The bell on the southern gate rang twice — visitor, not threat — and then the under-tone, slower: foreign.
Aldric was crossing the inner yard when he heard it.
He went up the wall to the gatehouse rather than around through the under-arch; faster, and the wind on the wall would tell him in a glance what the man on duty had seen. The wind in fact told him before he was halfway up the stair. It was clean wind, the cold scrubbed kind that came down off the heights when there had been no snow in three days, and on it was a smell he had not had in his nose in over a year: the woven-spice scent of a cloak laid up in cedar.
Elven.
Elven and not Tauriel.
He took the last steps two at a time.
The man on the gatehouse was Cuthwen, an older militiaman with steady nerves. He had not opened the gate. He had not refused it, either. He stood at the watching-slit and his hand was, in the unobtrusive way of older men of his profession, on his sword.
"My lord."
"How many."
"One."
"One."
"He says — Lindir of Imladris, on the errand of his master, and not in haste."
Aldric looked.
The rider was below the gate, on the cleared stone of the approach road. His horse stood quietly with one rear foot resting, the way good horses did when they had been ridden a long way by someone who knew how to ride. The rider sat upright but at ease. His hood was thrown back. The hair beneath was dark and long, the face under it carrying the slim, smooth lines of an Elf who was several thousand years older than he looked and had stopped, sometime in the third or fourth thousand of those years, taking the effort to disguise it.
There was a satchel across his back. A scroll-tube at his hip. No sword that Aldric could see, although among Elves this proved nothing — it might have been in the satchel, or under the cloak, or in a place Aldric could not see for reasons of weave.
He carried his hands openly along the reins.
"Open the gate."
"My lord."
"And send a runner for the Lady Tauriel. Quietly. Tell her — Imladris is at the gate. Not the council. The chamber."
"My lord."
Cuthwen turned and gave the orders. Aldric went down to the inner courtyard and crossed it, settling the line of his coat as he walked, conscious of having been on his feet since dawn in clothes meant for the office and not the gate. There was no time to change. There was rarely time to change. He stopped at the courtyard center as the gate opened.
Lindir of Imladris rode through.
He dismounted before he reached Aldric, and led the horse the last six paces by the rein, which was the courtesy of an envoy who did not wish to be looked up at from above. He stopped at the proper distance and inclined his head in a bow that was precise and shallow and not quite the bow given to a peer; it was the bow given to a host whose protocols one wished to honor without committing to anything.
"My Lord Aldric of Northwatch."
"Lindir of Imladris."
"You know my name."
"I have a kinswoman of yours under this roof."
"So I have heard." A faint smile, more in the eyes than the mouth. "And I have come, in part, on her account."
Aldric inclined his head.
He did not ask the question. On whose orders. The man would say what he had been sent to say in the form he had been sent to say it; pushing him would only cost the precision of the answer.
"You'll want the chamber, not the hall."
"I would, my lord, if it does not breach your courtesy."
"It doesn't. We've sat in the chamber for matters of this kind since the council was first seated. Halbarad will join us; he is my advisor and counts as household. Tauriel has been sent for."
"My thanks."
A boy came up to take the horse. Lindir gave the reins over and walked beside Aldric toward the keep at a pace that was unhurried and yet covered the ground.
He did not look at the new construction along the eastern wall. He did not look at the new barracks. He did not look at the iron stockwork of the granary roof, which Aldric had paid in coin and time over the summer to build twice the height of the old one. He did not look at any of the things a Gondorian envoy or a Bree-rep would have looked at.
He looked at the people.
Not staring. Not obvious. But there was the kind of glance an Elven scholar gave when he was indexing — the brief, soft cataloguing pass that took the carpenter's apprentice and the milkmaid and the off-duty soldier in the same sweep and put them in some interior register.
He looked, Aldric noticed, at the children especially.
There were children in the courtyard. A bundled group of them shrieking through a game of tag near the smithy. Lindir's eyes went to them and stayed an extra beat.
"They run."
"They run, yes."
"In the old chronicles I read of this country, when it was held by the line of your fathers, the children of the holdings of the North did not run loudly. They were quiet children. Their parents were quiet. There were not very many of either."
"There are now."
"There are." A pause. "I have a question, before we go to your chamber. You may answer it as a host and not as a lord, or you may decline to answer it. Either is in keeping with our errand."
"Ask."
"How long have you stopped expecting to lose them."
Aldric considered.
"About two years."
"Two years."
"After we held the orcs at Razorpeak. Before that, I thought every month would be the last."
Lindir nodded once.
"Thank you. That is useful."
He said it the way a scholar said useful — not in payment, in summary.
They went into the chamber.
[THE CHAMBER]
Tauriel was already there. So was Halbarad. They had set the chamber a particular way for receiving — the long table cleared, the chairs even-numbered, a pitcher of water and one of wine on a side stand. Halbarad had banked the fire to keep the room warm without dressing it; one did not, in receiving an envoy of Elrond, perform hospitality. One offered it, and let the offering be plain.
Tauriel stood by the window when they came in.
She did not turn at once.
Aldric watched the small thing she did with her shoulders — a settling, an arrangement of self — that he had not seen her do before. Lindir, walking in beside him, saw it too, and did not show that he had seen it.
She turned.
"Lindir."
"Lady Tauriel."
She crossed the room. She did not bow; she set her hand briefly on his forearm, and he set his briefly on hers, and that was the greeting. It was an old greeting and Aldric did not know its full meaning. He suspected it was older than Northwatch by some thousands of years, and he held his place at the door until they were done with it.
Then Lindir stepped back, and reached inside his cloak, and produced a letter.
It was a small thing. A single folded paper, sealed with a small disc of dark red wax, and stamped with a device Aldric did not know in any close detail — a six-pointed star with a small mark at the center.
Lindir offered it to Tauriel with both hands.
She took it.
She did not open it.
"From him."
"From him."
She inclined her head. She put the letter into the inner pocket of her own coat without looking down at her hand to find the pocket. She had folded it twice on the way in.
"I will read it later."
"In your own time, Lady."
She looked at Lindir a beat longer.
"Thank him for me when you return."
"I will."
Aldric closed the chamber door.
They moved to the chairs. Lindir took the seat Tauriel offered him; Aldric and Halbarad took their own; Tauriel sat at the place that was hers by long habit but that, this evening, was also the place an envoy from Imladris had chosen to recognize as hers by sitting opposite it.
Lindir did not speak first about the letter. He did not speak first about Tauriel at all. He talked about the road. He talked about the snow on the High Pass and how it lay differently this year than last. He talked about the carving the dwarf-quarter had set above their gate, which he had noticed coming in, and the workmanship of it, and the fact that he had once seen a similar carving at the deep gate of Khazad-dûm in a year when Khazad-dûm still had a deep gate to set carvings above.
He did not say I have been sent to assess your realm.
He did not need to.
He said: The carving is good. And: Your children run. And: The snow lies differently this year. And by saying these things he was telling them, as clearly as if he had read it from a roll, what Elrond's house had wished to know and what Elrond's house had been told.
Halbarad, who had spent many years in the company of Elves and several of those years in conversation with one particular Elf in Imladris itself, sat with his hands folded and his eyes mild and let the conversation run.
Aldric listened.
He had not, ever, sat in a room with an envoy of Rivendell. He had sat in a room with Glorfindel, which was different; Glorfindel did not envoy, Glorfindel arrived. This was the protocol layer beneath that, the unobtrusive watching that an old house did when it wished to know without being seen to ask.
After perhaps an hour, Lindir set down his cup.
"I will not stay long. The household has set me lodging for the night and I will be on the south road again in the morning. There is one further matter, before I go."
"Yes."
"My master would have me say — and these are his words, in his order — that the Lady Tauriel of the Greenwood, having long since become to him what kinswoman is, has his good will in her choosing, and may rely upon his house in such manners as his house may render without reaching beyond the line of its own counsel."
He stopped.
He looked at Aldric.
"That is the message, my lord. I have delivered it. I will not be asked to gloss it; I have no gloss to offer, and the wording was chosen carefully."
"I understand."
"I thought you would."
Lindir rose. He bowed again — the same precise, shallow bow — and Aldric and Halbarad rose with him, and Tauriel rose, and the four of them stood in a small formal quiet while the chamber settled around the words that had just been put into it.
Then Lindir was led to his lodging, and the door of the chamber was closed behind him, and Aldric and Tauriel and Halbarad stood for a moment in the chamber that the envoy had left.
"He said yes," Halbarad said, quietly.
"He said yes," Aldric agreed.
Tauriel had a hand on the front of her coat, over the inner pocket.
She did not say anything.
She walked to the door of the chamber and looked back at them. Her eyes found Aldric's.
"I will be in the upper room."
"Take the time you need."
She went out.
Aldric did not ask, then or after, what was in the letter.
Halbarad watched her go. He waited until the door was closed. Then he turned to the table and poured himself a cup of the wine he had not, while the envoy was present, taken.
"That was as much as he could have said and not be on record saying it."
"I know."
"He came in winter."
"He came in winter."
"They do not, generally, send Lindir out of Imladris in winter."
"No."
Halbarad drank.
"This was a thing they wanted to put on the record," he said, "without writing it."
"I know."
Aldric crossed to the window and looked out across the courtyard, at the new construction along the eastern wall, and the new barracks, and the iron stockwork of the granary that he had paid in coin and time over the summer to build twice the height of the old one. Lindir had not looked at any of it.
Lindir had looked at the children.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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