Elrond's words are taken from "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", Appendix B, The Return of the King: J.R.R. Tolkien.

"Less thanks have we than you. Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names… Yet we would not have it otherwise."

– Aragorn, "The Council of Elrond", The Fellowship of the Ring: J.R.R. Tolkien.

An Honest Crust

The young man sat with his legs drawn up and his ankles crossed, forearms planted heavily on upraised knees. His wrists lapped loosely over one another, and his head hung between his elbows, matted dark hair falling to shade his eyes. The noontide sun was baking down across his shoulders. It was high summer, high and dry and hot, and in these windswept hills there was no shade to be had.

Pearls of perspiration trickled into his brows and down the back of his neck. He had unlaced his cote to the base of the breastbone, and beneath it his well-made linen shirt was plastered to his body with sweat. Sweat and blood, likely enough, for the right sleeve and front quarter of his tunic were stiff with it, their rusty green cloth stained black and foul. It was not his blood, and he supposed that ought to be counted a blessing, but it stank and the skin beneath itched terribly. He had wiped his hands in the coarse, sunbaked wild grass and scraped the worst of the spatter from his face, but there had been little to be done about the cote. He had given away his spare in the spring, to a fellow wanderer who had lost the greater part of his own garment to a deadfall choked with brambles.

He had been tracking the wolves for six days, wending a winding path through the farm-country even to the very skirts of Chetwood. He had first caught wind of the pair while in Archet, loitering about the market square as he listened for news. Ordinarily the tavern was the place to do that, but coin too he had been without since the cold spring rains, and he had learned very swiftly that while a Ranger's money might be good in Bree-land, his reputation never was. Without custom, he would not have been welcome in The Ram and Thistle.

After that it had not been hard to follow the trail. The animals were bold, and everywhere he followed he had found rumours of maulings. They had killed six sheep belonging to one cotholder, maiming another. Someone else had lost a calf. Still another had a friend whose herd-dog had been torn to pieces. The great fear had been that the creatures were mad: in summer's deepest heat such things were always a risk.

He did not now think that had been the case, which was fortunate. He had watched the creatures keenly as he had fought them off, alert for any signs of poor coordination, paralysis or clumsiness, and he had seen none at all. They had both moved with a swift and deadly grace that was as beautiful as it was terrible. And after death he had examined their mouths, finding only thin strings of spittle between the rear teeth and a crusting of blood from their last meal – not Ranger-meat after all – along their gums. No froth of madness was there to be found.

That too he ought to have taken as a blessing, for one of them had raked a great grazing wound into the back of his left calf which he had bandaged neatly before breaking camp, but the alternative was still more unsettling. If the two had not been rabid, they were taken with some malign will that drove them from shyness to boldness. Their coats had been coarse and heavy: too coarse for these lands so late in the year. They had come out of the North, doubtless from places still tainted by the memory of Angmar. And where there had been two there might be more. Their behaviour was almost inexplicable otherwise, for their audacity had gone far beyond stock-worrying. They had doubled back on their trail to assault a Man – not an especially doughty Man, to be true: not even one fully grown. But ordinary wolves simply did not behave thus.

The youth sighed softly, the muscles of his chest shuddering with the effort. Waking suddenly into battle, he had deported himself well enough. But when the fever of war had ebbed it had taken the vitality of his limbs with it and left him unsteady and quaking. The worst of that had subsided, but the other symptoms lingered. The copper taste of combat was still thick on his tongue, and the fatigue was slow to pass. Worse was the lightheadedness, aggravated by thirst and the fact that he had foolishly allowed his store of food to become depleted to nothing: he had eaten his last hunk of stale bread the afternoon before last, and had had neither the time nor the fortune for foraging since. It was the giddiness that had stopped him on the trail, folding swiftly into this low pose before he could give into it and fall. The heat, the hunger, and his morning's desperate exertions had gotten the best of him.

He was ashamed of his failing: it seemed only further proof of his inexperience and undeveloped instincts. True, he was still new to this life. By the reckoning of his people he was not yet even of age and so too young to be labouring in the Wild alone. But wiser heads than his had deemed him ready, and these last three years he had striven to prove their judgment sound. This very patrol had been one such gesture of confidence: his first lone foray in inhabited lands, where one had not only to contend with the dangers of the open roads but also keep from drawing undue notice to one's efforts. It was hard not to see his present incapacity as a failure.

Yet it was only a failure if he did not overcome it, he thought. With a dry swallow that pained the back of his throat and did nothing to relieve the sourness in his mouth, he raised his head and rolled it, stretching the sinews of his neck as he squinted in the sunlight. His coarse straw hat had been a casualty of the skirmish, for one of the wolves had landed full upon it in its dying and had left it soaked through with gore. That was somehow the most irksome part of the whole sorry affair, for it seemed so senselessly misfortunate. With his left hand, the cleaner of the two, he raked his dark hair back from his eyes and let the sun beat across his proud cheeks for a moment. Then he shook his head to let the wild curtain fall back again and got to his feet with a nimble grace that owed more to his youth than his present fitness to go on.

Hitching one strap of his pack, weighed down by the cloak he could not bear to wear in this heat, higher onto his shoulder, Aragorn son of Arathorn resumed his road.

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It had been his grandfather who had made the decision that this patrol was to be his own. Dírael had been a mighty lieutenant of the Dúnedain for many decades, and in the dark years between the death of Aragorn's father and his own return to his people Dírael had fulfilled all the functions of Captain with quiet fortitude. There had been no question of succession when Aragorn came back to his people: he was the Chieftain they had waited for, knowing or unknowing as their nearness or distance from events allowed. He had been afforded a respect and affection that he was not too young to realize he had not earned. There had been no friction between the titleless leader and the titled, and Dírhael had been gladdest of all to welcome him. But Aragorn knew his own greenness, and he had been well taught by the wisest of teachers. He knew that no Captain, no Lord, was truly great if he could not listen to his advisors. And so, though it was the Chieftain who had the final word in all strategic matters in the field, it was still Dírhael with whom most judgments still originated.

So Aragorn had come southward when the camp in northern Chetwood had broken, alone and eager. Within four days he had been on the trail of the wolves. Now he was ill-supplied and trudging through empty country. He had misremembered this corner of Bree-land, and had expected that by coming down out of the hills he would find cultivated country – likely with a stream he could put to use or a well of which he might avail himself after a courteous word to the owner. Instead he found soil too stony to plough and scrub grass too sparse for grazing. He had drunk the last of his water at midmorning, two hours before the spell of dizziness that had overcome him so suddenly. Now he was making for the dark mass upon the horizon that just in the last quarter of an hour had begun to resolve itself into distinct buildings: the little hamlet of Combe. There he expected to obtain victuals and water, and hopefully enough of the latter that he might wash as well as slake his searing thirst.

He had learned to endure the grime of the wild, but there were times such as this when his state passed beyond that endurance. His hair was slick with grease and many days' perspiration, and the scalp beneath it itched. His clothing had the pong of shed skin and stale sweat, and his toes in their linen wrappings were slick and slimy when they shifted in his boots. If he pushed up a sleeve to chafe his arm, he raised grains of dead skin that wanted to be rinsed away, and his body linen was foul. Yet it was the slaughterhouse smell of the wolf-blood that was worst of all. It rose from his clothes, from his nail-beds, and from the very flesh of his face in hot waves, metallic and sickeningly sweet. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but he thought he was starting to catch the still fouler reek of rot.

Aragorn had grown up among Elves, washing morning and night and bathing as often as he wished and never less than twice a week. A few short years were not enough to inure him to filth.

He quickened his pace although this did nothing to improve the lingering giddiness between his temples. His gored leg smarted, but the hurt was not deep enough to slow him now. He had good hope of relief from his myriad discomforts when he came to Combe. Whatever his other shortcomings, he had done good work for the folk of Bree-land today. They could not grudge him relief from his miseries, and it was with hope in his heart and mounting good cheer that he reached the edge of the village.

The first small cottages were battened tight against the heat of the day, their occupants apparently abroad at one chore or another. Aragorn saw no well in any dooryard among them, but he did not find that disheartening. He could not remember the lay of Combe, but reason told him there must be some communal source of water farther in. He would still do better with a private well, if he hoped to wash as he yearned to: he had no wish to make a spectacle of himself. So he kept his eyes open for a likely home.

He came upon what he sought a little farther ahead. It was a neat stone house, two storeys high with doors and windows painted a cheerful blue. There was a little stone stable beside it, and both were roofed in slate. The garden was neatly kept, and the fence newly whitewashed. But what interested him most was the round stone well with the deep trough beside it. It was midway between the house and the stable, sheltered in the shade of a stout elm tree. As the Sun was only three fingers past noon this pool of shadow was a rare and unlooked-for blessing. Aragorn stepped off of the dusty road and went to the gate.

It was loose on its hinges, he found with some surprise, and he lifted it carefully before replacing it when he had passed through. Now that he was on the property he could see other signs of disrepair: an upper shutter that was missing until one saw it leaning up against the side of the house, a cracked board in the front step that surely posed a danger to anyone coming or going, and the roof of the henhouse stripped of fully a third of its thatch. The new rushes were in a fat bundle under the eaves, waiting only a moderately skilled hand to lay them. The feel of the whole place was that of a prosperous home where the keeper was too busy with more important matters to see to the little touches that would have been so swiftly attended to by householders of lesser means.

That was all to the good, he thought as he rounded the house with his spirits lifting. He could ask leave to avail himself of the well, and then offer his services in exchange for provisions and perhaps a dram of soap.

As he turned, Aragorn was seized by a nauseating bout of dizziness that left him clammy and clutching the corner of the house to keep himself on his feet. He screwed his eyes closed and tried to breathe steadily through the fit. Bright, manic flares of colour danced on the backs of his eyelids and the earth seemed to tip beneath his boots. His urgent focus and his grim determination that he should not faint were nothing to his anger at this weakness. In childhood he had swiftly learned that he could not hope to equal Elven stamina, but he had hoped that among his own kind he might prove less frail. He was sure, quite sure, that other Rangers did not swoon away from hunger after scarcely two days between meals regardless of their morning's exertion, heat or no, watered or dry. Frustration gripped him and he smacked his left palm against the rough stone. His right hand was too busy keeping him upright.

The brief pain was like a tonic, bringing him back into himself and a shaky body now covered with a fresh sheen of sweat beneath dirty clothes. He knew at once that he would not fall after all. Still it took a long minute to gather himself and swallow the lingering need to void his empty stomach. He knew – he had been told – that he had some years yet to grow. A young man's body, trying to fuel this growth, burned swiftly through its sustenance. His constant appetite was a healthful sign, even if in the Wild it meant constant hunger even when fed. This fierce response to even brief deprivation was surely natural. Still Aragorn loathed it, and felt its petty mortification keenly.

He rolled his tongue in his dry mouth as he straightened again, brushing his left hand over his face to wipe away the fresh perspiration and, he hoped, any lingering traces of wolf-blood. The gore on his cote was not identifiable as such, but on his pale skin the ghastly carmine-black would stand out starkly. To the same end he whacked his right hand, palm and back, across the knee of his hose. The dark stains in the nail-beds would need more judicious cleaning, but he did not think he made a glaring spectacle of horror. Setting his face into a mask of pleasant inquiry, Aragorn made for the back door.

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He had to come back into the village, of course, for in his joy at being able to wash and to drink his fill he had neglected to replenish his waterskins. But Aragorn waited until nightfall, sitting cross-legged in the shade of a copse of trees while his cote dried in the sun and perspiring quietly all the while. He thought this had been the hottest day of the summer, and it might well sustain that claim. It was the first week of August in the local reckoning, and soon the weather would begin to fall off towards autumn's clemency. But even without the heat he would have been burning; burning with anger and burning with shame.

Some windows were lighted, but many were already darkened for the night. Aragorn avoided the patches of gold cast by the lighted ones, and kept to the shadows. He was not interested in being driven off again. He tried to close his nose to the toothsome smells of evening meals – hot venison stew here, spiced porridge there, or roasting chicken, or only just barley-broth. Tomorrow he would cut south into farming country, and find something to forage. It might mean another tenuous moment on the road like the one he had had this noontide, but he could endure it.

The square was empty, as he had hoped, and he went to the well. There was no neat little hood over this broad stone circle, nor a winch to work the bucket. The pail was on a thick rope tied about an iron ring driven into the stone. He lowered it swiftly and drew it up, filling his skins with tired, clumsy hands. He drank again, less out of thirst than prudence, and then he emptied the bucket and put it back in its place. He tucked one waterskin into his pack and slung the other onto his hip. Then with a last look around at the cottages and houses and the handful of little shops, Aragorn slipped from the square and dissolved into the darkness, striking out for the open places and trying to walk off the hurt in his heart.

He was just about to vanish back into the shadows of a side street when he heard a soft sound. He spun swiftly, his cloak swirling as he flung it back over his shoulder to bare his knife. A dark shape, hooded and too tall to be one of the villagers, stepped out of a triangle of darkness he thought he had checked.

'What hail?' Aragorn whispered, using the Common Tongue as he had been taught to do with any persons unknown. He did not quite dare to hope.

'What hail, my Captain,' the shadow said, tossing back his hood so that his grey hair showed pale in the moonlight and his face was bared. 'Watering by night. Have you need of stealth, or are you but lately come to this place?'

'Grandfather,' Aragorn sighed, coming forward to greet him. They grasped hands like comrades-in-arms despite the intimate epithet. All through his boyhood Aragorn had lived with the lonely conviction that his mother was his sole relation. Having discovered to his great joy that this was untrue, he found it difficult to call Dírhael by his right name. When they were alone, there was no cause even to try. 'Neither, I fear. The truth is that I was too cowardly to go by day.'

'You, cowardly?' Dírhael snorted at this and laid a firm hand on the younger man's shoulder. 'Since you have come to us, I have seen no hint of cowardice – much to the chagrin of some who would see you wed and provided with heirs ere your courage outlasts your luck. What is this talk of "cowardly"?'

Now that he had begun he must continue, but for a moment Aragorn wished he had merely dismissed his grandsire's query. That would certainly have been his prerogative as Chieftain, but he was unused to that authority. He closed his eyes, steeling himself against the unpleasant confession to come.

'I have failed at the test I was set, I fear,' he said; 'if the test was to keep a good watch on the land without distressing the people who dwell within it.'

Now Dírhael had a hand just below the other shoulder also, watching Aragorn's face intently. 'I see. And in which particular have you failed?'

'The second,' Aragorn said sourly. 'As to the first, I have kept my patrol and I have slain two over-bold wolves. They were mauling sheep and would soon have moved on to children, I fear.'

'Then the slaying was well done,' said Dírhael, and Aragorn felt his heart warm a little at the frank approval in his voice. His grandfather released his hold and went to sit on the edge of the well. It was high enough that when he was perched comfortably his feet merely grazed the ground. He patted the broad stone rim beside him. Aragorn sat. 'Now, tell me of your misadventure with the fine folk of Bree-land.'

This was the worst part of any unsuccessful endeavour: the analysis afterwards with its confession of errors and strategies to avoid them in future. It had been a great part of Aragorn's martial and strategic education, and he had grown skilled at such introspection. That made it no more pleasant to go through. Never before had Dírhael employed the technique, preferring to offer his own somber corrections of missteps both technical and logistical. It seemed strange that he would do so now, when the stakes were not mortal, but Aragorn did not question him.

He gathered his thoughts, staring at the tapered lines of his boot in the dust. His own feet were firmly on the ground, but the stretch in his legs was welcome after his hard day and unmoving evening.

'My first error, perhaps my worst, was to attend poorly to my provisions,' he said, quietly but clearly. Of his many extraordinary teachers, it had been Glorfindel who had proved least tolerant of mumbling. 'I paid them little mind as I took up the hunt, and by the time they were spent I was in the empty hills. Foraging would have slowed my pursuit in that bare land, and I was eager. It was a foolhardy misjudgment.'

'I see,' said Dírhael gravely. There was more of the grandfather than the dour lieutenant in his eyes when he asked; 'When was it you ate your last, then?'

'Two days ago, about this time,' Aragorn answered, stretching the truth by several hours for the sake of his battered pride. 'It is of small moment, but I was foolish to pay the matter so little mind.'

'That lesson can only be learned one way,' the older Ranger said. 'Not a one of us has not done it, and few repeat the mistake. The next time you are in want it shall not be through your own inattention.'

Aragorn, who had been almost more ashamed of his shortsightedness than anything else, cast to his side a small, grateful look. Then he resumed his study of his errors. 'I came out of the hills and realized I had misremembered the country.'

Dírhael nodded patiently. 'You will learn it.'

He had been meaning to expound upon this, but it seemed there was no need. Instead he said; 'So I sought water and sustenance among the dwellings of Men instead of the wilds – but I cannot think that poor judgment.'

'To seek the most expedient means of food and drink? I should think not.'

'I took the leave of a servant instead of the mistress: that surely was not fitting,' Aragorn went on. It was always easier to proceed quickly once the momentum had built. 'And I should not have argued – but Grandfather, she was unjust and unreasonable.'

He feared this last might sound too much like the protest of a petulant child, and he closed his eyes again as he rethought it. 'She was unjust,' he concluded at last; 'but it was my error not to secure her approval before upholding my part of the bargain.'

'What is this litany of faults?' Dírhael asked, frowning in puzzlement. 'It makes for a most disjointed tale, my son. Never mind what you think you did wrong: what happened?'

Aragorn opened his mouth to protest, but then understood. Where Elladan and Elrohir had always been interested first in drawing out what he had learned before asking the details of the lesson, Dírhael wanted only the story. Aragorn took a moment to reorganize his thoughts into a narrative form. Then he breathed deeply and began.

'I came upon a home well-built of stone: two floors and a good slate roof, blue paint at doors and windows.'

'Toby the cloth-merchant's place,' said Dírhael. 'Toby Thistlewool, aptly enough. This time of year he's likely to be in Bree, looking in on his dyers.'

'Ah.' This explained both the prosperity of the property and its small dilapidations. 'I had hoped to ask the use of a private well so that… so that I might wash,' Aragorn admitted uneasily, unsure how this might be taken by one so often bereft of that luxury himself. He did not try to give voice to how loathsomely filthy he had felt, between the heat and his unwashed body, his grubby clothing and the dousing with wolf-blood.

'When I noted small signs of disrepair about the place, I hoped I might exchange my services with hammer and twine for some provisions as well: mend the gate for a meal, thatch the henhouse and put right a fallen shutter for something to take with me. The tasks required some skill, but nothing beyond my scope.'

'It seems a reasonable proposition to me,' said Dírhael. 'It is not uncommon for our men to strike similar bargains. I have done it myself.'

'So others have said,' Aragorn agreed. He drew his palm across his jaw, and despite the consequences he could not regret that both were now clean. 'I approached the house humbly by way of the back door, and I asked of the kitchen-maid – or maid-of-all-work, it seems more likely – leave to avail myself of the well. She consented readily enough, and so I tried my luck with the other proposal.'

'And she had agreed,' Dírhael surmised. His thoughtful expression had now become knowing. 'So you did the work, and did it well.'

'Certainly well enough to earn what was offered,' said Aragorn. 'It was no great bounty: old bread, some pickled beef and a couple of last year's apples. Yet I would have been content, and the work I did was certainly up to the standard of a day-labourer of average skill whose wages would have cost a silver penny. But I was hot and very thirsty from my morning's exertions with the wolves and the half-day's hard walk through the bare hills. Before I set to work I had to slake my thirst. I washed also, though only from waist to crown. My cote had been bloodied, so I rinsed it as best I could and set to work in hose and body linen.'

It had been a relief to do it despite the unseemly feeling of wandering about in only shirt, braies and hose, for by then it had been the very heat of the day. Farmhands and others who toiled heavily beneath the summer sun often went so clad. Greater still had been the relief of washing in the cold, sweet water.

Aragorn could not find words to limn the delicious sensation of splashing his face and neck with it, rinsing away the salt of his sweat, nor the blessed cooling reprieve as it trickled down his back. He had scrubbed his arms and shoulders and chest, without soap but scarcely noticing. Then he had ducked his head into the trough and luxuriated in the chill, purifying sensation as the water soaked into his hair. He had dug his fingers enthusiastically against his scalp, scraping away dust and grime and flakes of shed skin. He had emerged from the water, wrung the thin muddy streams from the mass of his hair, and immersed himself again. When he came up the second time, those rivulets had run almost clear. He had twisted the thick dark hank as tightly as he could before shaking out the shaggy mass so that droplets danced in the sunlight. Then he had sat back on his booted heels, breathless but refreshed beyond measure.

After that it had been almost a pleasure to set to work, at least at first. 'I knocked the gate hinge back into shape with little trouble, and patching the thatch was made easy by the squatness of the structure,' he said, self-conscious of the dreamy lapse in his tale.

'I'm sure,' Dírhael said with something like a proud smile on his lips. 'You would not have needed so much as a box to stand on. And the shutter?'

'The shutter was my downfall,' Aragorn muttered resentfully. Thatching the henhouse had not been nearly as easy as he had just let on, his height notwithstanding. By the time he had finished, he had been miserably hot again and feeling his empty belly keenly. After hauling the heavy wooden ladder up to the side of the house he had been obliged to cling to it, forehead pressed to one of the rungs, as he fought off another fit of faintness and nausea. It had been many minutes before he trusted himself to climb. But there was no need for his grandfather and lieutenant to hear any of this.

'The noise roused the mistress,' he said instead. 'She… she took exception to my presence on the property.'

'I see.' Dírhael was silent for a moment, considering. 'She reneged on her serving-girl's promise?'

'She took me for a beggar,' Aragorn confessed, his voice falling low as his ears burned with shame and anger. He had been the butt of unkind jeers before this, for it was not uncommon in Bree-land. Certainly he had been called far worse by orcs in the heat of battle. Yet this slur stung more deeply than any other he had before endured. 'She called me a wastrel and a vagabond, and demanded to know why I tramped the road in idleness when a likely young man could so easily find honest work.'

His wounded rage was rising over the mortification. He welcomed it. 'Honest work! As if our folk were naught but rogues and brigands walking the wild to despoil good citizens!'

'So some Bree-folk see us,' said Dírhael with a weary sorrow that seemed veritably ancient in his weatherworn face. This was nothing new to him, and Aragorn cursed himself for a fool for not considering that. No doubt the indignation and anger and shame he felt now were another experience – like the carelessly depleted rations – that each Ranger suffered in his turn.

The older man reached to the side to clap him on the shoulder again. 'But I promise that many more see us as merely shiftless,' he said, as if that were a consolation instead of the worse affront. 'We seem rootless to them, and without the responsibilities of home and family, farm or craft or trade, that preoccupy their own lives. Now and then one of them will have an encounter with a Ranger that shakes that prejudice a little, but such things are as rare as we can contrive to make them.'

'That is folly on our part, then,' Aragorn grumbled indignantly; 'to allow ourselves to be so ill-used by the very people we labour in peril of our lives to protect.'

'Is it?' asked Dírhael. 'You are wiser than your years, dear child, but here you are indeed in error.'

'I do not see how,' Aragorn said stubbornly. He knew that he was being willful and that he was wrong to speak thus to his grandsire. Yet he was entitled to his own thoughts on the matter and it seemed to him that the Dúnedain's policy of self-deprecation had been carried too far. 'If they scorn us for idleness and feed upon that scorn to shame us, why should we not disabuse them of it?'

Dírhael took the boy's hand, strong and sword-calloused but slender and fair with youth, and clapped both against Aragorn's leg in a bracing gesture. 'Oh, my son,' he sighed in a good-natured teasing voice that nonetheless carried with it a burden of regret. 'What did this simple woman say to hurt you so?'

Aragorn tried to withdraw his hand, but the old Ranger held it fast. He decided not to fight it. The contact eased his spirit. It was a reminder that there were in this world those who loved him and understood his feelings in this matter – those, even, who had patience with his blind frustration and perhaps loved him still more for it.

'All that I told you,' he said; 'and on she went in a state of great agitation, scolding me for my sloth and repeating time and again that I was young enough to mend my ways. "Why don't you go and find someone to take you on?" she asked. "Too good to swing a scythe, maybe, or to find a good apprenticeship? We're hard-working folk 'round here, and we earn what we get. We don't go giving it out for the asking to no-good wandering layabouts too worthless to look for an honest place in life!".'

He could not meet his grandfather's eyes. The grip upon his hand had tightened, and he let himself lean in to the strong shoulder beside him. 'As if I had come asking alms instead of offering my hands,' he murmured. 'And she told me to be off: back onto the road, if that was all I was good for, or back to my mother if she were not ashamed to have me.'

It had been this last, awful barb that had struck deepest of all. He knew the bulk of her taunts to be unfounded, though that did not keep his innards from shrivelling with shame to hear them. He was neither shiftless nor a wastrel nor a layabout. He was not even in want of a good apprenticeship, though he had just badly flubbed the first large task his craftsmaster had set him. He knew, too, that he had done nothing to give his mother cause for shame. But the underlying accusation of smallness, worthlessness, unworthiness, had rung true. Was he indeed doing enough to further the cause of his people and to safeguard the lands that had been so lovingly kept in his absence? Was he achieving anything at all in the greater struggle against the Shadow that those he loved and admired had been fighting against since long before his birth? And would he ever be worthy of more than this: to be turned off unfed from the stoop of an angry merchant's wife?

The memory of it made his stomach wrench in a way that had nothing to do with its gnawing emptiness. He tried to shut his mind, but not swiftly enough, to the recollection of the ethereal moonlit beauty of the daughter of Elrond and the words her father, his father – his foster-father had spoken with such mournful, tender truth.

Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it.

He was right, and Aragorn knew it, and that knowledge fed his anger and his shame at this day's ignominious encounter. If he was worthy of no better than this, what hope did he have of ever proving his merit to she whom he could not help but love?

Suddenly his curled fingers were being passed from one hand to another, and a strong, thin arm crossed his back to hold him close.

'She could never be ashamed of you,' Dírhael said softly. 'Never.'

Aragorn turned towards his grandfather, lifting his heavy head in momentary astonishment. There were those among the Dúnedain who could read the hearts of Men, but surely not with that clarity. Then he remembered the last words he had spoken, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. Dírhael was speaking not of his lofty beloved, but of his mother.

'You have been her great pride and dearest treasure since first she felt you quicken,' the old man went on. 'I remember well the day: she came running through the long grass, laughing and weeping both in her joy. There is nothing you could do to shame her, and certainly nothing you have done this day. Tell me now: what did you say to the cloth-merchant's wife who used you so ungallantly?'

The patience and the pain in his eyes were hard to bear, and Aragorn cast his gaze away. The moon was high now, and the square nearly as bright as by daylight. Had any of the denizens of Combe chanced to peek from behind their curtains, they would have seen the two outsiders perched on their well with no trouble at all. The thought made Aragorn uneasy, and he upbraided himself. It was ludicrous to be intimidated by these peaceable farming folk when he had faced armed bandits in empty places and fought dark things in the hollow hills. He forced himself to recall the question, and stared at the earth as he spoke.

'What could I say?' he asked. 'I stood silent while she ranted.' And he had, feeling quite naked without his cote and cloak, the crawling misery of mounting shame writhing within him. 'When she stopped, I said as courteously as I knew how that if she sought honest work for an honest crust, she should look at what I had done and judge for herself. It was then that she struck me.'

Dírhael's hand fell from his outside shoulder and he turned in towards him with such speed that Aragorn was startled into meeting his eyes again. 'She struck you?' he said incredulously.

'It was only a slap across the face. It stung,' he added sarcastically; 'but with due care I believe I will survive the outrage.' Then he sighed, feeling more weary than he had in all his brief life. 'After that she bade me be gone, and I went. Only later did I realize I had not filled my skins.'

'That is why you came here,' Dírhael said with quiet understanding. 'And you crept back under cover of night in the hope of avoiding another uncomfortable incident.'

Aragorn nodded and hung his head. He did not admit to the deeper truth.

For a while there was silence, and Dírhael's left hand found Aragorn's far elbow again and cupped it. He gazed off across the moonlit rooftops of Combe. 'You have had a hard day, my child,' he said. 'You have done good work in the wilds, and you have offered your best in the town. You have received no thanks for either but to be cheated of your pay and given an unjust tongue-lashing. You have a right to feel wounded and bitter, though I hope neither feeling will gain too deep a root. Many years of such slights lie before you, my son, as they lay before us all. The folk of Bree and of the Shire must know nothing of our work, and in your heart I think you know it. It would destroy the peace we labour to preserve.'

Aragorn thought of the cotholders and farmers he had spoken to as he chased the rumour of wolves. He thought of locked doors and barred gates, and children kept in from their play. If they knew of the dangers that lurked just beyond their dooryards – of the wild watchers of the night, and the orcs at Deadman's Dike, and the ancient evils of the Barrow Downs not a day's march from the village of Bree… Yes, he knew they could not be allowed to know. That meant that the men who toiled against these dangers could never be known for what they were, either, even at the cost of their reputation among those they defended. There were hidden places in the empty lands where the Rangers were known and loved for their deeds, where they would always be made welcome and offered the very best that the humble homes had to offer. That would have to be enough.

Yet his heart was uneasy, and he felt the unsettling glint of foresight lance through his mind. He looked up and turned his head to meet Dírhael's eyes again. 'Yet they will one day be called upon to aid in their own defence, labour though we may,' he said. 'The Shadow grows. Is it right to let them live in ignorance until it is on their very doorstep?'

'Not in ignorance: in innocence,' said Dírhael. 'There is so little innocence left in the world, and it is a precious thing. Yet there is another reason to keep to the shadows and the lowly places which you most of all must understand. If the Rangers were once known for their deeds in Bree, and given the courtesy we have earned, word would spread as it always does. Who could resist the legend of a band of lonely men defending rick and farm with their very lives? Indeed, who could resist a tale of a tall young man, dark of hair and fair of face, who slew two wolves with a hunting knife and spared the good folk of Archet? And who among the servants of the Enemy would not then wish to descend and smite us, who have blighted their designs upon Eriador for so long?'

He fell silent for a long moment, letting these words hang upon the air. Then he said quietly; 'Our safety relies upon our anonymity: upon our reputation as solitary and rootless men who if they go by twos or threes at all do so my chance and not because of any common purpose. Secrecy is our armour, my child. It may chafe our pride raw, but it safeguards our lives.'

Aragorn nodded. Of course he could see the truth in this, who for secrecy's sake had been raised under another name in the fastness of Imladris. Now he had further cause for shame: that he had not considered fully the consequences before suggesting, however cholericly, a lapse in that ancient policy of silent endurance.

'Do not take it so much to heart,' Dírhael said, seeing the youth's bereft expression. 'You are more hardheaded than most green Rangers, and quick-witted and knowledgeable into the bargain. You are wiser than men many times your age; there is no flaw in you that time and experience will not smooth away. If you learn tonight's lesson from my words alone you will do better than the rest of us, who have learnt our prudence only through terrible loss and pain. Many snares have been laid for the… the Captain of the Rangers ere this. Your father fell to one, and his father before him. You have a perilous road to walk; let your Elven wisdom and an old man's warning gentle it a little.'

Aragorn felt his battered pride stirring a little, but still he could not quite shake off the day's petty humiliations or his shame in the part he had played in bringing them upon himself. 'Elven-wise or no, I am still a young fool,' he muttered.

'At three and twenty I should hope so!' Dírhael said, and he laughed. At Aragorn's affronted look he let go of his hand and patted his cheek where a few fine wisps of downy dark whiskers did nothing to make him look any more like a grown man. 'If it be your folly to put right some small wrongs for a lonely if rather unpleasant woman and be denied your recompense, then you are less fool than most your age. You cannot expect to be infallible immediately, my Captain, nor at all times.'

At this Aragorn felt himself smile, ruefully but earnestly. It sounded so much like something Elrond would have said to him, and for the first time since leaving Rivendell he felt a sense of true belonging, as if he had come home. 'Still, I can try,' he ventured.

'Aye, you can. But you must learn to forgive yourself for the occasional imperfection,' said Dírhael. 'For tonight, know that of all the mischances in this sorry affair the only one for which you are to blame is forgetting to provide for your body's needs while on the hunt. Let that be the other lesson you take from this: never forget to take stock of your stores before leaving fertile country.'

He hopped down off the rim of the well and dusted his hands on his thighs. 'Come now, and let us make that right at least. I did not forget to have a mind for my stomach while on patrol, and I have the makings of a very pleasant supper if we can find some place to lay a fire.'

'I know of a copse of trees not far beyond the northeastern edge of the village,' Aragorn said, his spirits rising almost absurdly at the thought of food and companionship. He pushed himself off of the rim of the well, certain he could find the place where he had ridden out the last hours of daylight. 'Follow me.'

Dírhael followed.

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