Chapter 5: Calandris Remembers the Foundation-Laying

The morning they departed Aelindrath, the light came through the eastern passes at an angle Calandris had not seen in four hundred years, and she stood at the gate long enough that Thordun looked back at her twice before looking away, which was courteous of him, and which she noted.

She had watched many departures from this gate. That was not, strictly speaking, an unusual statement for one of the Silvari — most of her people could say the same, and did, with the particular nostalgia that the long-lived develop as a kind of weather-protection, the way certain coastal plants grow flat and parallel to the ground. But she had watched this specific departure before, or one so structurally identical to it that the distinction required more precision than the moment allowed. The angle of light. The smell of frost on eastern stone. A company of the small and the mortal moving away from towers they had not fully understood, which was, she had long ago concluded, the condition under which all companies left Aelindrath, including the ones who thought they had.

Frodo was twenty yards ahead of her already. He walked the way he had walked since she first observed him crossing the gate's threshold the week before — not with purpose, exactly, but with a quality of orientation that was subtly different from purpose, the way a needle does not intend north but is nonetheless more correct than any intention could make it.