Sleep too soon relinquished its claim on the exhausted woman, and at last she rolled up her blanket and slipped on her boots. In the wild lands of Eregion she had started this practice of refusing to lie still when sleep refused her. She had slept little then, and the Elf she travelled with needed less, so night or day it mattered not. They would rise by light of moon, and to the soft singing of ancient songs tread on under the canopy of stars.
She had thought the nights there cold and comfortless, but she felt now that she had never known true chill until she faced the cruel cold of Forochel. Here it would be but a few minutes before the bitter cold would force her back to her blankets.
She walked through the almost silent settlement, broken only by the creaking of the poles and scattered low bushes, stiff with ice and snow, and the soft crunch of her own footsteps. The cold attacked her, burning her nose and she pulled her mantle up to protect her face.
Already she regretted leaving the shelter, but looking up, she saw what she only now realised she had sought, the sight that more than the unyielding cold stole her breath.
The sky was rent with bands of green and purple, that as she watched seem to come alive, darting like strange creatures of light and smoke. Perhaps some strange animal of starlight, a horse with the speed of Nahar, left only the trail and wind of his speed, all else unseen by mortal eyes.
She had tried to ask about the wondrous lights in the sky, seeking as ever in the village the elders, the keepers of stories. But they had seemed reluctant to answer, and she was reasonably certain that they had misunderstood her question by the strength of their refusal to speak. Few of them spoke Westron, and her grasp of their language was limited to a few words—mostly taught to her by a child who seemed to consider the only useful vocabulary that of the animals that called the frozen wastes home. This might have been marginally useful, if the little girl had not in her eagerness, drawn representations of these animals in the soft snow. Few of these were recognizable, at least to the foreigner.
But her teacher had at least been tireless and enthusiastic, and Gwetheril was reasonably certain her pronunciation was correct, even if she still had no idea whether she was referring to a rabbit or a squirrel when she spoke of “ahma”. And little would the words for either animal aid her when it came to describing the light that turned the dark and starry night to a riot of color.
That had been in Kauppa-Kohta. Would that she had stayed there as she first intended, though their welcome of the stranger had been as cold as the land. That had been no option. She had gained their tolerance, but not their trust, not yet, and now she barely could remember why she had found it so important that she do so. Her reasons seemed as flimsy as the delicate florets of ice on the shore.
She supposed she should feel some sense of accomplishment; she had, by some strange quirk of fate, found the trail of a long dead king, evidence of the dwarven mine where Arvedui had sheltered.
What had he felt, that king in desperation and hunger? A king who lost hope of a united land, beset by foes, driven to hide in the dark and dismal underground?
Now again a king sat on the throne. Now, far away, there was the sound of hammers and workmens’ songs as they rebuilt places long beset by the enemy.
But she could not hear it here in the forsaken north, and the thought was as strange as the wavering lights in the heavens.
This thread, of kingdom divided and united, of king lost and found, of sword broken and remade, she could follow. But it seemed to her she bore the weight of the losses of the years, now deep as the sea.
Would her heart have rested, had she dwelt in Númenor in the days when Nimloth filled the air with sweet fragrance, and the gliding white ships of the Elves graced the shores? Now the stench of the evil of the latter days still clung, corrupting all, overpowering her heart and will, the voice of evil echoing in her mind in the deep and corrupt places, killing, and destroying.
Her effort at seeking release, to return home before her own inevitable failure hurt others had been ignored. The captain had refused to release her from the bonds of her own actions, of her own choice to follow her kin for selfish and short-sighted reasons. She steeled herself with the last courage of a man caught between death and death.
But, she stood stubbornly in the cold a moment longer, as if to prove herself strong enough to endure the frigid night, though she now barely saw the spectacular display of the heavens. At last she retreated back to blankets and sleep.
