Two hours.
That was Halbarad's silence. Aldric had been counting it without meaning to, the way he counted any silence Halbarad let stretch past the half hour. The old man did not, ordinarily, ride quiet. Halbarad rode the way he stood watch — running a low commentary that was half observation, half teaching, half the kind of complaint that disguised the teaching. Two hours of nothing meant something.
The courier had passed them at midmorning.
The courier had been a Ranger Aldric did not know by name, riding south on the Bree road on a horse with the kind of saddle-sweat that came from a hard two days. He had drawn rein when he saw them. He had given Halbarad three sentences and a folded paper. He had been gone again before the paper was open.
Halbarad had read the paper.
He had folded it again. He had tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. He had not, in the time since, taken it out, and he had not, in the time since, spoken.
The afternoon was going. The sun was low and the wind was clean and the road ahead bent down into the long flat that ran up to Northwatch's eastern boundary stone. A flight of cranes was passing overhead, calling once and once and once, settling for the night somewhere in the marshes to the south.
Aldric let his horse close half a length on Halbarad's.
"Speak it."
Halbarad did not look at him.
"My lord."
"Speak it, Halbarad. We have ridden the morning and the afternoon. You have not spoken since the courier."
"I have not yet decided what is worth speaking."
"You have decided. You are deciding now whether to tell me what you have decided. There is a difference."
A pause.
The old man rode a few paces with his hands relaxed on the reins. His left hand — the one with the two missing fingers — rested with the stub-end against the leather in the way it always did. The reins were tied in the small knot he used to compensate for the missing grip.
"There is no chieftain."
"Where."
"In the Ettenmoors. In the foothills above Mitheithel. In the country south of the troll-fells. There are orcs. There have been orcs again, increasing for two summers. But there is no chieftain. None of our scouts has named one. None of the Ranger scouts has named one. None of the prisoners taken on the Coldfells or in the bracken-country has named one under questioning."
"Maybe they do not know."
"Maybe they do not know. But orcs talk, my lord. They brag. They name their captains in the field. They name their captains when they are dying. They have not been doing so. They have been moving as if they have captains and dying as if they do not."
Aldric considered.
He had been looking at the same set of facts for three months in his own working papers and had not, until Halbarad said it aloud, named it as the same fact. The Coldfells engagements that Theoden had handled. The two probes against the southern Greenway in summer. The increase in the Misty Mountains scout sightings. None of them carried a captain's name back with them. Northwatch had killed orcs every month for two summers and had not, in those months, killed an orc that Maeglin's interrogations could identify as a leader.
He had filed it as luck.
He had filed it wrong.
"What does that mean."
"It means there is a captain. It means the captain is not on the field. It means the captain is somewhere else, and the captain is directing, and the orcs are moving on direction."
"From where."
"That is what I have been calculating for two hours, my lord. The pattern of the movements puts the source east of the Misty Mountains and north of the Trollshaws. The pattern of the timing puts the source someone who is not bound to a single mountain hold. The pattern of the discipline" — Halbarad turned his head, slightly, to look at Aldric properly for the first time since the courier — "puts the source someone who is not an orc."
A long pause.
The cranes called again. The road dipped.
Aldric's first impulse was to name it. He had a name. He had a hundred names. He had the entire shape of the next two decades in his head and he could have laid the words out for Halbarad in two sentences and ended the old man's calculation by the side of the road.
He did not name it.
He set the impulse aside the way he had set down the pen on the desk in August when the system had opened the panel. There were things one did not say. There were things one carried.
"How sure."
"My lord."
"How sure are you, Halbarad. Not in feeling. In count."
"In count?"
"Six engagements without a named captain — how many engagements would it take to be coincidence."
"Three. Four if you stretched. Six is not coincidence. Six is a pattern."
"And we have six."
"We have eight, if I add what the Bree-line patrol has reported this autumn and what the Rangers' eastern circuit has not been able to name."
"Eight."
"Eight."
Aldric rode for a moment without speaking.
He thought about the letter to Thranduil that had gone south the year past — about the kind of news that crossed mountains in the way that news did, and the kind that did not. He thought about the Lindon courier who would have been told by now of the Blue Mountain Compact. He thought about how the news that one settlement on the northern road had built itself into a regional power would, in certain ears in certain dark places, be precisely the kind of news that prompted a captain who was not on a field to look at a map and decide where to direct the orcs next.
He thought about Tauriel, and what she would say when he told her, tonight, that Halbarad had at last named the thing they had both been not-naming.
He looked at Halbarad.
"What do you want to do."
"Nothing today, my lord."
"Nothing."
"Nothing today. If we move men now, we move them without target. We tip our awareness without gaining anything by tipping it. We have eight engagements. We need twelve. Twelve will tell us whether the pattern holds through winter, and if it holds through winter we will know what we are dealing with by the spring, and we will move with knowledge instead of with worry."
"Twelve."
"Twelve."
"And in the meantime, the orcs we have been killing without names — they continue to come."
"They continue to come. We continue to kill them. Theoden and Eorlund and the others can hold the line through winter; the line is in better shape than it has ever been. We give the captains their work, and we count, and we wait."
"And in the spring?"
"In the spring we send Maeglin east. Properly east. Three months, if it takes three months. We find out who is on the map."
Aldric absorbed this.
He thought about Tauriel again. About the long flowing characters of her own people's letter-form. About the way Lindir had used the word kinswoman without quite naming it. About the small disc of dark red wax with a six-pointed star and a mark at the center.
He thought: Rivendell already knows. That is half of what Lindir came to tell us. He came to tell us they are watching, and he came to tell us they are watching because something is moving that is bigger than orcs. The letter to Tauriel was not only about us.
He did not say this to Halbarad.
He said: "Twelve. Then Maeglin in the spring."
"Yes, my lord."
"And no extra patrols this autumn. We hold the rhythm."
"Yes, my lord."
The road bent, the long flat opened, and the smoke from Northwatch came into view — the thin pale lines of the kitchen fires drifting up into the late afternoon, and behind them the silhouette of the keep against the eastern hills.
Aldric rode the last mile in silence.
Halbarad did not break it. Halbarad, having said his thing, had returned to his earlier disposition — the patient unsmiling alertness of an old man who had laid down his calculation and was now letting his lord carry it. He looked, in the slanted afternoon light, every one of his seventy-nine years. The cold of the last winter was still in him; Aldric could see it in the small careful way he held his shoulders against the wind on the open road, and in the long second he took before each cough that he tried to swallow.
The gate-watch saw them coming and rang the bell, twice — visitor, no threat — and then nothing further, the steady down-tone of the lord's-own-banner that meant nothing needed to be done in advance of the lord's arrival.
Aldric did not look at Halbarad again until they were inside the gate.
Inside the gate, in the courtyard, Tauriel was crossing from the eastern arch toward the keep, and she stopped when she saw them, and she looked at Aldric, and she read his face the way she always read his face, and she did not ask him anything in the open air.
She turned and went into the keep, ahead of him, to wait.
He swung down from the horse.
He did not, immediately, follow her. He stood for a moment at the horse's shoulder with one hand on the saddle, watching the gate close behind Halbarad's horse, and he thought: Twelve. By spring. Then we know.
He went into the keep.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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