#kreka

Elros and Elrond whispered their plan to the soft crescent ears of the camp’s horses picketed where the campfires and torchlight did not reach, asking the horses to wander away just for the few hours of leeway that the two needed to escape. Large equine heads bobbed silently in the night, eager to comply. In early summer, grass beckoned. With stolen knives the young boys sawed through ropes. Most of the horses were kept on the far side of camp in a large corral, and Elros needed the knife to wedge open the latch. Elrond had first stolen his knife to stab the ones that had murdered Meleth, the boys’ nurse. That plan had failed, but he kept the unused blade for this new plan. He had wanted revenge on those that had dragged them away, but fear stopped him. His heart felt better giving the knife to Elros and watching him use it on rope and wood.

A crueler version of their plan would have been to stab the horses, crippling leg tendons or cutting throats. That violent option would have been taken by the outlaws that served Maedhros and Maglor. That was what the murderers of their grandparents and uncles would have done. Elrond did not suggest it to Elros and hated himself for thinking of it.

Anyways, their mother had drilled into Elrond and Elros how to flee through a forest and find food and shelter. Elwing had not taught her tiny sons how to kill. Why she had not was difficult to say: either they were not old enough to learn or she did not know herself how to or Elwing did not want the life of warriors for her sons. Their mother was gone; Elrond and Elros could not ask her why. Two months ago the reminder that their mother was dead would have triggered tears, but Elrond was dry-eyed. Determination and excitement overrode other emotions. Tonight they would escape. They would flee into the woods and hide in the forest just as their mother had taught them. The trees that lined the final length of the River Sirion before it emptied into the Bay of Balar were scant and small, making Elwing’s instructions on forestcraft difficult to model. But their mother ensured that the twins knew how to start a fire, how to climb trees, where to find food, and how to mask their tracks. Their mother had placed them in the arms of Meleth, their nurse who had been their father’s nurse before, and told them to run and hide, to go far away from the fighting and the men with swords. She would draw the bad men away; they must flee.

Elros and Elrond were obedient sons. They would flee.

First, the horses needed to run away.

The old mare with the large star on her forehead bent to nibble at Elros’s hair. A gentle, familiar gesture. A farewell. The horses understood, and the twins thought that the animals must have had the same heartsick shame that turned some fighters at the refugee camp at Sirion, the ones that had refused to burn homes or kill more mortal and elven lives. In silence and slow walk did the star-marked mare lead the corral’s occupants out of the now-open gate.

Tonight’s watchman for this end of camp was Dregor, an outlaw from Talath Dirnen and briefly a follower of Gorthol of the Dread Helm, or so he claimed. Elrond and Elros knew those names from old Dírhaval’s great work, the prose-poem that the old mortal man had been building from all the pieces of story brought in by the refugees. Meleth had been friends with the caretaker of the old mortal and Elwing stressed to her sons that it was vital that they know the history of all their people. Gorthol was really their grandfather Tuor’s cousin, the dragon-slaying Túrin. Dírhaval told that part of the story over and over to the young boys, even though it had been scary at the time, because they liked best how great-cousin Túrin killed Glaurung the Golden through cunning and stealth. And that they were not allowed to hear other verses. Which even now terrified the boys, if the slaying of Glaurung by hiding in a river gorge and stabbing upward as the dragon crossed overhead was not frightening enough. What could have been worse? Now, the twins thought that they could guess.

No convenient river gorges could hide the boys tonight, but a stroke of chance would. Dregor’s young daughter, Rúth, was colicky, and he had taken her to Kreka, leader of the other mortals in the Fëanorian camp. Kreka was Bór, honor-bound to never raise a weapon against the elves, and her Easterlings were shunned by the other mortals and most of the elves in the Fëanorian camp. Not that there were many Bór and almost all of them old women - but Kreka had a son around the same age as Rúth and was something like a Wise-woman. Dregor hoped for a poultice to help his daughter and had abandoned his post. He did not know this, because Kreka promised to tell one of her people to cover the watch for Dregor as tiny Rúth wailed in pain. Elrond and Elros, watching while they listlessly played a board game with Bledda, Kreka’s son, knew that Kreka had been lying. Her mouth creased the same way that Bledda’s did when cheating. Bledda was a few years younger than the twins, a child hopelessly bad at simple strategy, dice rolls, and hiding that he lied about his dice rolls. His mother, Kreka, was a better liar. She fooled Dregor. But the twins knew. Kreka did not want them here. Her sad face whenever the boys visited her tent betrayed her. She told them to return to the tent of Maglor to practice counting puzzles, which she knew that they had finished, and bade Bledda to gather up a hamper of food so that the boys could eat dinner away from the chaos of a crying Rúth and her panicking father. Bledda, confused because they had already eaten, gave the twins a bag of dried tallow-covered meat and berries prepackaged by his mother. The tacit suggestion of travel food was clear permission.

Tonight no watchmen would scan the woods outside the tents of the Bór or the large horse corral to the west. No one observed how the gray mare with the large star silently walked west into the woods, all the other horses following her, some trailing cut lead lines, none nickering or neighing to betray the twins. No one to say which tent the twins were in or know until the dawn-break. At the treeline, where the earth was soft with last year’s decomposing leaves, did the horses trot off in multiple directions, no longer moving as a herd. Tonight Elrond and Elros must escape.

Pursuers would assume the boys run northwest, back towards Beleriand and the sea, in the direction of their remaining kin and safety on the Isle of Balar. Forest dense and green surrounded the Fëanorian camp, so south or east made little difference to get lost within. Summer and their mother’s lessons would keep them from starving. Elwing’s sons would fare better than Elwing’s brothers. The bag of Bór food promised that.

The young boys did not factor the danger of orcs into their escape route. Recapture from the attackers that snatched them from their home was a real danger; orcs were only in stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Elros and Elrond stamped their feet hard next to the hoof-prints facing west and shoved a scrap of fabric from their tunics, bright orange like autumn leaves, on the rough bark of the nearest tree. A small piece, barely more than a few threads, as if snagged on a wiping branch from a fast-moving horse. Leaping did not place the fabric scrap high enough to fool a tracker into thinking them riders, so Elros as the lighter twin stood on his brother’s shoulders to balance and reach. Then through miming Elrond regained the purloined knife, used it to cut a few strands of hair, and sprinkled them on nearby bushes. Elros enthusiastically copied him, but Elrond stopped him from cutting off a braid. That would have been too obvious. When the Fëanorian elves discovered them missing and started to track, they would feel clever for finding those clues. Maglor loved to tell hunting stories. His voice was nicer than old Dírhaval, and his stories were shorter and less sad and scary. Elrond worried that the skilled trackers would be hard to fool, but Elros was right. The horses and their own arrogance would trick them.

They had swapped out the bright orange clothing for inconspicuous green behind Arlun’s tent, where a small pack of rope, the knife, a flask, twine for making snares, and two long scarves that could work as makeshift hats or cloaks had been stashed in anticipation of this chance.

Climbing the rest of the way up the tree and then crossing to the next was difficult in the darkness but helped by the boys’ lightness. And Maglor and Maedhros did not know how well the twins could climb. Limb-walking required perilous applications of balance and daring leaps aided by a length of purloined rope, but this was a game that their mother and the Sindar had taught the boys as soon as they could walk. Squirrels and owls the twins would be, scrambling through the forest canopy as if the branches were the rigging of their father’s ship. At first the pounding of their hearts was fear as they circled wide around the wooded perimeter of the Fëanorian camp, but excitement replaced that. A glee from outwitting adults it was, as any parent of young children well-knew, and a glee that came from releasing the fear that had never left from the night that Meleth took them from their mother’s arms and began to run, even as Elros and Elrond learned to suppress that fear in an outward mask of acceptance.

The mask had only worked because it had been true. They liked Maglor’s stories and mathematics lessons, the lessons in horseback riding and soft songs when they cried at night. Maglor was kind. Maglor loved them as he did his own brothers, even if all of Maglor’s brothers were dead but for the one. Elrond only had his brother left, too, with the rest of his family slain or gone. Maglor and his brother promised to keep them safe, so the fear had to become small and hidden like a mouse in a burrow when the foxes hunted.

Euphoria, ever a short-lived emotion, faded in the predawn. Half-elven though they were, Elrond and Elros had only as much endurance as children possessed. What they also had was foresight to climb as high into the summer canopy of a tall oak as they dared and string the stolen rope in a loop around the trunk above two branches at the threshold of their weight, creating a loop to brace their bodies. Secured in the knowledge of the safety rope, the weight tolerance of thin limbs that even the unnaturalness of elves would not overcome, and the screen of leaves in summer fullness, Elrond and Elros settled for a quick nap to recover strength.

Morning birdsong woke them. 

The twins judged that hiding their trail was more important than the speed of running on the ground. Southern Ossiriand grew trees densely, mostly elm with thick fanning canopies. Many elm had two layers of dense branches, one high and low like two balls stacked atop another. Few bushes grew in the underbrush to hide in. It was better to fool the hunters’ instincts by staying above. And, the twins decided, the element of fun and danger won out. It felt like hopping between islands of drier ground in the marshland, and after each leap they paused, waiting for signs of notice and the startled birds to settle. Soon after dawn they could hear faint shouts when the wind blew eastward, but only twice before that sound faded. Success emboldened them, and they dared the ground in-between some of the larger trees, always pausing to see if any footsteps or obvious signs of broken twigs betrayed them.

“Your plan worked,” Elrond whispered as the twins found a promising hollow high in one of the elms, some old den that they could both fit into, alas uncomfortably. “They followed the horses.”

“They won’t give up,” Elros whispered in return, thinking of Maedhros. “After they recapture all the horses and know we aren’t with them. They need us,” he added, repeating something that Dregor had once said about how the peredhil boys were hostages to keep Gil-galad from retaliation against the Kinslayers. A strange notion, but one that the other mortals had thought sensible. Exchanging wards to forestall escalations of blood feuds was an old Easterling practice, according to Kreka, but one that rarely worked. Her great-grandfather, Bór, had been a peace-hostage of a tribe allied to Ulfang, but a raid had stolen him back. Kreka could recite a long history of blood spilled between the two Easterling groups, unlike the Edain, full of betrayal and slain family that the Nirnaeth Arnoediad was only the final most bitter verse. Her stories started to sound like their mother’s stories of her family, even their father’s of how Gondolin fell.

Rather than let nervous fear return, Elrond bit into the ball of dried meat and fruit.

His brother rudely requested a piece with a shove.

“I heard a creek nearby,” Elrond whispered as Elros chewed. “After dusk, we’ll go to it and gather water, then continue. M- they think we will run towards the sea. So we won’t. Not until they give up.”

Elrond almost voiced his fear that Elros was right and Maedhros and Maglor would not stop looking. But the sons of Fëanor had before. A strange thing to be grateful for. One that felt cruel towards the uncles that they had never known.

“Do you think Ada knows?” Elros whispered in the darkness of the tree hollow. 

This was not the first time that his twin had asked that question, nor did Elrond’s answer change. “He’ll go to Cousin Gil-galad and Lord Círdan when he returns and finds everyone…gone. Vingilot is the best ship. Ada is safe and waiting for us.”

What the twins feared most, elven voices echoing from below their hiding tree, failed to materialize, so at dusk they crawled out and continued climbing. At the creek they first lowered the rope to soak a rag with water and wring it out into open mouths. Only when convinced that no one besides a river rat knew of their presence did Elros climb down to the bank to refill the flask.Then Elros used the knife to cut a piece from his green tunic large enough to rewrap the remaining food and use the watertight bag to fill with water. The dry air foretold of more days without rain, and there was no guarantee of another creek. Elrond watched his brother nervously, hoping that the large mulberry hid him. Remembering one of Elwing’s lessons, the boys gathered any remaining fruit that was no longer green but ripe reddish black. Unripe mulberry was toxic to both mortals and elves. Washing their stained fingers in the creek and brushing the indentations in the mud with a fallen branch, the boys tossed their rope across the lowest-hanging branch of the nearby elm and hauled themselves up. For a minute they dangled over the creek, and Elrond thought of Cabed-en-Aras, the river gorge that Túrin used to slay Glaurung and where Hunthor died. Only in the safety of the elm’s higher branches did his fear fade. Spending the night back in that large tree hollow was a temptation to reject, as it was too close to the Fëanorian camp. The darkness of night dampened fear of discovery, and the boys only stopped when they found a tall evergreen in which they felt safe to hide.

On the second day the only excitement was the herd of deer that they almost mistook for riders. Then the badger that Elros had to drag his brother away from watching. This time they traveled during the daylight hours. Distance was important now, for the search window would be widened.

On the third day they chanced running on the ground, refilling their water at a creek large enough to be the early stretch of a river. A fallen log gave them a bridge to cross. Eventually, or so Elrond told his brother, they would follow one of these rivers down to the shoreline and then up back to the Bay of Balar. Maybe they would make a raft and paddle right next to the coastline, ducking in with the tides but using the ocean to stay out of the Fëanorians’ reach. Surely Ulmo would protect the grandsons of Tuor.