The knock came at the second candle.
Aldric had been at the letter for three hours and was on his fourth attempt at the salutation. The first three lay folded under the inkstand. He had drafted To Thranduil son of Oropher, King of the Woodland Realm, and discarded it because King of presumed a recognition Aldric had not earned the right to give or withhold. He had drafted To the King under the Mountain — no, that was Erebor, his hand had wandered, exhaustion. He had drafted Lord Thranduil, and crossed it out because Lord was diminishing where King would have flattered. The fourth attempt was the one he had been staring at for the last twenty minutes, ink dried on the nib.
To Thranduil of the Greenwood.
It was probably right. He was going to stop trusting himself to know.
The knock on the door was the second knock of the night — the first had been the steward bringing fresh ink an hour ago. This one was harder. Three sharp raps, the way a man knocks when he has been standing outside long enough that he has talked himself into knocking before he loses the nerve.
"Yes."
Gorlim came in.
He closed the door behind him with care. He had not, in the seven years Aldric had known him, slammed a door. He shut things the way he shut conversations: deliberately, with the latch placed properly in the socket, no possibility of drift.
"My lord."
"Sit."
"I'll stand."
Aldric set the pen down.
"Then I'll stand." He pushed back from the desk. He had been hunched over the letter long enough that the line of his shoulders complained on the way up. His left knee — the one that had taken a blow against a shield-rim during a drill in summer and never quite forgotten the trick — locked once, released. He moved to the fire and put his back to it, both because the warmth was welcome and because he wanted to face Gorlim head-on, not across a desk.
The captain stood in the middle of the floor. Not parade-rest, not at-ease. A third thing, the posture Gorlim took when he wanted to say something that did not have a regulation form.
"Speak."
"My lord."
"Captain. Speak."
Gorlim drew a breath.
"In the autumn of the year Maeglin came back from the Misty Mountains, I carried a knife."
A pause.
Aldric did not move.
"It was a thin one," Gorlim said. "Short blade. Bone handle. I bought it from a tinker on the road from Bree the summer after the duel. I told myself it was for cleaning game. I cleaned game with it a few times. Mostly I carried it in the inside pocket of my coat. Left side, where my right hand falls when I walk."
He said this as if he were giving a report on a flanking maneuver — precise, sparing, no adjective spent without need.
"It was meant for you."
The fire popped behind Aldric's back. He did not turn to look at it.
"I see."
"I carried it for six months. I sharpened it twice." Gorlim's hands were folded behind his back. They did not move. "I had a place picked. The trail that bends behind the smithy where it comes out of the trees on the south wall. There is a stand of three pines that closes the sightlines for about eight paces of the trail. If a man went around the curve and a second man stepped out behind him from the pines, the second man could finish his business and be back through the gate before the first man's body was found."
"You knew the trail."
"I know the trail."
"I watched you take it eleven times in the spring of that year. I counted them. I had it down to which day of the week you favored. I had it down to the morning hour."
"And then."
"And then I stopped carrying the knife."
The first thing Aldric had wanted to do, when Gorlim started speaking, was to step out from the fire and put his hand on his sword. He had not done it. He registered the impulse and let it pass. He registered it again now and let it pass again.
"Why."
Gorlim looked at the floor.
It was the first time since he had come in. He looked at it the way a man looks at a horizon line he has been trying not to look at.
"Because in the third week of the third month of that year, a child died of winter fever in the smith's quarter. Wenna's boy. The third one she lost in two years. I went down with the rest of the men of the quarter to stand a watch with her on the night she would not let go of him. She said nothing all night. She did not weep. She held the boy and stared at the door."
He swallowed.
"You came in the small hours. You did not bring a priest or a clerk or a steward. You brought a covered dish. You set it on the table by the door. You sat against the wall opposite Wenna. You did not speak. You sat there from the hour of the second watch to the hour of dawn. When the sun came up Wenna let the boy go and you helped the carpenter measure the box and you did not say a word the entire time."
Gorlim lifted his eyes.
"I had thought — until that night — that you came here to take what you could and ride out with it. I had thought my country had been handed to a man who would use it like a borrowed horse." A breath. "A man who would use a country like a borrowed horse does not sit eight hours against the wall of a woman whose son is dead, and not speak, and not leave."
He did not say more for a long time.
The fire popped again.
"I dropped the knife in the river the next morning," Gorlim said. "I did not throw it. I let it go off the side of the bridge as if I were dropping a stone. I have not spoken of it since."
"Why now."
"Because tonight you set Tauriel in our record. Tonight you tied yourself to a thing past your own life. A man who carries a knife six months and drops it because of one night against a wall — that man can sit in a hall and watch you do that and not feel its weight. But the man who sat against the wall — the man who got up after eight hours and helped a carpenter measure a box — that man has a household now. And if I do not tell him about the knife while he has a household, I will tell no one before I go, and there will be no one alive to know the shape of what he did."
He stopped.
He had said all of it. The hands behind his back had not moved.
Aldric stood at the fire.
He had not, in his life — either life — been told a thing quite like this. The instinct in him was to speak quickly, to brush it off, to absolve. He held still against the instinct. He had learned, slowly and at cost, that absolution offered in haste was not absolution; it was the absolver hurrying past the thing because it was too heavy to hold.
He waited.
When he spoke, it was quiet.
"Thank you."
Gorlim's jaw moved.
"My lord."
"Sit, Gorlim."
The captain sat.
Aldric did not. He stayed at the fire. He thought about saying that he had not known, in those days, what Gorlim was thinking; that he had not picked Wenna's vigil for anyone's benefit but Wenna's; that he had gone there because he had not been able to think of anywhere else to be, and because he had been afraid that if he did not sit somewhere quiet with someone whose grief was heavier than his own, he was going to lie down in his own bed and not get back out for a week. He thought about saying all of that.
He did not say any of it.
Some confessions did not need to be answered with confessions. They needed to be allowed to land.
"You are seven years on my borders," he said finally. "You have eight, maybe ten more in you, if the gods are kind. After that, what is built here will need a generation that is not mine and not yours."
"Yes."
"Are you telling me you have thought about what comes after."
"I am."
"Tell me."
Gorlim told him.
He had a nephew, a sister's son, in the rangers. Twelve years old. Quick. Smart in the way that worried Gorlim sometimes because smart in that way could go wrong as easily as right, and there was no one in the boy's family to steer it. He wanted the boy raised in Northwatch. He wanted him in a class, when a class was ready for someone that young. He wanted him not to be told who had asked, because if the boy knew he was being placed he would not work for the place; he had Gorlim's pride and not yet Gorlim's seasoning of it.
Aldric listened.
When Gorlim was done, he nodded once.
"Have him sent. He'll be assessed like any other candidate. If he passes, he passes."
"Thank you, my lord."
"And Gorlim."
"My lord."
"The knife."
"My lord."
"It's in the river. Leave it there."
Gorlim's mouth did something — not a smile, the captain did not smile, but a thing close enough to be the captain's version of one.
"Yes, my lord."
He rose. He bowed his head once, the way a man bows it when there is nothing more to say. He went to the door.
At the door he paused, with his hand on the latch.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"The letter to Thranduil."
Aldric looked over at his desk. To Thranduil of the Greenwood. The ink had dried clean.
"I'll finish it tonight."
"It is the right thing to write."
"I know."
"You do not know how it will be received."
"No."
Gorlim opened the door.
"Neither does he," the captain said.
He closed it behind him with the same care he had opened it with, and the latch settled cleanly in the socket. Aldric stood at the fire a long time without moving.
Then he went back to the desk, picked up the pen, and began the body of the letter.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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