[Airerûthiel]

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Airerûthiel watched as Elentari left; she was confused and saddened at her friend's sudden departure. 'She does not speak true,' she thought to herself. 'The Elves here turned away my cousins, and our mothers were Mirkwood Elves, rejected by their people because of whom they gave their hearts to - Men of Gondor and Rohan.'

Sérë stirred at the Gondorian's hand. "What is it?" asked Airerûthiel in Rohirric, the language of the horse-lords of that country. She heard talk in the woods and recognised some of the voices that came to her ears. "Did I not hear these same voices speak in the Green Dragon two nights ago?" she asked her horse, who merely whinnied softly and pawed the ground.

Now the half-Elf's mind was split. Should she seek voices she recognised but did not know, or should she try and help her new friend? It was bitterly painful to look upon Elentari after knowing what she was going through; all her young life she had been seen as nothing because she was unlike her lively fair sisters and her frail brother, and it had fallen to her to do the duty of a son of the house of Rocconinquë. But then her parents had shunned her for being too wild and unladylike; her sisters had teased her and then she had got into trouble for fighting back; her cousins had been afraid of her because her gender did not stop her being as good with a sword as they were.

And then, after they were slain, what had she lived beneath? The most terrible poverty in the world - loneliness and being unwanted. Everywhere she went, she was seen as no more than a Ranger and, as such, nothing compared to the world she had been born into. She knew she would never be truly accepted by this world, but she also knew that one day the Shield-maiden of Gondor would return to her people.

Mounting Sérë seemingly effortlessly, she spoke to her horse in the Ancient Tongue of her mother's kin and the two of them took off into the woods.