I Sit and Think of Times There Were Before by Erdariel  

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Of the journey toward the mountains

...so you all know how I said this was going to be three chapters? Yeah it's four now. Somehow as I write I keep discovering that some thing or another I had wanted to include in the story takes way more words to get through than I had thought

Also sorry for the rather lengthy chapter, I just didn't have a place where I liked putting a chapter break any earlier than this!

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We stood on the hillside, darkness wrapping tightly around us. The moon had vanished behind the clouds again. Gileinas’ words hung in the air.

He had given me leave to abandon him. The broken Narsil felt very heavy in my hand. Isildur had ordered me to save it at all costs; I knew that included abandoning Gileinas just as surely as it had included abandoning Isildur himself. No man would hold it against me if I left Gileinas behind to continue my desperate flight further than he had the strength to run. No man but myself.

I listened for a while. I could hear no sign of orcs. We had already fled far that night, and I chose to believe we were out of immediate danger. If we were, that meant I did not have to abandon Gileinas to keep Narsil safe.

“I will stay with you”, I whispered. “We should find somewhere to rest.”

We slept in a hollow probably left by the roots of a fallen tree in the nearest thicket we could find. I took first watch and sat in the dark huddled in my cloak and jumping at every crack and rustle.

   

The sun cannot have been very far above the horizon when I woke. The morning was bleak and overcast and I felt cold, tired, and stiff. The edge of my helmet had dug uncomfortably into my cheek while I slept.

Gileinas sat next to me. He was staring out into the thicket. His sword was bared and his hand on the hilt, but the blade rested on his lap and he did not look as if he had seen or heard anything worrying.

“All quiet?” I asked in a low voice.

“All quiet”, he replied.

We ate breakfast in silence. I already missed the noise and laughter of our fellows. I tried not to think about who might have survived and who died.

After breakfast we went through the bag of supplies Gileinas had taken when we fled and split the contents evenly between our packs. Most of it was food rations, but there was also a bundle of firewood. Near the edges of the forest we had not needed it, for there had been plenty of dead wood that could be gathered from the ground where the trees began, but earlier our way had gone along the edges of the barren Brown Lands where the only available firewood was what we had brought with us.

Between the additional supplies, the provisions we already had in our packs, and the waybread in the sealed wallets we carried for last need, we had enough food to last us maybe twenty-seven days. At the time I thought that was enough; it was more than twice how long the rest of our march to Rivendell was supposed to take. We were now alone, on the wrong side of the river from the road we had followed, in lands neither of us knew well, but surely, I thought then, it could not take us longer than twenty-five days to reach Rivendell. After all, the terrain made it hard to lose our direction entirely; if we kept the mountains to our left and the river and the forest beyond it to our right, we would be heading north. And if we just headed north long enough, we would hit the road again and could follow it the rest of the way.

How I wish things really had been so simple!

We made our way out of the little thicket. Gileinas moved stiffly and I could see pain in the set of his mouth, but he assured me that he was not badly hurt, only bruised. The clouds hung low above our heads. The air was damp, but it was not raining.

The thicket stood near the top of a hill. On one side, the ground sloped down into a shallow bowl before climbing back up to a larger hill. On the other, it dove further down at a steeper angle. That valley was half-filled with fog, but I knew somewhere at the bottom of it lay the River Anduin. I adjusted the belt I carried across my shoulder that the sheath of Narsil hung from, glanced at Gileinas, and got to walking.

We followed the crest of the hill northward. The weather turned into something halfway between fog and drizzling rain and we could not see very far in any direction, but so far as I could tell, we were keeping up a good, even speed. We aimed for much the same pace as on a regular march; after all, it was a speed we could sustain for days upon days without exhausting ourselves.

Our intention was also to stop for breaks the same way as on any march. As such we paused when we thought we had covered about a league, and sought a sheltered place further downhill to sit down for a little. Gileinas slumped to the ground with a grimace.

We had not sat there very long when I saw Gileinas tense up. He lifted a hand to silence me before I could ask anything. I listened with him, and after a moment I heard it: the sound of many heavy feet and the harsh voices of orcs, still muffled by the fog but moving inexorably in our direction.

In hindsight, I suppose they must have been some of the orcs chased out from the battlefield the night before who were now on their way to their secret dwellings in the mountains, and it was simply by coincidence that our paths crossed. But at the time it felt like a cruel joke. I felt certain they were pursuing Gileinas and I in particular, though I could not fathom how they had found us or where they had appeared from. I shot to my feet and gave Gileinas my hand to pull himself up, but by the time we were ready to move, the figures of the first orcs had already become visible in the grey mist ahead.

It was hard to tell how many orcs there were, or how battle-ready they were, but plainly they outnumbered us by far. During the war it was often said that one Dúnadan was worth ten orcs, and that might well be true when one stands in a sturdy thangail with fellow soldiers at either shoulder and the wave of enemies breaks upon the linked line of shields. It might even be true after a thangail breaks, in the chaos of a battlefield when the enemy has plenty of targets to choose from and distractions are everywhere. But for two weary men alone and exposed, things look much less bright. And even if each of us truly were a match for ten orcs, what is to be done when the eleventh one comes?

“Run”, I whispered to Gileinas, though he hardly needed me to tell him to do so; he must have known the odds as well as I did.

We turned and ran, scrambling up the hill as fast as we could. The orcs’ voices took on a sharper tone as they gave chase.

I halted at the top of the hill just long enough to glance around. The orcs were clambering up behind us, and more had circled to keep our way northward blocked. To the south there was only the steep descent towards the river and the long, open crest of the hill. Westward the shallow bowl of the vale opened before us. Its further edges disappeared into the fog again, but I recalled seeing a stand of trees somewhere in that direction earlier in the day. If we made it that far, perhaps we could lose the orcs. It was our best chance. On the open ground we could maybe outrun them for a little while, but not for long, and we certainly could not shake them off our track.

Gileinas and I ran side by side, hearts pounding, feet sinking into the soft earth, ears ringing with the cries of orcish voices. Arrows fell around us, but the fog must have made aiming hard and most of them went wide. Some were stopped on our armour. We reached the level ground on the bottom of the valley. It was wider than it had seemed from the hilltop, and I could only hope that the ground was firm enough to hold us and the recent rains had not turned it swampy.

Suddenly I felt a piercing pain in my right shoulder. I had no breath for crying out, but I nearly stumbled. Gileinas grabbed me by the arm and steadied me and we kept running, never fully coming to a halt. At every step I felt the jolt of something in my shoulder, but I forced it out of my mind. There was nothing that could be done unless we escaped from the orcs first.

I knew what must have happened, of course. Some of the metal scales on the back of the shoulder on my coat of armour had come off. It had happened all the way back in Minas Tirith, but I had never gotten around to having it repaired. The missing scales were easily covered by a cloak so I still looked tidy in my armour, and no one had expected any attack on the march north. A few missing armour scales had not seemed urgent. But now an arrow had found its way through that gap.

Lord Elrond told me later that the arrow must have missed a blood vessel that I would have inevitably bled out from by a mere hair’s breadth. It is strange to me how in the midst of all the ill fortune of the day I could still be so lucky. I am glad I did not know it then; even now the thought that the arrow came so close to killing me chills me.

We made it to the stand of trees before the orcs caught us. The fog was nearly as thick there as it had been on open ground. Roots and undergrowth got on our way. We scrambled further and further into the trees, though we had no idea how large an area they covered.

Finally I pulled Gileinas down by the arm and crawled under some bushes. They had lost most of their leaves, but grew thick enough that their centre could not seen from the outside. Gileinas crawled in after me. I felt his hands on my wounded shoulder.

“How bad is it?” I asked quietly, biting back a hiss of pain.

“Hard to say”, he answered. “All your clothes are getting in the way.”

He went still and quiet and I followed his example, nearly holding my breath. I could hear the shouts of orcs from at least two directions, not very close, but still too close for comfort. At length they faded and I allowed myself to breathe again.

“Can you get the arrow out?” I whispered.

“You might scream. We cannot afford alerting the orcs.”

I nodded. Gileinas was silent for a while, one hand still on my shoulder. I found it too awkward to turn my head far enough to see him, so I rested my head on a tree root and stared at the ground an inch away from my eyes. I heard Gileinas shift, felt his hand pulled away from me. The dry leaves rustled and twigs snapped as he crawled away. I listened to him move about somewhere outside of the bushes. But he was not gone for very long.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“I needed something to staunch the bleeding. I have no healer’s tools with me, and I doubt you do, either. Moss is the best thing I could think of.”

I let him work, sliding pieces of thick moss under my clothes and trying to pack them close to the arrow shaft. He secured them with string tied around my shoulder as best he could, though I was not certain how well it would hold.

Afterwards we lay a while longer under the bushes. The sound of the orcs had disappeared. The fog had not fully lifted, but it was thinning. The sun was hidden behind clouds and the light filtering down to the forest floor was dim, but I thought it must be near midday. I did not know whether the orcs were still hunting us, but if they were, the full light of the day was our best chance, even on such a cloudy and foggy day.

We crawled out of our hiding place. Gileinas helped me to my feet. I felt a little unsteady, but I knew I could walk.

I let Gileinas walk ahead, picking our path through the trees. He led me westward until we could see the trees growing sparse. I waited there while he crept to look ahead.

“There are orcs to the north of us”, he told me when he returned. “I do not think they saw me. If we come out of the trees a little further west, we should be out of their sight.”

It seemed to work. We walked on, careful but trying to keep up a good pace, still trying to head westward. The arrow in my shoulder had gone through my cloak, and as I walked the weight of the cloak kept pulling on the shaft. It was terribly painful, but I said nothing. I did not want to waste more time tending to the wound when I thought the orcs were still close on our trail.

We had only walked for half an hour or so when we heard the voices of orcs somewhere ahead of us. We did not see them; there was another stand of trees ahead, seemingly growing around a little stream running down from the mountains. The orcs must have been in the trees. They sounded as though they were arguing, but had they spotted us, they would likely have abandoned their argument in favour of pursuing us. We turned westward, trying to climb another hill while staying out of sight. The soil was thinner here, but the hillside nonetheless was covered in thickets of bushes and shrubs. Only waist-high, they offered little protection from the searching eyes of enemies, but they were hard to walk through. We circled around them when we could, but sometimes the only place where the hillside was not impossibly steep to climb was where the bushes grew.

I was trembling by the time we made it to the top of the ridge; the pain was taking more out of me than I had expected. Gileinas looked worriedly at me, but I only paused to drink some water and then told him to keep going.

We had not yet reached the mountains themselves, but the terrain was getting rougher and the hills steeper and more frequent. Gileinas tried to lead us northward, but we spent much time circling around hills or clambering over their lower slopes. We no longer paused for rest as we had planned before, but for all that I think we covered scarcely more distance than we would have on a march, and not much of the distance we did cover was in our planned direction. The fog thinned until it was entirely gone, though the clouds remained low and grey.

In the late afternoon we heard the voices of orcs again, this time coming from behind. We tightened our pace, but there was nowhere to hide. On our left the trees grew too sparsely to offer cover. On our right the hill rose steeply in cracked slopes of bare rock. It had begun to rain not long before, and I knew the rocks would be slippery. I might have been able to scale the hill for sport, unwounded and well-rested and carrying no weight; I had climbed such rock walls on the lower slopes of Ephel Dúath as a boy, as had many others who grew up in Minas Ithil. (Once I had competed with Ciryon about which of us could climb one faster, because Aratan had dared us to. We both had come rather close to losing our grip and falling in places where it might have killed us, and Isildur had been furious with all three of us when he had found out.) But now, wounded and weary and carrying a heavy pack, I could not hope to climb the rocky hill fast enough to escape the orcs.

In front of us the ground rose a little and we could not see what there was on the other side of the hill, but certainly on our side of it there was nothing that could help us. The orcs had spotted us now. We raced up the hill, the orcs nearer and nearer at our heels. I felt faint and it was all I could do to keep running.

We passed the crest of the hill and kept on running down the slope, hardly looking at where we were going until the ground dropped abruptly into a narrow, rocky gully at the bottom of it. It was sheer luck that I did not break my ankle when I stumbled down into it. Gileinas leapt down after me.

“We might as well keep going down this”, he said, eyeing the gully. “They cannot cut off our way downstream, the drop becomes too high to make without getting hurt.”

I nodded and began to follow the gully. The stream running down it did not quite come up to my knees, but it was very swift and I had to be careful to not fall. Gileinas walked a few steps behind me.

We had not been walking for long when we heard the sound of the orcs clambering down into the gully behind us. Gileinas’ steps halted.

“Ruinamacil”, he said in a quiet, even voice, “King Isildur gave you an order. Carry it out.”

“Do not let them kill you. Please. I need you”, I whispered. I did not turn to look at him.

Ignoring the protests of my aching heart, I ran. I slipped and stumbled and forced myself back up and ran down the gully. The clash of steel on steel echoed from behind and rang in my ears.

The light was beginning to fail between the steep walls of the gully. So was my strength. I lost my footing and fell into the stream again, scraping my palms bloody on the rocks in a vain attempt to catch myself. I stood back up on shaking legs. My head was spinning. I leaned on the rocky wall and looked back up the gully.

As I stood there trying to catch my breath, Gileinas came walking down to me. The front of his armour was splattered with orc-blood and he looked exhausted, but I could see no sign of injury in his movements.

So great was my relief that I rushed to embrace him. He closed his arms around me and held my trembling body.

“What happened?”

“The orcs are dead. It was only five of them, and in the narrow space they could only come at me one at a time.”

“If we are lucky, no other orcs came this far in pursuit of us. We might have escaped them”, I said.

“If we are lucky. But luck has not been on our side lately.”

“I think we must trust luck now. I can run no further”, I admitted.

Gileinas nodded. “We both need rest, and I should like a better look at your wound and to see if I can do more for it.”

We walked on for a while, searching for a place where we might be able to climb out of the gully. Finally we came across one, a place where a larger part of the left side had collapsed. We struggled over the rubble and dirt to find a man-high piece of nearly straight rocky wall still standing over us. Gileinas climbed it first. I looked at the wall doubtfully. I could hardly move my right arm for the pain that it caused to my shoulder. I knew I could not put enough of my weight on it to climb out.

“I will help you”, Gileinas said, seeing my doubt. “Give me your pack first, so I do not have to pull more weight than I have to at once.”

I wrestled the pack off my back. The right shoulder-strap caught on the arrow. I could not help the cry of pain that escaped my mouth as the weight wrenched the shaft downward until it snapped in two.

I passed my pack hurriedly to Gileinas. I feared my cry might have alerted more orcs, and the only thing we could do about that was to get somewhere else swiftly.

Gileinas hauled me up by my left arm. I helped as best I could, and soon enough we were both on level ground above the gully. I shouldered my pack again and stood up. Darkness was thickening and the rain had gotten heavier.

   

All the shelter we found for that night was a cliff face that leaned outward at the top, so that at the bottom there was a narrow space of somewhat drier ground. We made a campfire, not caring that it might draw orcs to us. We were drenched through from the rain, and without a fire the cold would have been as lethal as any orc’s sword.

After a dinner eaten in silence, Gileinas made me take off my coat of armour and the clothes underneath. He tugged the pieces of moss away from the wound. I pulled my cloak over my uninjured shoulder and wrapped it around myself as best I could, and tried to keep from shivering in the cold. Then I felt Gileinas’ hand on my shoulder go very still and heard a catch in his breath.

I listened for a moment. There was no sign of orcs or any other danger approaching.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think the arrow was poisoned”, he said reluctantly, as though by not saying it he might have made it not true.

The breath turned to ice in my chest. Orcs used many kinds of poisons, but none of them offered a pleasant death. Some there were antidotes for, but I knew that even if the poison on the arrow was one of them, we did not have an antidote with us. Some of the poisons a strong man might survive by luck, but that did not much comfort me. I had seen men with poisoned wounds during the war, lying in terrible agony that the healers had no means to ease in the infirmary tents until either death took them or the poison’s strength waned. I had heard some of them beg for death because the pain was more than they could bear.

“There is nothing we can do about that now”, I said, trying to not let my voice shake. “Just get the arrow out and do what you can for the wound.”

I felt Gileinas pull tentatively at the arrow. It hurt, but not as much as I was expecting. I felt him pull again. He cursed.

“I only got the shaft, the head has broken off. I do not think I can reach it”, he told me.

He got to work with washing the wound as best he could, and then binding it with strips of fabric torn from his spare shirt. It did not take very long. When he was done, I struggled back into my shirt and tunic. The pain in my shoulder and the entire arm was terrible and I could scarcely move it, and getting the arm through the sleeve proved a very frustrating task.

I opened out my bedroll, wrapped myself in my blanket and my cloak, and curled up to sleep. Gileinas sat with his back to the fire, looking out into the darkness. There was no need to discuss it. I was wounded. I would be the one to rest, and he would keep watch.

But the pain made it hard to sleep. I dozed off for short whiles, only to wake up again to the burning in my arm or the sting in my shoulder. Each time falling asleep again took longer than I had spent asleep. Finally after half a night spent so I sat up.

“Go to sleep, Gileinas. I can watch”, I said.

“But…”

“I cannot sleep in any case. Better that you at least are rested tomorrow.”

The fire had burned down to little more than embers, but even in the dim light I saw the doubtful look Gileinas gave me. At length he rose, however. We changed places, he lay down to sleep and I sat keeping watch.

The night passed quietly, save for the constant drumming of rain. The downpour would have made it hard to see far even by day, and in the night I could not see an arm’s length in front of me. I think even the night-eyed orcs could have passed us by fifty yards without ever catching sight or scent or sound of our presence.

The pain of my wound was relentless. As soon as I thought I might grow used to it, I shifted a little and a new wave of agony crashed over me. All I could do was sit still and hope the pain would ease. I tried not to think of the morning or the journey ahead.

I roused Gileinas as soon as there was enough light to see by. It was still raining. He looked at me blearily for a while before crawling out of his blankets. We ate breakfast, staring out into the dim grey world under morning twilight.

“What do we do now?” asked Gileinas.

“We keep going”, I said.

He sighed. “Ruinamacil, you should not…”

“I have an order to carry out. I will attempt to do so. And if I must die, I doubt I shall be more comfortable here than at any other campsite we might find.”

Gileinas looked as though he wanted to argue, but there was nothing he could say. Our campsite was not a very sheltered or comfortable one, and staying there did not give me much better odds than moving on. And we were soldiers, and orders were orders.

   

We returned to the gully, thinking we might travel further down it toward the Anduin, only to discover that the night’s downpour had turned the swift little stream into a great gushing flood that would have killed any man that went into it in an instant. We followed the route of the gully downstream for a while, but the ground fell in steep, jagged cliffs that were slick from the rain. Even walking was quickly exhausting me and my arm was useless. There was no way that I could have gotten down alive. I am not certain Gileinas could have, either.

We had hoped to make it back east somewhat nearer to the Anduin, where the hills were by and large less steep and the terrain easier to traverse, but plainly we had to find another route there. To the west the mountains rose in ever-higher peaks, and neither of us knew of a safe way to cross them before Cirith Forn en Andrath. Southward tracing our footsteps from the previous way we would not turn for fear of running into orcs again. So we turned northward, hoping to come upon a place somewhere ahead where the way eastward would be easier.

It was a wet and miserable day, and I hardly remember more of it than that. Gileinas chose our route; I followed him blindly, forcing my legs to keep walking. I could hardly think through the pain and knew very little of what was happening around us. The sounds around us turned into one constant noise from which it was impossible to distinguish anything meaningful. I could hardly see more than Gileinas a few steps ahead and the ground lying between us.

At times I felt so faint we were forced to stop and rest until the world stopped spinning and I could stand steadily again. Once a dizzy spell came upon me so suddenly that I was on my knees on the ground before I could say anything. After that Gileinas took my hand and led me like a child for the rest of the day.

I remember faintly that perhaps halfway through the day’s trek, when we had once again stopped to rest, Gileinas told me that the terrain seemed to keep leading us northwest. I do not know if I replied.

When stopped for the night, I could do nothing to help Gileinas set up camp. I slumped down and sat and watched dumbly as he built a shelter of cut branches and made a small, smoky fire to warm us. When he put a bowl of food on my lap and a spoon into my hand, I forced myself to eat, but it was an effort. I did not feel hungry, only exhausted and miserable and sick from the pain.

Gileinas wrapped me in both our blankets and made me lie down, and I wandered the borders of sleep and waking and true unconsciousness. I kept repeating to myself that Isildur had trusted me and I should not fail his trust. I should find a way to endure and complete the task that I had been given. It could not end here, not like this, not so soon. I had to bring Narsil to safety, at all costs. I had promised it to Isildur. I owed it to him. He was my lord and he had given me an order and I had to carry it out.

There is some time after that that I cannot account for. Days must have passed, but in my memory there are only some disjointed moments and hazy dreams. There is rainfall, and there is Gileinas tending to a fire, or his arms holding me, or his voice speaking words I cannot make sense of, and there is a sense that I am wasting time, that I should get up and act.

I dreamt often of Isildur. I only know they must have been dreams because he could not have been there, and because he was never so cruel with me as in some of the dreams, but they felt as real as any of what I think are waking moments. Sometimes he looked as I recalled him during the war, dressed in painted armour, his hair tied back from his face. He would look at me sternly and ask me when I would return Narsil to him, or accuse me of weakness and failing my mission. I could never find the words to explain myself to him. Other times he looked as in the days before the war, dressed in embroidered silks with a jeweled chain draped on his shoulders. He would never speak, but turn away from me, and that was accusation enough. And yet other times I saw him bloodied, bleeding from bone-deep marks of orcish weapons. The star shone red and blinding bright on his brow, and blood ran from his wounds and rose around us higher and higher until it was near to my chin and I thought I would soon drown in it. He would stare at me. I stood there, incapable of moving, my legs rooted into the ground, and could do nothing but watch him bleed.

   

I woke up to a sweet taste in my mouth and Gileinas shaking me. My body hurt all over and at first I could not make sense of where I was or what was happening. I blinked and stared at Gileinas in confusion. I could not find the words to ask any questions.

“I am sorry”, Gileinas whispered. “You must get up. I heard orcs nearby, it is not safe here anymore. We must go.”

The word orcs penetrated through the haze. I struggled to sit up, looking wildly about. The fire had been trampled out and the remains of it scattered. The shelter had been dismantled. My coat of armour and my pack were nowhere to be seen, but Gileinas’ pack and the sheath of Narsil were laid out on the ground nearby.

Gileinas shouldered his pack and Narsil and pulled me to my feet. My head spun and I clung to him. He wrapped an arm around me and began to lead me through the thicket of spruce trees. Night was quickly falling. The weather was clear, but it was very cold.

Fear gave me enough strength to keep stumbling on, though my legs ached and I knew if Gileinas had let go of me, I would have collapsed at once. The cold night air felt as though I was breathing shards of glass. Every step I took felt like a stab in my wounded shoulder, my arm was aflame with pain. I held onto the thought that there were orcs, that we could not afford to be caught by them, and grit my teeth and forced myself to endure one step more, over and over again. I must have groaned and whined in pain, but I had little breath for it. I suppose it did not make any difference to our safety; if any creature had been close enough to hear it, it would also have been close enough to hear our footsteps.

We climbed up a hill. I do not know where I found the strength for it, for even my fear and desperation were waning in the face of overwhelming pain and exhaustion. Gileinas had taken on as much of my weight as he possibly could, but the remaining burden was still nearly too much for me.

When at last Gileinas lowered me to the ground, I could do nothing but gasp and weep in pain. He held me so that my back was against his chest and my head rested on his shoulder while my mind drowned in the dark deeps of agony.

I do not think I slept that night, but I must not have lost consciousness at times. I stared dully at the stars filling the sky above. Then, with no recollection of moving, I was curled up on my side, my cloak wrapped carefully around me and my head in Gileinas’ lap. Next I saw the sky above me turned into a dull blue-green ahead of the slowly approaching dawn.

Slowly I realized that Gileinas was not with me. I shivered in the absence of his warmth. I was too weak to sit up, but I turned my head and saw his pack leaning against a stone barely more than an arm’s reach away. The shards of Narsil in their sheath were laid by my side.

I fought to remain conscious, though I do not know why. I could not have defended myself from an enemy, and if any had found me, death that caught me unawares might have been the easier option. Nonetheless I held on to the ragged edges of my awareness. The sun climbed into the sky. She still had some warmth left to give, enough that at length I stopped shivering.

The hours crawled by. Pain weighed my body down so that even my breathing was laboured, but my mind was clearer than it had been in days. I understood now consciously that I was very near death. The poison was still burning in my veins, sapping the last scant strength I had. Perhaps if I could endure a few days more, it might run its course, but I knew there was no guarantee that I would last that long.

That Gileinas had left his pack and Narsil with me was a sign that he meant to come back. I could not help but feel guilty of the predicament I had brought him into. Every moment either of us lingered in one place in these wild lands was a moment that yet another danger could find us, and so long as he tried to protect me, I was placing him in danger he might have evaded alone. But I knew also that it would be both cruel and useless to ask him to abandon me.

   

I had nearly lost the struggle against the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision when he returned to me. His face softened with relief when he saw me awake. He dropped my pack, which he had been carrying, to the ground by his own, and knelt next to me. He brushed the side of my face with his hand.

“You went back for my things?” I asked.

He nodded. “I had to leave your armour behind. It was too heavy and I cannot risk going back to retrieve it. But we cannot afford to leave the other supplies.”

I said nothing. Simply breathing was hard enough; speech was an effort I did not want to make if I did not have to. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gileinas busy himself with building a small fire and preparing food for us. I also saw him pausing from time to time to cast worried glances at me. I wished I could have reassured him.

I did not feel hungry, but he made me eat nonetheless. Afterwards I must have slept for some hours, for when I opened my eyes again, the sky was dark. The fire was still burning. Gileinas was holding me in his arms and had wrapped his cloak around both of us. He was singing softly in some tongue of the Haradrim that I could not understand. I lay still for a while, listening to his voice, feeling the beating of his heart in his chest.

“Gileinas”, I said when he ended his song.

I felt the sharper inhale when he heard me. I think he had not noticed I was awake. I tilted my head back until I could see his face, the skin tinted clay-red by the glow of the fire.

“Gileinas, if I die…”

“You are not going to die. You are not”, he insisted. It is strange, the way men instinctively deny such things as though they were in our control.

“But if I do”, said I, “then my orders must be yours to carry out. Will you promise that to me?”

Sleep had dulled my pain for a while, but now I was too awake and felt the full force of it again. I could speak no more. It took all I had to endure the pain. Gileinas must have seen it in my face. His hand strayed into my hair, stroking it quietly for some time.

“If you die, then I will do what is in my power to bring Narsil to its rightful owner. I give my word I will”, he replied at length. “But while you live I will not leave your side.”

I nodded. I let my eyes close and fell into a half-doze. Though I no longer saw it, I was aware of Gileinas’ eyes on me, but I thought nothing of it. I was warm, and would have been comfortable if not for the pain, and while Gileinas held me I could even pretend I was safe.

Gileinas shifted and woke me up. I could hear the rustle as he sought for some item. He propped my head against his shoulder and pressed something cold and metallic to my lips. He told me to drink. I obeyed. My mouth filled with the sweet taste of the cordial we had alongside waybread in the sealed wallets. I realised that I had had the same taste in my mouth when I had woken up the night before.

Warmth filled my body. My pain eased and I could breathe easier. I watched as he slipped the silver phial back into the wallet at his belt.

“I had hoped I could stretch it out longer. But last night was too hard on you”, he said.

“It was not your fault”, I replied, hearing the apology in his voice. “How much do you have left?”

“A third, maybe.”

I nodded. “I hope what you have used will be enough. Who knows if we might need it again before our journey is over.”

I fell to sleep again soon afterwards, and it was the most restful sleep I had had in days. I was alert enough the next day that I could keep watch for some time while Gileinas slept. Toward the evening I fell again into restless dreams, but the respite the cordial had given my body was enough. Some days later I started to recover.

It took a while longer before I could travel again. I was unhappy about it, but at least it gave us time to consider our course. Our last flight from the orcs had taken us up to the lower slopes of the Misty Mountains themselves, and we realised that after the way we had run in directions chosen at random, neither of us knew an easy route back to the Vales of Anduin. We also did not know where in the foothills we would have to cross the orcs might have permanent dwellings, and we thought the orcs in those regions might still be more alert than usual after our passage through. The mountains were never entirely safe and the autumn weather would not make them more so, but we nonetheless decided on trying to cross them instead of turning back eastward.

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Chapter End Notes

Hope you guys are still enjoying whatever this fic has decided to be, and hope I'll see you guys again soon-ish with a fourth chapter! (It should be the last chapter. I can't see how it could develop so much more story as I write that I'd have to up the chapter count again, but I mean... I've already thought that twice, so I no longer trust my judgement)