She looked about, the red and orange leafed hickory trees and yellow brush crowding flush to each fork of the pathway. A place for ambush? Her instincts said move on, head south and pass this place in haste.
The bird stopped and looked at her, eyes sharp and focused past a deeply curved beak. It balanced oddly, in compensation for the askew wing, and, as if in completion of its survey, hopped directly toward her.
Now Cadence rustled around for more clues. The readable pages definitely seemed like bits of a single story, told and retold over long expanses of time. She found another scrap of rough paper that had been folded many times. She guessed it was hidden for some part of its long history:
The halfling feared, deep down, that her choice had been wrong. The world had fallen and cracked like an earthen pot, and she was picking through the thousands of shards without ever having seen the pot whole. But of its dimensions and nature, she had a sense.
This she knew. Her Amon was the Bearer. The object he carried could only be destroyed at the place of its creation.
Perfect, Cadence thought, so they
If she knew him at all, she knew he would not part with it, nor would he abandon the journey to destroy it. She had seen the direction of the Dark Lands and a few other places on a map the Woodsman had briefly shown.
On that map, a great, purple-veined, granite mountain range called Everdivide ran east to west and severed north from south. This barrier she must somehow cross in order to follow his way.
She also knew that she was racing against a moon-clock, as certain as the pouring sands in the day-glass kept by her village elders. This run of the moon to bloated fullness, now well underway, measured the trap awaiting the Bearer. All else, the who and the how, was mere detail. She still had a choice — go forward, or go home. She could not bear the long, tedious hearthside wait for the unlikely return of her loved one. All her family were doers of the first order — on a scale impressive only to halflings perhaps, but “all’s the measure is what we have, so eat your porridge and go to work!” as her Mum would say.
She took stock of her meager kit. No provisions, only her cloak and a small knife handed down from her grandfather. She turned to the fish-catching hawk sitting on a log a few feet from the fire. She said to it, “You’re a long way from lake, stream or sea, my friend.”
It had hobbled to her on the road yesterday, and that had touched her heart so that she finally knelt and offered her arm. She stared at those exquisitely sharp talons powered by strength that could stop a millwheel, and the quick, yellow beak that, in a flash, could render her blind. At that moment, the world closed down to her forearm fixed in the steady gaze of the raptor.
It stood uneasily on one leg, reached out, and slowly curved those terrible claws around her arm flesh. She belonged to it. It squeezed down hard, then deftly lifted the other leg and sat on her arm, gazing about rapidly in all directions.
The fire was now just embers, casting up lazy sparks. She stared into it knowing, as does anyone that has spent fireside nights in the wild, that in each small blaze lives the memory of all such fires.
Each an augury of the past and the unknown to come.
Above the unlikely fireside pair, the heavens twinkled madly in a riot of uncountable stars.
“Hafoc, I name you,” she said, looking at the hawk.
She travelled efficiently, equal to the most adept and durable of her kind. She was unheard and unseen, keeping to the brush-sides of trails and the stream edges as her furred feet travelled tirelessly across rocky plains and through shadow-banded days.
Always to the south.
Cadence took a long breath. So, Ara too felt the doubt, the disquiet of a blind advance toward a ledge. She had stayed her course.
She gathered up the documents and stuffed them in the valise. She buckled it up and got down on the floor and squirmed under the bed.
As she struggled among the dust-bunnies to wedge the valise in a hiding place behind the headboard, she reconsidered her doubts. Picking up the decades-old trail with Coats was a heartening break. She would stick with this, she would walk toward that ledge.
Chapter 16
1970 AGAIN: SEPARATE, STILL AND SECRET
On his fifth and final day in America, Professor Tolkien was hunched over in the long aisle between tiers of steel shelves in the Teachers’ Archives section in the basement of the Butler Library. Looking over his shoulder every few seconds, he turned sideways to catch the tepid light from a bare electric bulb down the aisle. He had in his hands a pen and a few pieces of paper. At his feet sat a small cardboard letter box. He scribbled some more notes on his papers and surveyed his work.
As he corrected a word, he knew this moment, this trip, should be completed in even greater haste. His muse whispered:
He started to put the pen in his pocket and hesitated. Ever the editor, he reviewed his note one last time:
To Whom May Follow:
Be warned! As a “spell” means both a story told and a power over men, so I write this note to close and bar a gate behind me. I am leaving a perilous realm not just of my imagining. Time now makes me blunt as a peddler late to his errands.
Take heed, because things of which we weave tales in fact are true, and exist independently of our minds and purposes. As I have imagined and written Elvish, there are Elves. As I have woven a mythology, it exists. It has a living form and color.
And it
Like a changeling infant abandoned on my doorstep, a box of ancient documents was left on my threshold one day. Its heritage was anonymous and perhaps untraceable, save for the unease of having seen a sample of similar material before the war. In any case, I studied these documents, and from their depths grew rumors and a disquiet that would not leave. They stir, and like the moors and fen beyond the keep, they breed monsters that slouch and bellow just beyond my reach.
And yet, within this wreckage of ancient histories, there were fascinating tatters, fragments, and even full scrolls. Many of these were written, I no longer doubt, by Elvish hands, masterful hands now long departed from the world. These — precious (I will leave the word, yes) writings have a power of their own. They twist and turn and lead the mind down shifting paths as if they were the very essence of Mirkwood itself. Their language, vast and deep, makes my poor scratchings as but the work of whimsical ants before the soaring range of those mountains they call Everdivide. I have glimpsed this through the agency of a single document, a key that is like an Elfin guide through Mirkwood. I cannot bring myself to destroy it. It is hidden here with this note. May it long rest undisturbed in this musty graveyard of unwanted archives. To whoever may read this note, beware! The key is dangerous, for these phantoms sense its power.
For me, these vague monsters do not depart. They stalk me, and seek not only this trove, but to intervene even in the tales I would tell. Tales that have been unearthed, I thought, solely from my own imagination delving into the bedrock of myth.
The other documents have been sent away. As with these few papers I leave here, I could not be the author of their destruction. I have entrusted them to an itinerant who is fated to wander. These are actions I once held unthinkable.
Now I bury the last, push close the gate, and take my leave forever from this shore.
