The valley was hidden the way the best things in the North were hidden — not by magic but by the patient work of people who had spent two thousand years learning that the only way to survive was to be invisible.
The entrance was a fold in the hillside that looked like dead ground from every approach and opened, once you knew the turn, into a narrow defile that wound down into a bowl of green and grey stone where the last Dúnedain of the North kept their women and children and lore and the stubborn hope that had outlasted every kingdom that tried to kill them.
Fenn had not known what he expected.
The recruit’s memory had images of the refuge — glimpses from a boy’s few visits, blurred by distance and the incuriosity of the young — but the images hadn’t prepared him for the weight of the place.
The valley was beautiful in the way old things were beautiful: worn and enduring and already halfway to elegy.
The stone houses were built into the hillside with the same grey rock that made the hills themselves and the roofs were turf and the smoke from the hearth-fires rose thin and clean into an air that smelled of pine and cold water and the particular stillness of a place that had been a secret for so long it had forgotten there was any other way to live.
Women and children.
He had known, intellectually, that the Rangers had families.
He had known that the grim men who rode the bounds of the North in silence and killed orcs in the dark went home somewhere, to someone, and that the grimness was the cost of keeping those someones alive.
Knowing it and seeing it were different things.
The children chasing each other between the stone houses weren’t the children of legend.
They were small and quick and loud in the way of children everywhere and they didn’t know they were the last of anything.
They thought the valley was the whole world and the valley was safe and the valley had always been safe and Fenn understood, standing in the grey light with the sickness’s cold seam still burning at the edge of his awareness, that his star was the thing that would take that safety from them.
Randir was speaking to the elders, grey-haired women and a man so old his eyes had gone to milk but his voice was steady and his questions were sharp, and Fenn was meant to be delivering his warning about the sickness and the seam and the waking thing under the barrows.
He delivered it.
The words came out flat and measured and hit the elders the way bad news always hit people who had been waiting for it: with a stillness that was worse than panic.
But the words weren’t what he would remember from that hour.
What he would remember was the woman who had been standing at the edge of the healing-hall when he finished speaking and who hadn’t moved when the elders began their quiet, urgent council of war.
She was tall for one of the Dúnedain and grey-eyed like all of them and her hair was dark and pulled back from a face that was younger than her years and older than her face.
She carried a healer’s satchel and a healer’s stillness and her hands were the hands of someone who had been setting bones and brewing draughts and singing the old death-lays over dying men for longer than Fenn had been alive in either world.
She was looking at him the way Randir had looked at him after the two dead orcs: reading, weighing, filing.
And then she looked past him, at the empty air beside his head where the star was burning, and her face changed.
“I have read of stars like yours.”
Her voice was low and formal and entirely unhurried.
She did not introduce herself.
She did not ask what he was.
She named the thing he was carrying as if it were a patient with a complicated wound, something to be understood before it was treated, something dangerous but not, in itself, evil.
“I am Fenn.” He kept his voice as steady as hers.
I am here to warn the refuge about the sickness in the Hills.”
“Yes.
You have warned us.” She had still not looked at his face.
She was reading the star the way he had learned to read a blade’s crack, and the reading was taking a toll on something behind her eyes.
“It is an old thing.
Older than the sickness.
Older than the barrows.
It has been sleeping a long time and you have woken it and it is — hungry.
Grieving, and hungry.
Those are dangerous things to have together.”
“You can see it.” He did not make it a question.
She could see it and she wasn’t afraid of it and the not-fearing was the most unsettling thing about her.
“I can feel it.
It is not a seeing.
The old lore speaks of lights that kindle at the edge of the world’s dark places — watchers, set to guard against the return of the Shadow.
Most of them are gone.
Most of them died with the kingdoms they were bound to.” Her eyes met his now and the grey of them was the grey of winter water and the knowledge in them was very old and very tired.
“The men who carried them did not end in happy songs.
I am Maerwen.
I am the healer here and the keeper of the old lays and I will help you with the sickness because you came to warn us and that is worth something, whether your star pays for it or not.
But I will tell you now what I will spend the rest of this war telling you: that light is a danger to every soul in this valley, and the danger is not your fault, and the danger does not care whose fault it is.”
Fenn stood in the grey light of the hidden valley and the weight of the place settled onto his shoulders like a second pack.
The children were still chasing each other between the houses.
The elders were still debating the warning in quiet, urgent voices.
The sickness was still spreading toward Bree and the seam was still pointing toward the barrows and the star was still burning at the edge of his sight and the woman who could feel it was waiting for him to say something that would make the danger smaller than it was.
He could not make it smaller. The source of this chapter is g.com.
He could only make it known.
“Then teach me,” he said.
“The lays.
The old lore.
Whatever you know about stars like mine, and the things that hunt them.
I am not asking you to trust me.
I am asking you to arm me.”
Maerwen looked at him for a long moment.
The healer’s stillness was still there but something behind it had shifted, not toward warmth, not yet, but toward the grudging acknowledgement of a difficult patient whose condition was going to be a problem whether she liked it or not.
“The lore does not make the star dimmer.
Every lay you learn, every Verse you carry, every old song you master — it makes you brighter.
You understand that.
You are asking me to make you more dangerous to my own people.”
“I know.”
“And you are asking anyway.”
“The sickness does not care about your people either,” Fenn said.
“The thing under the barrows does not care.
It is going to reach this valley whether I am bright or dark and when it does I would rather be bright enough to hold it back than dark enough to die quietly with everyone else.”
Maerwen was silent for a longer moment.
The children’s voices carried up from the valley floor and the smoke from the hearth-fires rose thin and clean into the grey sky and the old man with the milk-white eyes was nodding slowly at something Randir had said and Fenn could feel the choice being weighed behind the healer’s grey eyes.
She was weighing her people’s safety against a stranger’s star and the arithmetic was no cleaner than his own had been on the slope and the answer, when it came, was the same.
“Come to the healing-hall at dusk,” she said.
“I will show you the first of the lays.
And then I will show you what they cost.”
She turned and walked back into the hall and Fenn stood alone in the grey light with his warning delivered and his cover, for the first time since the slope, genuinely breached.
The woman who could feel his star hadn’t run from it.
She had named its danger and named its cost and agreed, against her own judgment, to arm him anyway.
The logic of that choice was either the bravest thing he had seen in this world or the most foolish and he didn’t yet know which and would probably not know until one of them was dead.