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A Matter of Appearances  by Lindelea

Chapter 13. In which a muster is interrupted

Caution. Chapter contains graphic details. PG-13 at the least, and perhaps R.

The dwarf-made clock in the Thain’s study had just struck one when Hilly slammed open the door. He was breathing hard, having run all the way from the courtyard where he’d left his shuddering, lathered pony.

‘Hilly!’ Pippin said, starting up. ‘What news?’

‘They’ve got him,’ Hilly gasped, pulling the note from beneath his shirt where he’d thrust it, for safekeeping on the long gallop. He’d pushed his pony to its limits, riding break-neck through the darkness, covering in a little more than an hour a distance that had taken three hours, riding away from the Great Smials, stopping only long enough at each smial or hamlet as the small body of Tooks worked their way down their list, to give the alarm.

Haldi would continue the task, Hilly had every confidence. Haldi would send two riders along the line they had taken, spreading the alarm further into the Green Hill country, while he and the rest scoured the area around the weaver’s smial for sign of the ruffians. At least they knew the rogues had been there, but an hour before the Tooks’ arrival. It was too bad none of his companions had been skilled trackers, but the Thain would soon remedy that. Pippin would send trackers out to the weavers’ and even though the moon would have set by the time they arrived, they’d work by torchlight if they had to.

And they had to. They had to find the ruffians, before...

‘Who’s got whom?’ Regi asked, rising from his desk to steady Hilly.

But Merry had a sick look on his face, and Sam was white, and whispering, ‘How...? I thought he was still safe at Whitwell...’

But Hilly pressed the note into Pippin’s hands, and then he dug in his pocket and scattered a handful of golden-brown curls upon the desktop.

Pippin read swiftly, and then his eyes closed and his hands shook; he swayed, and caught himself on the desk.

‘Farry...’ Merry said, and to Regi, ‘Fetch Woodruff!’

‘No,’ Pippin said, opening his eyes again, and had the ruffians seen his face they might have known fear of hobbits for the first time since they’d been chased from the Shire after the Battle of Bywater, and rightly so. ‘No, I need no healer.’

He swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat and threw the note down on the desk. Merry took it up and began to read as Pippin turned to Reginard.

‘Call the muster together, whatever hobbits have arrived,’ he said. Some of these were in the yard, saddling ponies and packing supplies, but the majority were sitting in the great room, fortifying themselves against exertions to come. ‘We won’t be waiting until the dawn. Who ever is here will be going out immediately, and we’ll arrange to send latecomers out after.’

Regi nodded and left. What ever the note contained, he was sure he’d be finding out shortly. In the meantime, there was work to be done, and done swiftly from the Thain’s icy tone.

‘Going out...’ Sam echoed. ‘Where?’

‘Where was the note left?’ Pippin demanded, swinging on Hilly.

‘Weavers’,’ came the succinct answer.

‘A bag of gold, to be left atop the Three-Farthing Stone,’ Merry read. ‘That is their destination, you think?’

‘Of course not!’ Pippin snapped, ‘though some one or two of them might go that way, to collect the gold, or they might take a hobbit family in the vicinity and force a father or son to do their dirty work for them, or suffer the poor hobbits left behind.’

‘Yes,’ Sam said bleakly, remembering an incident in Gondor. ‘That’s how they work. I’d hoped to forget.’

‘We’ll send a body to the Three-Farthing Stone,’ Pippin said, ‘with a bag of gold, of course...’

‘You’re going to pay them?’ Hilly said, hope stirring in him. ‘And they’ll give Farry back, unharmed?’

‘They think we’re stupid enough to believe that,’ Pippin snapped. He drew a shaking breath and ran a hand over his head. ‘But we’ll pay them, nonetheless, on the off chance that they are honest ruffians.’

Merry gave a snort, and though it was grim reading, his eyes went over the note again. ‘Three-Farthing Stone,’ he said. ‘That’s quite some way from where the note was found. In which direction do you think they’ll go? What are they after? They could not have come into the Shire gambling on running into the son of the Thain...’

‘The treasure-hoard?’ Pippin said, and shook his head. ‘I cannot see them coming to the Great Smials, creeping under our noses to steal the treasury.’

‘The new gold mine,’ Sam said. ‘News has gone out, as far as Bree and beyond, of the rich strike. They might have visions of attacking the mine under cover of darkness, taking the miners unawares. The hobbits would scarcely be expecting trouble, and a shovel makes a poor enough weapon against arrows and man-sized clubs.’

‘And the gold mine lies on a line between Weavers’ and the Stone,’ Merry said.

‘What’s that?’ Pippin demanded suddenly, holding out his hand for the note.

‘What’s what?’ Merry said, though he obediently surrendered the paper.

Pippin turned it over, laid it down, smoothed it out on the desk.

‘A map...’ Sam said, and on closer inspection he amended, ‘Part of a map, anyhow.’

‘Buckland,’ Merry said, ‘but it’s been torn from a larger whole. A map of the Shire... and they’ve torn Buckland away. Obviously they won’t be escaping in that direction.’

‘Well that narrows things down considerably,’ Pippin said with an ironic twist to his mouth. He was breathing shallowly, but forced himself to stay calm, for Farry’s sake, for whenever he closed his eyes the mocking words danced before his lids.

Here is a token, to show we have your son. He is whole, at the moment...

...a bag of gold, one thousand sovereigns, on top of the Three-Farthing Stone by the third hour after dawn, and no tricks...

‘Whole, at the moment,’ he whispered.

‘What you told us,’ Hilly said, remembering the Thain’s talk of ruffians and child-stealing, the talk that had nearly landed his brother Tolly, and their cousin Ferdi in ruin. ‘The note is worded as the one in Gondor you saw, when the ruffians made Samwise a messenger in one of their foul plots...’

He didn’t need Pippin’s nod. The Thain had told them of child-stealing, of his fears for Diamond and Farry, after the Thain’s wealth of gold both found and gifted became common knowledge beyond the Bounds of the Shire.

‘Then, if they don’t get the bag of gold, they’ll cut off his ear,’ Hilly said, wanting to be sick. ‘They’ll cut... the ear of a little child... the filth!’

‘Aye,’ Pippin said, ‘and probably whether they have the gold or not. If they get the first bag of gold, so easily, they’ll cut off his ear to prompt us to surrender another bag, or ten.’

‘And if they don’t get the gold,’ Sam said thickly. ‘First they’ll leave an ear where it might be found, to ensure his family are listening, and then his thumbs, to show his family how helpless they are in the face of the ruffians’ determination, and next his great toes, to show how they are crippled in any effort to find...’ He was breathing in quick, sharp breaths, but he couldn’t stop himself, though Merry had taken him by the shoulders and was imploring him, with increasing urgency, to stop. ‘And then his eyes, to show... and last his tongue, to tell that this is their last chance to ransom their loved one alive... if you can call it “alive”.’

The Mayor gulped, and breaking free from Merry’s grip he barely made it to the waste bin before he was violently sick. He had picked up a packet left in the marketplace in Minas Tirith, thinking to return the lost item to its owner. But when he’d opened it to try to find identifying information, he’d found it to be containing a note and a grisly accompaniment. He would never forget the horror of it. Never. Worse than Shelob’s lair, in a way, for it had occurred after Sauron’s fall, in a city of Men who’d fought for good, where he had expected no vestiges of Shadow.

‘And now they are in the Shire,’ he whispered, wiping his mouth with a shaking hand. Catching a white blur at the corner of his eye, he looked up, and nodded thanks to Merry, who was extending a handkerchief.

‘And in the Shire they have sown the seeds of their own destruction,’ Pippin said. ‘We’ll hunt them down. They’ll have no escape. And perhaps...’ he dashed an impatient sleeve across his watering eyes. ‘And perhaps we’ll find Farry before they’ve quite finished with him...’ But there was no hope in his voice, and in his helplessness he allowed the cold fury to rise within him, to engulf him in a wave that for the moment washed away his despair, replacing it with determination. The time for grief would come, he knew, but he must be cool and clear-headed if he was to avenge his sister’s husband... and his son.





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