The ambient sounds of Forochel are new to Therdis, and because they are new they have not yet faded into noise as the sounds of Tornhad or Angmar or the shores of Lake Evendim had. The slow crack of ice, the soft hiss of shifting snow, the low roar of wind in the pines on the cliffs, the keening wail of the birds of prey that nested above – all are equally loud as her own pulse in her ears. She had wandered to the very edge of Kauppa-Kohta and sat down cross-legged on the packed snow, closing her eyes and trying to separate the din of noises and thoughts and still-healing pains. Her ribs, her dislocated shoulder, the raw spot where she had hit her head against stone, the fresher cuts that still try to rip at their scabs along her arm. Zôrzagar’s voice, and Halfaeron’s voice, and her own, and others that, though they infect her dreams like creeping rot, she cannot – dares not – name.
I see it now in your eyes: the darkness has taken root in your heart, and you will never be free of it.
Something pokes her in the back, and she jumps, nearly losing her balance with a curse that would have made a Balrog blush.
The child, no older than five or six, pokes Therdis again wordlessly with one chubby finger. “I cannot help you.” With this, as though he (she thinks he is a boy, though the Lossoth children were so heavily bundled that her guesses feel random) could understand her, he scrunches up his face and starts to cry. She assumes the word he sobs over and over is the Lossoth term for ‘mother’ or ‘father.’
“I do not know where your mother or your father are.” The crying becomes snotty-nosed screaming. What was one supposed to do with a screaming child? “Look here. If you stop it, I will make you a bird out of this parchment.” She fumbles to tear a sheet from her sketchbook, a few folds turning it into a bird-shape which flaps its wings when its tail is wiggled. The boy, enthralled with this creation, suddenly sits down of his own accord to watch the ‘bird’ as Therdis makes it ‘fly’ around him and land on his head. He bounces up and down and waves his arms, babbling incomprehensibly. “See? It is not so bad, the crushing weight of loneliness and abandonment. At least, screaming about it does no good. Then you are afraid and tired. Where I am from, we call this a bird.”
“BIRV!”
“No, bird.”
“VIRB!
“Bird.”
“BIRB!”
Therdis gives up correcting the child and hands him the makeshift toy. Though his pronunciation of Westron had been poor, he seems to know what it is, as he starts to run in rapid circles around her making chirping and squawking noises. The sound grates on Therdis, and she lets a slow breath out through her teeth, but cannot find the heart to tell the boy to stop.
“Onni!” A girl – twenty, or just a little older – runs up, speaking rapidly in the same foreign tongue. This, Therdis realizes, is the boy’s name, as he turns at the sound of it and starts to babble again, happily repeating the same word he had screamed earlier. It dawns on her that this is his mother and not his sister, despite her age.
The baby would have been younger than this – just learning to walk, to talk. Would it have called me mother? Could I have loved it?
The girl looks Therdis up and down with the same apprising, calculating glare as the other members of her village also seemed to reserve for outsiders. Onni, briefly not the immediate center of attention, starts to wave the folded bird around, and her gaze softens. She points one mittened hand at herself. “Aili.”
“Therdis.”
The two stare at each other and then seem to find some mutual, silent agreement. Onni sticks his baby-sized mitten into his mother’s hand, and the Lossoth woman motions for Therdis to follow her to one of the tents clustered in the middle of the village. Aili reaches to her shoulder, unfastening the straps on a back-board that holds a sleeping baby nestled among furs.
“Ilmi.” She sets the board down next to Therdis, and then ducks inside her tent.
It does not take Therdis very long nor very much reasoning to infer that the Lossoth woman had decided that if the foreigner was going to sit around, she might as well make herself useful and take on the task of watching the children while others cooked or prepared hides or loaded sleds. Onni’s babbles and yells seem to materialize his friends out of the snow, and before the sun had risen much lower in the sky, Therdis finds herself surrounded by a pack of Lossoth toddlers whose parents seemed equally content to get their children out of the tents and let them run their energy off. Though she had started with the folded birds, she quickly moves on to sketching animals in the snow with the charred end of a long stick, learning a few scattered words of the language as the children try to guess her subject. Then it was a ball-game, though she suspects that the pack of children were really just throwing balls at her under the guise of some other competition.
By the time Aili’s whistle sends Onni running for his tent to get his supper, Therdis’ knees hurt from crouching, her fingers are cold – and some great, heavy thing has shifted in a way she understands without being able to explain, an invisible crack in an unbreakable wall.
I will be proud when I see you again, unburdened by the weight of your dead faith in the hope of what you once thought good.
When she turns, Aili beckons her in, holding a steaming bowl of something that smells strange, but not bad.
Not entirely dead. Not yet.
Therdis goes in to help Aili serve the food, and she eats, and puts Onni to bed while his mother feeds the baby, and when she sleeps she does not dream, nor does any shadow wake her.
