Post by Admin on Jan 2, 2021 2:41:36 GMT
Author: Mirrordance
Ranking: 3rd place
Summary: When King Thranduil falls, it is his son, Legolas, who pays the ultimate price
Rating: T
Characters: Legolas, Thranduil
Warning: Some violence
The change, when it came, was deep and immediate.
One moment I was a soldier like any other in the service of our Woods, out on patrol with a handful of other elves. But with five words I was transfigured into something else entirely.
“Close ranks on hir-nin!”
The messenger, who suddenly burst forth from the trees, exclaimed it with urgency. He was not part of my immediate squad, but one of the soldiers assigned to the eastern outpost that had been my home for the past two seasons. He was our fastest, most able rider, and he arrived trailed by two of the outpost’s finest soldiers as well as its commander.
The reason why they were there under such alarming haste, and why I had been called by my honorary title rather than by the lesser, military one of “Captain” that brought me here, dawned on me quickly.
The squadron that I led was just as quick to come to the same realization, and they wordlessly took me from my position on point and surrounded me protectively on all sides.
Two of these soldiers were my royal guards and constant companions. They were always seconded to whichever unit I was assigned to in my military capacity, but their main task was my welfare as their Prince. The two soldiers our yelling messenger had arrived with, on the other hand, were the exact reverse – they were skilled infantrymen within the ranks first, but in the event of a very specific emergency, were expected to immediately switch to royal guard duties.
I knew the protocol well.
It was the practice we had all agreed on and studiously prepared for in case the King was incapacitated or killed.
The signal must have gone out. The King was down, and the line of succession had to be secured.
I took a deep breath and accepted their protection. It was my duty to do so.
# # #
They did not bother bringing me back to the eastern outpost to gather the meager belongings I tended to travel with. The first order of business was to bring me to safety, and safety was decreed to be the King’s Halls just a few hours’ rideaway. I was to go there post-haste with my – four, now – royal guard. The rest of the squad, I dispatched back to our eastern base.
“Double the guard on the border,” I ordered our commander, for our relationship changed as quickly as did my title. He was mine to command, now.
“Yes, my lord!” he said.
We both knew military history, and looked upon any assault on our King only as the first move in a dangerous game. Destabilize a territory’s leadership, and then attack. We had to be ready in case of a secondary, larger-scale assault on our people.
“Has word gone out to other outposts?” I asked.
“The emerald smoke from the Halls would have been seen by all,” the commander replied. I knew of what he spoke. In the event the King was harmed, it was the signal we had all agreed upon. Its very sight would have triggered the added precaution at all border outposts, just as it trigged my immediate return home.
It was an efficient system; quick, to-the-point and action-oriented. It would have taken messengers much longer to have to run to every distant posting and inform all of what had transpired. But what smoke signals lacked, was precise (or even imprecise) information on how the King – my father – actually fared.
I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
I did not ask the commander or the messenger who had retrieved me from my patrol any more questions, as I did not expect them to have answers. All we knew was that the signal was out. I had to come home to a father who may or may not be alive, and they had to prepare for an attack that may or may not come.
# # #
If he’s dead, I’d know it.
This single line of thought consumed me as our horses tore through the forest paths our kin knew with relentless intimacy, toward our home.
I don’t know how, but I’d know it.
Because he’s such a presence in the world, I think it would stop, even for just the length of a single second, to ponder his loss. The world would certainly stop, and that is how I’d know it.
Because our hearts are tied together by a thin but powerful string, growing taut every time we are apart, his sudden absence would snap that bond back at me, I think, and it would smart, and it would sting, and by that jarring pain I would know. I would know.
The birds would stop singing, and the trees would weep, and the sun would cease from shining, and by these, I would know.
If he’s dead, I’d know it…
The ride back to the King’s Halls was fast, but not nearly fast enough for me.
He can’t be dead, because I hear his voice in my ear telling me to have some mercy for my horse, it’s doing the best it can. He can’t be dead because he is also in my ear putting up a case for my minders, who can barely keep up. He can’t be dead because I haven’t seen him in months, it would be so unjust. He can’t be dead because he is the forest, and he is our resistance to the otherwise overwhelming, ever-encroaching dark. He can’t be dead because...
...because nothing. Sometimes people just die.
At least, that’s what adar would say.
But if he’s dead – why does my heart hear him saying it?
# # #
A party of soldiers with fresh, rider-less horses on leads intercepted us halfway back to the King’s Halls, both as further protective escort for the rest of the way, but also to speed us along. I left my exhausted horse and took a tempestuous mount eagerly, and spurred him along at twice the speed.
I did not ask the soldiers for news of my father – I did not expect them to have any, not that they would have had the authority to speak of it. If they had both, they would have said something themselves, without my prompting. This was all protocol too. Sometimes, secrecy was important.
Careless spreading of news on the King’s dea-health could have real consequences. Misinformation and panic could spread among our people. If we were dealing with an inner betrayal, we also couldn’t compromise his security. Whatever had befallen the King, I would simply have to bear not knowing more it until I crossed the gates of our Halls.
Not knowing was a curse and a comfort. Uncertainty made me anxious, but certainty of death would have crushed me. I used to think I would always rather know, but now that the possibility of my father’s loss was too close and too real, I realized I could live with not knowing forever, if it meant there was a chance he was still alive. I could live with false hope forever.
I leapt from my horse even before it came to a complete stop at our stables, tossing the reins at the gods knew whoever would care to receive them. The grounds around our gated stronghold were bustling with activity, but no one got in my way. I stalked forward and was met at the entrance by my father’s councilmen.
They were in their usual finery, not garbed in mourning black (we all have mourning black on hand, always). Their faces looked grave, but they did not take a knee and give me a bow of deference. They lowered their heads at me inrespect, as they would for a Prince, not a King.
I am not King.
My father is still alive.
My knees shook and my breath caught in my chest in relief. I looked away from them for my eyes had welled up, but to my left and my right and behind me were my guards, and beyond that tight circle were our people, and more people scattered beyond them and so on.
There was no relief to be found anywhere, and I’ve never felt so alone, surrounded by so many. There was no relief to be found here, so I blinked away at my self-pity and jutted my chin at my unhappiness. There was work to be done.
# # #
“Walk me to him,” I said to the councilman nearest me, the she-elf Galliel, our Minister of the Interior. “Explain what happened.”
My guards loosened the half-circle they had formed beside and behind me, making room for my father’s closest advisers. I assumed father would be in the healing wards and took brisk steps leading in that direction, and no one stopped or corrected me.
“There was a Woodman seeking an urgent audience with the King,” she replied as we walked, “He had information, he said. He was old and with a child. They refused to speak with anyone else. Aran-nin saw no reason to deny them, they looked harmless and pitiful really, and we have been peaceable neighbors with their kind all this while after all. They looked ragged and desperate...”
“Go on,” I prompted.
“There was a small blade,” someone else continued on her behalf. It was our War Minister, who looked ready to throw himself on his sword. “Concealed in the miserable nest of the child’s hair. It missed my soldiers’ efforts at confiscating all weapons on people coming within close proximity to your father. He had shown them mercy, and offered them his hand. The old Woodman retrieved the blade from the child’s head and slashed at the King’s palm. A trifling thing it was, until it wasn’t.”
“Poison?” I asked.
He nodded. “Their people and their ways are not known to us, and neither are their vile concoctions. We have no remedy, the child knows nothing and the elderly man has not been susceptible to our efforts at interrogation. In the meantime, the poison... it is taking your father quickly.”
My father is alive only for now.
Only for now...
My heart jolted, and I felt it like a kick in the chest. I was surprised no one saw it, or felt it with me.
“It is beyond the capacity of our healers?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “They will be able to tell you more, but it will boil down to that. We took the liberty of sending riders to seek aid from Imladris and Lothlorien. They may have knowledge that we do not, but it will take time for any help to arrive and the King cannot travel.”
I motioned for the Intelligence Minister lingering by my elbow. “I want the hardiest of your spies. Esgaroth is a thoroughfare of goods and men and much nearer. They may have a healer or chemist or magician or the gods know what, with knowledge of what ails aran-nin. But the inquiries made should be of the utmost discretion. No one beyond our borders must know of the Elvenking’s true condition.”
My first concern was father’s health, but it was not the only one. I then turned toward the preservation of our home. This was what he taught me to do.
“Are the borders secured in accordance with protocol?” I asked the War Minister.
“Double the guards,” he reported, “No one in or out except by express permission from hir-nin. Every soldier is either on duty or on ready call. We brace as if for a secondary assault. The Kingdom is also under curfew.”
Our chief diplomat, the Minister of External Affairs, added, “All of our representatives beyond our borders have been recalled, and all missions venturing outside suspended.”
“We are placed on wartime rations,” shared Galliel, “and securing supplies in the event of a long seclusion. All schooling of the little ones are suspended until further notice.”
“We’ve instituted price controls,” said the Treasury Minister, “and have also made special arrangements for the security of our gold and other valuables.”
The Commerce Minister had his own report to make. “We have immediately suspended all deliveries and commercial exchange excepting vital supplies like weaponry, or those which would be needed by our healing wards. Nighttime work is canceled in deference to the curfew too.”
“How much do our people know about what has happened here?” I asked the Intelligence Minister, upon whose sphere of work information sharing and communications fell.
“The signal of the King’s distress and the need for his son to return home was seen and understood by all,” he reported, “and there is no doubting the implications of all these restrictions we have imposed.”
“Say nothing else for now,” I ordered. “They will be patient for a little while yet. They will attribute it to our immediate occupation with the emergency. We can deal with questions later.”
We reached the healing halls, and I stopped before the entrance. It was manned by royal guards, and I fully expected – erroneously – that the advisers would leave me be to see my father alone.
“Go about your tasks,” I ordered and they dispersed quickly, except for the ministers of Intelligence and War, whose arms I reached for. “My lords.”
They immediately turned rapt attention my way.
“I wish to see my father,” I said, “but I expect you to delegate tasks to your lieutenants and return immediately to me. And please find my valet and tell him I will need my formal mourning clothes.”
They nodded without question, even as the last had been a strange and sort of macabre request indeed, and ran to do as I bid them. They were elderly statesmen, elves I knew and admired as a child and still looked to for expertise in my majority. Now they rushed to follow the word of a Princeling, even the occasional crazier instructions. I felt like a fraud, a poor copy of adar. But this was better than what I would have been, if the King Thranduil did not see it fit to prepare me for this occurrence.
The bitter truth was, elves were immune and immortal until they simply were not. By poison or blade or bow we still got hurt and died, and in times as rough as these, hurting was common and death was a constant visitor. Father did not want me to be a scared, scrambling, elfling prince if something happened to him and I had to take his position, so he made sure plans were in place and all I was expected to do was follow along until I knew better how to do things in my own way.
“I don’t need you to be like me, Legolas,” he’d said more than once. “I need you to survive until you can figure out how to be yourself in my place.”
He was such a formidable figure in my eye, forever strong, forever the King, that when I was younger I imagined he must have found it easy, taking the burden of ruling our people after grandfather fell in battle. Thranduil must have been hurting of course, but he must have taken to the crown so easily too. He must have stood angry and determined. He must have been so sure and powerful and strong...
But over the years, by the dizzying extent of how prepared he wanted me to be in the event of his own death, I realized how scared and uncertain he must have been when his father died and he had to take the burdens of a kingship. This, in my heart, counterintuitively made him even better and stronger of a person; that he was able to survive and thrive despite having limited means and limited knowledge, despite having to tread water and make things up as he went along.
His competence and dogged determination shamed me, as I gathered my breath and my courage while standing outside the doors of the room that held his failing body.
I nodded to the guards there, and they opened the doors for me. The healing hall was wide and long, lined by beds on both sides of the walls and doorways that branched out and burrowed deeper into our mountain cave, holding supply rooms, isolation and operation halls, healers’ quarters and offices, and a hallowed room that held the recently deceased. The end of the hall was a large, curtained alcove that was saved for my and father’s use whenever we were doing poorly enough to end up here. Father and I both had the misfortune to know it intimately.
The occupied cots were few today, and all of them were clustered near the entrance, away from where the King was kept. This was for the King’s privacy and dignity, yes, but also I realized, for the ease of his subjects too. For as I stepped closer and closer toward the curtained room that housed him, I could hear him in his grunting, moaning agonies.
Guards stood before this entrance too, giving me one more chance to pause and gather my courage. I set my jaws and steeled my expression. Barely sparing the guards a glance, I waved away at the curtains and the guards did as I wordlessly commanded – they pulled it open to let me inside. The heavy cloths brushed against each other when they swished closed immediately behind me.
Thranduil was the least himself that I had ever seen him.
There was that scar on the side of his face that was on full display – he had neither strength, enchantment nor inclination to conceal it now. Where his face was not marred it was mottled with pinks, reds and a deathly gray, like all the rest of his exposed skin. Those who looked after him had pulled his long, golden hair back by a string and swathed it gracelessly over the pillows on his head, to keep it away from his face and chest. Still, stray, stubborn strands clung to his sweat-slick neck and forehead. His thin shirt also similarly stuck to his body, which was almost rippling with fine tremors from the top of his head to his legs, all tangled up in blankets. His eyes were closed tightly and he thrashed his head from side to side, as if caught in a nightmare. His breaths came hard and fast. He looked deeply ill, and at the site of the injury where the poison had been administered by a blade, he bled continuously, even through the healers’ stitches and bandages. Violent bruises and angry streaks of red spread out from this hand.
It took me a long moment to realize that the head healer, who was also Minister of Health whenever he felt like leaving his precious halls, was sitting with ada. His eyes were closed and he glowed dully as he held my father’s unharmed hand. I dared not disturb him, and waited for him to notice me. I stepped forward quietly until I was on my father’s other side.
“He waits for you,” the healer murmured quietly. He reached for my hand, and placed it over my father’s. Ada’s was icy cold, but his tremors lost their edge at my touch.
“I am here, ada,” I said, and looked down on my father’s face. “I am safe, and everything is taken care of. You’ve prepared me well, just as you always meant to. All you need do is rest and recover, do you understand?”
Thranduil’s eyes opened to slits and settled on... my general direction. They wouldn’t quite focus. For a moment I wondered if I had made a mistake, and if I should instead tell him that everything was going wrong. That I was in danger and that I needed him. That our Kingdom needed him. Would he find strength to rally better that way? But if I let him think he had failed and these were indeed his last moments, I would never forgive myself. I would never let him become like that regretful, restless ghost of lore, the kind whose jobs were incomplete. If he found rest and peace with my assurances, then assurances he would have, and he would simply have to fight this ailment without my lies.
“Is he in pain?” I asked quietly. Father looked... beyond pain. He looked absent this failing body. I wasn’t sure what the shaking meant, or the grunting and moaning, but he was all reflexes it seemed, as if he was... no longer at home.
By the chief healer’s wince I deduced he felt the same. “It is good that you are here, Legolas. I do not know how much longer he can last. Sit with your father, hir-nin, and lend him comfort where you can, while you can. It is all we can do.”
It was my turn to wince for I had to leave, and quickly if I wanted some hope of being able to save father. I look down on him again, and made sure his eyes were as set on me as they could possibly be.
“Listen close, ada,” I told him fervently, “You have given me much to do, and so I must make my leave and do them. But this is not over, do you understand? This cannot be our goodbye, that all I have to say is that I cannot be with you because I am busy. I know you are fighting and trying your best, but so am I. You’ve waited for me this long, you can stand to wait a little longer. Let me try this one more thing, and in the meantime I need you to live - for my soul, for my sanity, I need you to live even if just for a little while longer. Because there is something I must do and it must be worth the price. I don’t know if it will work or not, but what I do know, is that if it works you live and if it doesn’t, at least give me time to say goodbye properly. Do you understand?”
I didn’t think he did, but that was not due to his illness for the healer looked similarly confused by my words. The confusion was all on me, but that was all right. Maybe it was better this way. The less who knew of what I was about to do, perhaps the better.
I shook my head in dismay at myself. “Never mind, ada. All I am trying to say is this – there is something I desperately need to do, and I will be back shortly. I expect you to be alive when I return, even if only long enough for a proper goodbye. Please. I cannot ask you to live for me; that would be unfair to you, upon whose hands that choice may not lie. But give me a chance to say goodbye. That is all.”
I leaned forward and pulled the stray, wet strands of hair away from his forehead. I kissed him there, right in the middle where the center of his jeweled circlet usually sat. When I backed away, his eyes had closed, but his trembling had petered off to the occasional jerk and spasm, and he looked like he was resting.
“What are you up to, Legolas?” the healer asked, worriedly. He’d known me a long time...
I ignored the question in favor of my own. “I require the assistance of your chief herbalist and chemist. Who should I commandeer?”
“The elf you seek is in the offices,” the healer said warily. “She is one and the same. Bad nerves for a healer – too cautious, not instinctive, doesn’t like cutting into flesh. But she has a soul that grows and nurtures things, and she has an eye for measurement and accuracy.”
I nodded at him and stepped away from adar, but I couldn’t resist a lingering touch at Thranduil’s hand. I turned away and wondered for an aching moment if that was the last time I would ever hold him alive...I killed the thought quickly. There were things, so many things that needed doing.
I suddenly had a better understanding of what it cost my father to walk away from me whenever I was the one lying there, hurt and sometimes on the edges of dying, but he had to turn away and do his work. The world didn’t stop for us, it never did.
I didn’t even have time to sit with him and beg him to live.
I walked away. I didn’t look back, else I might have lost my nerve. Father had prepared me for everything that had anything to do with running this kingdom in his absence, but what he couldn’t prepare me for was his absence. The sheer gone-ness of him. The possibility that I might never again see or hear or feel him. The possibility that the last time I looked at him was the last time I looked at him.
I collected the herbalist from the healers’ offices where she was half-buried in tomes about the plants and poisons of Middle-Earth. On a table sitting in a bed of cotton was the knife that had harmed aran-nin, still stained by his blood and coated with poison. I knew she was trying to find relief for my father, but I think I had a better one. I ordered her to bring the weapon and come with me. She followed immediately, but had to jog just to keep pace. Outside the healing halls, the War and Intelligence Ministers were waiting for me, just as I instructed them.
# # #
They were such pitiful creatures.
I watched my prey closely, from the spaces between the bars that separated us. Behind me were the Intelligence and War Ministers, the herbalist I accosted from the healing halls, and a small company of royal guards I was no longer permitted to shed in my capacity as Elvenking-designate, especially in our time of crisis.
The old Woodman, that surprisingly successful assassin, was near-emaciated and his dry, leathery skin - upon whom nature and a rough life had been unkind - clung to too-prominent bones. His face was scraggly, world-weary. His drooping eyes were pools of fiery indignation but also, a kind of inextricable sadness. He had a story to tell, and I was almost tempted to ask it except those same sad eyes raked over my mourning attire and flickered with victory and light, and his seeming delight in what symbolized my father’s death made me angry.
Men were lesser beings, I let myself think, weak and ephemeral. They were so fragile and fleeting in this world, that what I was about to do was a barely a pinprick in the larger scheme of things.
“The Elvenking is dead?” he asked. His voice was raspy from lack of use. Solitary imprisonment tended to do that, even though he hadn’t been here for very long. He rose from his miserable corner to shaking feet and stepped toward where I stood at the barred door to his cell.
“I am the Elvenking,” I told him evenly and let him think what he needed to think. From my end, it was not entirely untrue. I had the guards at my bidding, the ministers on my tail, my father’s crown on my head, and an heir’s mourning clothes on my back. What else was he supposed to think, other than that I had taken my father’s place?
The implications of what I said dawned on him in the exact same way that I hoped. “Is it well-known in the land?”
“I imagine the news should be making its way around as we speak.”
“Thank the gods!”
The bars that separated us was as good at keeping him inside as it was for keeping me outside and away from him. Otherwise I would have that neck in my hands and it would be so easy to break it, and then I would never get the answers I came here to seek.
“Now that you have accomplished your mission,” I said, “perhaps you can be more forthcoming with information. Think of the fate of the child you brought here and used for your schemes. It languishes in a cell like this one, same as you. It will live a longer life within it, you know. Or perhaps... shorter. I do not know which is worse.”
“The child is innocent!” he protested. “Your only quarrel is with me. Do with me as you will, I have a profound understanding of my crime, I cannot seek mercy for myself. But my lord, your father had been kind to our kin, and us specifically. You cannot be so cruel. I would never have wished him ill, nor ever dreamt of harming him. I was compelled to do so. The child was here only by necessity. She has no one else, I had to bring her. But she knew nothing of my plans!”
“Compelled by who?” I asked.
He swallowed, and appeared to come to a decision. “Perhaps it does not matter now,” he murmured. “As long as the Elvenking is dead.”
“Compelled by who?” I asked again, needing him to talk faster.
“We are a small people,” the old man rattled on, “We do not have much land, much means. We have few needs, and most of the time we have enough to survive. As of late we have been suffering from raids – dark forces from Goblin Town perhaps, or elsewhere in the Misty Mountains. There was little we could do to defend ourselves. We are not the Elvenking, nor do we have the strength of your kin in Rivendell or Lorien. In this region, we are the only easy-pickings.
“A party of them had taken many of our women and children,” he continued, his voice now trembling. “We had nothing to give them for the safe return of our loved ones. Nothing but the barest promise that we would turn on our Mirkwood neighbors when the time came. They needed proof of our word. They needed us to do something irrevocable to end what accords our people may one day in the future have. There was no other proof good as good as the shedding of the Elvenking’s blood. They still have our families – my wife, my daughters – one of them the mother of the little one. Word of the Elvenking’s death will buy their freedom.”
He stood by the bars of his cell, and looked at me imploringly. His fingers curled at the bars that bound him, and he came so close that the guards behind me stiffened, but I was not going to back away. They knew to respect that will.
“Your father was a kind and noble King,” the prisoner went on. “He saw an old man saddled with a child and gave us his time and his ear. He is greatly feared but his gentleness did not surprise me, for we have long lived peacefully beneath the eaves of your trees. He welcomed us to his halls, and held out his hand. I can say no greater praise of any being, than that he saw our poverty, had no good reason to come in aid of it, but he had opened his heart. Surely, his son would have been raised with such care and loving. Surely he is fruit that does not fall far from the tree...”
His generous words of my father’s virtues, meant to appease me, only angered me more. That he would dare take such a presence from the world, from my life... that he would use our blood for his small, silly, inconsequential bargains in his short, little life...
It blackened my mood and hardened my heart, which I welcomed greedily, for I very much did not want to concern myself with his miseries, or that of his family’s. I was barely able to concern myself with mine. I also did not want to contemplate what would become of my soul or sanity if I did decide to end his life, or that of the raggedy child he had used to gain my father’s (secretly) ready sympathy. I wished only to know what he knew. I wished only to save my father. The rest I could resolve and/or live with, later.
I motioned for one of my guards, who brought forth the child who had accompanied the old man. It was small, all skin and bones. It was bald now after we had shaved its head to assure they kept nothing else in there. But there had been anger in the spiteful gesture too, inextricably. Mercy was suddenly the luxury of a different time (as recently as yesterday...). Only people as powerful as my father could wield it, and sometimes as now – to disastrous results.
I placed the child between us, and rested my hands over its frail, quaking shoulders. The top of its shaved head barely reached my hip.
“She has your eyes,” I said to the old man. “You had mentioned your kidnapped daughter was the mother. A beloved granddaughter, isn’t she?”
The old man reached from across the bars suddenly, but I was faster. I pulled the child away from his reach, but kept them painfully close. He strained, and the tips of his fingers were a hair away from that whom he loved.
“The child is innocent!” he protested.
“They always are,” I said evenly. I motioned for the herbalist to bring forward the knife that had hurt father. She blinked and hesitated. The head of the healing wards did say she had little nerve.
None of the elves with me knew of my plans, not that they would have been foolish enough to stop me except I could see that the anxious herbalist was wondering if she had the courage to. Even the War Minister, who was a friend of long-standing to adar and had watched and helped me grow, could only stiffen and wait. I was Elvenking-designate now, and free to bloody my own hands and tarnish my own soul. They would have stopped their Prince Legolas, of this I had no doubt. But they were not going to stop me.
I grabbed the sword from the tray the herbalist carried. In some ways her fear proved useful – the old man knew now that I was blindly angry and deathly serious because even those around me dreaded what I would do.
“No!” the old man yelled, but he hadn’t even finished the word and I was already done with my deed.
I cut at the child’s arm. It was an inconsequential little nick, barely should have even drawn any blood except the poison in it seemed to spur bleeding. I released the child then and it shot to its grandfather. They embraced through the gaps between the bars.
“You are a heartless animal!” he yelled at me, but I let his anger bounce off. I wasn’t done yet, not by far.
“My father was an elf and his body larger,” I told him coldly, “She is human and small. It will take her quickly.”
“No, no,” the old man sobbed into the child’s bare head. It was already beginning to weaken, and its legs folded. The old man braced the child, and they kept their pitiful hold on each other as they slid to the floor.
“Hir-nin...” the herbalist said breathlessly, and made a tentative step towards the ailing child. The old man saw in her sympathy a potential ally.
“Please,” he begged up at her. “Please, you must help.”
“She is beyond our care,” she replied to him quietly, “what ails her is unknown to us.”
“No,” said the old man determinedly. “No. This is a rich forest, it will have, it should have everything you will need. But you have to act quickly.”
This was what I wanted. My father’s ministers gasped behind me, but steeled their expressions and said nothing as the old man spoke rapidly about the composition of an antidote. When he was finished, the herbalist stepped away and looked flushed and surprised, but determined.
“Go with her,” I told two of the guards. “Make sure she has everything she demands – supplies, personnel, anything and everything. What she requisitions comes above all.” To the herbalist herself, I said, “Ensure this fiend is not lying and test the antidote on the child first before giving it to father. I suspect she will need it sooner, at any rate.”
The old man’s head shot up at that, and his grief slowly turned to anguished realization. “But I thought... I thought... oh good gods. Oh, good gods. The Elvenking is alive. I am sorry, child. I am sorry. I have doomed your mother and those we love. I’ve doomed them. Now we may not ever get them back. Oh, good gods...”
The old man’s sobs were grating in my ear, or maybe it was clawing at my heart. I did not know how to feel about him, about his miseries, or about myself.
“The child is to be moved to the healing wards,” I told him, and the elves around me naturally treated it as a command. The old man stopped crying and looked at me with confusion – anger, disbelief, distrust, impossible hope all warred on his weathered face. “Everything that can be done for her will be done.”
To the ministers I said – “Assemble a committee, my lords, with whom we can discuss the phenomenon this Woodman is using as an excuse to attack us. I want intelligence information, and I want the extent of this betrayal investigated and answered for, and I want to know if our kin should expect a similar attack from other quarters. This cannot be allowed to stand. I wish to convene in an hour. As for the hostages being held...” I chose my words carefully. “Explore options for a rescue mission.”
“My lord!” the old man exclaimed in surprised delight.
“I make no promises to you,” I seethed at him. “And you, to whom we owe nothing, will suffer gladly whatever is in store. We will not risk ourselves needlessly for your kin, remember that.”
I turned away from him. I never want to see his face again, even in his rapturous gratitude if we should succeed in retrieving his kidnapped family.
“As for this prisoner,” I said. ‘Execute him’ danced on the tip of my tongue but instead I settled on, “If father lives, so will he. For now, keep him alive. He stays imprisoned. Keep him here until I decide to remember him.”
# # #
The world refused to stop for us.
My days were consumed by the running of a kingdom in crisis, though fears of a secondary attack thankfully proved fruitless. In the night, I sat with my father and eased him through his agonies. It was the only time I could find to beg him to stay alive, and stay alive he did.
The old Woodman’s antidote proved true for both Thranduil and the granddaughter, whom I could never find the inclination or nerve to look upon whenever I passed her bed in the healing wards on the way to the King’s. She’d lost a hand from poor circulation and rotted flesh though, on the side where I cut her. Of all that had happened to us over the course of these hard days, this is what gnawed at me the most.
I never expected to escape my sins unscathed, but I did not think I would be punished through the pain of another. Because I received it through the child’s suffering, it was a finer punishment, as if distilled, more concentrated, as if through a sieve. It tasted stronger and purer and more potent. But I thought also that her pain was efficient, because certainly it was meant to punish me and her grandfather too.
The old man would never go free, but the child he had come with would be released back to their lands and the parent whom our hardy elven soldiers had successfully rescued. Neither the old Woodman nor his people contested his punishment, though they certainly mourned it. I let some of them visit him to say goodbye. Such a crime as he had committed never would have gone unpunished, and his imprisonment was a just one.
His crime, ultimately, was not the attempt at murder. He had claimed he knew my father to be merciful, and he should have spoken plainly of his need, rather than resort to duplicity. It was an egregious mistake, and the misjudgment was his undoing.
The days melded together as we returned to some semblance of normalcy, and I had acquired new habits of my own. I sat for morning briefings with father’s ministers, and ada’s attendant Galion had learned to force a piece of bread in my hands for breakfast otherwise I would go almost entirely without meals until I or someone else remembered it at some point before bed. During the course of the day one or a few smaller groups of ministers would accost me for a variety of issues that demanded a King’s decision but not the wise counsel of the others.
To ease our people’s minds about their safety and my competence, I agreed to hold court for a very short few hours every day too, so that they could see the succession was secure and their kingdom well-handled. It did not take long for various interests to hand me petitions and lobbies during these hours, which I would then pore over at night alongside an intimidating collection of papers that included intelligence reports, military movements, missives from other territories, personal correspondence, farming yields and everything else under the sun.
The better father got, the less and less time people gave me to sit with him (and the more papers they gave). Sometimes, the only moments we had together was when I fell to an exhausted sleep on a small divan by his bed in the healing wing.
When he first woke, I was not there.
When he next woke, I was not there.
The same went for the other times. I would arrive late at night and he would already be deeply asleep and resting. My first hint of just how well he was recovering, was when I entered one evening to find the divan I’d been sleeping for weeks in, outfitted with the comfortable bedclothes of my own suites, rather than the frugal pillows and flimsy blankets of the healing halls. It could only have been by order of my father.
When Thranduil had had enough of our missing each other back and forth, he took matters into his own hands. I was drifting off to sleep, and I felt an insistent palm softly patting at my cheek.
“Ada” I greet him with a smile. It felt strange on my mouth, as if it could have split my face in two. It was like an unused muscle, stinging after injury and immobility. My joy had atrophied until now. I don’t believe I’ve smiled since before I was pulled from the eastern outpost with news that my father was grievously hurt.
“Legolas,” he said. His voice was hoarse and broken, and he was clearly far from well but he was recovering. It warmed my heart as few things could, now that my mind was weighed by something I was dying to tell him. I was dying to confess to him.
“Have they told you?” I asked quietly, “Have you been informed of the things I’ve done?”
He pretended to be obtuse. “What you have done... saved the King’s life. Outsmarted an assassin. Organized the rescue of abducted women and children. Ran a kingdom in crisis and restored it to proper order. Of what do you speak?”
I was in no mood to be coddled. “I hurt a child. I cut and poisoned her and she lost her hand.”
Father’s eyes softened at my determination to discuss this. “Ah,” he said gently, “There is that.”
“I wish to apologize but I find I cannot feel sorry,” I told him. “How can I be both contrite and yet so sure that I was right? I cannot regret the outcome of her suffering at my hands. I can only regret my hand in it. How is one to reconcile...”
I looked away from him and down at, yes, the very hands in question. They were shaking, and I clasped them together to try and keep them still.
“I always,” I struggled to find my words. “I always knew I was willing to die for you, for our people. I was also certainly willing to kill, though I did not understand to what extent. I did not expect how easy it was to decide to cut and bleed her. It was so easy to risk her life to get to what I want.”
“You trusted in her grandfather’s love,” the King pointed out. “You had reasonable belief that she would survive.”
“Yes but I didn’t know if he even knew of the antidote,” I answered. “I did not know for sure and I gambled with her life, ada, make no mistake. I had to risk it, I had to look resolute. She really could have died. I could have murdered an innocent.”
“But you didn’t,” father said. “You didn’t. Sometimes you take your victories as they come. Can you imagine the barest triumph of it, just the smallest most vital win of it, that we are all somehow alive?”
“Except I cannot look at her,” I said. “I can barely look at myself. Does it get easier, aran-nin? Does it ever get easier to live with decisions like these?”
“Do you want it to?”
“Yes,” was the easy answer and I let myself say it before I think it through. Who wouldn’t want pain to ease?
“I do not want that for you,” he said softly. “It’s not you, to not feel things. To cease from caring. I would take this pain from you if I could, ion-nin, but in this capacity, we will carry many burdens. Guilt amongst them.”
“Is that all she is, in the end?” I asked. “One of many sins? An episode, a casualty, a little bite that itches and swells for a little while?”
“Yes,” he answered plainly.
“Maybe the old man was right to call me an animal.”
“This is the world we live in, Legolas,” the King told me. “We all learn to go on the only way that we know how. The child, for example, will know not to expect an apology from you, the same way you should not expect the gratitude of her people for the rescue of her family. Everyone pays a price, and we all just... go on.”
I bite my lip and nod. It was all just... philosophy. I would change nothing of what I’d done in the past, and pondering this would change nothing of how I would conduct myself in the future. Maybe I was just tired, and needed proper rest. Thranduil reached for my trembling hands with his uninjured one.
Hands, hands, hands...
I lowered my head to our hands and wept over them, bitterly.
“We just go on, Legolas,” he said, “We just go on.”
I wept at my father’s bedside until I fell asleep.
THE END
Ranking: 3rd place
Summary: When King Thranduil falls, it is his son, Legolas, who pays the ultimate price
Rating: T
Characters: Legolas, Thranduil
Warning: Some violence
The change, when it came, was deep and immediate.
One moment I was a soldier like any other in the service of our Woods, out on patrol with a handful of other elves. But with five words I was transfigured into something else entirely.
“Close ranks on hir-nin!”
The messenger, who suddenly burst forth from the trees, exclaimed it with urgency. He was not part of my immediate squad, but one of the soldiers assigned to the eastern outpost that had been my home for the past two seasons. He was our fastest, most able rider, and he arrived trailed by two of the outpost’s finest soldiers as well as its commander.
The reason why they were there under such alarming haste, and why I had been called by my honorary title rather than by the lesser, military one of “Captain” that brought me here, dawned on me quickly.
The squadron that I led was just as quick to come to the same realization, and they wordlessly took me from my position on point and surrounded me protectively on all sides.
Two of these soldiers were my royal guards and constant companions. They were always seconded to whichever unit I was assigned to in my military capacity, but their main task was my welfare as their Prince. The two soldiers our yelling messenger had arrived with, on the other hand, were the exact reverse – they were skilled infantrymen within the ranks first, but in the event of a very specific emergency, were expected to immediately switch to royal guard duties.
I knew the protocol well.
It was the practice we had all agreed on and studiously prepared for in case the King was incapacitated or killed.
The signal must have gone out. The King was down, and the line of succession had to be secured.
I took a deep breath and accepted their protection. It was my duty to do so.
# # #
They did not bother bringing me back to the eastern outpost to gather the meager belongings I tended to travel with. The first order of business was to bring me to safety, and safety was decreed to be the King’s Halls just a few hours’ rideaway. I was to go there post-haste with my – four, now – royal guard. The rest of the squad, I dispatched back to our eastern base.
“Double the guard on the border,” I ordered our commander, for our relationship changed as quickly as did my title. He was mine to command, now.
“Yes, my lord!” he said.
We both knew military history, and looked upon any assault on our King only as the first move in a dangerous game. Destabilize a territory’s leadership, and then attack. We had to be ready in case of a secondary, larger-scale assault on our people.
“Has word gone out to other outposts?” I asked.
“The emerald smoke from the Halls would have been seen by all,” the commander replied. I knew of what he spoke. In the event the King was harmed, it was the signal we had all agreed upon. Its very sight would have triggered the added precaution at all border outposts, just as it trigged my immediate return home.
It was an efficient system; quick, to-the-point and action-oriented. It would have taken messengers much longer to have to run to every distant posting and inform all of what had transpired. But what smoke signals lacked, was precise (or even imprecise) information on how the King – my father – actually fared.
I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
I did not ask the commander or the messenger who had retrieved me from my patrol any more questions, as I did not expect them to have answers. All we knew was that the signal was out. I had to come home to a father who may or may not be alive, and they had to prepare for an attack that may or may not come.
# # #
If he’s dead, I’d know it.
This single line of thought consumed me as our horses tore through the forest paths our kin knew with relentless intimacy, toward our home.
I don’t know how, but I’d know it.
Because he’s such a presence in the world, I think it would stop, even for just the length of a single second, to ponder his loss. The world would certainly stop, and that is how I’d know it.
Because our hearts are tied together by a thin but powerful string, growing taut every time we are apart, his sudden absence would snap that bond back at me, I think, and it would smart, and it would sting, and by that jarring pain I would know. I would know.
The birds would stop singing, and the trees would weep, and the sun would cease from shining, and by these, I would know.
If he’s dead, I’d know it…
The ride back to the King’s Halls was fast, but not nearly fast enough for me.
He can’t be dead, because I hear his voice in my ear telling me to have some mercy for my horse, it’s doing the best it can. He can’t be dead because he is also in my ear putting up a case for my minders, who can barely keep up. He can’t be dead because I haven’t seen him in months, it would be so unjust. He can’t be dead because he is the forest, and he is our resistance to the otherwise overwhelming, ever-encroaching dark. He can’t be dead because...
...because nothing. Sometimes people just die.
At least, that’s what adar would say.
But if he’s dead – why does my heart hear him saying it?
# # #
A party of soldiers with fresh, rider-less horses on leads intercepted us halfway back to the King’s Halls, both as further protective escort for the rest of the way, but also to speed us along. I left my exhausted horse and took a tempestuous mount eagerly, and spurred him along at twice the speed.
I did not ask the soldiers for news of my father – I did not expect them to have any, not that they would have had the authority to speak of it. If they had both, they would have said something themselves, without my prompting. This was all protocol too. Sometimes, secrecy was important.
Careless spreading of news on the King’s dea-health could have real consequences. Misinformation and panic could spread among our people. If we were dealing with an inner betrayal, we also couldn’t compromise his security. Whatever had befallen the King, I would simply have to bear not knowing more it until I crossed the gates of our Halls.
Not knowing was a curse and a comfort. Uncertainty made me anxious, but certainty of death would have crushed me. I used to think I would always rather know, but now that the possibility of my father’s loss was too close and too real, I realized I could live with not knowing forever, if it meant there was a chance he was still alive. I could live with false hope forever.
I leapt from my horse even before it came to a complete stop at our stables, tossing the reins at the gods knew whoever would care to receive them. The grounds around our gated stronghold were bustling with activity, but no one got in my way. I stalked forward and was met at the entrance by my father’s councilmen.
They were in their usual finery, not garbed in mourning black (we all have mourning black on hand, always). Their faces looked grave, but they did not take a knee and give me a bow of deference. They lowered their heads at me inrespect, as they would for a Prince, not a King.
I am not King.
My father is still alive.
My knees shook and my breath caught in my chest in relief. I looked away from them for my eyes had welled up, but to my left and my right and behind me were my guards, and beyond that tight circle were our people, and more people scattered beyond them and so on.
There was no relief to be found anywhere, and I’ve never felt so alone, surrounded by so many. There was no relief to be found here, so I blinked away at my self-pity and jutted my chin at my unhappiness. There was work to be done.
# # #
“Walk me to him,” I said to the councilman nearest me, the she-elf Galliel, our Minister of the Interior. “Explain what happened.”
My guards loosened the half-circle they had formed beside and behind me, making room for my father’s closest advisers. I assumed father would be in the healing wards and took brisk steps leading in that direction, and no one stopped or corrected me.
“There was a Woodman seeking an urgent audience with the King,” she replied as we walked, “He had information, he said. He was old and with a child. They refused to speak with anyone else. Aran-nin saw no reason to deny them, they looked harmless and pitiful really, and we have been peaceable neighbors with their kind all this while after all. They looked ragged and desperate...”
“Go on,” I prompted.
“There was a small blade,” someone else continued on her behalf. It was our War Minister, who looked ready to throw himself on his sword. “Concealed in the miserable nest of the child’s hair. It missed my soldiers’ efforts at confiscating all weapons on people coming within close proximity to your father. He had shown them mercy, and offered them his hand. The old Woodman retrieved the blade from the child’s head and slashed at the King’s palm. A trifling thing it was, until it wasn’t.”
“Poison?” I asked.
He nodded. “Their people and their ways are not known to us, and neither are their vile concoctions. We have no remedy, the child knows nothing and the elderly man has not been susceptible to our efforts at interrogation. In the meantime, the poison... it is taking your father quickly.”
My father is alive only for now.
Only for now...
My heart jolted, and I felt it like a kick in the chest. I was surprised no one saw it, or felt it with me.
“It is beyond the capacity of our healers?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “They will be able to tell you more, but it will boil down to that. We took the liberty of sending riders to seek aid from Imladris and Lothlorien. They may have knowledge that we do not, but it will take time for any help to arrive and the King cannot travel.”
I motioned for the Intelligence Minister lingering by my elbow. “I want the hardiest of your spies. Esgaroth is a thoroughfare of goods and men and much nearer. They may have a healer or chemist or magician or the gods know what, with knowledge of what ails aran-nin. But the inquiries made should be of the utmost discretion. No one beyond our borders must know of the Elvenking’s true condition.”
My first concern was father’s health, but it was not the only one. I then turned toward the preservation of our home. This was what he taught me to do.
“Are the borders secured in accordance with protocol?” I asked the War Minister.
“Double the guards,” he reported, “No one in or out except by express permission from hir-nin. Every soldier is either on duty or on ready call. We brace as if for a secondary assault. The Kingdom is also under curfew.”
Our chief diplomat, the Minister of External Affairs, added, “All of our representatives beyond our borders have been recalled, and all missions venturing outside suspended.”
“We are placed on wartime rations,” shared Galliel, “and securing supplies in the event of a long seclusion. All schooling of the little ones are suspended until further notice.”
“We’ve instituted price controls,” said the Treasury Minister, “and have also made special arrangements for the security of our gold and other valuables.”
The Commerce Minister had his own report to make. “We have immediately suspended all deliveries and commercial exchange excepting vital supplies like weaponry, or those which would be needed by our healing wards. Nighttime work is canceled in deference to the curfew too.”
“How much do our people know about what has happened here?” I asked the Intelligence Minister, upon whose sphere of work information sharing and communications fell.
“The signal of the King’s distress and the need for his son to return home was seen and understood by all,” he reported, “and there is no doubting the implications of all these restrictions we have imposed.”
“Say nothing else for now,” I ordered. “They will be patient for a little while yet. They will attribute it to our immediate occupation with the emergency. We can deal with questions later.”
We reached the healing halls, and I stopped before the entrance. It was manned by royal guards, and I fully expected – erroneously – that the advisers would leave me be to see my father alone.
“Go about your tasks,” I ordered and they dispersed quickly, except for the ministers of Intelligence and War, whose arms I reached for. “My lords.”
They immediately turned rapt attention my way.
“I wish to see my father,” I said, “but I expect you to delegate tasks to your lieutenants and return immediately to me. And please find my valet and tell him I will need my formal mourning clothes.”
They nodded without question, even as the last had been a strange and sort of macabre request indeed, and ran to do as I bid them. They were elderly statesmen, elves I knew and admired as a child and still looked to for expertise in my majority. Now they rushed to follow the word of a Princeling, even the occasional crazier instructions. I felt like a fraud, a poor copy of adar. But this was better than what I would have been, if the King Thranduil did not see it fit to prepare me for this occurrence.
The bitter truth was, elves were immune and immortal until they simply were not. By poison or blade or bow we still got hurt and died, and in times as rough as these, hurting was common and death was a constant visitor. Father did not want me to be a scared, scrambling, elfling prince if something happened to him and I had to take his position, so he made sure plans were in place and all I was expected to do was follow along until I knew better how to do things in my own way.
“I don’t need you to be like me, Legolas,” he’d said more than once. “I need you to survive until you can figure out how to be yourself in my place.”
He was such a formidable figure in my eye, forever strong, forever the King, that when I was younger I imagined he must have found it easy, taking the burden of ruling our people after grandfather fell in battle. Thranduil must have been hurting of course, but he must have taken to the crown so easily too. He must have stood angry and determined. He must have been so sure and powerful and strong...
But over the years, by the dizzying extent of how prepared he wanted me to be in the event of his own death, I realized how scared and uncertain he must have been when his father died and he had to take the burdens of a kingship. This, in my heart, counterintuitively made him even better and stronger of a person; that he was able to survive and thrive despite having limited means and limited knowledge, despite having to tread water and make things up as he went along.
His competence and dogged determination shamed me, as I gathered my breath and my courage while standing outside the doors of the room that held his failing body.
I nodded to the guards there, and they opened the doors for me. The healing hall was wide and long, lined by beds on both sides of the walls and doorways that branched out and burrowed deeper into our mountain cave, holding supply rooms, isolation and operation halls, healers’ quarters and offices, and a hallowed room that held the recently deceased. The end of the hall was a large, curtained alcove that was saved for my and father’s use whenever we were doing poorly enough to end up here. Father and I both had the misfortune to know it intimately.
The occupied cots were few today, and all of them were clustered near the entrance, away from where the King was kept. This was for the King’s privacy and dignity, yes, but also I realized, for the ease of his subjects too. For as I stepped closer and closer toward the curtained room that housed him, I could hear him in his grunting, moaning agonies.
Guards stood before this entrance too, giving me one more chance to pause and gather my courage. I set my jaws and steeled my expression. Barely sparing the guards a glance, I waved away at the curtains and the guards did as I wordlessly commanded – they pulled it open to let me inside. The heavy cloths brushed against each other when they swished closed immediately behind me.
Thranduil was the least himself that I had ever seen him.
There was that scar on the side of his face that was on full display – he had neither strength, enchantment nor inclination to conceal it now. Where his face was not marred it was mottled with pinks, reds and a deathly gray, like all the rest of his exposed skin. Those who looked after him had pulled his long, golden hair back by a string and swathed it gracelessly over the pillows on his head, to keep it away from his face and chest. Still, stray, stubborn strands clung to his sweat-slick neck and forehead. His thin shirt also similarly stuck to his body, which was almost rippling with fine tremors from the top of his head to his legs, all tangled up in blankets. His eyes were closed tightly and he thrashed his head from side to side, as if caught in a nightmare. His breaths came hard and fast. He looked deeply ill, and at the site of the injury where the poison had been administered by a blade, he bled continuously, even through the healers’ stitches and bandages. Violent bruises and angry streaks of red spread out from this hand.
It took me a long moment to realize that the head healer, who was also Minister of Health whenever he felt like leaving his precious halls, was sitting with ada. His eyes were closed and he glowed dully as he held my father’s unharmed hand. I dared not disturb him, and waited for him to notice me. I stepped forward quietly until I was on my father’s other side.
“He waits for you,” the healer murmured quietly. He reached for my hand, and placed it over my father’s. Ada’s was icy cold, but his tremors lost their edge at my touch.
“I am here, ada,” I said, and looked down on my father’s face. “I am safe, and everything is taken care of. You’ve prepared me well, just as you always meant to. All you need do is rest and recover, do you understand?”
Thranduil’s eyes opened to slits and settled on... my general direction. They wouldn’t quite focus. For a moment I wondered if I had made a mistake, and if I should instead tell him that everything was going wrong. That I was in danger and that I needed him. That our Kingdom needed him. Would he find strength to rally better that way? But if I let him think he had failed and these were indeed his last moments, I would never forgive myself. I would never let him become like that regretful, restless ghost of lore, the kind whose jobs were incomplete. If he found rest and peace with my assurances, then assurances he would have, and he would simply have to fight this ailment without my lies.
“Is he in pain?” I asked quietly. Father looked... beyond pain. He looked absent this failing body. I wasn’t sure what the shaking meant, or the grunting and moaning, but he was all reflexes it seemed, as if he was... no longer at home.
By the chief healer’s wince I deduced he felt the same. “It is good that you are here, Legolas. I do not know how much longer he can last. Sit with your father, hir-nin, and lend him comfort where you can, while you can. It is all we can do.”
It was my turn to wince for I had to leave, and quickly if I wanted some hope of being able to save father. I look down on him again, and made sure his eyes were as set on me as they could possibly be.
“Listen close, ada,” I told him fervently, “You have given me much to do, and so I must make my leave and do them. But this is not over, do you understand? This cannot be our goodbye, that all I have to say is that I cannot be with you because I am busy. I know you are fighting and trying your best, but so am I. You’ve waited for me this long, you can stand to wait a little longer. Let me try this one more thing, and in the meantime I need you to live - for my soul, for my sanity, I need you to live even if just for a little while longer. Because there is something I must do and it must be worth the price. I don’t know if it will work or not, but what I do know, is that if it works you live and if it doesn’t, at least give me time to say goodbye properly. Do you understand?”
I didn’t think he did, but that was not due to his illness for the healer looked similarly confused by my words. The confusion was all on me, but that was all right. Maybe it was better this way. The less who knew of what I was about to do, perhaps the better.
I shook my head in dismay at myself. “Never mind, ada. All I am trying to say is this – there is something I desperately need to do, and I will be back shortly. I expect you to be alive when I return, even if only long enough for a proper goodbye. Please. I cannot ask you to live for me; that would be unfair to you, upon whose hands that choice may not lie. But give me a chance to say goodbye. That is all.”
I leaned forward and pulled the stray, wet strands of hair away from his forehead. I kissed him there, right in the middle where the center of his jeweled circlet usually sat. When I backed away, his eyes had closed, but his trembling had petered off to the occasional jerk and spasm, and he looked like he was resting.
“What are you up to, Legolas?” the healer asked, worriedly. He’d known me a long time...
I ignored the question in favor of my own. “I require the assistance of your chief herbalist and chemist. Who should I commandeer?”
“The elf you seek is in the offices,” the healer said warily. “She is one and the same. Bad nerves for a healer – too cautious, not instinctive, doesn’t like cutting into flesh. But she has a soul that grows and nurtures things, and she has an eye for measurement and accuracy.”
I nodded at him and stepped away from adar, but I couldn’t resist a lingering touch at Thranduil’s hand. I turned away and wondered for an aching moment if that was the last time I would ever hold him alive...I killed the thought quickly. There were things, so many things that needed doing.
I suddenly had a better understanding of what it cost my father to walk away from me whenever I was the one lying there, hurt and sometimes on the edges of dying, but he had to turn away and do his work. The world didn’t stop for us, it never did.
I didn’t even have time to sit with him and beg him to live.
I walked away. I didn’t look back, else I might have lost my nerve. Father had prepared me for everything that had anything to do with running this kingdom in his absence, but what he couldn’t prepare me for was his absence. The sheer gone-ness of him. The possibility that I might never again see or hear or feel him. The possibility that the last time I looked at him was the last time I looked at him.
I collected the herbalist from the healers’ offices where she was half-buried in tomes about the plants and poisons of Middle-Earth. On a table sitting in a bed of cotton was the knife that had harmed aran-nin, still stained by his blood and coated with poison. I knew she was trying to find relief for my father, but I think I had a better one. I ordered her to bring the weapon and come with me. She followed immediately, but had to jog just to keep pace. Outside the healing halls, the War and Intelligence Ministers were waiting for me, just as I instructed them.
# # #
They were such pitiful creatures.
I watched my prey closely, from the spaces between the bars that separated us. Behind me were the Intelligence and War Ministers, the herbalist I accosted from the healing halls, and a small company of royal guards I was no longer permitted to shed in my capacity as Elvenking-designate, especially in our time of crisis.
The old Woodman, that surprisingly successful assassin, was near-emaciated and his dry, leathery skin - upon whom nature and a rough life had been unkind - clung to too-prominent bones. His face was scraggly, world-weary. His drooping eyes were pools of fiery indignation but also, a kind of inextricable sadness. He had a story to tell, and I was almost tempted to ask it except those same sad eyes raked over my mourning attire and flickered with victory and light, and his seeming delight in what symbolized my father’s death made me angry.
Men were lesser beings, I let myself think, weak and ephemeral. They were so fragile and fleeting in this world, that what I was about to do was a barely a pinprick in the larger scheme of things.
“The Elvenking is dead?” he asked. His voice was raspy from lack of use. Solitary imprisonment tended to do that, even though he hadn’t been here for very long. He rose from his miserable corner to shaking feet and stepped toward where I stood at the barred door to his cell.
“I am the Elvenking,” I told him evenly and let him think what he needed to think. From my end, it was not entirely untrue. I had the guards at my bidding, the ministers on my tail, my father’s crown on my head, and an heir’s mourning clothes on my back. What else was he supposed to think, other than that I had taken my father’s place?
The implications of what I said dawned on him in the exact same way that I hoped. “Is it well-known in the land?”
“I imagine the news should be making its way around as we speak.”
“Thank the gods!”
The bars that separated us was as good at keeping him inside as it was for keeping me outside and away from him. Otherwise I would have that neck in my hands and it would be so easy to break it, and then I would never get the answers I came here to seek.
“Now that you have accomplished your mission,” I said, “perhaps you can be more forthcoming with information. Think of the fate of the child you brought here and used for your schemes. It languishes in a cell like this one, same as you. It will live a longer life within it, you know. Or perhaps... shorter. I do not know which is worse.”
“The child is innocent!” he protested. “Your only quarrel is with me. Do with me as you will, I have a profound understanding of my crime, I cannot seek mercy for myself. But my lord, your father had been kind to our kin, and us specifically. You cannot be so cruel. I would never have wished him ill, nor ever dreamt of harming him. I was compelled to do so. The child was here only by necessity. She has no one else, I had to bring her. But she knew nothing of my plans!”
“Compelled by who?” I asked.
He swallowed, and appeared to come to a decision. “Perhaps it does not matter now,” he murmured. “As long as the Elvenking is dead.”
“Compelled by who?” I asked again, needing him to talk faster.
“We are a small people,” the old man rattled on, “We do not have much land, much means. We have few needs, and most of the time we have enough to survive. As of late we have been suffering from raids – dark forces from Goblin Town perhaps, or elsewhere in the Misty Mountains. There was little we could do to defend ourselves. We are not the Elvenking, nor do we have the strength of your kin in Rivendell or Lorien. In this region, we are the only easy-pickings.
“A party of them had taken many of our women and children,” he continued, his voice now trembling. “We had nothing to give them for the safe return of our loved ones. Nothing but the barest promise that we would turn on our Mirkwood neighbors when the time came. They needed proof of our word. They needed us to do something irrevocable to end what accords our people may one day in the future have. There was no other proof good as good as the shedding of the Elvenking’s blood. They still have our families – my wife, my daughters – one of them the mother of the little one. Word of the Elvenking’s death will buy their freedom.”
He stood by the bars of his cell, and looked at me imploringly. His fingers curled at the bars that bound him, and he came so close that the guards behind me stiffened, but I was not going to back away. They knew to respect that will.
“Your father was a kind and noble King,” the prisoner went on. “He saw an old man saddled with a child and gave us his time and his ear. He is greatly feared but his gentleness did not surprise me, for we have long lived peacefully beneath the eaves of your trees. He welcomed us to his halls, and held out his hand. I can say no greater praise of any being, than that he saw our poverty, had no good reason to come in aid of it, but he had opened his heart. Surely, his son would have been raised with such care and loving. Surely he is fruit that does not fall far from the tree...”
His generous words of my father’s virtues, meant to appease me, only angered me more. That he would dare take such a presence from the world, from my life... that he would use our blood for his small, silly, inconsequential bargains in his short, little life...
It blackened my mood and hardened my heart, which I welcomed greedily, for I very much did not want to concern myself with his miseries, or that of his family’s. I was barely able to concern myself with mine. I also did not want to contemplate what would become of my soul or sanity if I did decide to end his life, or that of the raggedy child he had used to gain my father’s (secretly) ready sympathy. I wished only to know what he knew. I wished only to save my father. The rest I could resolve and/or live with, later.
I motioned for one of my guards, who brought forth the child who had accompanied the old man. It was small, all skin and bones. It was bald now after we had shaved its head to assure they kept nothing else in there. But there had been anger in the spiteful gesture too, inextricably. Mercy was suddenly the luxury of a different time (as recently as yesterday...). Only people as powerful as my father could wield it, and sometimes as now – to disastrous results.
I placed the child between us, and rested my hands over its frail, quaking shoulders. The top of its shaved head barely reached my hip.
“She has your eyes,” I said to the old man. “You had mentioned your kidnapped daughter was the mother. A beloved granddaughter, isn’t she?”
The old man reached from across the bars suddenly, but I was faster. I pulled the child away from his reach, but kept them painfully close. He strained, and the tips of his fingers were a hair away from that whom he loved.
“The child is innocent!” he protested.
“They always are,” I said evenly. I motioned for the herbalist to bring forward the knife that had hurt father. She blinked and hesitated. The head of the healing wards did say she had little nerve.
None of the elves with me knew of my plans, not that they would have been foolish enough to stop me except I could see that the anxious herbalist was wondering if she had the courage to. Even the War Minister, who was a friend of long-standing to adar and had watched and helped me grow, could only stiffen and wait. I was Elvenking-designate now, and free to bloody my own hands and tarnish my own soul. They would have stopped their Prince Legolas, of this I had no doubt. But they were not going to stop me.
I grabbed the sword from the tray the herbalist carried. In some ways her fear proved useful – the old man knew now that I was blindly angry and deathly serious because even those around me dreaded what I would do.
“No!” the old man yelled, but he hadn’t even finished the word and I was already done with my deed.
I cut at the child’s arm. It was an inconsequential little nick, barely should have even drawn any blood except the poison in it seemed to spur bleeding. I released the child then and it shot to its grandfather. They embraced through the gaps between the bars.
“You are a heartless animal!” he yelled at me, but I let his anger bounce off. I wasn’t done yet, not by far.
“My father was an elf and his body larger,” I told him coldly, “She is human and small. It will take her quickly.”
“No, no,” the old man sobbed into the child’s bare head. It was already beginning to weaken, and its legs folded. The old man braced the child, and they kept their pitiful hold on each other as they slid to the floor.
“Hir-nin...” the herbalist said breathlessly, and made a tentative step towards the ailing child. The old man saw in her sympathy a potential ally.
“Please,” he begged up at her. “Please, you must help.”
“She is beyond our care,” she replied to him quietly, “what ails her is unknown to us.”
“No,” said the old man determinedly. “No. This is a rich forest, it will have, it should have everything you will need. But you have to act quickly.”
This was what I wanted. My father’s ministers gasped behind me, but steeled their expressions and said nothing as the old man spoke rapidly about the composition of an antidote. When he was finished, the herbalist stepped away and looked flushed and surprised, but determined.
“Go with her,” I told two of the guards. “Make sure she has everything she demands – supplies, personnel, anything and everything. What she requisitions comes above all.” To the herbalist herself, I said, “Ensure this fiend is not lying and test the antidote on the child first before giving it to father. I suspect she will need it sooner, at any rate.”
The old man’s head shot up at that, and his grief slowly turned to anguished realization. “But I thought... I thought... oh good gods. Oh, good gods. The Elvenking is alive. I am sorry, child. I am sorry. I have doomed your mother and those we love. I’ve doomed them. Now we may not ever get them back. Oh, good gods...”
The old man’s sobs were grating in my ear, or maybe it was clawing at my heart. I did not know how to feel about him, about his miseries, or about myself.
“The child is to be moved to the healing wards,” I told him, and the elves around me naturally treated it as a command. The old man stopped crying and looked at me with confusion – anger, disbelief, distrust, impossible hope all warred on his weathered face. “Everything that can be done for her will be done.”
To the ministers I said – “Assemble a committee, my lords, with whom we can discuss the phenomenon this Woodman is using as an excuse to attack us. I want intelligence information, and I want the extent of this betrayal investigated and answered for, and I want to know if our kin should expect a similar attack from other quarters. This cannot be allowed to stand. I wish to convene in an hour. As for the hostages being held...” I chose my words carefully. “Explore options for a rescue mission.”
“My lord!” the old man exclaimed in surprised delight.
“I make no promises to you,” I seethed at him. “And you, to whom we owe nothing, will suffer gladly whatever is in store. We will not risk ourselves needlessly for your kin, remember that.”
I turned away from him. I never want to see his face again, even in his rapturous gratitude if we should succeed in retrieving his kidnapped family.
“As for this prisoner,” I said. ‘Execute him’ danced on the tip of my tongue but instead I settled on, “If father lives, so will he. For now, keep him alive. He stays imprisoned. Keep him here until I decide to remember him.”
# # #
The world refused to stop for us.
My days were consumed by the running of a kingdom in crisis, though fears of a secondary attack thankfully proved fruitless. In the night, I sat with my father and eased him through his agonies. It was the only time I could find to beg him to stay alive, and stay alive he did.
The old Woodman’s antidote proved true for both Thranduil and the granddaughter, whom I could never find the inclination or nerve to look upon whenever I passed her bed in the healing wards on the way to the King’s. She’d lost a hand from poor circulation and rotted flesh though, on the side where I cut her. Of all that had happened to us over the course of these hard days, this is what gnawed at me the most.
I never expected to escape my sins unscathed, but I did not think I would be punished through the pain of another. Because I received it through the child’s suffering, it was a finer punishment, as if distilled, more concentrated, as if through a sieve. It tasted stronger and purer and more potent. But I thought also that her pain was efficient, because certainly it was meant to punish me and her grandfather too.
The old man would never go free, but the child he had come with would be released back to their lands and the parent whom our hardy elven soldiers had successfully rescued. Neither the old Woodman nor his people contested his punishment, though they certainly mourned it. I let some of them visit him to say goodbye. Such a crime as he had committed never would have gone unpunished, and his imprisonment was a just one.
His crime, ultimately, was not the attempt at murder. He had claimed he knew my father to be merciful, and he should have spoken plainly of his need, rather than resort to duplicity. It was an egregious mistake, and the misjudgment was his undoing.
The days melded together as we returned to some semblance of normalcy, and I had acquired new habits of my own. I sat for morning briefings with father’s ministers, and ada’s attendant Galion had learned to force a piece of bread in my hands for breakfast otherwise I would go almost entirely without meals until I or someone else remembered it at some point before bed. During the course of the day one or a few smaller groups of ministers would accost me for a variety of issues that demanded a King’s decision but not the wise counsel of the others.
To ease our people’s minds about their safety and my competence, I agreed to hold court for a very short few hours every day too, so that they could see the succession was secure and their kingdom well-handled. It did not take long for various interests to hand me petitions and lobbies during these hours, which I would then pore over at night alongside an intimidating collection of papers that included intelligence reports, military movements, missives from other territories, personal correspondence, farming yields and everything else under the sun.
The better father got, the less and less time people gave me to sit with him (and the more papers they gave). Sometimes, the only moments we had together was when I fell to an exhausted sleep on a small divan by his bed in the healing wing.
When he first woke, I was not there.
When he next woke, I was not there.
The same went for the other times. I would arrive late at night and he would already be deeply asleep and resting. My first hint of just how well he was recovering, was when I entered one evening to find the divan I’d been sleeping for weeks in, outfitted with the comfortable bedclothes of my own suites, rather than the frugal pillows and flimsy blankets of the healing halls. It could only have been by order of my father.
When Thranduil had had enough of our missing each other back and forth, he took matters into his own hands. I was drifting off to sleep, and I felt an insistent palm softly patting at my cheek.
“Ada” I greet him with a smile. It felt strange on my mouth, as if it could have split my face in two. It was like an unused muscle, stinging after injury and immobility. My joy had atrophied until now. I don’t believe I’ve smiled since before I was pulled from the eastern outpost with news that my father was grievously hurt.
“Legolas,” he said. His voice was hoarse and broken, and he was clearly far from well but he was recovering. It warmed my heart as few things could, now that my mind was weighed by something I was dying to tell him. I was dying to confess to him.
“Have they told you?” I asked quietly, “Have you been informed of the things I’ve done?”
He pretended to be obtuse. “What you have done... saved the King’s life. Outsmarted an assassin. Organized the rescue of abducted women and children. Ran a kingdom in crisis and restored it to proper order. Of what do you speak?”
I was in no mood to be coddled. “I hurt a child. I cut and poisoned her and she lost her hand.”
Father’s eyes softened at my determination to discuss this. “Ah,” he said gently, “There is that.”
“I wish to apologize but I find I cannot feel sorry,” I told him. “How can I be both contrite and yet so sure that I was right? I cannot regret the outcome of her suffering at my hands. I can only regret my hand in it. How is one to reconcile...”
I looked away from him and down at, yes, the very hands in question. They were shaking, and I clasped them together to try and keep them still.
“I always,” I struggled to find my words. “I always knew I was willing to die for you, for our people. I was also certainly willing to kill, though I did not understand to what extent. I did not expect how easy it was to decide to cut and bleed her. It was so easy to risk her life to get to what I want.”
“You trusted in her grandfather’s love,” the King pointed out. “You had reasonable belief that she would survive.”
“Yes but I didn’t know if he even knew of the antidote,” I answered. “I did not know for sure and I gambled with her life, ada, make no mistake. I had to risk it, I had to look resolute. She really could have died. I could have murdered an innocent.”
“But you didn’t,” father said. “You didn’t. Sometimes you take your victories as they come. Can you imagine the barest triumph of it, just the smallest most vital win of it, that we are all somehow alive?”
“Except I cannot look at her,” I said. “I can barely look at myself. Does it get easier, aran-nin? Does it ever get easier to live with decisions like these?”
“Do you want it to?”
“Yes,” was the easy answer and I let myself say it before I think it through. Who wouldn’t want pain to ease?
“I do not want that for you,” he said softly. “It’s not you, to not feel things. To cease from caring. I would take this pain from you if I could, ion-nin, but in this capacity, we will carry many burdens. Guilt amongst them.”
“Is that all she is, in the end?” I asked. “One of many sins? An episode, a casualty, a little bite that itches and swells for a little while?”
“Yes,” he answered plainly.
“Maybe the old man was right to call me an animal.”
“This is the world we live in, Legolas,” the King told me. “We all learn to go on the only way that we know how. The child, for example, will know not to expect an apology from you, the same way you should not expect the gratitude of her people for the rescue of her family. Everyone pays a price, and we all just... go on.”
I bite my lip and nod. It was all just... philosophy. I would change nothing of what I’d done in the past, and pondering this would change nothing of how I would conduct myself in the future. Maybe I was just tired, and needed proper rest. Thranduil reached for my trembling hands with his uninjured one.
Hands, hands, hands...
I lowered my head to our hands and wept over them, bitterly.
“We just go on, Legolas,” he said, “We just go on.”
I wept at my father’s bedside until I fell asleep.
THE END