Chapter 6: Legolath Begins Dismantling Himself at Rivendell's Threshold

The cold in my shoulder had ceased, by the time we descended into the valley of Rivendell, to register as pain in any framework I retained for classifying pain. It had become instead a presence — a second pulse, slower than my heartbeat and not synchronized with it, operating according to its own biological grammar as though the Morgul-blade's informing had seeded in my flesh some intelligence that was now conducting its own quiet census of my interior. I had ceased to find this alarming. That I had ceased to find this alarming was the observation I returned to, at intervals, during the fourteen days between Weathertop and the valley's edge, because it seemed the kind of observation that ought to be found alarming by someone, and I was, still, nominally, the nearest candidate available.

Striden had spoken little on the road. He spoke, when he spoke, with the calibrated economy of a man who had learned that excess disclosure creates its own obligations, and who had perhaps calculated, correctly, that I was accumulating observations at a rate that would eventually produce questions he was not prepared to answer directly. He tended my shoulder each evening with herbs whose names he provided in three languages — Sindarin, the common tongue, and one other he did not identify, which had the phonological texture of something learned not from speakers but from inscriptions — and his hands during these ministrations were steady in the particular way that steadiness requires maintenance. I noted this. I noted also that the steadiness increased in proximity to my shoulder, as though he were compensating for something he could perceive in the wound and was choosing not to communicate. The steadiness was a professional suppression. I recognized the mechanism. I employed it myself.

Sam walked. This requires no more elaboration than that. Where I catalogued and Striden managed, Sam walked — with a constancy so absolute it had ceased to operate as locomotion and had become instead a statement of position, a declaration that whatever the road was doing to its geometry and whatever the sky was doing to its angles, he was here, his boots were on it, and the next concrete objective was within reach. He named them, each morning. Rivendell, he would say, as though the word were a nail he was driving into something prone to coming loose.