"True words you say that one would not tell another of their business. However, this Ranger of the north has at the present time an advantage," Silvanis said with a smile, as he turned and walked away toward the stairs. Kaldir watched him go with a rather sardonic smile of his own playing at the corners of his mouth. He saw Silvanis drop a nod to the desert lady's hobbit friend before vanishing up the stairs and into the lady's room.
No doubt gone to tell her all about me, he thought to himself. Set her on her guard. He was a little disappointed that what had earlier promised to be such an easy catch was now turning out to be nothing of the sort. It was a setback, yes, but not catastrophic. If nothing else, Kaldir was immensely patient. The lady would drop her guard again eventually. When she did, he would be there. In the meantime, he decided to enjoy the hospitality of the Inn.
He was just tipping his tankard to his lips to finish the last swallow of the Green Dragon's excellent brown ale, when the thin elflady he had noticed earlier, the skittish one with the pale golden hair, abruptly got up from a table and dashed out the front door, nearly upending a pair of hobbits who were on their way in. Curious, he walked across to the window and watched her progress across the stableyard until she vanished into the stable itself. She ran heedlessly, as though a pack of angry orcs were on her heels, her long hair flowing out behind her like a mantle. There was definitely fear in the elflady, fear and something else, but he wasn't quite sure what the other element was that made her run like that. He turned it over in his mind as he finished his ale and set the mug aside. She interested him professionally. She was definitely running from something. What he had to determine was what - or who - was in pursuit.
As the stable door closed behind her, Kaldir realised there was something familiar about her, not so much about the elf woman herself, but more something in the line of her delicate features. The echo of a description he had heard in the south played through his mind. "Tall and thin, with golden hair, she is quick of hand and foot." Thoughtfully, he gazed across the yard at yet another closed door. "Her eyes are the blue of the midsummer sky, her skin as smooth and fair as the Lady Galadriel's..."
His eyes narrowed as, for the second time that afternoon, a deeply buried memory stirred at the back of his mind. Intense heat and fire. His skin burning. And another delicate-featured elf woman. laughing soullessly. Pain and inpenetrable black smoke. He flinched visibly as a spear of remembered pain shot through his smashed cheekbone. No, it is merely coincidence, he told himself. This can't be she. This one is afraid. The other one did not know the meaning of mercy or fear.
Kaldir bowed his head and, with a great force of will, pushed the memories of the other elf woman back down into the dead place in his mind, the place where he stored the pain. Twelve years had passed since his release, but he still was not equipped to deal with the horrors of what he had endured in Mordor at the hands of his captors. He would go mad. Even so, the terrible beauty of Naiore Dannan, the Ravenner of Mordor, still hung before his eyes like a shroud. He had only seen her once, briefly. She had passed over him without a glance and killed the man beside him. She looks like her...
Moving toward the door, Kaldir cast a quick glance over his shoulder toward the upstairs door of the desert lady. With a no doubt broken ankle, she would not be going anywhere soon, and he was not the sort to sit outside her door all afternoon like an obsessive terrier. He slid out the door and moved silently across the stableyard.
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