When Demrîng and Navelwort left the Pony, Delioron exited Elwil’s room and returned into his own. He had interrogated Elwil for a long time. He hadn’t left her until he was sure she had told him everything she knew. He had made her tell him everything from the time she had been the young scholar of history Delioron had known her as fifteen years earlier. It had not been easy, but he had made her talk about her marriage to a Curate of Common Law in Minas Tirith, the son she had had with the Curate and the illness that had taken them both a few years later. She told him about the financial difficulties with her late husband’s creditors and how she had been driven out of her home to pay the debts – a young widow who had lost her child and everything she owned in life but the clothes she was wearing. Her parents and relatives were all dead too, their inheritances spent, so there had been no one to turn to for help.
It was then, at the lowest point of her life, that she had met the man who called himself Parthadan. Parthadan was an important man in Minas Tirith, the Warden of the Green, and he had an important mission for Elwil; a mission to serve the kingdom of Gondor in the age-old war against the growing shadow from the east. Naturally all of Elwil’s financial difficulties would be sorted out as well, so they wouldn’t interfere with her important duties in the service of Gondor. When you thought about it, she really didn’t have much say on the matter, now did she? She had no choice at all.
She had described Parthadan, as well as she could remember him, and her description matched Delioron’s memory of him. Elwil had never been invited to Parthadan’s office, but neither had Delioron. Parthadan had put her up in a modest apartment in the Sage’s Tier and once a week a messenger would come to bring her money. Not too much, but enough for her to eat, buy decent clothes and live comfortably. She never heard of her late husband’s creditors after that. Parthadan never came to see her in the apartment, but sometimes the messenger would come with a message: Parthadan wanted to meet her in this or that location; a tavern, a shop, a bench by a fountain… places varied. The meetings were brief, and Parthadan would give her some small assignments, with as little background information as was necessary for her to complete the task. The tasks were usually simple: deliver a letter, follow someone, meet somebody at this or that location and deliver a cryptic oral message that made no sense to Elwil whatsoever.
In her spare time, and she did have an abundance of spare time, she resumed her scholarly activities she had dropped out of when she had gotten married and birthed a child. Parthadan had approved of her studies, even encouraged them. Being a scholar was one of the best things you could be, he had often said. It opened a lot of doors and explained a lot of things. You could go anywhere in the world, and nobody would question your motives for being there if you were a scholar, a hunter of history and lost lore.
Delioron believed Elwil was telling him the truth, or at least what she believed to be the truth. But still he found it difficult to believe that Parthadan would have sent him all the way to Bree just to set him up and sacrifice him, even if Elwil’s description matched him perfectly. He could not come up with a plausible reason or scenario for Parthadan to do so. And what about the Rangers of Ithilien Demrîng had mentioned earlier? The chief of Rangers of Ithilien was Denethor’s niece Túrher, and Túrher and Parthadan had been rivals and bitter enemies for as long as he had known Parthadan. Could it be possible that Túrher had found a double for Parthadan – could it be Túrher who was using Elwil as a pawn in an elaborate scheme to set Delioron and Parthadan up for some kind of scandal in Bree? Or was Delioron so desperate to find some other reason than Parthadan’s betrayal that he was clutching at straws? Because if Parthadan had decided to sacrifice him for his own game, Delioron was finished, done for. If that was the case, he might just as well take Demrîng’s offer and flee to Mordor to become Sauron’s servant. If that was the case, he would be exiled from Gondor forever and never be safe anywhere again. Finally he had left Elwil and returned to his own room, feeling tired, confused and lost.
When Delioron was gone, Elwil sat in the gloom of her lonely, defiled room for a long time, staring at the picture of her dead son, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked at that little boy who would be ten years old now and wondered what he would have become had he been allowed to live. So many ’what-ifs’, so much lost potential. Elwil wondered if his spirit still lived on somewhere, in the afterlife, or if his soul had gone back to nothingness, ceased to exist. She wondered if he was watching her now, from some place, and what he would think of her and the choices she had made with her life. She wondered why she was torturing herself with his memory, because Mîwon was gone from this world. Only his memory lived, and only Elwil needed the pain of remembering.
After a long time she put the picture away and started cleaning her room, slowly, like a sleepwalker. She couldn’t fix what Delioron had broken, but at least she could put things back into their proper places in a desperate attempt to insert some order back into the chaos her life had become. There had been a method and efficiency to Delioron’s destruction, she noted dully, without real interest or curiosity. There were no signs of anger or malice, no desire to punish her for her betrayal, only meticulous and thorough searching through her possessions to find whatever knowledge or information he was after. Delioron was cold, inhuman, machine-like. Elwil wondered if he had always been like that or if the years in the service of Gondor and Parthadan had destroyed that part in his soul that makes us human and turned him into a machine.
When she had cleaned the room as well as she could she felt no better nor worse. She started to cry again, but she wasn’t sure what she was crying about.
Finally she got up and blew out the candle. She couldn’t stand staying another moment in this room alone with her thoughts. She needed to be around people. Delioron had destroyed all her spare clothes, so what she was wearing would have to suffice for now.
Elwil went down to the common room. It was late, and most of the guests had gone home or retired to their rooms already. She ordered wine and emptied the goblet in quick, greedy sips, then ordered more. Barliman watched her, disapproving, but poured her more wine. Elwil didn’t care what he thought of her. To hell with Barliman – to hell with everyone! She needed wine, and lots of it. She needed something to shut down her racing mind and drown the painful memories.
Elwil wasn’t sure how many goblets of wine she had drained when she heard someone talking and realized that someone was talking to her. She turned her head and saw a man sitting on the barstool next to her. He was wearing a brown cloak and a green tunic and trousers and he had tied his black shoulder-length hair into a plait in the back of his head. He looked young, but he had the leathery and weathered face of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. His eyes were pretty, very pale blue with long and thick lashes, but there was also something strangely unsettling about those eyes. He spoke Westron in Gondorian accent, very similar to Elwil’s own manner of speech.
He was flirting with her, Elwil realized. She had never seen the man before, and normally she would have been alarmed to find yet another Gondorian stranger in Bree-land under the circumstances, after all that had happened already, but she was very drunk and her fuddled mind failed to see the danger in the situation.
She was very drunk and suddenly she became aware of her state and was ashamed of it. Her bleary eyes gazed upon this good-looking but somehow smarmy stranger who was likely trying to take advantage of her groggy state, then at Barliman who kept staring at them both. It was time to call it a night and go to bed – alone. She emptied her goblet and paid Barliman, leaving a generous tip. She said something and was annoyed to notice how much she was slurring her words.
She got up and the stranger got up right after her, offering to escort her to her room. She looked him in the eyes and didn’t like what she saw in those pale blue eyes, so cock-sure of himself. Suddenly she felt angry and told the man to sod off.
Elwil turned her back to the man and walked across the common room, slowly and carefully, so nobody would see how drunk she was. She entered the corridor and walked towards the stairs.
She did not notice that the stranger was following her.
Elwil clambered up the stairs into the dimly lit corridor on the second floor. Perhaps it was the faint creak of floor-boards behind her, perhaps the strange shadow in the flickering torchlight, but something made her suddenly turn. There was a dark silhouette of a hooded stranger standing behind her, a flash of a blade in his right hand – Elwil’s reaction was fast and pure instinct when she pushed the figure on the chest hard with both hands. The man cried out, astonished, as he lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs.
Elwil ran down the stairs quickly and leaped over the man, who growled like an irritated beast as he tried to grasp Elwil’s ankle before she could get away. And he almost succeeded, his fingers wrapped around a leg of her trousers, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop her or make her lose her balance. Elwil reached the bottom of the stairs and was running towards the only person she thought could help her now.
Elwil stopped before Delioron’s room and pounded it with both fists.
”Help! Help! He’s trying to kill me… I have nowhere else to go! Please help!”
The door opened immediately, and she was once again faced with those cold, dead, marble gray eyes. Delioron grasped her arm, pulled her inside, shut the door behind her and bolted the door with a chair.
