"And what is the matter to be set before us, my lord?"
The question came from the bench where Halvir son of Halvar sat, hands folded over the leather of his belt, posture exactly as it had been at every council since spring — neither bowed nor stiff, the posture of a man who would not be the first to commit and would not be the last either. He was a careful man. Aldric had appointed him to the council for exactly that quality.
He was about to find out whether the appointment had been a mistake.
"A matter of household," Aldric said.
He stood at the front of the hall. The full council was seated — six members, half-circle, the long benches behind them packed three deep with the leaders he had asked to attend in addition: Halbarad on the left, Gorlim on the right, the senior officers of the new corps along the middle bench, Grimgar from the dwarf quarter at the end with two of his elders beside him, and along the back wall — the part of the hall that opened to the public when public business was on — a thin scatter of merchants and craftsmen who had come to watch because it was known the meeting concerned something more than the usual rolls.
Tauriel stood to his right.
Not behind him. To his right. That had been agreed. The visual was deliberate; he had drawn it in his head the way he drew battle order, and she had looked at the diagram and nodded once.
"My household." He did not raise his voice; the hall carried. "And what shall be entered, today, into the record of this realm."
He looked at the council clerk. The clerk had his pen ready. He had been told that morning what to write and had been told that he was not to write a word of it until the matter had been spoken in full and answered in full.
"On the night of the twelfth of October last," Aldric said, "I asked Tauriel of the Greenwood whether she would be my wife. She answered. The answer was yes. I bring the matter before this council and this hall to be witnessed and entered into the record of Northwatch, and to be named as it stands."
He let the words sit a beat.
He had thought, in the drafting, about a longer preface. He had cut it. The shorter the matter, the less surface there was to grab.
He had also been right.
Halvir's hand moved fractionally on the leather of his belt.
But before Halvir had finished the motion that preceded speech, Gorlim was on his feet.
The captain did not push back from the bench dramatically. He simply rose, the way Aldric had seen him rise a hundred times before he gave an order, and stood for a moment with his hands behind his back and waited until the room understood that he had taken the floor.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"Before any matter is raised in concern, may the council hear plainly that the man who stands at your shoulder gives his pledge. I have ridden with the Lady Tauriel of the Greenwood for seven years on the borders of this realm. I have seen her bow turn a flank that would have rolled over us. I have seen her stand a night-watch in weather that broke men twice her weight and stand it again the next night without complaint. I have, more than once, owed her my life." A breath. "If the matter before us is whether she will be acknowledged Lady of Northwatch, my answer is yes, and I would ask leave to be the first to set it on the record."
The clerk's pen did not move yet. The clerk was watching Aldric.
Aldric inclined his head once.
"Write it. First."
The pen moved.
Halvir had let his hand drop back to his belt during Gorlim's speech. He waited until the pen had stopped, which was a courtesy. Then he stood, in his own turn, in a way that was neither hostile nor in retreat.
"My lord. May I be heard."
"You may, Halvir."
"I have no quarrel with the Lady Tauriel personally. None. Let that be the first thing entered after Captain Gorlim's pledge." He paused for the pen, which scratched briefly. "I have a question that is not a personal quarrel. It is a question of standing, and of how that standing is read by the powers around us."
"Ask it."
"The Lady Tauriel is, as the hall knows, of the Woodland Realm. Of King Thranduil's people. It is also known — though it has not, to my knowledge, been spoken in this hall before — that she left that realm under a sentence of exile."
A murmur along the back wall.
Halvir kept on. "I do not raise this to shame. I raise it to ask: if she stands Lady of Northwatch, and if a question of standing should be put to us by Thranduil's court — and I think we should not pretend that question will not come — what is the answer we give? I would prefer," he said, choosing the word, "prepared. I would prefer we know what we say when it is asked. That is the whole of my concern."
He sat down.
Halbarad had not moved. Halbarad's eyes were on Aldric, and there was, faintly, the very small look the old man got when he wanted to step in and was deciding whether he had to.
He didn't have to.
Aldric turned slightly, and looked to his right.
He had said he would name the matter. He had named it. He had said she would speak for herself. He stepped back half a pace, the courtesy small but seen, and let her have the floor.
Tauriel took it.
She walked four paces forward, until she stood at the place a speaker stood in this hall, which was a stone slightly worn down by generations of Men who had spoken there before her. She set her hand for a moment, lightly, on the head of the staff that lay across the council's table — the gesture the local custom asked of any speaker before they began, claiming the right of the words.
Then she straightened, and she addressed Halvir.
"You ask," she said, "what we say when Thranduil's court asks. I will tell you what I will say, and the council may decide whether to say it the same."
Her voice carried easily. It had always carried easily; it was a voice trained on woods and ridgelines, not halls, and the hall caught it cleanly.
"My exile from the Greenwood was given to me by Thranduil son of Oropher in the year of the great battle at Erebor, for choices that I made in that battle, against his orders, in service of friends to whom I owed a debt. I have not, in the centuries since, asked it to be lifted. I have not, in the centuries since, set foot on the soil of his realm.
"That is the matter that is in the record of the Greenwood.
"This is the matter that I would set in the record of this hall: I came to this place when it was a ruin and three dozen Men. I have set arrows on its walls and on its borders for seven years. I have buried men I trained, and I have stood beside men I would not part from while breath was in me. I have, in the slow way of long-lived things, learned the names of the children born in the year I came, and seen those children grown tall enough to hold a bow. This is the realm to which I will answer for my standing."
She paused.
She looked at Halvir directly.
"If Thranduil's court asks of this hall, what is she to you, the answer this hall may give is: she is the Lady of Northwatch, named in our record by witness, and the matter of her standing in the Greenwood is between her and the king of the Greenwood, and not between this hall and any other. That is the answer I would put in your mouth, Halvir, if you will carry it." A small pause. "I am not asking you to defend my exile. I am asking you to defend the line between his realm and ours. That line is older than I am, and it is yours to draw, not mine."
She stopped.
She did not sit. There was no seat. She held the place at the speaker's stone and waited.
The hall was very quiet.
Halvir got up again. It took him a moment. He was not a quick man, in council or out of it; he was a man who turned an argument three times in his head before he spoke it. He had turned this one twice.
"My lady."
"Halvir."
"That is an answer I can carry."
A beat.
"Set it in the record," he said, to the clerk. "Set my support beside Captain Gorlim's."
The pen moved.
The other four members of the council, in turn — none of whom had risen, none of whom had any quarrel that had not been carried by Halvir on their behalf — gave their voices one after the other to the clerk. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. The dwarf elders at the end murmured between themselves a moment and then Grimgar gave a single dwarf-fashion nod that the clerk had been told in advance to record as a vote of the quarter, which the clerk did. The corps officers along the middle bench were not council and did not vote, but the senior of them — Theoden, just back from the Coldfells, the boy still in the road-dust of three days' ride — got up and put his hand to his sword hilt and said, Witness, and sat down. Three more captains in turn did the same.
Halbarad rose last.
He did not say anything.
He bent his head once, the way old men bent their heads in this country when a thing was settled that they wished settled, and sat down.
The clerk finished writing.
"Read it back," Aldric said.
The clerk read it back.
The words were the words. They were short. On this day, in the eleventh month of the year, before the council and hall of Northwatch, the Lady Tauriel of the Greenwood is acknowledged the betrothed and intended Lady of Northwatch, by the witness of the council and the witness of the hall, and recorded.
"Set the seal."
The clerk set the seal.
Aldric, who had not spoken since he gave Tauriel the floor, stepped forward to take her hand briefly in the sight of the hall and then released it, and the formal portion was done.
[AFTERWARD — SIDE CHAMBER]
The hall emptied slowly, the way halls did when a thing had happened in them that people wanted to talk about before they went back to their work.
Aldric had retreated to the side chamber off the council floor — the small room with the one window and the table he used for the conversations that were not, technically, council business but tended to happen at the edges of it. Halbarad was already there, sitting on the bench along the wall, looking smug in the particular way old men permitted themselves.
"Don't," Aldric said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face is saying it."
"My face has been saying it for two years."
Tauriel came in behind him. She closed the door. The sound of the hall outside dropped.
"There is a man in the back rank," she said, "who has the look of a Breeland trader. He was writing on a wax tablet during my speech. Did either of you arrange that, or has Bree sent us a quieter sort of envoy this season?"
"Bree sent the trade representative two days ago," Aldric said. "Barliman's nephew. The shorter one with the red beard. Yes, he was taking notes."
"What he writes will be in Bree in a fortnight."
"It will."
"And then it will be everywhere."
"It will."
She considered that. She did not look displeased. She looked the way she had looked on the balcony, when she had been measuring elevation and wind.
"Then we have," she said, "two weeks before the questions start arriving from outside the borders."
"Two weeks."
"What do we do in two weeks?"
Aldric crossed to the small table. There was a map on it, weighted at the corners with stones from the orchard. He had not unrolled it for this conversation; it had been on the table from the morning council and no one had cleared it.
He set his hand on the western edge of it, where the road from Northwatch bent toward Bree.
"Halbarad," he said, without looking up. "Pick me three Rangers and a courier. I want them on the Bree road before the trader is. Whatever he writes, I want our version to get there first."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
The old man stood up. The bench creaked. He went to the door.
He paused with his hand on the latch.
"Aldric."
"Yes."
"You did it well."
"You're going to be insufferable about this for the rest of the season."
"I am," Halbarad said. "I have earned it."
He went out.
Aldric stood at the table a moment with his hand on the western edge of the map. Tauriel came up beside him.
"Two weeks," she said again.
"Two weeks."
He folded the map up under his hand and tucked the stones aside.
"I'll write to Thranduil tonight."
Her head came up. "You will?"
"Before he hears it from a Bree-rumor."
"He will not answer."
"He will not answer. But I will have written. And the letter will exist. And the next time the matter is raised, the letter will be the thing it is raised against, not silence." He looked at her. "Unless you would rather I didn't."
She thought about it. He could see her thinking about it.
"Write it," she said, finally. "Write it in your hand. Not the clerk's."
"I will."
"And let me read it before it goes."
"I will."
She set her hand on the back of his and left it there.
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"I have just put a great many years of my own quiet into your hall."
"I know."
"I will need," she said, "in a day or two, to ride out for a morning. Alone. Up to the high ridge above the orchard. I will come back by midday."
"Take whatever morning you want."
"I am not asking permission. I am telling you where I will be."
"Then I'll know where to find you if the messenger from the Bree road comes back faster than I think."
"You'll know where to find me."
She lifted her hand.
He pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, and reached for paper.
The letter to Thranduil was going to take some time, and it was going to have to be the right kind of letter, and the candle on the table was going to be one of two before it was done.
He picked up the pen.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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