Wild Monster

by Matthew Harrington

  "Steed is there because I put him there." She growled at the elf. "I have charge of Osp. The Elvenking would have left him to wander back to the Halls, provided all the butterflies in his head led him in that direction. He's more distracted by this place than a child."

  Osp blinked, slowly, and the distant forges sparked in his voice, "That's because there are so many wonders… in it."

  She stepped beside him. "Bee, are you all right?"

  He ignored her words.

  A longbow interjected itself between Dorondir and Lusis and nudged Osp's ribs, and not gently. Telfeth's brows had drawn down on her forehead. Osp pulled away to look from her bow and up at her, but all the small elf-archer had to say was a leaden, "When the Lady asks a question, Western-gwass, so help me, you answer."

  Lusis blinked, "What did you call him?"

  And Telfeth's lip actually curled, "A stain." She smoothed her expression. To forbidding.

  Osp knitted his long fingers and stepped away from the smaller elf. "What was the question, Lady of the Great Greenwood?"

  "Don't call me that. We said we were friends," She instructed. It was surprising when he set a hand on his heart and inclined his head to her.

  Now his voice was yielding as cotton fluff. "In all this, I thought you might have forgotten."

  "I don't forget my friends," she glanced from him and over to Dorondir. "That goes for you too."

  The elf spy's gaze found her shoulder, just a fraction off her expression, and his voice was softer than she'd ever noted of him prior, "Of course."

  Lusis stepped between them, Telfeth unapologetically straight behind her, and went to look at the wall. She sucked in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. The beautiful drawing actually went straight onto the ceiling. It covered the back wall too, where a great harp dominated, and where elves now stood and watched, in apprehension.

  It moderated her temper to see them all looking so tense. But it also worried her.

  The drawing was like nothing she'd ever seen. It looked to be the work of many elves. She stepped back to take more of it in and murmured, "Steed, has Icar seen this?"

  Her Ranger made a very human headshake in her peripheral vision. "I hadn't thought that way."

  The elves would fail on answering what the headshake meant, she felt sure. Lusis quickly decided that Icar would love this. He would likely stare at it for hours.

  The city of Lake Township rolled out almost as if a charcoal rubbing had been made from far up in the sky, and transferred to the sanded wood here. This had been done from the rooftops, for certain. The elves raced across the tightly knit houses day and night, and the level of detail that they saw was… overwhelming. Lusis stood and looked at this, dazed. It had been painted, this map from above, in warm and quiet washes of colour that, she would bet, were perfectly accurate.

  "But what does this have to do with math? I…" she glanced at Dorondir, "I don't follow."

  The spy exhaled. Elves filed out and pulled the draperies shut. One of them turned up an oil lantern and delivered it to the hands of the spy. Osp stepped in beside Lusis and his expression, for a moment, was a sunny as a child's. "What cleverness your Thranduil displays, friend-Lusis. And such beautiful execution by this half-Noldor spy of yours."

  Lusis took from this, "You drew that, Dorondir?" She had to look up at the ceiling to see all of it. How had he done that work unnoticed? Although… who was in these buildings at night, but Argus' Rangers and the section elves of the Elvenking?

  Osp smiled, "He did draw this. And these others, here, painted it in. But, as sublime as it is, beauty is not the most wonderful thing about it. That is a secret that the spy and Elfking," he took and raised the lamp, "brought to light."

  The light of the lamp on the darkened room bounced off small chips of bright glass that had been embedded in the painting. There were shining trails no wider than a strand of web that crossed the entirety of Lake Township, they came in several colours – white, red, and blue. Lusis glanced at the river glass on the table and saw all the same colours there. The sources were those beautifully carved bits of glass. She quickly glanced over the white marble hammer and pestle on the table and understood how the glass had become shining trails concealed in the painting.

  "What do the colours mean?" She looked from Osp to Dorondir.

  "The white… is for the King of Mirkwood." Dorondir explained unhurriedly, as if reluctant. "The red is for Lord Elrond. It is the blue… that is the one you should attend to. It is where the math comes in." He looked to Osp, and the tall elf rocked up on his toes in excitement before settling beside Lusis again.

  "Well," Osp inhaled and opened a long hand at the wall. "You see, there are reports of lights over the city at night. These were things that the Master, Drivenn, paid little attention, it seems. Your Thranduil, your King, however, was not the same in his thinking. His mind is… enjoyably systematic in that it sees or hears of phenomenon and wants to study and understand. And even to explain and predict. He is a flawless Sinda in that sense. This is how the Sindar came to construct great elf ships that sail all the waters of the world, so far from shore they can navigate only by star and sunstone. Yet they never lose their way, the fair ones of the sea."

  Steed huffed a breath, which caused everyone to look at him. And he flushed. "I forget he's a sea-elf. It's hard to imagine him there."

  Lusis' quirking smile was genuine. She hadn't ever thought of the great elf in that sense either. She turned back to the map and noted. "So the blue lines are… are they reports of lights?"

  Dorondir told her, "Yes. The blue dots are."

  "They seem random."

  "They are not," Osp said with certainty and nodded. "I have been over the math dozens of times. They are no more random than the colour of the Elfking's eyes, being that his bloodline did not diverge from his kind until the birth of his half-Silvan son. And in the colours reported of that particular leaf of the line of Thranduilion, Legolas, you see the math of probability, friend-Lusis. It is not random that he is blond, or that he is blue, rather than silver-eyed."

  She looked at the tall, lovely elf with his bee clasp and said, "Of course it is."

  "But of course not." Dorondir told her. "White horses to white horses give white horses."

  But Lusis frowned, "People don't work that way."

  "Oh, but secretly, all things do," said Osp. "There is math for everything in the natural world, friend-Lusis." He pointed the slide-rule he so loved at the wall. "And there was math buried in the lights. Your King's mind is trained by long practice, little friend. He could sense that there was a pattern here. He did predict, twice, the proper areas of the city where the next might appear. You see that his travels twice parallel the lines made in blue."

  "We were with him on one of those nights," Dorondir explained. "When the Elflord collapsed."

  A zephyr of worry passed through the elves in the room and ruffled their smooth expressions at the sound of that. They hurried to either look away or steady themselves to hear on.

  "He is clever." Osp was forced to admit, "Perhaps… brilliant. And he came very close. Though… if they'd come upon their quarry one fears what might have befallen the fading Lord of Rivendell."

  Lusis felt herself sigh deeply, "Elrond is Lord, but you cannot find it in you to admit that Thranduil Oropherion is King?" He made things difficult for himself, Lusis felt sure of that now.

  "The Valar themselves allowed him to choose his race." Huffed Osp. "He is the blood of Elwe, the Sindar High-King to which your match was once a subject, and his adar, Oropher, was a general. If either of the two of them could ever truly deserve the title of King it would be-"

  Telfeth's bow made a whooshing sound in air. Osp fell back, hurriedly, and it narrowly avoided thwacking him.

  Dorondir's stance shifted at once, and, Lusis swore, his green eyes flashed like the edge of a knife as he said, "You dispute my Lord and disparage my King. Why are you here?" His hand glided to a blade on his belt.

&n
bsp; And Lusis set her hand over his.

  He turned to look down at her, clearly tired of Osp's opinions.

  Lusis stepped forward as Dorondir backed away. "I think I told you, he's a child. He's innocent and bright, and ignorant and rude, like a child."

  Osp half-turned. "Friend-Lusis?"

  "And, Osp, stop provoking these good souls with your conceit," she snapped at the Western elf, "or you can fend them off with that slide-rule of yours. Do you hear me?"

  At that notion, Osp folded inward and pulled his shimmering cloak around himself again. "Fact. This map is the culmination of your King's night-walks with the Lord of Rivendell. Fact. Your King was able to intuit a pattern he did not have the equations to verify. Now he has them. Shouldn't that victory matter more than these petty squabbles?"

  Steed took the lamp from Osp and pulled the tall elf to a more defensible position behind Lusis. "Maybe you should stop talking, Bee. Or at least stop stinging others."

  "Lest you be swatted," Lusis sighed as she released Dorondir. The spy of Rivendell, and citizen of Mirkwood, had command of his quicksilver temper again. His green gaze was locked on hers a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then he stepped aside and glanced at Osp.

  "Be useful," said Dorondir. "Show her."

  The light through the door was one with a perfect explanation. The Elfking in his pale blue snow-fall clothes and his Mithril antler crown. He was so pale and bright that the lamp seemed dull once he'd entered.

  His silver gaze went to Lusis. "I am not surprised to find you here at last."

  She took a step toward him. "Then why didn't you tell me?"

  "Tell you?" he said slowly, and his bright head tilted. "What would I have said to you, Lusis-dess, of half-formed suspicions, and incoherent conjectures, as if handing you a key would make clear that there is a mountain to be opened?"

  He stepped up to her and then glanced at Steed.

  Steed brought the lamp without having to be told to do so. The Elfking's graceful hand took it up and he raised it, which was an irony to Lusis. The King shone so bright that his light swallowed that of the simple oil lantern. But as he raised it, the fragments of glass blinked again.

  "We were able to predict some of the pattern you see here."

  "You were, my King," Ewon corrected the King quietly, his flinty, storm-coloured eyes on Osp.

  "I did try to convince Osp to finish constructing the lines, that he might connect all the points on this map," the King looked down at Lusis beside him and shadows played on his profile from two light sources. It coloured him blue and gold together, like some great master's painting. "He refused."

  Without as much as a tap at the doorframe, Jan Kasia walked into the room that he'd granted the Mirkwood elves. He was nervous. At first he looked to the King: tall, still, and lit up by the lantern that gleamed against the curves of his Mithril crown. Then Kasia glanced around the elves gathered in the dimness, for he had never been in a place with so many of them at once. They were motionless capitals, as silent as an empty house, and their long eyes glittered, glassy, in the lamp light. The elves might have been embossed in silver, except Lusis Buckmaster moved. She turned to take him in, and in that moment, managed to look no more human to him than a golden fawn at the edge of the immense woodlands, West.

  The lamp lowered in the King's hand, and he looked on. "Come, Master of Boats. Join us."

  Kasia hesitated. He glanced through the room and found that the most human of people therein, Lusis Buckmaster, and Steed Roanhead, both seemed less connected to the world of Men than they currently did to the fabled West.

  The King spoke again, "We are not enemies to you, Jan Kasia. This is your home. Come in."

  Slowly, Kasia joined them. His gaze poured over the corner table, with the flowers, and stones, and the bone antler, and shot up at the crown of the King, with silvery-white prongs of his own that made the elf so utterly inhuman in aspect – his horned shadow unmoving on the ceiling. The tall elf with the bee clasp, his gaze followed the Master of Boats, unblinkingly. The green-eyed elf whom Kasia's security swore was a spy, and who both put Men at great ease and fit into shadows, his green stare was like that of a forest lion.

  Something very serious… was happening here.

  Kasia finally looked up where the Elfking did. He saw the expert painting of the Township, and gasped, dumbstruck by the exquisiteness of it, like a tribute to this city of Men, but drawn up by elves and painted with stars. "My… my King and good elves… this work of yours is such an honour. It is stunning. I gave you this room solely as a comfort, but you've made it into a tribute."

  Lusis turned to look up at the Elfking's colourless eyes. His lids lowered. His eyelashes cast shadows upward onto his pale flesh.

  Kasia opened his arms to the elves, "Why wouldn't you finish this? It is so fine and flawless."

  The King raised the lamp again, "Kasia, do you know the rumours of lights over the city at night? Have you heard anything of that?"

  "That's just the talk of children." Kasia chuckled, and then sobered at the way the elves reacted.

  "No," the King said softly. "It is not, Master of Boats. This that you see… is a map of the reported lights with all the points joined. It was corrected mathematically, to draw lines across Lake Township. They appear in a predictable pattern, drawing a shape across the lands of the Men of my holdings."

  "What is it?" Lusis heard herself ask.

  "A square… tipped on an edge in this painting," Kasia could easily see that the blue lines intersected, now that his attention had been drawn to the lines among the stars. "Do the elves have such a constellation?"

  "Yes, in fact," the Elfking said. "The lozenge, the same shape upon which edhel men of noble birth place their devices – the same heraldry that represents them."

  "A round device for an edhel woman," said Osp softly, "and square for families, houses, and countries. I… I am surprised it is the same in this light-forsaken place."

  The King's teeth flashed in irritation, "You woke on these shores, child. Not in Valinor."

  "You dare call me a child?" Osp gasped. "I woke. You were born."

  "Ah, and having woken, what have you withstood?" the Elfking said in scathing reply. He advanced on the taller elf… and Osp backed away, childlike in his reaction, as accused. "You have tasted little of the poison of war, or the bitter rapture of killing and, by it, surviving. Has this child yet breathed in the wretchedness of slaughter and edhel deaths? But you may see all today."

  Kasia shook his head as if to clear it. "Excuse me, what?"

  The King passed the lamp aside to Dorondir, who turned its flame down to nothing. Grave-cheeked elves opened the draperies to morning light. The spy set the lantern on the ground as the Elfking made for the door in his splendid robes. "Ai. Did bright Osp of Valinor glimpse the Rider and the Hunter? I think not."

  He pushed his white-golden hair roughly over his shoulder.

  Lusis hooked her hand into Osp's as he nervously gathered his cloak around him. "You're all right with me, Bee." She gathered his cloak in one fist and pulled him closer to reassure him. The tall elf was immeasurably old, but he was adrift in this strange land. His eyes were startled.

  Lusis pressed, "Why wouldn't you finish the lozenge? What is it about what you've found?"

  "You would not want to draw this device upon a city-map, friend-Lusis." Osp explained shakily. "Once… once it flew over our own lands to the West. Red and gold and black and white." He shuddered.

  The King half turned to look, but offered nothing. He merely waited.

  Osp continued, "It… I believe it remained unknown in Middle Earth… still, there is no elf yet in Valinor who does not recognize the accursed device that is tracing itself across your sky."

  Kasia frowned. "So these lights mean something?"

  Osp's upper body tipped back. His voice also sounded hollow. "It is a white tower on a black field. It is flanked, on either side, by six golden stars. And one is set atop.
All is surrounded in a ring of fire. This lozenge was meant as a beacon to guide souls safe to shore. But that was a lie. It guided souls astray into torment and endless darkness. Where I come from, it has been taken down and burnt – an emblem of arrogance, travesty and brutal domination. Much of the lozenge is already upon this map. But I will not finish it. The device is his, and so those who make lights appear at night must also be his. Who else would know this obscenity? I will not close this device, not in this room because I would not dare to create such a seal for the enemy. Thranduil is not my King, but I would not give a fiend to the Lord of the Rings. I could never betray an elf."

  Dorondir exhaled slowly and turned toward the King. "I am sorry that we have uncovered this."

  There was a moment, as the Elvenking raised his head, where his silver eyes where shut.

  The Elvenking's expression was serene, but he appeared like marble scoured by water and Ages – marvelously worn. Swallowed by time. His voice was slow and deep. "I am too late. My eyes did not see." His hands pressed to his bright chest and there was a sudden stillness in the room. But it was followed by a flurry of motion.

  Elves came together. They reached in, and, in clear violation of elven social regulation, they touched the person of the King. Their hands rested on his shoulders and arms, his chest and back, they pressed against his white blond hair. Ewon, himself, laid a hand over the King's curled fingers. So many moved to him that Lusis was pushed back into Osp. The Western elf closed his forearms around her quite naturally, as if doing so was a normal thing in the Undying Lands, or as if he'd forgotten where he was. He stared at the press of the elves and his lips parted in a kind of wonder.

  Lusis marveled that none could see the surge of fire, since the light forced her to squint through watering eyes. The colours of all those secret fires melted to one and became blindly white. She eased away because she could see that Osp's moonlight had begun to flood out around him and pass into the King, itself. Her own starpoint flared to painful brightness.

  As quickly as this unity had come upon them, the elves departed.