Bree smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the particular honest rot of a town that had been standing at the crossroads of nowhere for longer than most kingdoms.
Fenn hadn’t known he was hungry for ordinary places until he walked through the west gate and felt the weight of the wild lift off his shoulders like a pack he had forgotten he was carrying.
The Prancing Pony’s common-room was warm and loud and full of the small, forgettable people who made the North work while the Rangers bled in the hills no one knew about.
Barliman Butterbur was behind the bar, round and flustered and already forgetting three things at once, and the smell of good beer and bad stew was thick enough to cut with a blade.
Fenn had come down from the Hills with Fell at his side: the wound was holding, the fever hadn’t turned, and Randir had decided the patrol needed medicines and news more than it needed two recruits standing watch over a cold hollow, and the errand should have been simple.
Buy the medicines.
Listen for trouble.
Leave without being remembered.
The plan was clear and the plan was clean and the plan ran directly into Hob Tunnelly.
Hob was a hobbit of Bree, which was a different creature from the Shire-hobbits of old story: shorter than a man and rounder than a Ranger, with the quick, calculating eyes of someone who made his living off things other people lost and gossip other people didn’t know was valuable.
He was the tapster in the Pony’s back room, which was the real room, the one where the serious drinking got done and the serious information changed hands and no one from the Road who was just passing through ever found the door.
He had clocked Fenn as interesting before Fenn was three steps inside.
“Ranger,” Hob said, appearing at Fenn’s elbow the way small folk appeared everywhere in Bree, suddenly and without preamble and already halfway through a thought they expected you to catch up to.
“You’ll be wanting the back.
The front room’s for farmers arguing about sheep and I can tell by your shoulders you’re not here for sheep.” He squinted up at Fenn with the air of a man reading a ledger.
“Long-shanks, is it?
Or Master Grim?
I never know what you lot prefer.”
“Neither,” Fenn said.
He kept his voice low and even and didn’t smile.
Smiling in Bree was a signal and he wasn’t sure what signal it sent and he wasn’t ready to find out.
“I’m here for medicine.
Willow-bark, kingsfoil if you have it, clean linen.
And news.
Quietly.”
“Quietly costs extra,” Hob said, entirely without shame.
“Does it pay in coin or just in trouble?
Trouble, I thought.
Right.
Back room.”
The back room was smaller and warmer and Hob’s territory in the way a fox’s den was its territory: full of small valuable things and several exits and one entrance you had to know about to find.
Fenn sat where Hob pointed him and watched the hobbit pour two mugs of an ale that was better than the front room got and settle into the chair opposite with the air of a man beginning a long and profitable negotiation.
“Right,” Hob said.
“Medicine first because you look like a man who’ll walk out if I don’t deliver something useful in the first two minutes.
Willow-bark I have at a price that’ll make you wince, kingsfoil I have less of at a price that’ll make you wince harder, and clean linen I’ll throw in because I like your face.
It’s a very grim face and I respect a man who commits to a look.” He took a long pull of his ale.
“News is trickier.
News has been getting odd around here and odd news costs.”
“What kind of odd?”
“Cold kind.” Hob’s voice lost the comic register for a moment, a quick drop into something flatter and more serious, and Fenn filed the shift the way he filed everything: a hobbit who dropped the patter when it mattered was a hobbit who understood the difference between a joke and a warning.
“Herders on the Weather Hills have been coming down sick with something the leeches can’t touch.
Not a fever exactly.
More like — the cold got inside them and won’t come out.
Old Ebba’s boy died last week and he was strong as an ox and half as bright.
Went grey and cold and gone in three days.
Folk are saying the barrows are waking.”
Fenn did not react.
The sickness was the thing he had come to hear about and he had already heard about it, from Randir, from the patrol’s scouting, from the wrongness in the water at the steading the patrol had passed two days before, and hearing it from Bree meant it was spreading faster than the patrol had feared.
“Anything else?”
“The usual.” Hob’s eyes were bright and curious and altogether too knowing.
“Wolves further south than they should be.
Travellers going missing on the Greenway.
And — ” He paused, and the pause was calculated, and Fenn knew a trade was coming before it arrived.
“There’s a pale fellow been asking after a new light in the North.
I told him the only new light in the North is the candle I overcharge for.
He did not laugh.
Bad sign, a man who will not laugh.”
Fenn’s pulse did not change.
His face did not change.
Inside the planner’s register a door had just opened and something cold had walked through it and the cold was the knowledge that the star’s first kindling was already a rumor with a life of its own.
“A new light,” he repeated.
The words came out flat and incurious and he was proud of how incurious they sounded.
“That’s what he said.
New light.
In the North.
Asked if anyone had seen anything odd up toward the Hills — anything bright, anything strange, anything that looked like a star coming down to earth.” Hob was watching him with the same bright, calculating eyes.
“I told him the only stars I see are the ones I charge extra to show people the way to the privy.
He didn’t laugh at that either.
I’m beginning to think the man has no sense of humour, which is always a warning in my line.”
“What did he look like?”
“Pale,” Hob said promptly.
“Tall.
Quiet.
Dressed like a traveller who’s been on the road too long but hasn’t got thin from it, which is another warning.
He wasn’t — ” The hobbit hesitated, which was the first time Fenn had seen him hesitate, and the hesitation was a warning all its own.
“He wasn’t quite right.
You know how some folk walk into a room and the room gets a little dimmer?
He was the opposite.
The room got sharper.
Like the shadows got longer.
Arnor — ” Hob stopped himself midsyllable and the name of the North was spoken in full: “Arnor’s a big place.
A lot of old things in it that don’t like new lights.
I’d be careful, if I were you lot up in the hills, not to be lighting anything you can’t put out.”
Fenn paid for the medicines with coin and for the news with gossip: a careful trade, nothing about the patrol, nothing about the star, enough about the wolf-packs and the orc-movements to satisfy a hobbit’s hunger for trouble without feeding the wrong story to the wrong ear.
Hob pocketed the coin and filed the gossip and when Fenn rose to leave he added, with the same cheerful deflation he had used for everything else: “Say hello to the other long-shanks for me.
And tell them the little folk are counting their boots.
We count everything, Master Grim.
It is how we stay little and alive.”
At the door of the common-room Fenn passed the pale traveller.
The man was sitting alone at a corner table with a mug of ale he hadn’t touched and his eyes were the colour of winter water and they tracked Fenn across the room with the patient, unhurried attention of someone who had been doing this work for a very long time and had never needed to hurry.
Fenn did not look at him.
He did not let his pace change.
He walked out into the Bree street with the medicines and the news and the cold certainty that the thing that had kindled in him on the slope was already a rumour with a hunter walking backward along it, and that the hunter hadn’t laughed at Hob’s joke because the hunter never laughed, and that was the most frightening thing about him.
Behind them the pale traveller was still asking his quiet question of the room.
A new light.
In the North.
Fenn rode out of Bree with the medicines and a hobbit’s regard and the first cold sense that the thing he carried was no longer his alone, that it had already started a rumour, and that the rumour was walking ahead of him toward somewhere very dark.
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