Burn Again

Chapter 7

Several days passed.

Elu checked on the newborn foal regularly, sometimes several times a day. She often sat with the mother and her baby, curled up in the straw next to them, petting them and speaking gently to them. The mare almost seemed to have an inner knowledge that her offspring was alive thanks to Elu's efforts, and accepted her presence. The foal himself was always eager to see her, and often trotted over on spindly little legs to greet her on her approach.

Thranduil spoke to no-one of what had happened that day in the stable. Instead, he spent long hours through the darkness assessing what he'd witnessed, the miracle that she'd performed by giving the young animal the gift of life.

Was she a wizard? He didn't think so.

A witch? No.

But he sensed some deeper magic, an inner light that had glowed bright enough for him to see as she'd worked on the helpless being on the floor. Nobody else had mentioned seeing the glow, and he reached the conclusion that only he had been privileged enough or wise enough to see it. Magic was one of his inbred traits; a gift passed through to him via his royal lineage. He could heal in areas and to a depth where his healers were unable to, and he knew things that no other living being could ever comprehend.

But Elu remained a mystery to him.

His clever mind cast a hundred thousand different thoughts as he tried to work out what it was about her. She wasn't an angel, and she wasn't some ethereal being like Galadriel. She seemed to be a reasonably normal elleth, albeit one who'd managed to torment the life out of him and drive him almost insane for three hundred years. The prominence of her eyes had distracted him hundreds of times over the decades, and several times he'd been lucky to escape from battle with his life as his mind had wandered to thinking about the dark blue irises.

The thought came to mind that in times of trouble, her eyes had always come to him in his sleep, not just on the run-up to the full moon. When his son had left the realm in a fit of temper after a heated argument, her eyes had been an almost constant companion until his return several months later.

When Fennion, his closest guard had fallen in battle, her eyes had appeared that very same night. He'd been too distraught to realise the significance, but they'd been with him through the night nevertheless.

He'd spent over a week bedridden under the care of Assana when he'd taken an arrow in his right thigh, and the blue eyes had again drifted to the front of his hazy mind as he'd slept. The painkilling herbal concoction he'd been given hadn't dimmed the intensity of the dark blue in the slightest.

He took a deep breath and turned his gaze to the window, watching the first streaks of daylight appear above the tops of the trees on the horizon. His heart and soul were no less restless than they'd been hours earlier, when the skies overhead had darkened and his kingdom had settled down to sleep. Normally the sounds of night were comforting to him as he pondered matters of his realm, but not recently. His spirit became increasingly over-wrought with the knowledge that she was close by somewhere; somewhere in the depths of his palace she was either asleep, or padding around barefoot as she seemed to favour.

In the gloomy darkness of the stable, Elu sat with only a solitary lantern casting a soft light onto the two sleeping animals by her side. The foal was curled on his side leaning against his mother, who dozed peacefully, content in the knowledge that she was within touching distance of her child. The elleth leaned against the mare's opposite shoulder, gently stroking her mane.

Thranduil's demeanour towards her had changed. He no longer glared at her and treated her like she was the rebirth of evil.

He simply ignored her completely.