CHAPTER 1: FRODO’S KIN

It was midday, and sunlight fell through the narrow windows in the Houses of Healing, striping its stone floors with a thin warmth dimmed by soot-laden clouds. Meriadoc Brandybuck sat propped up against pillows on his too-large bed, staying in bed as his healers had ordered, but stubbornly sitting on top of the rumpled bedclothes, fully dressed. His right arm was bent at the elbow and cradled against his waist, wrapped tightly in strips of linen from thumb to bicep. Except for that small reminder of his recent battle with the Witch-king, he seemed hale. And angry, if judging by the set of his jaw.

Pippin was sitting quietly--too quietly--on the side of Merry’s bed, looking down at his dusty, dangling feet. His black and silver guard’s uniform was wrinkled and dust-streaked as well, and shadows creased beneath his eyes.

“Please,” Pippin said. “I’m too tired to argue anymore, Merry.”

“Are you?” Merry leapt on these words as if offered a prize, his eyes narrowed with determination. “And if you’re too tired to talk, how do you expect to have the strength to fight?”

“Leave me out of it. It’s been a long day, is all.” Pippin frowned. It didn’t matter what Merry thought. Strider already said Pippin would be representing the Shire in the last battle for Frodo. But Merry was staying here. Healers’ orders.

Merry saw his cousin’s shoulders slumping with weariness and almost felt guilty pressing his argument. Almost, because he would feel much more guilt if he didn’t go to battle with Pippin. He couldn’t go through it again, the anguish of their separation, his cousin lost somewhere in a city aflame. (Courage, Merry. Courage for our friends.)

“If you go, I go,” Merry said firmly, trying to put all of the weight of his older-cousin authority into his words. “Or we both stay.”

Pippin knew Merry didn’t mean to be unreasonable. But at this point, all Pippin wanted to do was storm about the room, comparing Merry’s logic to that of a troll’s. Or the density of his thick head to stone. Or better yet, he could make the excellent point that Merry’s current reasoning had all the combined logical prowess contained in the walnut-sized brains trapped in the thick skulls of a group of greedy trolls turned into stone.

Now that would do the trick.

But instead he closed his eyes a moment and said, in a voice so quiet that Merry was forced to lean forward to hear him, “I know I can fight when we meet the forces of Mordor in battle. Can you say the same?”

Merry blinked. “I--”

“Can you even grip a sword, Merry?” Pippin persisted, though it hurt to see the look of despair creeping back so soon into his cousin’s eyes. (Are you going to leave me?)

Merry remained quiet, his eyes fixed on his immobilised arm, as Pippin continued, “You’ve been bedridden. Today was the first day the healers allowed you to take a short stroll from this room to the gardens and back, and you were drenched in sweat when you returned. You couldn’t possibly march all the way to the Black Gate, much less fight.”

There was silence for a moment. Pippin was just beginning to think he’d won the argument, when Merry spoke in a low voice, fierce and unexpected.

“Give me your sword,” he said.

“What?” Pippin gasped. The look in Merry’s eyes.

“Give me your sword.”

Pippin’s eyes remained locked on Merry’s as he slowly drew his blade from its scabbard. He presented it to his cousin, pommel first.

Merry held out his left hand, his unbandaged hand, and sighed when he felt the cool weight of the sword’s hilt against his palm. He slid from the bed and walked to the centre of the room, sword held before him.

Merry swung the blade once, crookedly. Then again, with more determination, and the sword’s path was true. He tried a few jabs, a swing low to an invisible orc’s ankles, a thrust high to the creature’s gut.

He turned to Pippin, triumphantly, but his cousin’s brow was wrinkled in worry. Of course. Boromir had taught them to swing with their off-hands, just in case their sword hands were injured in a skirmish. But to go into battle one-handed? If something happened to Merry’s left hand, he would be utterly defenceless.

Merry knew what he must do. He lowered the sword to his side. “Pippin, untie me,” he said, with a meaningful look at the cloth that had been tied as a sling around his neck, holding his injured arm against his chest.

“But the healers--” Pippin began, but Merry quelled him with another fierce look. With an aggrieved sigh, Pippin stood up and pushed Merry around by his shoulders so he could reach behind his cousin’s neck to deftly loosen the sling’s knot.

“If you injure yourself, you better not let Strider blame me when he sees what you’ve done,” Pippin said.

“I won’t,” Merry said, though his breath quickened and his face whitened as the sling fell to his feet. He stretched out his arm, rotating his wrist gingerly, feeling the bandages support and constrict the movement of his muscles. This new movement brought new pain. It was as if all the time his arm was in the sling he’d been holding it in a bucket of snow, numb with cold. But now, as he tried to move his arm freely, he felt a sensation like cold water trickling across his skin, which soon gave way to fiery prickles of heat and pain, concentrating in his joints--his wrist and fingers, his elbow, even his relatively unscathed shoulder.

Pippin could see his cousin’s distress. “Merry, let me tie it back,” he said.

“Give me a moment,” Merry rasped, from between clenched teeth. The fiery sensation was lessening. If he could just stand a few more minutes....

“Merry--”

“A moment, you wretched Took!”

Pippin stepped away, a look of surprised hurt on his face, and sat back down on the bed. Merry closed his eyes against this. His pain was too consuming, he’d make it up to Pippin later. His breath eased up, and colour returned to his cheeks. His arm still ached, but the prickling stabs of pain were subsiding, lessening enough that he might try a swing or two.

Tentatively, he switched hands. The second the sword’s full weight rested upon his bandaged wrist, his face became pinched and white again, but he still spun and dropped into a ready stance, the sword gleaming before his face, its blade upright and unwavering. He spun it in a slow arc as sweat-beads gathered on his forehead, his eyes dark with concentration.

“Meriadoc Brandybuck!”

Pippin yelped in surprise, but Merry’s grip on the sword didn’t falter as he raised his eyes to front of the room. The heavy wooden door had been flung open by Gandalf, who stood in the doorway wearing a frown beneath his bristling eyebrows. He looked first at Merry’s defiant expression, then Pippin’s guilty one.

“Peregrin Took, what mischief is this?”

“Mischief?” Pippin said, tapping into his best survival tactics on instinct, his eyes going wide and innocent, his eyebrows arching in confusion, his mouth open in a guileless Oh! of surprise. A face that Merry knew all too well.

Of course, Gandalf was acquainted with Pippin’s tactics as well. His glower deepened. “Mischief, indeed. Why did you give Meriadoc your sword when you know he’s supposed to be resting in bed?”

“An interesting question. Perhaps Meriadoc would like to answer?” Pippin said, clasping his hands together and giving his cousin a significant look.

Gandalf shifted his glare to Merry, who just couldn’t resist. “I’d rather not. After all, it’s your sword,” he said, a little too cheerfully.

“And it’s your poor health and your neglected bed,” Pippin said, then muttered under his breath, “and it’s not like I didn’t try to stop you, you lousy, traitorous Brandybuck.”

At this, Gandalf turned to cough suspiciously into the sleeve of his robe. When he turned back, his face was still grim, but laughter sparkled in his eyes. “Hobbits,” he said, as if this explained it all.

Merry took this lightening of Gandalf’s mood as an opportunity to press his advantage. “Gandalf, I want to fight--you can see I’m well enough. And....” His voice faltered and Merry quickly turned away.

His back to them, Merry continued in a low voice. “And you can’t leave me behind. Not again.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not my decision to make,” Gandalf said.

“That’s right,” a voice said from behind him, “it’s mine.” Aragorn stepped into the room and Merry whirled back around, still holding Pippin’s sword aloft. “And I’m not likely to listen to the requests of patients who defy their healers’ orders.”

“Please, Strider--Aragorn. You can’t tell me I can’t go. It’s for Frodo. I have as much of a right to be there as any of you--maybe even more.”

Aragorn sighed and stood for a moment, measuring the hobbit before him, sword held up before his face, his eyes ablaze with an emotion stronger than anger or fear. He was in pain, that much was obvious. But the passion in his heart outweighed his pain, buried it beneath the task he was determined to do. He saw in Merry’s eyes the same look he’d seen in Frodo’s eyes countless times as they journeyed together. Perhaps it was just because their features were similar; he was Frodo’s kin. But Aragorn suspected it was more than that. Hobbits were, after all, amazing creatures.

Aragorn nodded once, noncommittally. “Let’s see you swing the sword, then.”

~~~

Aragorn followed Gandalf out of Merry’s room and shut the door behind him with a sigh.

“Well?” Gandalf said.

Aragorn stood silently for a moment, then said, “He’s in pain.”

“Yes, he is.”

“But he’s very determined.”

“Yes,” Gandalf said, as he removed his pipe from his robes and cupped his hand to light it.

“He shouldn’t go, you know this,” Aragorn said, as if Gandalf had been arguing with him.

“Certainly not,” Gandalf said.

They stood there a moment, worry and frustration wrinkling Aragorn’s brow as Gandalf puffed on his pipe.

“And yet, unless I am mistaken, you have already made your decision. You will allow Meriadoc to fight,” Gandalf mused. “What swayed you?”

Aragorn sighed again. “When I looked in his eyes and saw....” Aragorn’s voice trailed off as his gaze slid over the walltop to the fierce black clouds resting over Mordor. “I saw Frodo in him.”

Gandalf nodded. “Yes. As did I.”

“Yet I fear--I fear that as wrong as it is to keep him here, it is equally wrong to send him into battle,” Aragorn said. “He was not pierced by a Morgul blade like Frodo, but he too bears the mark of the Witch-king’s touch. I’m afraid what contact with the other Nazgul will do to him.”

Gandalf’s expression was closed, inscrutable, wreathed in pipe smoke that quickly vanished, swept away by the hot winds that gusted fitfully from the dark mountains on the horizon. “We can know only one thing for certain. As one of the two who slew of the Witch-king, Meriadoc will never again be underestimated by the enemy.”

“And the remaining Nazgul, if they realise who he is....”

“We could be sending him to his doom,” Gandalf muttered, “just like Frodo.”