week at home, resolving to stop fretting. I had made my apologies sincerely, and if they were not accepted, that was how it would be: not unfair, but not something I could manage by cringing.

It seemed to work, more or less. Alparenë and I arrived in Merrilosto at the same time on the ferry road. Her solid Sindarin-type stock horse whickered to Quildatal, who whickered back amiably. I gave Alparenë a respectful nod, which she returned with the barest courtesy before turning her horse’s head away from the plaza and towards the little warren of streets where she lived.

So it went. Elquessë appeared to adopt more or less the same tack as I, just a little more extravagantly — as one might expect. Alparenë began to join us at breakfast again perhaps every other day, coming in just as we were finishing, but bidding us good morning. I regretted what had seemed like a potential route towards friendship before the Urundil fiasco, but thought this state of events was enough for a start.

The very last day before we headed out again on our circuits, Alparenë appeared in the door of the dispensary where I was filling pills. I nodded, but did not speak. After wavering a moment, Alparenë truly surprised me.

“Would you look at my horse, please, Heriel?”

The “please” startled me nearly as much as the request. I looked up from my work and assessed. Alparenë’s face was very smooth, but she shifted from foot to foot on the threshold.

Laying my funnel aside, I straightened up fully. “I did not notice anything the matter with her last time I saw her. Is there a problem?”

“I believe so.”

When nothing more seemed forthcoming, I prompted, “Would you like me to come see?”

Alparenë nodded jerkily, and I washed my hands, took off my clean robe, and walked out the door into the long July evening. People were out enjoying the golden light. It was not the Mingling, but I wondered if perhaps I even preferred this, the long slanting rays of Arien’s arrows piercing the summer air and leaving sharp shadows against the glowing walls of the white houses. Alparenë and I were well known, and we waved and called out greetings as we walked.

Alparenë lived in the tangle of narrow streets on the south side of Merrilosto, where the cobblers, jewelers, and other small artisans lived. Her apartment took up the west side of one of those classic Falmarin buildings which give blind white walls to the street, then open up inside to beautiful tiled courtyards with arcades on the lower floor to let the air flow and rooms for living above. This particular courtyard boasted an ancient buckeye chestnut in the center, already dropping its leaves for its summer dormancy. Alparenë led me past it — we both brushed our hands against its silvery bark — and towards one end of the arcade, which I could see was fitted with fencing between the arches to create a long, open stall where three horses munched brome hay. I spotted Alparenë’s mare in a shady back corner.

She came when Alparenë called. I looked at her – the picture of bright-eyed health.

“So what is the problem?” I asked.

Alparenë crossed her arms and sighed. “It is behavioral,” she said crossly. “I am no specialist as you are, Doctor Heriel, but I can tell she has no physical problem. I did not notice before I moved in here, where I live over the stable and can hear her at night.”

“And what does she do at night?”

“She becomes a perfect monster. She stands stock still in the corner, and if the other horses come near her, she neighs like a destrier and kicks — even though she is friendly enough during the day. I have also been called out for late-night emergencies, and she absolutely refuses to move outside town, just plants her feet and stands stock still.” She knit her brows in displeasure. “I had to walk to a calving the other day, and might have arrived too late, because she would not move. I have done my best speaking to her, gentling her, explaining to her that there is no danger. None of it seems to make any difference, and I am at my wits’ end as to what to do.”

I looked at the horse, who looked back at me with her ears pricked convivially. Laying a hand on her neck, I pushed her to the right, then the left, and she went willingly. This close, her pretty brown eyes were gentle and soft, not at all a spitfire. Looking at those white sclera around them, I had an idea what the problem might be — and it was no wonder Alparenë did not.

“She–” I began, “No, wait, what is her name?”

“Ithilloch,” Alparenë replied. That did surprise me a little.

“Oh, she is actually from Beleriand, then!” I exclaimed. “I thought perhaps she was just Sindarin-bred; those crosses are very fashionable these days.” I rubbed at her ears, and Ithilloch ground her teeth in pleasure. It was a fitting name; her white coat with a few black spots on her strong hindquarters did bring to mind Tilion’s pale, dimpled surface.

“Yes,” Alparenë said, watching me make friends. I could not tell quite what she was thinking. “I bought her in a hurry when Elquessë said she wanted to bring me out here for the long run. A carter was selling; he got her from an ex-soldier who could not take her up in the mountains.” She sniffed. “Now I wonder if he was selling in a hurry because he found out about this whatever-it-is.”

I nodded; I thought that was likely, if dishonorable. “So you never rode her before.” Alparenë shook her head.

“That does actually help this problem make more sense,” I told her. “These patterned horses from Beleriand are lovely and different from the usual run of colors here, so they have become voguish, but people here are unfamiliar with their specific problems — the same inherited factors that cause the patterns also cause health problems in certain circumstances. I expect we might see some other problems of this sort as they become more common here.”

Alparenë gave me a measuring look. “You believe this behavior to be one of those factor-linked problems?”

I looked out of the arcade and to the sky, which had darkened to a profound blue like velvet, the first stars awakening. Glancing back at Ithilloch, I came to a decision.

“If you are willing to wait until dark, I can show you, so you recognize it if you see it again.”

Alparenë visibly balked, but quickly unbent enough to thank me (only a little stiffly) and offer lemon-water while we waited. Her interest, I thought, seemed genuine. As the sky grew darker, Ithilloch inched back into her corner. Alparenë arrived with wooden cups of cool water, and we sat together on a bale of straw and watched the stars unveil themselves fully. It was strangely pleasant, I found, waiting for full dark in a silence that was almost companionable.

“I suppose you knew many of these spotted horses in Beleriand,” Alparenë said abruptly.

What, Alparenë willingly asking me about the war? I thought to myself, then remembered my resolve to be the friendly one.

“Yes, the Sindar love them,” I replied. “On the great plains, I heard, no one could be counted truly a person of consequence without at least three, and the more remarkable their patterns, the better. The range was all gone once I was there, of course, but the horses persisted, some of them.” I warmed to the subject. “But they are not only pretty patterns! They are wonderfully strong, clever beasts, fire-fast at a short sprint, and untiring trekking over distances. The Sindar bred for temperament, too — none of those hotheads you get sometimes in Aman.”

Beside me, Alparenë nodded, just visible in the increasing murk. “Ithilloch has powerful hindquarters, and she is very sweetly tempered. She never bothers the other horses at the inns, or here – well, except at night.”

“Speaking of which, let us go over to her.” We rose, and I led Alparenë to Ithilloch’s corner, crooning softly so she would know we approached. Ithilloch snorted in alarm when we drew close, and I let my fëa wash soothingly over her.

“She cannot see us,” I told Alparenë. Each of us was visible to the other’s Elvish eyes as a shape against the sky, the starlight providing the means to pick out a few details. I knew, however, that Ithilloch could likely not see a thing. I reached out and placed my hand delicately against the mare’s neck. Her calm, steady mind touched mine, and I felt her anxiety at being awoken into pitch darkness, with people and other horses around her.

From my pocket, I pulled a Fëanorian lamp and veiled it with my handkerchief to protect Ithilloch’s eyes. I held it above Ithilloch’s head, to the side where she could see me easily, and watched her pupils contract.

“You see,” I said to Alparenë quietly. “She cannot see at all at night. It comes with her particular color: that almost-pure white coat with but a smattering of spots means she has the spotting factor from both parents. Horses with double factors are always like this, night-blind.”

Alparenë leaned in to study Ithilloch’s eyes. I pointed out the white sclera around them, explaining that spotted horses who inherited the factor twice turned out like Ithilloch, almost like normal grays but for a few solitary splotches of pigment, striped hooves, and those white edges to their eyes. They would always throw dramatically spotted foals, which made them highly desirable, but they would also always be night-blind. Alparenë nodded, listening as I spoke, stroking Ithilloch’s nose gently.

At last, I put the Fëanorian lamp back in my pocket. With all the gentle force I could muster, I put to Ithilloch that the other two horses in the long stall were her friends, not threats, and that she was safe here, even in the dark. Then Alparenë and I retired again to our straw bale.

She kicked her heels glumly against it. “I am glad to know it is not dangerous to her, but I am often called out late. A mount who can travel at night is necessary for a country leech.”

I pondered whether Alparenë would accept a comforting pat on the knee, decided against it, but still tried to imbue my voice with sympathy as I spoke. “It is unfortunate, surely. I am sorry.”

To my surprise, Alparenë pulled her knees up to her chest. Perhaps emboldened by the darkness, she said, “Everything is much harder here, outside of the city.”

“I have little basis for comparison.” I pulled at the straw. “Aside from Tirion, where I hardly left the university, the largest town I have ever lived in is Merrilosto. I do not believe you could call a war camp a city.”

Alparenë scoffed, but mildly. “Alpalondë is one of the great cities of the Eldar, a pearl. It is entirely unlike a war camp.”

Greatly daring, I asked, “So why did you agree to come here, if it is so wonderful and out here it is so hard?”

Silence stretched, and I began to wonder if I had once again ruined our tentative truce. Then Alparenë spoke, voice halting.

“My– I–.” I heard her lick her lips, then try again. “Oh, what does it matter if I tell you?”

I wondered briefly whether to be offended, but Alparenë went on. “My parents were ropemakers, rigging the Swanships, but I never learned to make rope. We were always at court, or arguing our case to Prince Arafinwë, or even in Valmar petitioning the Valar for redress for… everything. They lost friends, their livelihood, their way of life. I was born the same year; I always went with them, wherever they went.” She trailed off.

“And then the war,” I guessed.

“And then the war,” Alparenë echoed. “Or rather, there was plenty to do during the war – protesting it, mostly –” I restrained myself from comment “-- but then the war ended. Everyone was dead, and not coming back to bother us. So… what was left to do any longer? Make rope? I never learned how. I went to the university out of boredom, as much as anything. I do not think I know what Alpalondë is, any longer.”

I listened to the horses shifting in the darkness. That was a surprising revelation, from Alparenë the firebrand. I murmured my thanks, as sincerely as I could. Alparenë sniffed, but her heart was not in it.

A sudden impulse made me speak up again. “Wait to try to sell her until we are back from our rounds next month. I have an idea.”

“Well… all right.”

That easy acquiescence felt like the greatest victory of the night.

The next month, when the heat peaked, I returned to Merrilosto and did not hesitate to visit Ruanel. I found her in a round pen, working a handsome bay gelding over crossrails at the canter. Leaning against the wall, waiting for her to finish, I admired his form and Ruanel’s gentle instruction, just catching the outer edges of her fëa coaxing him into frame. Once she had clucked him down to a trot, then a cooling walk, she turned her attention to me. My previous regular visit had been only two weeks before, so I explained that I was there to see about trading a horse.

Ruanel raised an eyebrow. “I had not heard that you had acquired a horse.”

I clarified that I was brokering for a friend (I did not hesitate to say it), who had an exceptionally fine Sindarin mare, pure-bred, whose unfortunate night-vision problems prevented her from being a leech’s mount. Ruanel’s other eyebrow joined the first.

Gesturing at the gelding, who stood seventeen hands high if he stood an inch, she said, “You know I breed sport horses, Doctor Heriel — when certain Powers are not meddling. I’m sure this mare is a fine example of the type; I have seen a few at shows in Alqualondë doing all sorts of fancy cutting and chasing on the flat. But that is simply not what I do here. That downhill build isn’t at all the thing for a jumper.”

She brought the gelding in with a click of her tongue and pulled out a currycomb, breaking up some places where he had sweated his hair into clumps. The great beast hung his lower lip and made a face like Illimmállë’s drunken bull. I smiled.

“There is something a little special about this one, though. First of all, she is willing as anything: a lovely temperament, good with strangers and novelty. These plains horses have endurance, too. Then, also: I remember the other week you mentioned that buyers kept asking you about spotted animals.”

Ruanel ducked around to the gelding’s other side. Dubiously, she said, “A good horse has no color; I know you know that!”

I held up my hands. “Certainly! But it is so fashionable these days, and this mare is double-factor: any foal she throws will be spotted. Most will be spotted all over like pard-cats.”

Ruanel gave me a sidelong look. I sensed an advantage and pressed on. “I saw several of these crosses between Sindarin horses and Amanyar ones in Beleriand — needs must, you know. They certainly were not showjumpers, for you’re quite right that they lacked the scope, but they were fantastic all-arounders. Good tempers, good stamina, a bit of a jump when needed, comfortable standard gaits. I would certainly recommend such a cross to any number of amateurs or beginners — who as we both know are the most likely to judge a horse by its color.”

There was a beat, during which Ruanel pocketed the currycomb and drew out a hoofpick. From down by the gelding’s left hind, she eventually said, “All her get would have spots, you said?”

I grinned. “Every one, though they would not necessarily throw true themselves. If you bred her to your Maldanar, for example, the foal would be spotted all over: either black spots or chestnut ones, depending on her other factors.”

“I really do not believe in breeding for color,” Ruanel warned me, switching to the gelding’s other hind foot.

“Nor do I!” I protested. “If I did not truly think you could produce some good beginner horses out of this cross, I would not suggest it.” I spread my hands wide. “I thought merely to offer you a bit of an exciting deal, since to my knowledge this is the first of these spotted Sindarin horses in Ránanandë, and there are not so many anywhere in Aman, yet.”

Ruanel picked out the rest of the gelding’s hooves in a quiet I let settle, making silly faces at the horse while Ruanel could not see me.

At last, Ruanel put down the gelding’s last hoof and stood, hands on hips. Turning to face me, she warned, “I would not pay anything like my usual prices for her.”

Blood in the water! I thought jubilantly. “No, no,” I protested. “In fact, I was hoping for a trade, rather than a sale. Do you, by chance, still have that husband horse?”

Being a breeder of sometimes high-strung sport horses meant Ruanel also kept a docile light draught cross to provide companionship and a steadying influence in the pasture. I had seen her pony green yearlings alongside him to teach them nerve and patience, and I thought that while he would never go fast, he would go a long time, and willingly. Those big horses, crossed with something with just a touch more lightness, are surprisingly good on tracks and trails, taking their time but taking it well.

Ruanel looked taken aback once more. “You mean Heldamorco? Really? He is nothing like a sport horse; I believe his dam was bred in someone’s garden.”

I laughed. “That is not at all a worry! My friend — you have surely met her, the other junior leech — needs a strong, calm horse with comfortable-enough gaits in order to ride long distances and carry instruments. Nothing fancy is needed; in fact, just the opposite, for Doctor Banilómiel is not so horse-hearted as you and I.”

That seemed to seal the deal. Ruanel hemmed and hawed a little as she finished grooming the gelding and put him back in his paddock, especially when I explained the night-blindness, but she promised to accept a visit from me and Alparenë the very next day. I took that as a hopeful sign.

Alparenë was shocked when I told her the news over dinner that night. She made a few awkward protestations, clearly entirely at a loss as to why I might have done such a thing. It might have been a little insulting, except that I felt truly pleased to have made a grand, but useful, gesture of friendship. From the head of the table, Elquessë watched with jovial approval, periodically breaking in to expound upon the interest inherent in inheritable spotting patterns.

Alparenë and I brought Ithilloch out to Ruanel before the next day could grow too stifling, and I put her through her paces, with special attention to her nimble turns and good wind. Ithilloch did not need much help; her placid friendliness in a new place, surrounded by strange horses, spoke for itself. Ruanel handed over Heldamorco and his tack right then, and Alparenë, not without a slightly wistful goodbye, gave Ithilloch a final pat on the neck and went to try him under saddle. I rested my forehead against Ithilloch’s and murmured soothingly about her new home until her ears pricked and she went and butted her sensible square head against Ruanel’s chest.

“Very well, very well,” Ruanel muttered to her, as though I could not see her rubbing at Ithilloch’s poll. “It will be interesting to try something new, after all. Ithilloch here will have a good life with me, Doctor Heriel, and if I sell her on after a few foals, I will be sure it is to a steady household who will not mind her eyes.”

I thanked her, and Alparenë returned to announce that she had found Heldamorco a comfortable ride. We hammered out a few last details for if either horse should later turn out to be a poor fit, but left Ruanel feeling that the business was done, and for the better. Alparenë seemed slightly mournful, but big, friendly Heldamorco was impossible to resent. He and Quildatal were fast friends already, trading places along the sunny, dusty road back into Merrilosto.

Outside her apartment, Alparenë turned to face me, looking down from her Heldamorco-assisted height with a slightly confused expression.

“This was truly… truly generous of you, Doctor Heriel.”

I smiled at her. “My pleasure,” I said, quite honestly.

Alparenë slid down off Heldamorco’s back – it was a longer way down than she had grown accustomed to with Ithilloch! – then turned back to me, squaring her shoulders.

“You know,” she said, “Elquessë would probably be quite pleased to work with you on a publication on these spotting factors, once Ithilloch starts throwing foals. They are quite interesting; I would be keen to read such a thing.”

From Alparenë, I thought, that was probably as close to a declaration of friendship as I was likely to get. With thanks for the idea, I turned Quildatal towards the rambling house on the plaza, smiling as we went.

Chapter End Notes

Much inspired by HoundsOfValinor's wonderful art of Beleriandish horses: I, II.

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I did not think much on Alparenë’s suggestion for a while, except to be grateful for the overture it represented. Some leeches, with centuries of comparison cases at hand, become prolific authors of scholarly literature. Elquessë is one such, of course, publishing not only in leeching journals but in the wider circles of life-lore as well, where her arguments about inheritance and fetal development, derived from the study of her beloved chickens, are well respected. My own tendency when writing has always been more fanciful, to the dismay of my teachers in Tirion, who demanded more straightforward argumentation and less personal opinion in my reports. Yet, before too many more months had passed since Alparenë proposed it, I did find myself writing a long paper on the inheritance of spotted and painted coat colors in the Beleriandish horse, with Elquessë’s help. The reason, alas, was one of misfortune.

It has always seemed to me that finding one’s own grief at death utterly intolerable and unique is the province of princes. Some princes more than others, to be fair, but it is a fortunate life indeed that is untouched by loss, even among us everlasting First Children. For, as Elquessë says of death, “also in Valinor it dwells.” No parent mourning a miscarriage, no ancient Journeymaker who lost friends and children forever to fading (or worse, to Moringotto’s perversions), and certainly no farmer, lives under the illusion that loved creatures endure forever.

Yet fate is hard, and the little foal that spurred me to write in a scholarly mode died without blame, but also entirely without need.

I was visiting the grange of Voranna the butcher. To this day, most cows in Ránanandë are kept for dairy. However, just as in Elves, for milk to let down in a cow, there must first be a baby. As we all know, the resulting calf is as likely to be a little bull as to be a valuable milch cow. Apart from the stud needed to keep the cows in calf and the milk flowing, there is not much use for a bull except to eat. As such, Ránanandë’s dairies supplied two reasonably large operations which raised up the calves for beef, one of which was Voranna’s. He is a kind but solemn man, which I have always thought suits the nature of his work. He likes his steers to live happy lives before they die, so his grange covers a substantial tract of land, and he moves them about it often on a careful rotation to prevent damage to the delicate hillside grasses. Indeed, he claims – and having seen them, I believe – that his pastures are some of the healthiest grassland in the region, because of the aeration and fertilization his herds provide the ground with their occasional grazing. To effect these rotations, he has always relied on fast, clever horses in the same way shepherds rely on sheepdogs.

He was, therefore, overjoyed to find that the new patterned horses from Middle-earth had been in many cases bred in the vast prairies of eastern Beleriand for precisely that task. Just as my sheepdog on the slopes of Taniquetil would herd by instinct if anything — sheep, goat, or Elvish child — presented itself to be herded, so did many of these agile, clever horses possess a kind of “cow sense” that made them invaluable to any stockperson.

I arrived at the grange at the end of summer, enjoying the cooler nights bracketing the still-warm days. Voranna had requested my presence especially then, for he had for the first time sought to breed his own horse and wanted the leech on hand to assist at the foaling.

He met me at the outermost gate, which I appreciated for the respite from the endless mounting and dismounting that often accompanied my rounds. He was on foot, moving with a certain restlessness I did not associate with him, but which I found infectious, perhaps for that very reason. I swung down from Quildatal, who was already attempting to sniff out any treats in Voranna’s capacious pockets — indeed, he had brought a piece of sugarloaf — and we walked together through the golden fields. We discussed the small fire Voranna had let burn a few acres for the sake of the grass earlier in the season, the fodder he was laying up so that his summer foal would have enough to eat throughout the autumn and winter, and the doings of his daughter, who had taken advantage of her father’s calling and become a leatherworker of some renown. In his way, he was careful to lay out interesting details and seek my opinion, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere, and our pace grew quicker as we approached his house.

Like a horse smelling the barn, I thought with amusement, but I found his eagerness touching. Voranna let us into the small stable beside the house and led me with a bounce in his step to the largest stall, deeply bedded and fragrant with the first of the summer hay. He stood beside the door and made an elegant, proud gesture of introduction that reminded me of nothing so much as the sleeve-dancers of Alqualondë, incongruous on this tall and rather morose-looking Elf.

“What do you think, Doctor Heriel?” he asked. “Is Mótulkë ready?”

Mótulkë, Voranna’s prized Beleriandish cow-horse, was certainly the picture of a healthy broodmare, faintly dappled with wellbeing and roughly as wide as she was tall. My understanding was that she was brought back by a soldier with more means than I, a horse with some mixed ancestry from Doriath and the herds of the Edain, who had ridden them over the mountains and into the west. She was quite plain for a stockhorse of that type, displaying none of the lacy spots of the Sindarin horses and none of the flashy pieing and splashing of some of the horses of the Edain, just a pair of trim white coronets and an off-center blaze marking her glossy bay coat. Voranna had sense; he knew that “a good horse has no color” and prized Mótulkë for her substance. I once watched the two of them cut a single calf out of a running herd, Mótulkë crouched so low to the ground I was amazed at her knees, turning and stopping and lunging with the agility of a dancer. Voranna, in his taciturn way, called her “a fine, useful beast with sense,” which I took to mean he probably personally named her in his thanksgiving to Oromë, and that Mótulkë would be one of those animals who lived forever.

“She looks the picture of health,” I told him, stepping into her stall and beginning the usual examinations. Heartbeat, temperature, reflexes — all seemed perfect, and from what I could tell, the foal was well-positioned. “You have done a wonderful job keeping her in condition. I would not feel any hesitation about encouraging her labor; all seems ready.”

“Thank you,” was all Voranna said, but he stood tall as a prince and looked upon me with great affection as I pulled out the appropriate draught from my saddlebags. Mixed into a mash, it would encourage Mótulkë’s contractions without the nasty jolt of inducing her through the fëa. It would take time, though, so we walked down the line of other stalls to check on the other working horses. I filed a few overgrown teeth, treated a mild case of hives from an insect bite, and performed the myriad small adjustments and healings that horses can always use.

When we returned to the end of the hallway, Mótulkë swished her tail and looked anxiously at her flank from time to time. Voranna and I settled in to wait, the beef steers given over to his assistants. While Mótulkë paced, we spoke of the herds of Nargothrond, where the painted horses of the Edain and the spotted horses of the Sindar were bred together under Felagund’s flamboyant guidance. Voranna had a dream of a perfect stock horse with the height and substance of an Amanyar warmblood, the cow-sense of the Sindarin breeds, and the endurance and gentle temper of the Edainic painted horses. Mótulkë’s foal might be one step closer.

Near noon, Mótulkë’s bag of waters burst and active labor began. I moved into the stall and checked the foal’s position as her contractions began in earnest. All seemed just right, with one hoof slightly before the other and the foal on its belly. A healthy labor should not take a horse more than half an hour. Mótulkë was well in time. Labor is never pleasant, especially for a maiden mare who has not foaled before, but Voranna by her head kept her relatively calm, and nothing at all seemed to be the matter. We cheered quietly when the first small hoof emerged, clad in its golden slippers, then the next.

It was not until the little muzzle appeared that I felt the first twinge of disquiet. The head and neck were quite white, with pink skin beneath.

Perhaps it is very splashed indeed, I thought. That happens sometimes. The foal rested a moment with its hind legs still inside Mótulkë, then a final push sent it spilling at last onto the deep straw. A little colt. Every hair from nose to short, fuzzy tail was pure white under the birth muck. I cleared his nostrils and mouth, healthily pink already, and grabbed a twist of straw and began to rub him down vigorously, noting the strong heartbeat beneath my hands. The foal shook his head and flailed a long, ungainly leg, clearly alive and well. Mótulkë craned her neck over her shoulder, making the deep, interested nicker that so many mares make on first sight of their offspring, and the foal made a tiny noise back.

Voranna, I could tell, was nearly beside himself in his quiet way, stroking Mótulkë’s sweat-dark neck in long, gentle passes. I looked down at the foal again. He opened his eyes as I watched, pale blue as the sky outside.

“I did not expect a color like that out of Mótulkë,” Voranna noted, even voice thrumming with pride.

I did not answer at once. There were such things as dominant white factors, though it usually took at least one white parent. The foal tried again to gather his ungainly legs, shuffling along towards his dam’s flank.

“Voranna, what color was his sire?” I asked.

“Bay painted white,” he answered promptly. “Horizontal splashes on his entire body, nicely mixed, and a white face. A classic pattern of the Edainic breeds, I am given to understand.”

I bit my lip. “Were Mótulkë’s dam or sire also patterned like that?”

Voranna clearly caught my hesitant tone. “I never saw either,” he replied. “The soldier who sold her to me said her parents were both war mixes, a little of everything. They must not have been very colorful, for look at Mótulkë.”

At that moment, Mótulkë struggled to her feet and staggered to her foal, nickering. She nudged the little colt with her muzzle, her off-center blaze flashing in the dim stall.

The corners of Voranna’s mouth turned upwards in a small, pleased smile, but it wavered and vanished when he saw my face. Trying to be hopeful, I said, “I will just make a quick check in the fëa, and then we can try to help him stand to nurse.”

I rested my hand on the white neck, out of reach of Mótulkë’s lapping tongue. The foal’s curiosity at the sudden expanse of the world was a swell of interest against my spirit. Its nerves and heartbeat showed clear and strong in my mind’s eye. The stretch of its new muscles, the pathways and channels of the body— my own heart sank.

“Voranna,” I said, then had to clear my throat and begin again. “Voranna, there is something the matter with the foal.”

He looked at me, then at the foal, still trying to get his legs underneath himself to stand and suckle. When he returned his gaze to my face, I could see that he wondered at my certainty, with the little creature so obviously alive and active.

“I will show you,” I said with a heavy heart. “Feel the bond between your fëa and your hröa; pay special attention to your abdomen and the organs of digestion. See how the passages lie smoothly, neither closed nor ruptured.”

He nodded. I took his hand and guided it to the foal. Mótulkë whickered and left off licking her foal to nudge Voranna. Breathing deeply, I guided Voranna to follow the same pathway in the foal, from the stomach through the intestines. To my muted surprise, Voranna had a poetic mind; flashes of images flickered in my mind as he thought through what he felt: flowing rivers, smooth cataracts, streams through caves. Then dams, choked deltas, dry springs.

It was difficult to look at him, but I forced myself to hold his eyes and say, “This is a little-known danger of breeding patterned horses. There is a name for it in Sindarin; I suppose in Quenya it would be something like ‘qualmefánë.’” I was rambling, I could tell. “You can feel that his digestive organs are not complete. I do not know why, but in Beleriand it was known that two painted horses of that pattern — they call it frame, for how the white is framed in the base color – could throw a white horse who would only live a few days, or hours.”

I looked back down at the little foal, swallowing around a lump in my throat.

“Mótulkë is not painted,” Voranna said.

“I also do not know why this happens, but sometimes a horse with two painted parents looks almost solid, with just a little white. Or, alternately, they can be so painted that they look entirely white, or they are a gray who has whitened completely, hiding the spots. So they are bred to other painted horses with the same pattern, none the wiser, and there is a chance the foal that results is qualmefánë, like this one.”

We watched the colt lift its head and rub against Mótulkë’s forelegs. Voranna pressed a hand over his belly, face impassive.

“What then does this mean for the little one?” he asked eventually.

I closed my eyes. Behind them were the little white forms of the three lambs with swayback Elquessë had taken me to on that first day, a test of my fortitude and the dictates of my conscience against my reluctance to cause pain.

Doing Voranna the courtesy of a direct gaze, I said, “We must give him a gentle death. He seems well now, but he will never pass his first stool, for his intestines do not connect with the outside. If we leave him be, he will first show signs of colic, and within no more than a few days he will die in terrible pain. Better that I lead him out of the world now, before he has time to feel it.”

Voranna did not grimace or exclaim at my words, only dropped his eyes to the small white creature nickering back and forth with his mother.

“What about…” he paused to clear his throat, as much sadness as I had ever seen him show. He tried again. “What about Mótulkë?”

I thought he would not appreciate exaggerated shows of sympathy.

“I will sing the foal out of the world so he feels no pain. We shall leave his hröa here in the stall for a while, and allow Mótulkë to see that he is dead. It is better for her than if he suddenly disappears.”

Voranna nodded slowly, not quite meeting my eyes. “Well then, please do so,” he said gruffly.

“Stand by her head,” I told him. It might or might not comfort Mótulkë, who likely would not realize what was going on, but it would certainly comfort him.

Sitting down cross-legged by the foal, I rested my hand on his neck and began to sing of profound, painless sleep. His fëa resisted not at all, falling peacefully into twilight and then blackness. When I could no longer feel a heartbeat, I let my song end. I could not dwell on the little body on the straw, for Mótulkë stood watching tensely. She nudged at her foal’s hröa, sniffing all over. She turned around, then back, as though expecting to find something different when she looked again.

Voranna looked stricken under his taciturn mask.

“You should go,” I said. “I will watch as she comes to terms with it, however long it takes.”

He nodded jerkily and slipped out of the stall. To Mótulkë, I sang the very song I would sing to an Elf whose comrade fell in battle, or to a woman of the Edain whose babe arrived stillborn. These were songs the Vanyar had learned well in Beleriand, and I had sung them many times before to many Children. Mótulkë examined the foal, turned away, then approached again. While she made sense of what had happened, I delivered the placenta, inspected it for any flaws or warnings, and drew out the precious first milk before singing her teats dry. It took several hours for Mótulkë to turn her back one last time without returning to nudge or gaze at her foal.

I stroked her nose and neck, soothing her with all my spirit. Great Rochallor ran until his heart broke upon his rider’s death; let no one say animals do not grieve. Yet animals and we Elder Children are not the same, facing different fates with different bearings. I thought Mótulkë perhaps understood better than I, or Voranna, how to countenance death.

Arien brushed the hilltops when I emerged from the stable in search of Voranna. He leaned against the doorway with a shovel in his hand. His hat brim shadowed his face, but I thought I would not have learned much from his expression regardless.

“I put Mótulkë in a different stall,” I said. “She will be well soon. I am so terribly sorry, Voranna. There is no way you could have known of the risk.”

The hat brim dipped for a moment. I wondered how Voranna would respond to the loss of his hopes for his favorite mare and this first attempt at a perfect foal for his cherished, well-tended lands. For myself, I felt weary and sick with self-blame for having knowledge without thinking to share it. At war, I learned that such irrationalities attend death.

Voranna took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “These things happen.”

Farmers have said those words to me many times. Like Voranna, they say it with grief in their eyes, then sow the next crop, deliver the next lamb, build the next fence.

I am not, and was not then, so equable. I stared at the ground, then held out the first milk I collected from Mótulkë, explaining that it might help foals in future if he kept it in a spell of fixity. He took it gently from my hand. Then I explained the actions I would take to help ease Mótulkë’s grief, all of which I am sure he knew perfectly well, though he listened patiently. At last, I was able to look him in the eye and promise, “I will make sure this is a known danger – I will write about it and make sure it is published.”

Voranna only nodded, not unkindly, and went into the stable with his shovel.

For myself, I rode home with a fire in my heart. Elquessë sat at the scuffed oaken desk when I arrived, and I hardly paused for a greeting before I poured out to her all my plans and worries. She rested her elbows on the desk and did me the courtesy of listening until I tapered off into vague snatches of outlining.

“You need more than one observed case, unless you can somehow unearth an Iathrim library from beneath the sea to review. Write letters to the editors of the Proceedings of Tirion and Alqualondë and another one to Deerlore — I will sign them with you — for your conscience. Then go find more cases, for your reputation.”

“My reputation is not my concern, it–”

Elquessë held up a hand. “The reason I work with chickens, apart from their undeniable charm, is that I can see three generations in a year of the Sun. In this race, horses do not pull ahead. I know you are not as invested in scholarship as I am; that is in part why I hired you! That is also why you should listen to me. It is better to have one publication on the firmest bedrock, though it takes time, than one that is too sloppy to even be published.”

She gestured to the chair next to the desk, pulling out paper and ink. I sat down beside her, and so began the outline of the work that first made my name interesting to publishers. Alparenë’s suggestion, Elquessë’s expertise, Ruanel and Ithilloch’s productive efforts, and the kindness of my leeching colleagues (plus, I suppose, my pen and eyes) produced a paper that I still see cited betimes in various Proceedings. The sight of my name between the parentheses produces a little thrill, but it is not one of unmixed pleasure. I believe I have made the dangers of careless breeding from Beleriandish stock common knowledge among those who need it. Even so, handing the fresh copy of Deerlore containing my article to Voranna could never have been so pleasant as guiding the little foal who inspired it into his hands. But these things happen.

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I have been telling solemn stories for a while now — it makes the life of a country leech seem nothing but endless political squabbles and tragedy. Worse, I am making myself out to be a Rúmil figure, a grand thinker on important topics. Really, nothing could be further from the truth, for the limits of my expertise are hard and immediate.

These curbs were driven home to me one day in the spring, when the grass still shone green on the hillsides but the afternoons burned the fog off and revealed the glorious sky. Quildatal and I were enjoying the freshness of the air and foliage while visiting Nissaratë’s sheep for the lambings.

I felt very much at home amongst Nissaratë’s flocks. As a youth on Taniquetil, my own family’s herds grazed between glaciers and rock spires as I followed them with my spear and crook, and I enjoyed the nostalgia evoked by the the bleating ewes and barking sheepdogs on Nissaratë’s windswept patch of coast.

There was interest as well as nostalgia, for lambings are a wonderful puzzle for the animal leech, not unlike those toys of interlocking loops the Noldor give their wee engineers. Twins and triplets are common in sheep, which means upwards of eight to twelve legs ready to tangle and prevent their poor mothers from delivering them safely. Sorting them out is so much easier than straining against a cow or a horse, both in terms of sheer muscle required and the lessened need to dodge flying hooves. Lambs also all come at once, and never in the comfortable byres set up for them by their doting shepherds. During lambing season, all three of us leeches would essentially camp in the sheepish areas of Ránanandë, dashing from fold to fold as the ewes and the lambs demanded.

A knock at the flap of my tent woke me near dawn one day. A piping voice called, “Doctor Heriel, Ammë says the ewes in the top pasture need help!”

Nissaratë’s young daughter was a second reminder of my childhood home. I have no siblings, but an abundance of older and younger cousins, and little Tófanyel was just the right age to remind me of my youngest uncle’s children, underfoot but too winsome to really mind. If I am being honest, it flattered my junior partner’s pride to have her crouched beside me as I worked, peppering me with questions and handing me my instruments.

Indeed, as I crawled out of my tent into the nippy pre-dawn air, Tófanyel had my bag in hand and looked up at me hopefully from inside her enormous sheepskin coat — clearly chosen by Nissaratë to last a decade or so while her daughter grew into it. For a moment I debated whether I wanted to bring the little girl up to the steep, slippery top pasture, where the paths were really more like rainwater ruts and studded with rocks like raisins in feastbread. Sensing my hesitation, Tófanyel widened her eyes and clutched my bag closer, and I relented.

“Come on, then!”

The hike to the top pasture was strenuous, but nothing compared to the escarpments of my youth. I took a rather prideful pleasure in stepping lightly from firm foothold to firm foothold, just as I had learned so long ago. I took the bag from Tófanyel after only a few hundred yards, though she protested. I also insisted she walk ahead of me, so I could steady her if she tripped, for the so-called paths were slick with recent rain, and the stones turned underfoot. We managed well enough, however, and as we reached the summit, Arien finally burst over the Pelóri, sending sunlight spilling down the sides of the distant mountains like the incoming tide.

“Ah! Bright Arien, who re-enacts each day the work of her creation!” Tófanyel and I sang together in slightly ragged chorus, then grinned at each other.

The ewe was huddled in the meager shelter of a large boulder, in sight of a little byre but stubbornly clinging to her preferred spot. Her sides strained, but weakly, and the ewe seemed discouraged. I dropped to my knees in the dew-sodden grass and gestured for Tófanyel to open the bag. She crouched next to me and followed my every movement with bright eyes as I cleansed my hands and arms and delicately inserted my fingers into the ewe’s birth canal.

“Give her head a stroke for me, Tófanyel. Hum a lullaby, if you can put some power in it.” Tófanyel nodded importantly and went to sit by the ewe’s head.

A truly spectacular tangle met my questing hand inside the ewe. Three lambs, I guessed, one breech and the other two put awry by its position. As gently as I could, keeping up a running commentary for Tófanyel, I palpated the ewe’s abdomen in tandem with gentle pressure from the inside the disentangle the breech lamb from its siblings and turn it in the uterus, pausing when contractions came and keeping up an easy traction to keep things in position. It was so much easier than a calving, though I did not say that to Tófanyel. Seemingly sensing that the situation had improved, the ewe bleated and strained with greater intent. Gently, I helped ease the first lamb out of her body.

It was not in the best of shape, thanks to its long struggle, and I cleared the mucous from its muzzle before blowing into its nostrils. A spark of power steadied the thready heartbeat, and after a minute, the lamb opened its eyes and lifted its head.

“That’s it,” I murmured, and helped the unsteady creature to its mother’s teat.

“Doctor Heriel,” Tófanyel whispered, and I turned my attention back to the ewe, who was pushing again with intent. The second and third lambs came easier, hardly landing on the cushion of grass before shaking their tiny white heads and seeking to stand on their shaky limbs. I lifted them over to where their sibling already gave suck, listening to the wonderful bleating of the relieved ewe as she nuzzled and licked her offspring. I saw the afterbirth delivered safely, then sang a song of protection and healing for the ewe. Before Arien was high in the sky, all was well.

Rubbing at my dirty arms with hanks of wet grass, I said to Tófanyel, “Do you see the cobalt bottle in my bag? No, the darker one to its right. Yes. That is a draught of strength I wish to feed the ewe. Will you uncork it for me, please?”

Tófanyel did so with solemn ceremony, then waited as I instructed her to take one dropper’s worth of the liquid inside and very gently hold the ewe’s head while she inserted the dropper into one side of her mouth. Only a little of the draught spilled, and I thought the ewe had swallowed most of it.

“Well done,” I praised her, and Tófanyel beamed in response.

“Let us bring this little family into the byre where they should have been all along,” I said, and together we chivvied the unsteady little lambs and the proud ewe under the roof. There was a small pump of frigid water under the roof, and I washed my arms more thoroughly while Tófanyel cooed at the nursing lambs, their tiny tails wagging like the bird-scare ribbons in the vineyards.

It was time to descend back to the farmhouse, where Nissaratë might send us back out to another ewe in need, but might also have a hearty breakfast waiting for her daughter and the leech. Down the slope, I could see hopeful white wisps of smoke from the chimney. It did look like a steep way down, however.

“Stay behind me on the path, all right, helper-mine?” I said. Tófanyel agreed brightly. Gingerly, I started down the path, testing each lump of rock for soundness before placing my full weight on it. Even an Elf can be caught out by a rockslide, and springtime in the mountains is well known as the most dangerous time for the Vanyar, after the snow has melted and one can no longer run lightly over its white highways but must trust to the unsettled stones it covered. By myself, I likely could have scampered down, but Tófanyel was only a child, her fëa and hröa not yet fully in tune with the world’s song.

She seemed cheerful enough, however, chattering away behind me about other lambings she had seen. I told some stories, pausing occasionally to help lift her over particularly steep drops.

“Do you have to go to Tirion to learn about leeching?” she asked when we were about halfway down the steepest part.

“Not at all,” I replied. “The University of Alqualondë has an excellent course of study, and it is truly the only place if you find you are interested in fish or the beasts of the sea. Or if you still want to go farther afield, but not to Tirion, the University of Valmar is much smaller, but that may simply mean getting more time with the instructors and more individual attention. You would see many more lambings there!”

“Is that where you went?”

I negotiated another tricky part of the path where the rain had worn a gully down the middle, pointing at the safe places for Tófanyel to put her feet.

“No, I never did, although I am from the mountains. My real education began with an apprenticeship during the war to a fine leech of the Nandor, the Green Elves of Beleriand.”

Tófanyel sighed. “Ammë says she does not want me crossing the ocean until I am six hundred years old. It is not fair; my cousin Luinesar went to Valariandë as a war-sailor when they were only two hundred and two.”

That was young enough and more to go to war, by my lights. “When you are six hundred years old, you will be old enough to go wherever you like,” I demurred. “Middle-earth may be much changed by then. It is not like here, where change comes slowly as glaciers.”

“But if I want to make draughts like you, I need to go!” Tófanyel exclaimed, and just as I was about to make a somewhat rash promise to teach her myself, if she grew to six hundred and still wanted to learn, she shrieked almost loudly enough to drown out the grinding sound of a rock dislodging.

She slammed into the backs of my knees, though I was tall enough to grab onto the steep sides of the gully and halt her there, rather than sending both of us skidding down the side of the hill.

“Sh– stars!” I gasped, and as quickly as I dared, turned around to see Tófanyel on her back in the middle of the path, covered in red clay and her right ankle already welling with red blood.

In the way of young children, she seemed shocked by her hurt, as though not yet decided whether it was worth crying about — but my own shocked expression settled it, and her lip began to wobble and tears to well.

“Easy, easy,” I said, crouching and ignoring the rapid beating of my heart in my ears. My first thought upon seeing the blood and the mud had been a terrible inchoate flash of the war, but it had been quickly supplanted by some atavistic cousinly instinct: Ilmarë, I will do anything, just please don’t tell your ammë!

“Little sweeting, that was a hard fall.” I eased her ankle onto my lap, noting with relief that it did not seem to be broken or even sprained, though it was badly scraped all the way from the heel cord to nearly halfway up her calf. How would I know, though? An Elf’s leg is not entirely like a horse’s leg, and perhaps I was missing some obvious sign of injury. Somewhat frantically, I cast about for something to treat it with, thinking wildly that I was a leech, not a healer!

“You are being very brave,” I told her, scrabbling around in my bag for my bottle of clean water. She was, in fact. Although she was crying, she was not outright sobbing, and she held still as I rinsed the red dirt away from her scrapes, though she flinched when I knocked loose some tiny pebbles embedded in the skin. “Wonderful, well done,” I reassured her again, and looked frantically through my bag again for more appropriate remedies.

Healers used iodine on Elves and Men as well as on animals, I thought, though it would stain her skin. I hurriedly diluted some with the rest of the clean water, then doused her scrapes in the solution. Tófanyel started crying harder as it stung her, and I shushed her as gently as I knew how — one could not exactly say the same things to a child as to a sheep.

“Brave girl,” I repeated, chanting it as I wound turnout wraps I kept on hand for clumsy sport horses around the wound. I did not dare sing my songs or charms, for they really were specialized for animals, though like everyone I knew some minor healing chants for sore muscles and the like. Singing through one of those, I tried to get Tófanyel to sing with me to distract her from her tears. It seemed to work, her hiccups subsiding as she sang along.

“That’s it; well done. Can you stand?” I thought that would probably indicate no lasting damage, although I supposed it could also reveal some profound injury a healer would have noticed at a glance. Setting her little jaw, Tófanyel accepted my hand up. She could indeed put weight on the foot, but I saw that her boot rubbed against the scraped skin. Shifting my bag to my back, I scooped up the little girl and held her against my shoulder.

“I think you are just fine, but let us protect that ankle until we are down to your house. Wrap your legs around my waist and put your hurt foot on the outside,” I said.

Tófanyel struggled a little. “What if you fall?” she asked.

“No Vanya has ever fallen on a hillside,” I replied. In fact, it was quicker to bound down with Tófanyel more or less still in my arms, and we approached the farmhouse in a blink. I might have liked it to take longer, in fact — the prospect of telling Nissaratë of her daughter’s injury on my watch was not enticing.

I set Tófanyel (no longer crying, in fact, impressively stony-faced) down on the stoop.

“Hail the house,” I called. “Nissaratë, you are needed at the front.”

A clatter of footsteps heralded Tófanyel’s mother’s arrival from within. A broad woman whom I had seen wrestle a struggling ram to the ground for my attentions, she filled the doorway.

I have been within a quarter mile of a balrog, I reminded myself, before saying, “Tófanyel fell coming down from the top pasture. I am so sorry for my lapse in care; she is not badly hurt, but she broke the skin on her right leg. I treated her as best I could, but I am not a child-healer. Again, I apologize!”

Bowing from the waist, I waited to, perhaps, be wrestled down by the horns like a wayward sheep.

Instead, she sighed gustily. “Oh, poor darling, not again!” she said, and, paying me no mind, crouched down next to her daughter.

“You must watch your feet as you go down the pasture, or stop wiggling out of light-walking practice with Auntie Andasolmë. Show me your leg, then.”

Tófanyel muttered something vaguely protesting, but tugged up her wide trouser leg to display my bandaging. There was a pause. Nissaratë looked at me for the first time.

“Are these wraps like the showjumpers wear?” she asked. Overcome with embarrassment, I bowed almost double and muttered an assent no louder than Tófanyel. When I risked a glance at Nissaratë’s face, I noticed her mouth twitching, though she tried to maintain a stern mien.

“Very creative,” she said, turning back to Tófanyel and beginning to unwind the wrapping. She raised an eyebrow at the brick-colored stain left by the iodine, which I hastened to explain.

“It looks clean, anyway,” she said, before starting in on a healing charm. Surely parents must go to school for their knowledge of such things, for I never learned them!

In front of her mother, Tófanyel put on an even braver face, staring nobly into the hilly distance as Nissaratë ran her hand over the scabbing, then healing, skin of her ankle and calf. The rusty iodine stain stubbornly remained. Nissaratë patted it firmly, then said to Tófanyel, “You are all better; good job listening to Doctor Heriel and coming back here to me. Now go and wash up; Auntie Andasolmë wants you by noon and you have not done your chores.”

With bad grace and several longing looks back at me (standing awkwardly by the doorstep waiting for my dressing-down), Tófanyel passed through the door to the farmhouse and the ever-present duties of a farm child. I turned to face Nissaratë squarely, preparing to meet my fate like a soldier. She gazed back at me, seemingly vaguely puzzled as to why I was still there on her doorstep.

“Was there a problem with the ewe, Doctor Heriel?”

She seemed pleased when I stammered a denial, though no less perplexed. I decided to throw myself on my spear.

“I am so terribly sorry for getting Tófanyel hurt — I ought not to have taken her up that path and should have carried her down to begin with. And the iodine will stain for a week at least,” I finished miserably.

Nissaratë’s mouth twitched again. “Thank you for your concern, Doctor, truly. You cared for her very well and made sure to hurry back to me so I could examine her. That girl scrapes her knees three times a week, though; it is part of being a child! I am sure you did that and worse at her age. All is well.”

“I hope you will please at least accept a lowered bill from us,” I replied, relieved but not entirely sure I could accept such a comprehensive dismissal. Some falling-down was of course natural, but I had felt properly unsettled to see Tófanyel lying there bleeding.

“No farmer can say no to that,” Nissaratë said jovially, and that, I thought, was that.

It was only a week or so later that the white, fluffy tide of lambing receded, leaving me to enjoy my at-home days in Merrilosto. The weekly market arrived on my third day home, and I went out to barter for more ready-made pottery jars for the dispensary, joyfully leaving Alparenë to deal with a curmudgeonly terrier with a toothache. Jars acquired for the exceptionally reasonable cost of a mother-of-pearl pendant earned for confirming an amorous cat was not pregnant, I decided to also purchase some raw wool grease to refill our stocks. Leeching is terribly hard on the hands, with the constant washing and subsequent insertion into hostile environments and washing again, and we three went through the softening grease as though we were sheep ourselves.

Walking to the clothiers’ section, I saw Nissaratë looming over the crowd from a stall selling lambskins. She spotted me at the same moment, and waved me over enthusiastically. Somewhat reluctantly, for I still felt guilty over Tófanyel’s fall, I went to her stall, which she manned with a far slighter woman.

“Doctor Heriel, you come in good time as always. I must show you something. Andasolmë, mind the stall for a breath, would you?”

She let herself out and towed me down an alley towards one of the civic fountains, where a cluster of children were playing with toy ships. A smaller gaggle, however, were enacting some tragic play on the steps of a nearby house. An older alnerwen — all the signs of a long-suffering eldest sibling, I thought — held a limp girl-child in their arms, the dangling limbs and pushed-out tongue belied by constant giggles. As I watched, another younger child waved her arms and made a sound like a laryngitic hawk, while the others called out, “Rockslide, doctor, rockslide!”

The older child, to my horror, cried, “A Vanya never falls in the mountains!” and leapt down the whole staircase, the “dead” girl in their arms shrieking with glee.

I put a hand to my chest. “They could both break their ankles!”

Next to me, Nissaratë chuckled. “But the brave, noble leech Doctor Heriel is a master of little children’s broken ankles, as you can see!”

Vanishing Elves is a common misconception of Men which I had never wished more were true than in that moment — and remember that I have been within a quarter mile of a balrog!

“It was not broken,” I muttered, hiding my face in my hands.

“There now, Doctor,” Nissaratë said in a tone not unlike that which she had used with Tófanyel. “You have made my little leech-to-be’s whole yén. She stole a bottle of iodine from the stillroom to keep painting on her leg stain, so she can show it to all our visitors and tell the story of how she had to go to the horse leech to fix her ankle.”

“Undiluted iodine might irritate her skin,” I tried, but Nissaratë only laughed again, half drowned out by another gleeful squeal from the children on the steps.

In any case, readers: I have decided never to become a parent. It is simply too much for a simple country leech like me.

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I believe I mentioned before that when I first began working in Ránanandë, I thought it would be a stopgap measure until Aman recovered from the shock of the various returnees (from the war, Mandos’ Halls, or both). It seemed natural that bright young recently discharged things would gravitate towards sparkling Eressëa, where daring Returned radicals postulated theories on death and the Halls, or reviving Tirion, with its experiments in electoralism. That did not last: if I have not yet made it clear that the hinterlands of Alqualondë enchanted me at once and did not loosen their grip as the seasons passed, I have failed as a writer!

Nonetheless, I did sometimes think in those early years that I might enjoy running my own practice someday, somewhere just a touch more urban. I never did think of returning to my family’s bothies on the eastern slopes of Taniquetil, nor even to make my way to Valmar. Reader, if you dwelt in the war with me, you know the meaning of “Valar-fearing” as I do. To live in the very throne of the Powers is to be exposed to their being as we are exposed to the fierce sunlight, the freezing snow, the thundering storms of lightning by the Great Mountain. As a child, I accepted this, even gloried in it as I lay on steep ledges looking up at the stars only an arm’s-length away — but I have seen other Mountains now, and their crumbling, and I do not think I could once again live that way. I am a Vanya, then and now, but I make my devotions from a greater distance, having been once too close to holiness.

Instead, Alqualondë seemed ideal. A great city of the Eldar, filled to the gills with good food, fierce debates, well-kempt shrines and parks, and beauty, where a newcomer could rent a flet from a kindly fisherman for a reasonable labor tithe and eat salmon every day. Alqualondë was also simply rooty (as we used to say in the region). The ravages of the Kinslaying had deepened and darkened, but not nearly stamped out, its freethinking spirit and open-minded approach to life, love, and so on. The vision of inviting a pretty local meleseldë up to my rented — but stylish — flet while Quildatal got fat on daily oats below attracted me, I must admit. I could see Elquessë every other week, even, on the river boat, and still eat all the Ránanandë grapes and olives I wanted, just from restaurant bars.

Hence my guilty excitement when I received a letter from a publishing house in the North Beach neighborhood of Alqualondë saying that they had seen my article in Deerlore and the small chapbook of my letters home my cousins had published for clan distribution in Valmar, liked them, and wondered if I had more of the latter ready. Near the end of the businesslike letter, they invited me to their building for an interview with an editor. It was high summer, the least busy time of the country leech’s calendar, so I felt slightly less guilty than I might have approaching Elquessë for unscheduled time off.

She steepled her fingers together and leaned back in her chair behind the perpetually chaotic desk in the waiting room, an expression of serene wisdom settling on her aristocratic features. A teetering pile of prescription slips wafted to the floor as she did so, but she did not affect to notice.

“Hyamessë,” she intoned, “You are more than welcome to take your annual holiday now, but please, allow me to advise you, as a friend and elder.” (Let it be noted that I believe Elquessë is a mere three or four hundred years older than I, if one counts yéni as a dozen dozen Years of the Sun.)

She continued. “It is very exciting to be sought after, but the arts scene in Alqualondë is a match for many.” She made several other vague but menacing pronouncements of that sort, all of which I disregarded.

Finally, she said something to which I did attend, namely, that she had a cousin and colleague who would let me assist in his surgery and would be happy to put me up in exchange. For that, I thanked her profusely, for Alparenë had made a begrudging noise about her parents’ home when I told her of my potential voyage, and I did not think either I or her parents were entirely prepared for such a stay.

Thus within the month I had groomed Quildatal to a high shine and left her sadly (or so I feared) alone in her stall and taken the Alpasírë to Alqualondë. My meeting with the editor was at the full moon, so I left in the dark of the month in order to pay Elquessë’s cousin adequately in labor for my room and board.

The cousin turned out to be like Elquesse, in that he had silver hair and birdlike features, and quite unlike her, in that he had the delicacy of manner to match them. He came to meet me at the ferry dock with a guest-gift, a shining length of catgut which, I knew, would never tangle or catch or snap inside a wound. I was glad to have brought a host-gift of my own, a cake of almond paste with marmalade inside made from the oranges of the very trees that lined Elquessë’s courtyard, which would be fit for the king’s table, if I did say so.

I called him by his title, always: Doctor Olwaryion was of a stature, bearing, and birth that would not permit otherwise. He took me by steep roads to his home and practice at the crest of one of Alqualondë’s many hills, surrounded by a bulging hedge that gave patients privacy. It was clear Doctor Olwaryion saw a different class of pet than Elquessë: his waiting room heaved with silken-haired hounds whose owners would never tolerate them being called dogs, pampered rabbits in gilded wicker baskets, and cats with pearled collars. Animals know nothing of such divisions, of course, and behind the clean marble table in the surgery, I felt as at-home as in Elquessë’s own clinic.

It helped that I could feel useful, as I did in Merrilosto, for my surgical knowledge from Tirion. A faster technique for the spaying of cats saves the city leech much time! Doctor Olwaryion would always say the same thing as I placed the final stitch: “A tidy job, Doctor Heriel.”

The warm glow of pride this engendered did not fade, but I did begin to wonder, after a week or so, if the practice did anything but spay cats and prescribe lapdogs eyedrops. Wandering through the higher reaches of Alqualondë was an exercise in amazement, however. Taking in the golden bridges, the pearly public buildings, and the bright colors of the common people’s homes took the edge off the monotony. When I had shipped off to war from the docks, I had seen little but the wharves themselves and the hastily revitalized shipyards. Impressive enough, but not the same as the stretch of street adjacent to the practice which boasted, in a wall-to-wall row, a coffeeshop which seamlessly became a beerhouse in the evenings, a bakery specializing in butter-cakes, an architectural pearl-machining practice that inexplicably also sold Ránanandë wines, a grandly domed temple of Uinen undergoing renovation to glass in its elegant courtyard, and finally, a hairdresser with Maiar-blessed dyes. Even so, I must have spayed at least thirty cats that first week. Tidy jobs all, according to Doctor Olwaryion, but somewhat wearing by comparison to the variety I usually saw.

Doctor Olwaryion also liked his assistants to dine together at table with him, which prevented me from seeking out the meletheldi’s haunts a few hills away. He kept a fine table, and also fine assistants, which soothed the wound somewhat, and I did enjoy the lively, wide-ranging conversations.

“So your father, the prince, is Elquessë’s great-uncle on her mother’s side?” I asked one evening at dinner, trying to pin down exactly how Elquessë, leaf of a silver branch, ended up in chicken practice in the countryside.

“Just so,” Doctor Olwaryion assented. He ate his soup of whole-shell clams elegantly, with a little instrument to pick out the clam meat separately from his spoon, which he always operated in the correct direction. The other assistants and I watched him furtively to remember which way that was.

“How is it that she lives all alone, so far in the hinterlands? From what you have told me, the greater part of your family lives around the palace.”

“Oh, Elquessë was always something of the Ossë of the family, Doctor Heriel. She was always running around the Great Park looking for birds, rather than attending court, and once she was old enough she was away from the city as often as she was at home, exploring, as she called it. I believe she found all the pomp and circumstance of our family rather confining.”

I took another spoonful of soup in the correct direction. I thought it verged on pert to accuse Elquessë of being tempted by Morgoth for the sin of liking birds and fresh country air, but forebore to comment.

“I do not believe I have known her to visit Alqualondë since I arrived, almost three years ago,” I said.

“What is three years?” Doctor Olwaryion asked indulgently. “My little cousin makes sure to visit at least once a century, and that seems to suit everyone nicely. It is too bad that she did not introduce you before, though — we all like to take an interest in her projects.”

Elquessë’s project chewed a final clam.

Doctor Olwaryion mused, “Well, perhaps I should take on that duty. It is the mid-tide tomorrow, which means I am due a visit to my grandfather’s mews — magnificent hawks, Doctor Heriel, superb hawks!” His eyes flashed, and for the first time, I saw some similarity in character between him and his “little cousin.”

So the next morning I donned my dress uniform, which I had admittedly brought in order to charm women in coffeehouses, but which served well enough for an unexpected visit to my employer’s noble ancestors. Doctor Olwaryion led the way past the baker, the temple, and the hairdresser and into the parkland which occupied the northernmost tip of Alqualondë’s peninsula, where the palace and the white houses of the King and Queen’s many relatives lay. I took deep breaths of the fresher air, moist and healthful after a nighttime rain. The streets of the city were broad and clean, but I did not notice until I left them that the air was closer.

We skirted the palace, gleaming white and blue against the blue and white of the whitecapped sea, entering instead into a three-story house, also white, though not so nacreous and glistening, and full of the musty smell of corn and feathers. Though it looked like a house from the outside, standing inside, I could see it had been hollowed out to the studs and rafters, with a staircase spiraling up the center. All around were little stalls, more like the cubbyholes in which students studied in Tirion’s Great Library than the stalls of a stable, with fine mesh grates over their entrances. Everywhere was the rustle of feathers and the surprisingly quiet peeps of the great birds of prey, their yellow eyes gleaming in the dim coolness.

“Well met,” a quiet voice said, and I started, having been entirely distracted by the mews and their inhabitants. A black-haired woman in riding habit, with the braces and heavy gauntlets of a falconer on her arms, stood at the foot of the staircase, struck by a shaft of dusty golden sunlight. It made the features of her face stand out like projections on a crag, beckoning exploration. She nodded to me, then turned to greet Doctor Olwaryion as a trusted colleague. I hardly knew where to look, at the glorious merlins and kestrels on their perches, or at their keeper.

“Doctor Heriel, my bag, please.” Doctor Olwaryion beckoned, and I started up after him and the falconer to a landing where the second floor would have stood. A white-tailed kite was jessed to the perch, a grand female who spread her snowy wings and cackled at our presence. The falconer slipped in before us and offered her a piece of raw meat from a cup fastened to her habit’s belt. The kite took it with her cruel beak and swallowed it whole, golden eyes never leaving the falconer’s. The woman gently urged the bird onto her right arm, stroking her head and crooning in raptor-tongue. In the better light of the stairway, I could see a tumor on the bird’s right leg, bulging between the toes.

“Ah,” Doctor Olwaryion breathed. “Such a sad hurt for such a fine lady, but simple enough to cure. Doctor Heriel, please prepare a table for a small surgery on the ground floor.”

I did so, adding a flourish to my charm of cleanliness. The white cloth over the small collapsible table glowed in the same beam of sunlight that had illuminated the falconer, and I glowed myself when Doctor Olwaryion allowed me to take the knife to the bird, held fast asleep by his song. The feet of a raptor are strong as iron, full of tough muscles the eye would not guess at. The tumor, of the sort that often grew after a small injury, lay clamped between two of those muscles, where it hampered movement and prevented the kite from grasping her prey in the fearsome talons that crowned her toes. As delicately as I knew how, I sliced the thin flesh around the lump, noting with pleasure that the tumor was fully encased, almost as round as a marble and only loosely connected with the surrounding tissue. With a curved scalpel, I scooped it out as neatly as the down from an artichoke, with but a little blood to stain the pure white feathers of the kite's breast, which made even the cloth look dim by comparison.

“Fine work,” the falconer breathed, and I flushed with pleasure, even before Doctor Olwaryion chimed in with his, “Tidy job, Doctor Heriel.”

Neatly as Míriel, I stitched up the clean flaps of skin, massaging the muscle into place as I did so in order to prevent a hollow where the tumor had been. As I placed the last stitch, Doctor Olwaryion laid a single finger on the wound and sang one of those glorious Falmarin descants of healing, and every trace of injury vanished but for the thin seam of the incision.

I could not help but stroke the kite's outstretched wing, careful not to disturb the feathers. However the falconer handled her, she was too fierce for me to touch when awake.

The falconer bundled the bird up and returned her to her perch. Some words of the kite tongue, changed by an Elvish throat, floated down to us below, and I stared up, entranced, as perhaps a fish might when that flashing white shadow shows above the water.

A little chuckle beside me drew me back to myself.

“Poicasíma would have said if there were more than one bird requiring surgery,” Doctor Olwaryion said. “Why don’t you leave me to make my own round. She can show you the stables, which are also a sight to see.”

I flushed again, but was happy to nod my assent. Poicasíma came down ungauntleted, and I saw the marks and scars of talons and beaks on her hands, silvery fine like spiderwebs in the summer field of her fingers.

“To the stables, then?” she asked, and I followed her from the dim mews into the brilliant sunshine, with the air full of brine and the pearl of the palace gleaming like the tarrying moon. Again, we passed it by, walking instead towards the sea, rougher and darker than the Bay. A long, low strip of stable stood white against the spring-green pasture around it, where bays and chestnuts and grays grazed, turned away from the sea wind. As delicately as I would use a scalpel, I reached out and touched the back of Poicasíma’s scarred hand.

“Let us sit here,” I said. “I would look at the horses and hear you tell me of your life here, in Alqualondë.”

Poicasíma turned to face me, black braid whipping in the wind. She held up her hands and laughed. “Of my life, soldier? You have not yet told me your name.”

“Hyamessë,” I said. “I am Hyamessë. I am thinking of making my own life here.”

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“I am certain you say that to all the girls,” Poicasíma replied, amused, but she sat upon the green grass before the palace of Alqualondë and told me stories of caring for the royal family’s hawks.

In return, I told her of Eagles circling above the Army of the Valar, and her eyes shone as though she looked upon their high glory herself.

“To be jessed to the arm upon which such splendor sits is honor indeed,” she said, and though the words were different, I thought I recognized the sentiment.

“You speak like a Vanya,” I told her, and she laughed.

“Vanyar think they are the only pious Elves in all the world. The King of Birds is close indeed when one cares for his children daily. And you, do you swear to the Horse Lord? I see you watching the steeds below.”

I shook my head. “I have sworn at the Horse Lord,” I said ruefully. “He did not seem to mind too much, for here I stand on my two legs. No, I was born beneath the stars, and the Star-Kindler witnessed my naming. It is to her handmaiden I pray first, Ilmarë Who Combs the Starlight.”

A slow smile spread over Poicasíma’s face. “A devotee of the stars living beneath the sea fog? I cannot see it. Why do you want to live here?”

I stumbled through a list of attributes, realizing as I did so that I did not feel any of them terribly strongly, but for the last — entire streets where melehesti sold books, drank tea, strolled about openly. Poicasíma cocked her head.

“I had not heard our hinterlands were so hidebound. That is much more Tirionish; they use the Laws and Customs for more than doorstops there, or they did when I was young. Is there not that one town up the Russanaira River — Filit-something?

“Filitambo, yes,” I supplied, “But it is more of a melotorno’s game there… and I suppose my years in Tirion still outweigh my years here in the north; I find them difficult to shed. Always, even when I was young, I thought that one day I might go to a shining city, to come amongst people like me and live as them. Tirion is not so conservative any longer as you might think, but I have fought my battles abroad and do not wish to fight more.”

Poicasíma smiled and lay back on the grass, flinging her arms over her head so her sleeves rode up and revealed the paler lines where her gauntlets did not cover the skin.

“Shall I bring you amongst my people here, as you say, and show you our battlegrounds?”

I could not help but stammer again, and was grateful that Poicasíma only smiled wider. “Perhaps tomorrow evening I shall come to Doctor Olwaryion’s door and draw you out.”

I practically floated home. Doctor Olwaryion noted genially that he was glad I had enjoyed my study of the stables, and that there were four more cat spays to be done before he shuttered the surgery tonight.

Those were routine, so routine that I felt I could almost do them with my eyes closed, for Doctor Olwaryion insisted on being the one to sing all the charms. My role was simply to wield the knife. I recalled Alparenë’s insistence that she be permitted to take on the surgeon’s role when she first began her work at Elquessë's practice, and felt a rueful kind of delayed kinship. I would have given much to whistle a little sleep or hum a table clean!

The next day was much the same — a floppy-eared rabbit’s sore hocks were a welcome beacon of novelty — but I found it harder to mind in the face of the evening to come. As the sun fizzled out in the bay, I donned my uniform again and neatened the tie of my clubbed hair. A few other assistants cast me gentle smirks as I hopped from foot to foot before the side door, but when it opened, I forgot them entirely.

Poicasíma smiled at me, hand still upraised to knock. The sleeves of her daringly short men’s jacket fell back from her wrist, revealing again the scars and tan lines of her trade.

“Well, come along,” was all she said, and I scrambled to follow her out into the darkening streets, where strings of lanterns, glowing windows, and corner costers roasting pinol cast the city into an archipelago of rainbow lights. She led me up and down several hills and finally to a cross street cutting diagonally across the handsome grid. On one of the narrow corners cut out by the angles, a wooden house painted daringly purple hung a sign showing, of all things, the four pink petals of a Ránanandë clarkia, as jarringly familiar as if Quildatal had been the doorkeeper.

“Self-pollinating,” Poicasíma laughed when I pointed, and led me in. Just as the sign had surprised me with its familiarity, so too was I surprised to find the inside like nothing so much as the upstairs parlor of Sister Turkanta’s boarding house, stuffed with copper cooking implements used as semi-ironic decoration and just as stuffed with Elves in madcap but handsome dress. The unexpected dissonance of familiarity eased into comfort as Poicasíma led me to a corner next to a shuttered window curtained with bent spoons, carefully tuned by some impish artist to chime dulcetly whenever a passing body rustled them.

Poicasíma drew me into a conversation that ranged from hawks to horses, then horses to ships, then to stories of childhood, hers aboard fishing skiffs and mine in the snows and meadows of the great Mountain. Our words seemed to flow as easily as the pleasant cordials from the pitchers of the single server, and there was much laughter. Slowly, however, I became aware of some reproving glances — not so very many, but enough to make me look around nervously when the spoon-curtain tinkled.

Watching me glance at the room out of the corner of my eye, Poicasíma rested her sharp chin on her hand and sighed. “The uniform isvery dashing, soldier.”

At once, a wave of understanding and embarrassment crashed over me. I had thought of nothing but of trim lines and crisp pleats, for, I realized, in Merrilosto and Filitambo, everyone knew me, Hyamessë the horse leech, and did not mind what I wore even if it was the uniform of the army of Finarfin, sent to war from the charred docks of Alqualondë. I closed my eyes and covered them with my hand.

“Do not take it to heart,” Poicasíma said. “It is only a few who dart unfriendly glances. Opinions are never singular anywhere, much less in Alpalondë.”

Her gentle words were soothing, but they could not restore the spell of the warm and thrilling tavern. Poicasíma seemed to sense it, though I tried to be as gay and merry as before. After all, I had less right to discomfort than anyone trying to burn me with the Treelight in their eyes. Even so, the nerves and resentment rather spoiled things.

“Ah, I am sorry,” she said at last. “I thought this would be an excursion of fun: see how we may do things here in the city! I was not thinking like a completionist. Let us go elsewhere.”

She waved aside my protests and stood, settling our tab. My cheeks burned with shame, though I thought it did not show. Poicasíma showed no sign of embarrassment herself, only rested her hand on my arm and guided me gently back out the door and into the night.

“Let us return to the palace point, where we may stand on the gangway in the mews and watch Eärendil rise,” Poicasíma said. “It is a marvel away from the lights of the city looking across the water.”

“Oh, let’s!” I cried, feeling the sense of heaviness lift. “There is a place on my rounds in Ránanandë where you can see him so clearly; it is a sight to dream of.”

So I followed her into the soft, feathery rustling of the mews and up the twisting staircase to the rafters, where a single goshawk cheeped at us and settled back into sleep. A tall, narrow window gave onto the frigid stars. Through puffs of our breaths, we watched them glimmer, hands on the sill, shoulders, arms, and the sides of our hands pressed together as if by chance, warm in the cold nighttime.

Far to the north, a dazzling light lifted from the horizon, a shooting star in reverse. The sky did not precisely flash, or illuminate, but its quality changed, like turning a piece of velvet from the straight grain to the cross. I sighed.

“Aiya Eärendil, elenion ancalima,” Poicasíma whispered in the accents of the Falmari, and I echoed with my mountain Quenya. We pressed closer.

“Do you remember the first time you saw him rise?” I asked.

She replied, “Yes; it was here, in fact, I remember—” she trailed off, my upper arm growing cold as she leaned further into the window. “Oh, look.”

Peering past her, I saw only the Star of High Hope, ever higher in the sky. Then, I saw it. Eärendil did not rise ever higher, but seemed to grow larger, no, closer, yet dimmer. Then a winged shape emerged from the darkness between the stars, like one of the Green Elves’ constellations formed from the black aether. A Maia of Manwë? I wondered.

“Stand back!” cried Poicasíma, and took my hand — my heart leapt — to yank me back from the sill. Like a falcon, the winged being soared through the window and landed in a crouch on the grate before us, dripping stardust from the white pinions sprouting from her shoulders.

I admit I gaped. I had seen many wonders, but never a woman of the Edain winged like a Maia and all aglow in starlight. She looked up, and I realized with a shock that I knew that arched nose, those streaks of glittering silver in the black hair. The ship that had borne me from Alqualondë to the shattered coast of Beleriand had borne her likeness on its prow.

“Poicasíma!” Elwing the Prophet exclaimed. “I hoped you would be here. Help, look–”

From my daze, I realized that Queen Elwing bore a sling upon her chest, and in that sling was a huge white-and-mahogany raptor, an osprey. Queen Elwing gestured with her — my mind stuttered — her wing, which was already shedding feathers and becoming something more like an arm in a process that somehow dazzled my eyes.

“Whatever is the matter?” Poicasíma asked. “She looks terribly unwell.”

The great sea-hawk did look unwell, with a glaze over her golden eyes and a fine shiver through her muscles. Queen Elwing’s fingers finally returned, and she reached up to cradle the bird.

“I do not know,” she said, “She does not know, and I cannot work it out myself.”

“May I look, great lady?” I asked, voice squeaking slightly. Queen Elwing looked startled, as though she had not noticed me.

“This is my friend, an animal leech and colleague of Doctor Elquessë Helwáriel,” Poicasíma said hurriedly.

“What good fortune it is to find you here, for I know the work of Doctor Helwáriel well,” Queen Elwing said. “Can you help, do you think?”

All of a sudden, the calm I had learned on the front marches of the war returned to me. This was no different than receiving an order to attend Prince Finarfin to treat a laceration of the leg of his charger.

“Let us go downstairs, and I will examine her.”

Poicasíma hurried before us to set up the same table Doctor Olwaryion and I had used the day before. Queen Elwing called up a brilliant ball of white light without a single whistle or hum, which illuminated the aviary as though it were dawn. All around us, the hawks and falcons awoke and made noises of disgruntlement. She looked around guiltily and seemed to draw a curtain of soft darkness around the light she held, so we three stood alone in a softly glowing circle. I swallowed.

“Poicasíma, would you please help me lay out the osprey?”

Cooing in osprey-tongue, Poicasíma took the bird from Queen Elwing’s arms. The bird cried out shiveringly in pain, but did not lash out with her wicked talons or beak — a very poor sign. Gently, Poicasíma laid her on her side on the table, for the hawk resisted all efforts to put her on her back. Silhouetted against the white cloth on the table, I could see an unnatural bulge on the bird’s stomach.

“I asked if she had eaten something, but she said she had not,” Queen Elwing said. Poicasíma trilled a snatch of sleep-music, and the bird’s eyes drooped. So quickly I assumed she must be exhausted already, she fell into slumber. I turned her onto her back and laid a finger on the swelling. Cold to the touch: not an abscess. I pressed gently and felt no give at all beneath the bird’s thin skin: almost certainly not a tumor. If the bird insisted to Queen Elwing that she had eaten nothing strange…

“Does she have a nest, O lady?”

Queen Elwing nodded. “She decided Vingilot’s rigging makes for a comfortable nest. She laid an egg yesterday.”

That settled it. “She is egg-bound. That bulge is another egg which she cannot lay, which has hardened inside the body and made things yet worse. When did you notice she was sick?”

“Only when I flew onto the rigging on Vingilot to take off for home. Eärendil could not see her from the deck. She might have been ill a long time.”

“It looks like she has been,” Poicasíma said in a worried tone I could not but agree with. A bound egg poses danger just as serious to a bird as a delayed birth does to an Elvish mother. The osprey had been exhausted and I had seen no evidence of straining, the bird perhaps too weak to even try to lay her egg. If only I had my bag!

“Poicasíma, I need instruments. Have you a kit here?” Poicasíma nodded and strode purposefully to a cabinet by the door, returning with a large box which she opened to reveal a fair kit of materials for the treatment of minor wounds. I dug through it and came up with mineral jelly and padded swabs.

I caught myself thinking that if Elquessë, expert in all things egg, were here, she would surely have a better idea of what to do! But my hands worked steadily, gently lubricating the osprey’s vent and searching out the shape of the trapped egg within her tract. Perhaps I had finally gained enough experience that my worries did not amount to much.

With luck, the egg would slide down the freshly slippery track, eased by the jelly and encouraged by the gentle pressure I applied with the swabs. Carefully, I pressed from every angle, seeking the one that would loosen the egg from whatever prevented its passage. I dared not press too hard, however, for the worst case was the one in which the egg broke within the bird and left behind sharp fragments of shell tearing at her insides.

The egg did not budge. Under Poicasíma’s and Queen Elwing’s eyes, I nudged and pressed, but the egg moved not a hair’s breadth. I closed my own eyes and thought. Surgery was possible, but not with these instruments and no assistant beyond Poicasíma. Could I bring the osprey to Doctor Olwaryion? Perhaps, but I did not like the thought of trekking half an hour or more from the palace, or even of Queen Elwing flying, jostling the osprey and holding her in dangerous positions which might break the egg. It could be done, but I would prefer to finish it here. What could I do?

An image of Elquessë working in the surgery struck me — sitting in the surgery on long evenings when the clinic was quiet, reading my journals and watching her hold an egg before a candle and nudge at the embryo within with a long needle.

Once again, I dug through Poicasíma’s kit. A single long needle, which Poicasíma likely used for repairing jesses and other leathers, emerged from its recesses. I whispered a charm of cleanliness over it and returned to the table, where Poicasíma and Queen Elwing both made the soft noises of osprey mothers over the still-sleeping bird. I laid my hand on her belly and envisioned the chutes and passages of the egg tract, then, achingly slowly, eased the needle into her vent and towards the egg. When I hit resistance, I pressed until I felt it give.

The needle passed into the egg. If I were in a fully equipped surgery, I would use a siphon to draw out the contents, but here song must do. What would serve? Another flash of memory arrived: Alparenë slicing through the bone of a little cat’s hard palate, elegant and clean. Not without trepidation, I sang the dissonant melody again and again, controlling my breath such that I thought even Alparenë would have been proud.

When I go home, I must tell her I used her technique, I thought. Something in the thought nagged at the back of my mind, but I pushed it aside, focusing on the problem of drawing out the egg’s contents. Elquessë’s whistle for sucking away blood came to me, and I pursed my lips and blew, modulating the tone until the insides of the egg began to flow down the needle.

Painstakingly, I pressed again at the eggshell, keeping the membrane intact as I crumpled the shell inwards, guiding any sharp edges inwards and away from the osprey’s egg tract. The jelly began to work as the egg shrank, and I pressed and pulled it out. It emerged with a trickle of blood, where despite my efforts bits of shell had bitten in their passage. But the egg was out and I could feel no others behind it. Breathing deeply once more, I sang a song of healing as powerfully as I could, waiting for the internal lacerations to heal and the bird’s strength to return. Weary from my experiments, my fëa wavered, my breath breaking away from the spirit that filled it. Then a deep, husky voice joined me, something like the crying of a gull, and something like the tolling of a great bell, and I was borne up, music flowing through me like springtime snowmelt.

I finished my song, and a bar or two behind me, Queen Elwing also stopped singing. The osprey lay quiet between us, breast rising and falling evenly. I realized my legs were shaking and leaned hard on the table. Poicasíma slipped her shoulder beneath my arm and I gladly gave my weight over to her, thinking of her gauntlets and jesses and her scarred hands stroking the backs of her hawks.

“What skill, Doctor,” said Queen Elwing in a voice in which, faintly, I could still hear the cry of a gull, now I knew to listen for it. I shook my head, forgetting my formality, but Queen Elwing reached across the table and tapped the back of my hand. “You made a marvel here; I should think any midwife could not have done as well. I am sorry: I do not know your name.”

Leaning on Poicasíma, I looked up into Queen Elwing’s gray eyes, framed by delicate lines like tree branches.

“I am Hyamessë Heriel,” I said.

“Thank you, Hyamessë,” Queen Elwing said. “I will remember you, and I am sure my friend here will as well.”

The rest of the night is something of a blur. I remember blurting out some form of thanks, then Poicasíma helping the queen strap the osprey back into her sling. I remember the strange wrench of watching feathers where skin had been, and the awe of watching a woman take flight, just as Vingilot took flight from its tower in the north. I thought to go back to Doctor Olwaryion, but Poicasíma would not hear of it, leading me, stumbling, instead to a small lean-to appended to the mews and pressing me down into a soft, narrow bed. I slept.

In the blue dawn, Poicasíma helped me shrug back into my uniform, then leaned against the doorway as I left, staring up at gibbous Tilion tarrying in the sky.

“Is it always like that in Alqualondë?” I asked.

“Legends flying out of the stars? Awkward times at melehesti’s bars? If it is not always like that, it is not always different.”

I shook my head. “You live a stimulating life.”

We bid each other farewell and I walked back to Doctor Olwaryion’s practice, where I proceeded to spay five more cats and extract a tooth from a lapdog. As I worked, I thought back to the starlit urgency of the previous night, and farther, to operating on a different table beside different companions, on different cats. The hours which had slipped away under the starlight dragged again. In the evening, I made my way to the publishing house, following the map that Poicasíma had drawn for me. The door fluttered with strings of pamphlets and chapbooks, printed and handwritten. I knocked, and went inside.

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The egg cart rattled and bumped its way along the road into Merrilosto. I gave up trying to read the letter in my pocket and gazed around me. To my right, Urundil’s house and workshop passed by in the shade of the oaks. As we approached the town, I peered into the doorway of Alparenë’s building, wondering if I might be able to see the horses I knew stabled in the back of the courtyard. Turning into the central plaza, I caught sight of the three stories of Elquessë’s practice, still faintly disreputable with Elquessë’s tiled plaque hanging at an angle, with the strong, elegant bones of the place showing through beneath the whitewash. I hopped down from the cart.

“I will be seeing you soon, Doctor Heriel,” the driver said, and I nodded, lifting my bag down.

“You and Valimahen, third on my rounds,” I replied. I patted Valimahen’s neck and walked up the steps into the waiting room, where the wooden benches and disarrayed desk greeted me along with a waft of orange blossom from the courtyard beyond.

Elquessë popped her head out of the surgery. “Oh, Hyamessë! I thought you must be Alparenë coming back from the west county.” She cocked her head. “Were you not expected the day after tomorrow?”

I laughed. “Yes, I came back early! I thought no one would protest an extra pair of hands in the surgery.”

“Indeed not! Although, if you have the time, I have a case I was going to attend to this afternoon which you might like to take…?”

“Let me drop my bag upstairs. Then, yes, I would happily go out and reacquaint myself.”

Elquessë nodded and smiled, but looked hesitant. “Afterwards, I suppose I will see you in the evening, and we can discuss your time in the city?”

“Yes, certainly. For now, where should I go?”

Quildatal was beside herself to see me again, and I laughed as she butted me with her head, almost sending me sprawling into the hay. Hanging onto her short mane, I reminded her of all the things of which horse-hearted people should remind their mounts: namely, that she was the smartest, prettiest, most comfortable mule in Aman. Several chunks of carrot later, I tacked her up and led her out into the bright sunshine of summer in Ránanandë. I turned Quildatal’s nose into the golden hills and she ambled off, smooth as butter from Ilimmállë’s creamery. I settled my hipbones into the saddle and felt her arch her neck like a destrier and step higher. The daunting thought of that dinnertime conversation faded under the sunlight.

I knew the farm Elquessë had sent me to, a family affair with vines, oaks, a few cows, and some goats, but I had never been to the precise corner I now sought. I took a turn through the vines where grapes ripened in the sunshine, following the contour of a gentle hill towards a small stream, trickling slowly in the dry season. A small adobe cottage stood in the shade of a black oak, surrounded by a neat vegetable garden covered over with squash leaves and greening sweetcorn.

I set Quildatal to grazing outside the bounds of the garden, for I did not trust her not to test how well corn husks served as mule fodder. Mounting the low steps to the cottage door, I knocked.

A smiling Elf opened it at once. “The young leech!” he exclaimed. “I expected Doctor Helwáriel, but I am pleased to see you.” He held out his hand, and I saw a tattoo on his wrist: the crest of Finarfin in a circle of wings, a common adornment of old soldiers. I clasped his hand in delight.

We went through the usual conversation of campaigners meeting one another for the first time: where had we served, and when, and with whom? When had we come home, and via the sea road or the dark one? Eventually we came to names and origins: he was Kilinulo, originally of a small town not so far from my home of Orvambo, only a few peaks away. We laughed to find each other here, so many miles and centuries away from our hometowns.

“Oh, I have kept you on the threshold,” Kilinulo said at last. “Please, come in.”

Stepping into the cool of the thick-walled cottage, I was struck by the glitter of glass. Dark green, blue, and gold gave the impression of sitting in a high Valinorean corrie, looking up into the gauzy lights of Varda’s skirts. I leaned over a table laden with such shards, sharp edges limned in blue and gold in a pattern like the scales on a butterfly’s wings.

“I have never seen glass like this,” I wondered. “What is it?”

“This is a gift from the owner of this cottage,” Kilinulo replied. “The eldest daughter of the family — my great friend Elennolwen. We studied together in the cloister of Roaring Valleys, watching the stars. She left with the army too, but she came back on the dark road, while I took the short one.”

I bowed my head, recognizing his grief. “What did she do to the glass to make it glitter so? It is like a peacock feather.”

“Only buried it! Long and long ago, when she was only a little girl, she broke a whole shelf of glassware and buried it as trash. I moved here thanks to the generosity of her family when I returned, and I found it as I was digging up the dirt for my garden. There it was, transformed. It is an art of time, circumstance, and chance.”

At his nod, I picked up a shard, tilting it back and forth in the light. I had spoken truly when I compared it to a butterfly and a peacock, I found, for the play of colors depended on the angle at which I held the glass, not the pigment within it.

As I gazed at it, Kilinulo said, “I have buried more beyond the garden fence. Different shapes, different colors. Every so often I will dig some up and see how it has progressed, if different patches produce different patinas. There is nothing yet, so I think it must take great quantities of time, Ages.”

“I suppose now there is time,” I murmured, and Kilinulo nodded solemnly.

“I promised her parents I would stay in the cottage until Elennolwen returned,” Kilinulo said solemnly. “Whether that is next month or ten thousand months from now. Surely I will discover much in that time.”

I stared again into the refracting play of color, only to be distracted by a tinkle, then a crash.

Kilinulo cried, “Sían!” as I jumped.

A calico cat had knocked a glass phial off the table it stood on, breaking it into three large pieces. I pressed a hand to my mouth, horrified. Kilinulo only sighed.

“Hold right there, nuisance,” he said, and went to sweep up the glass. The cat, pleased that she had my undivided attention, only licked the guilty paw. Kilinulo glanced up at me and saw my stricken expression.

“Worry not,” he reassured me. “It will simply go back in the ground, and I will see how the patina develops with more time.”

As I watched the cat, waiting to swoop in if she seemed liable to knock over more art, I noticed that some of her calico patches were actually zones of hairless skin, shiny with scarring. She watched me equitably as I stretched out a hand, gently resting it on her head. She also had half of an ear on the right side, I realized, and her tail was as crooked as an oak branch, broken in at least two places at some point in the past.

One did not often see creatures hurt like this in Aman. I rubbed under her chin, wondering at her story. Kilinulo returned from the garden and I turned to him with a questioning expression. He smiled and called Sían over to him. She jumped from the table and walked over to him easily enough, though with a hitch in her gait. He scooped her up and brought her to a different, clean-topped table near a south-facing window where the light was good and I could examine her.

“I expect you can see that my little lady here has had a hard life,” he said, pointing to her ears and tail. “It has been a long time since she incurred these injuries, but I worry they still pain her. I never learned to speak the tongue of beasts as the servants of Lord Oromë do, so I cannot ask.”

I laid my tools on the table and reached out again to the little cat, holding her firmly down by the shoulders and telling her to behave, for I would be gentle and as quick as I could, which would be quicker if she cooperated.

“Would you tell me how she came by these hurts while I check her?”

Kilinulo hummed while I prepared to take Sían’s temperature. Quite normal, I read, and he began to speak.

“I was in nearly the first boat to ship over,” he began. “We landed on Balar — I think your group landed later on, when we had made a beachhead farther north.”

I nodded and began checking Sían’s ribs and palpating her stomach. I had not been sorry to escape seeing Balar, where it was known that the ruins of Sirion were visible from the harbor towers. It made sense that the little calico was not Aman-born; it was not so unusual for soldiers to bring back keepsakes of their time in Middle-earth, even living ones, even large ones like horses.

Kilinulo continued, “So, the first time I left the boat was to explore Sirion. Of course, King Gil-galad had explored it right after, looking for survivors. I met some of those, on Balar — not many. But we were looking for a beachhead ourselves, and Sirion had that wonderful harbor. So we went to see what could be repaired, or salvaged, of the docks.”

All Sían’s organs were properly sized and positioned. I switched to her mouth, checking her teeth for plaque and damage. She meowed in protest, and I sang her a little calmness. Some calm would not go amiss for myself, for I did not know, but could guess, what Kilinulo must have seen.

“It was… I am sure we both saw worse, afterwards, as we marched north, and after all, it had been four years since the attack, and time and weather had done their work. There were no bodies any longer, only some bones we would turn up where some… part had been missed. But mostly it was soot and rotting wood, every now and then an old toy or a cooking pot. I kept seeing this flash out of the corner of my eye down in the ground, however, these gleams in the dark holes where the doors used to be. It made me terribly nervous.”

He reached out and stroked Sían. “Eventually, I decided I had had enough, and I charged screaming into the door of a fallen-down house where I had seen a pair of those watching lights. It was full of ash, of course, so I failed to spear any Orc, but blinded myself in the cloud and made myself sneeze to boot. Certainly, I was never so foolish again. When I recovered, I saw Sían in the corner under some fallen beams, puffed up to twice her size, which was nothing. She was a skeleton. She wouldn't let me get near her, nor even the leech who had come along for the horses. We figured the last time she saw an Elf, they burned down her home. None of the survivors claimed her, so her people must have died and left her behind. I saw her broken tail, her broken leg, those burned patches on her sides. I still think it must have been that she belonged to the house I found her in, which collapsed when the Kinslayers burned it, killing all but her. I have always wondered how she survived.”

I ran a light hand down that stiff back leg, finding the seam of a badly healed break. Sían laid her ears back and I sang more peace into the air between us. Rubbing around the break, I could feel the knotted muscles that compensated for the crooked bone, surely sore and strained. Her tail was much the same, though it seemed those breaks had not been as major. Kilinulo was right to wonder: animals and Children easily succumbed to injuries far more minor than these under the care of healers, much less abandoned in a blighted ruin.

“However did you get her onto the ship?”

Kilinulo gazed down at the little cat. “I fed her when I could. She was starving; I doubt she really learned how to hunt as someone’s pet, and there was little game even for a working barn cat. Sirion was better than the lands around it — we figured the Silmaril had kept it fertile, the Silmaril and the river Sirion — but it was not that much better. She did not trust me, but I had fish and lembas from Queen Elwing in my rations, and that was too much of a temptation even for a cautious cat. Eventually, right before we left Balar to establish camps in Nan Tathren, I drugged it with help from the leech, and she woke up on board ship.”

“Oh, she must not have been happy about that.”

“Furious! It took a week before she would come out from the box we had brought her on board in, and a month before she would leave the sailors’ cabin. But I kept feeding her, always with a bit of lembas. I thought it might help that Queen Elwing was the one who had made it, and she was, maybe, something like Queen Elwing’s cat, if cats recognize Elf-queens.”

I hummed, now inspecting those bald patches on Sían’s sides. Inside, I wondered if I could not presume to ask Queen Elwing herself, or at least ask Poicasíma to do so — if the letter in my pocket said what I hoped it said. But Sían had the bulk of my attention. Healed as they were, I winced to look at her ropy scars, unable to stop imagining how she had come by them. Burns undeniably: flaming rafters? Falling embers? Simply the heat from the conflagration devouring her home? But they were healed now, and Sían reacted not at all as I gently danced my fingers over them.

“Look at her now,” I said. “Happy for me to touch her all over. Creating havoc, just as a cat should. These old burns do not seem to bother her at all, only the healed breaks.”

Kilinulo asked a few anxious questions about those. I answered as best I could, then requested silence while I examined them in the fëa. The breaks whined with a small but constant pain, better for the warmth of the sunlight, worse for heavy use the day before chasing a rainbow mote cast through a glass shard. It irritated Sían, but she thought little of it except on the worst days, I could tell. Healed long ago, it was no use re-setting the leg or the tail.

I straightened up and let Sían go. She lashed her tail in disgruntlement and hopped off the table handily enough, disappearing through a door at the back of the main room.

Pointing to her halting but purposeful passage, I said, “As you can see, she is not terribly hindered by the injuries. There is nothing I can do to heal the breaks at this late date, but I can certainly suggest some solutions for the lingering discomfort. In the leg it mostly comes down to keeping the muscles relaxed, while the two in her tail can be managed on wet days with medicines.”

I showed Kilinulo how to mix my draughts with Sían’s food, feeling pleased, not for the first or last time, at how my education in Beleriand meant I could easily leave strong medicines behind with animals who would benefit from them. He prepared a small dish for her right away, using, to my slight disappointment, a plain earthenware saucer rather than one of his gleaming glass experiments.

Sían, drawn by the clink of pottery, came trotting back out, her poor mood at her manhandling forgotten in the face of a meal. We laughed at her a little as she sniffed suspiciously at the pile of shredded dried fish, some habits clearly dying hard, then fell to with a will.

Kilinulo touched my shoulder, and I turned from watching Sían eat her medicine to find him holding out another cup which smelled of wine.

“Do you care to stay a while longer and reminisce some more?” he asked, and I accepted gladly.

We sat on his stoop and watched the bees buzz in and out of the great golden flowers of the squash, taking sips of the wine, which I thought I could recognize as a coastal Black Pine varietal. Quildatal cropped at the grass, swishing her thin mule’s tail at the flies.

Kilinulo sighed happily. “It is certainly not much like the gorges I grew up in.”

I laughed in agreement. “No, too much grass and not enough goats. I did not expect to find another comrade here, so far away!”

“Ah, but there are all types in Ránanandë,” Kilinulo said. “What better place to try out a new way of living than here? Aman will never again be what it was before the war. People are coming now, not leaving.”

“You know there is a Noldo living outside of Merrilosto?” I asked. “Someone who was at the docks of Alqualondë.”

“Everyone knows that,” Kilinulo said. “I cannot say I would have him mind Sían if I am called to the university about my glass, but what does it matter? He lives in Merrilosto; I live here. If Sían ever graduates from breaking glass to breaking chairs, perhaps I will see him then.”

Sipping at my wine, I watched Quildatal some more. “The distance helps, I think,” I mused.

“Too far to bother, too close to ignore?” suggested Kilinulo wryly.

I thought it must be something like that. Sían padded out of the house, her meal apparently having entirely absolved us for the various indignities visited upon her. Kilinulo stroked her spine as she passed by. The bees buzzed. We drained our wine and said farewell, and I went to fetch Quildatal. Together, my mule and I crossed some of that distance and passed back into Merrilosto with the last of the afternoon.

The summer evening cast its lingering shadows as I groomed and fed Quildatal and left her with a last nuzzle and carrot chunk in her stall. Crossing the courtyard, running my fingers through the fountain bowl, I could see Elquessë and the housekeeper laying out the evening meal. I remembered with a start that I had found it daring when Elquessë hired a female cook, not just for the bread but for all we ate: myself, Alparenë, Elquessë, our ragtag trio of women leeches. I wondered if even The Clarkia in Alqualondë could boast as much. Then the scent of roast trout with plums wafted out into the courtyard, and I dropped my musings and hurried inside. Alparenë and I entered at the same time, Alparenë from the surgery.

“Welcome!” Elquessë exclaimed. “How wonderful to have my assistants both back again. Sit, eat.”

So we sat and ate. Throughout, I felt Elquessë and Alparenë casting glances at me, each unsubtle in their own characteristic way. Alparenë broke the stalemate.

“So, did you decide to go to Alpalondë to live?” she asked bluntly.

Elquessë assumed a hangdog expression and said, “It is a city full of points of interest, although I have found a much fuller scope for my research here, outside of the pull of political interests–”

“I did meet your cousin,” I laughed. “I also met with the editor who wrote to me with the offer. When I came back today, I admit I was as yet undecided.” I fingered the edge of Poicasíma’s letter in my pocket. I thought I knew what it must say — but either way, my choice was made.

“Well?” interjected Alparenë.

“No, I will not be moving to Alqualondë.”

Elquessë sat back in her chair with an explosive sigh. “I should not have doubted you, Hyamessë! Since I first met you, I could tell you had a good head on your shoulders, not to be swayed by adventure or ambition.”

“On the contrary!” I protested. “I believe I have come to see that the adventures I find here are the kind for which I am fit. My patient today said it: too close to ignore.”

Dryly, Alparenë asked Elquessë, “Does your diatribe against ambition mean you will not show Heriel the gift you made to convince her to stay?”

Elquessë blustered a bit, but drew a wrapped package from beneath her chair and passed it down to me. I worried at the cloth wrapping, wondering what in the world Elquessë might think to give me.

The cool ceramic plaque read, in beautiful lettering, “Hyamessë Heriel, P.A.L.” It was twin in every way to the one that blazoned Elquessë’s name across the front of our house. I stared at it, tracing the capital hyarmas with my finger.

Elquessë, usually so confident, moved her head back and forth a little in uncertainty.

“Thank you,” was all I could say, clutching at the rough, unglazed corners. “Thank you.”

Dinner went on after my revelation. Even Alparenë toasted to my new status as partner without rancor — after all, I had been here first, and surely her turn would come. We stayed at the table until late, while the summer stars sidled in through the windows.

At last, Elquessë departed, claiming an early appointment, and Alparenë and I decamped to the chairs near the fireplace, cold for the season. I wished I could go upstairs and read my letter, but it would wait. Companionably, Alparenë and I stared out the windows at the starlight playing on the water of the courtyard fountain.

Eventually, Alparenë said, “I truly supposed you would prefer to stay in the city. It seems to me that all my generation stayed. And you have seen so much more of the world than I, to be content here, in the countryside, with us.”

I hummed. “Your city is beautiful. But I went looking for a home, and well,” I spread my hands, taking in the scarred table, the overgrown courtyard, the breakfast room, and the company. “Quildatal likes it best here.”

Alparenë snorted. “And your plum publishing offer?”

“It so happens that all the stories they were interested in were my stories of leeching in Ránanandë, so I had really better stay here to write them. Who would have thought?”

Alparenë shook her head at me, but held her peace. By silent accord, we finished our drinks, nodded a goodnight, and drifted to our respective beds. I placed my boots right where my feet would land in the morning. At last, I pulled out the letter and unfolded it, glancing through the lines that read just as I expected: that Poicasíma was sorry I had decided to leave Alqualondë and return to Ránanandë, but that Elven lives were long and the ferry route short, and the Noldor had not done much worthwhile in the land of the Falmari, but they had invented the concept of the long-distance relationship. I turned the paper over and pulled out my pen. As I did, I somehow seemed to become aware of Ránanandë itself stretching out in the darkness beyond my window, with the road leading past Urundil’s home, and Sister Turkanta’s boardinghouse, and the creamery on the point. Tomorrow meant the ferry to Filitambo, then the riding rounds down the coast, where the dry grasses would rustle golden along the sea cliffs and the redwoods would hold the morning moisture as mist until late afternoon. The next week would be much the same, and the next, and the next, and at the same time, I would find cats who survived Kinslayings, and donkeys owned by Kinslayers, and drunken bulls, and clever mules, and sometimes foals whose destiny lay in the lands I had marched over as a soldier looking for some purpose.

Perhaps I could have sat there indefinitely, dripping ink off the nib of my pen, but that I remembered that in the morning before the ferry I had promised to stop by and examine Valimahen the egg-cart horse. I smiled to myself. One sentence would not hurt and would serve as a letter and a draft in one. I wiped my nib, rewetted it in ink, and began to write.

In the years immediately after the war, there was not much for an animal leech to do but to go out into the hinterlands and see if one might find a small portion of that purpose and, strange though it may sound to say it, harmony which had attended the army of the Valar.

Then I lay my pen down, closed my eyes to the silver shining of the antler on my chimney, and slept.

The End.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you all so very much for accompanying me through Hyamessë's early adventures! Like James, I am sure she will go on to have many, many more. Extra thanks here at the end to Zdenka, for being a great bird owner, to everyone who commented along on AO3 as I experimented with the actual-WIP format, for the encouragement and excitement every week, and to all the creatures great and small who cameoed and inspired their counterparts here.

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