The Rivendell healer came up the road in April.
Her name was Arethil daughter of Nimroth. She had ridden the High Pass on the season's first clear week, with a single Elven attendant and four leather panniers of the things she had been told, by Tauriel's letter the previous autumn, would not be in the keep no matter how well-supplied the keep had become — small dark glass bottles, two long wooden cases with the careful inner partitions of a thing that had been packed for a journey it would not be repeating, a bound book of hand-drawings of plants in their winter form, a small silver-handled instrument Aldric did not know the name of, and a wrapped bundle the size of a child's head that she did not, on the courtyard, take out of its wrapping.
She dismounted in the inner yard.
She did not, on dismounting, ask for the lord.
She asked for the Lady.
She was taken up.
Aldric, who had been in the corridor when the gate-watch had rung the long single tone of an unexpected Elven arrival and who had come down to the yard fast enough to be there by the dismount, met Arethil at the foot of the stair instead of at her horse, and she inclined her head to him there — the bow of an Elven healer to a Mannish lord whose wife she had come to attend — and went past him up the stair without asking permission.
He did not, then, follow.
He had been told, in the letter Tauriel had drafted at the eighth bell of the previous winter, that the healer would set the terms of the attendance on arrival, that the terms would not be negotiable, that he would be told which terms applied to him by way of the steward, and that his role from the day of Arethil's arrival was to be the place his wife could find him by walking into a room.
He went back to his desk.
The months took the shape the months were going to take.
The Brackridge survey commission's final report came in at the fifth month. The recommendation was that mining could proceed on the southern flank of the ridge under terms that would, by the commission's hand, not displace any of the seven families on the upper slope and would compensate the four families on the lower slope for the use of a strip of grazing land. Aldric read the report at his desk, alone, in the early hours of a morning when he could not yet hear the keep stirring; he agreed with the recommendation. He signed it. He sent it back to Nálin under the council seal, with the additional clause Tauriel had written into the cover-letter the night before — the realm holds itself to compensate, not just permit; the families on the lower slope will be paid before the first stone is broken, not after.
The controlled deception closed in the eighth month.
Maira brought it to him in the inner chamber. She brought it bound, with the small leather strap she had used since the operation had begun, and she set it on the table and stood behind it. She did not, at first, sit.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"Twelve months. The wagoner has been retired from the channel; he is back in his trade-house at the upper-east, his wife and three children are safe, and his brother in the Tower of Ecthelion's garrison is now a sergeant, which has been confirmed by Húrin's last courier."
"And the second hand."
She drew a breath.
"My lord, I have not, in twelve months, identified him. Or her. I have narrowed the field to seven persons, all of whom were in the keep on the dates the false information would have been verifiable from inside the keep. I have not, in twelve months, been able to narrow it further. The agent has not, in twelve months, slipped. I am — I will not, my lord, dress this up — I am at the limit of what passive operation can give us. The agent is careful, the agent is unhurried, the agent is patient. The agent has not, by any small careless thing, marked themselves. I do not believe the agent will, in any further three or six months of waiting, mark themselves. I would, my lord — if you will hear it — propose a second operation, with a smaller false anchor, on a tighter time-frame, with a different lure."
He looked at the bound file.
"Propose it in writing. I will read it tonight. We will speak in the morning. Sit down, Maira."
She sat.
He poured her a cup. She took it. She did not, in the chair, become any less of the captain she had spent two years becoming; she did, however, take the small set of her shoulders down by a fraction of a width. The cup was a courtesy that twelve months of single-minded work had earned. She drank it. She set it down. She did not, on rising, salute. She had stopped saluting in this room a year ago.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"My second proposes, separately, that the seven names go to the Lady, by the inner channel, so that the names exist in her head as well as in mine."
"They should."
"Then I will send them tonight."
She went out.
In the ninth month, the second-class officer who had been Velan's posting-second came up from the Eleventh to deliver, by hand, the season's report.
She was Erin daughter of Earlan. She was twenty-six. She had been one of the two lieutenants who had stepped into Maira's old patrol rotation when Maira had been reassigned; she had taken to the work, by Velan's account, the way some officers took to work that they had been born to.
She delivered her report.
She also brought, by Velan's quiet instruction at the bottom of the report, the small wrapped bundle that contained a single tooled-leather purse-strap with a small worked-iron clip — Velan's own work, by Velan's own hand, at the smithy of the Eleventh garrison over the winter months — for the child, when there is a child, with the captain's compliments.
Aldric took the gift.
He set it on the corner of his desk.
He did not, in the eight days following, find a place to put it; he did not need to. The strap sat on the corner of his desk through the rest of the ninth month, and was the small visible reminder, every morning, that the country was already, by its own quiet decision, getting ready.
In the tenth month, Halbarad came up to him in the corridor.
The old man was using two of the small holly staves now, one in each hand, because the stair to the upper rooms had become more difficult than the stair to the lower rooms and the lower rooms had become the rooms he was in for most of the days. He came up to Aldric outside the door of the inner chamber. He stopped.
"My lord."
"Halbarad."
"There is — a matter, in the small order of matters, that I wish to set down before the larger matter sets the small ones aside."
"Speak it."
"The witness-elder words for the naming."
A pause.
"The Dúnedain do not, by old practice, name a child until the third week. There is a small custom — the witness-elder, who stood at the binding, stands also at the naming. I am, by the binding, the witness-elder. I would like to know whether I will be — at the naming."
Aldric looked at him.
He set his hand briefly on the old man's shoulder.
"You will be at the naming, Halbarad."
"My lord."
"In the chamber, or in the corridor, or in a chair we will set up beside the cot — wherever you can be, you will be."
"My lord."
The old man inclined his head — the small inclination, the one that was almost the only inclination the neck could still comfortably make — and went on down the corridor at the slow pace of two staves.
[THE CORRIDOR — TWO HOURS AFTER MIDNIGHT, EARLY T.A. 3004]
Halbarad was telling a story.
He had been telling it for the better part of an hour, in the long careful voice he used when he wished to fill a silence without seeming to be filling it. The story was about a Ranger named Berenor who had ridden home to a wife in childbirth across forty leagues of snow with a midwife on his saddle, and how the midwife had spent the last six leagues of the ride sharpening her shears on the inside of her own thumb because the midwife was an old woman of a particular sort and had told Berenor that she would not arrive at his wife's bed with dull shears, and that the cold of the ride was a thing the shears, but not the woman who carried them, needed to be made indifferent to.
The story was not comforting.
Aldric, who had been standing in the corridor with one shoulder against the inner wall opposite the door of the birth chamber for an hour and a quarter, registered that the story was not comforting and registered also that Halbarad was telling it because the old man had run out of comforting stories some hours ago and was, in the small private way of a man who would not let a friend stand alone in a corridor, telling whatever he had.
Aldric stood still.
He did not pace.
He had been told by Arethil, an hour past, that the second hour after midnight would, by her count, be the hour to come in. The first hour after midnight had been and gone. The corridor had a single lamp at each end. The door of the birth chamber was closed. Inside the door he could hear, at intervals, the small sounds of women's voices — Arethil's, and her Elven attendant's, and the voice of one of the keep women who had been brought in for the practical labour of the night — and once, twice, a long sound from Tauriel that was the sound of a body doing a thing the body did not, in its preferred order of things, do quietly.
He did not, in the corridor, react to the sounds.
He had been told he would not react to the sounds, by Tauriel, in the quiet conversation they had had on the eighth month's evening; he had been told he would react to the sounds, and that he would let them pass without coming through the door, and that he would not, by any sound of his own, draw the labour out of the room he was making it in.
He held.
Halbarad set the small holly staff he had been using in the corridor against the wall and sat down on the small wooden bench by the lamp. He had been on his feet for nearly the full hour, which was longer than he had been on his feet at one time in three months. He set the staff against the wall. He drew breath.
"My lord. I am sitting. I am not retreating."
"You are sitting."
"I am sitting because my legs are eighty-four years old and the bench is the right height. The story will continue from the bench."
The story did not, however, continue.
The door of the birth chamber opened.
Arethil stood in the doorway. She had the long sleeves of her tunic pushed back to the elbows. There was a stain on the front of her apron and a streak of pale-coloured something on her left forearm. Her hair, which she had bound up at the third hour of the evening, had come down on one side; the strand on the loose side was longer than Aldric had thought it would be.
She did not, in the doorway, smile.
She did not, in the doorway, frown.
She inclined her head.
"My lord. Come in."
He crossed the corridor.
He did not, on crossing, look back at Halbarad. He did not need to. He had passed the old man's bench, and he had heard the old man's small breath in the wake of his step, and he had registered that Halbarad was crying without sound on the bench, because there had been a thing Arethil had said in the doorway by the cast of her shoulders that Halbarad had read before Aldric had.
He went into the chamber.
Tauriel was on the bed.
She had been moved, by Arethil's order, from the chair she had laboured in for the long middle of the night to the bed for the last hour, and she lay back against the pillows the keep women had stacked behind her at the eighth bell. Her hair was loose. Her face was pale in the way an Elven face was pale, which was different from the pale of a Mannish face after labour and which Aldric did not, in the year of the marriage or the year of the pregnancy or the long hour past the second bell, have a frame for. There was a small bowl of something brown on the table by her elbow. The keep woman closest to the bed was wiping Tauriel's face with a damp cloth.
She had a small bundle in the crook of her left arm.
The bundle was wrapped in the pale grey linen Arethil had brought up in one of her panniers the first week, and the linen had been opened along the top so that the face of what was inside the linen was visible to the room.
Tauriel looked up.
She did not speak.
He came across.
He stopped at the side of the bed.
He looked into the linen.
The face inside the linen was very small. It was red. It had the closed eyes of a thing that had been, that morning by his own count, asleep inside another body and was now, by the count of perhaps a quarter-hour, awake outside it. The hair on the head was thin and dark. The ears — he could not, in the wrap, see the ears properly. He would see the ears later.
He set his finger against the small hand that had escaped from under the edge of the linen.
The small hand closed around his finger.
The closing was not strong. It was not, by the strength of a Mannish infant's grip, anywhere near full. It was the soft tentative closure of a half-Elven hand at the first quarter-hour of being a hand at all. The closure held.
He stood with his finger in his son's hand.
He did not speak for the count of a long minute.
He did not look at Tauriel until the count of the long minute was done.
When he did, she was watching him. She was watching him in the way she had watched him on the parapet eight years ago when she had said yes in the single word that had been the whole of the binding, and the watching had the same long-measured Elven steadiness, and the steadiness had something now under it which had not been under it on the parapet because the thing that was under it now had not, on the parapet, yet existed.
He bent over the side of the bed.
He kissed her forehead.
He said, quietly: "Hello."
She said: "Hello."
He did not, then, know which of them she was answering.
In the corner of his vision the panel had been registering, since his hand had touched the small hand in the linen, a steady slow soft sliding that he had not, in seven years of carrying the system, ever felt before. The flag was registering itself, and the registering was the flag's own work, and he had not made any decision about it because the decision had been made the moment the hand in the linen had closed on his finger.
He did not look at the panel.
He stood at the side of the bed, with his finger in his son's hand and his other hand on Tauriel's shoulder, and the panel did its registering, and the door of the chamber closed at his back as Arethil pulled it to.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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