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One Who Sticks Closer than a Brother  by Lindelea

Chapter 50. (Almost) As Fit as a Butcher's Dog

As Tolly stood up from the bed at last, ready to dress himself and begin the day, Mardi insisted on a thorough examination of his brother.

‘Before breakfast?’ Tolly protested.

‘Before anything!’ Mardi insisted. He shooed Freddy and Meadowsweet from the room. ‘Go and have early breakfast with Haldi, and have Ned see to the coach and ponies, that we may set out soon after!’ With just Freddy, the message might be garbled, but Meadowsweet would be eager to see home and children once more, and would be a faithful messenger.

Mardi conducted his examination with all the solemnity of a healer whose patient’s recovery is half-suspect. At intervals he muttered under his breath; at one point he shook his head, and several of the thumps and listenings were repeated more than once before he was satisfied. At last he sat back, shaking his head once more.

‘Well?’ said Tolly. ‘I’m half afraid to ask!’

‘I’m half afraid to tell,’ Mardi said, feeling as if he were in a dream. ‘There’s naught wrong that I can tell, save the fact you look like a survivor of the Long Winter – half-starved, that is, and in need of a steady routine of rest and feeding up until you regain the good health you enjoyed before the fever’s onset.’

‘I feel completely well!’ Tolly said. ‘Never better – not even weakened from lack of feeding, though…’ he looked down at himself, ‘…truth be told, I feel as if I’m wearing someone else’s nightshirt, for this one doesn’t fit me at all! Now, where are my clothes? I’ll see just how “half-starved” I may be, if my clothes are overlarge as well…’

And at this, Mardi stared suddenly, and slapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Clothes!’ he said.

‘Yes, brother,’ Tolly said. ‘You know, shirt and breeches, jacket, cloak – for it is still winter, I deem…’

‘We didn’t pack anything,’ Mardi said in chagrin. ‘We carried you out to the coach on a litter, bundled in blankets, and carried you in here from the coach…’

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess,’ Tolly said. ‘Bundled in blankets!’

‘And not a piece of luggage amongst the lot of us,’ Mardi admitted.

‘Let me try to understand,’ Tolly said slowly. ‘You set out on a journey, without any luggage?’

‘Shades of Bilbo Baggins,’ Mardi said ruefully. ‘Though I do happen to have a handkerchief in my pocket, which is one better than himself.’

Tolly folded his arms and stood before Mardi with a stern look. ‘D’you expect me to walk through the corridors of this inn to the front door in naught but my nightshirt? D’you expect me to brave the winter chill to cross from inn to coach, and from coach to Smials once we arrive? And is it night-clad that I’m to arrive at the Smials?’

When Mardi did not answer, he added as if to himself, ‘I suppose I might always wrap myself in blankets!’

‘We’ll borrow a suit of clothing, from the tallest hobbit here at the inn, and send it back by pony post with a handsome payment,’ Mardi said at last.

Tolly grinned. ‘Very well, brother! Trust you to solve any problem!’

‘Not any, sadly,’ Mardi said. ‘But this one, at least I think I can manage.’ He did not explain further at that moment, though on the long ride back to the Great Smials, he would make clearer Tolly’s peril, as it had been before this wondrous healing, and the Shire healers’ helplessness, including his own.

They made an easy journey back to the Great Smials, Tolly and those who loved him, for Mardi insisted, and Meadowsweet backed him up, and Freddy certainly didn’t mind, and the Thain’s best coach certainly was comfortable to travel in. Haldi tied his pony on behind the coach and sat next to Ned, the driver, up on the box. He directed Ned to steer for the smoothest part of the road, and hold the ponies down to a slow pace, that the occupants might be shaken as little as possible. He still remembered – though Tolly might hardly be able to credit it – how very close the race against death had been, and how only the luck and pluck of the Thain had been enough to secure the win.

Tolly may seem to have his wit and his strength back, but he was still dangerously thin, to Haldi’s way of thinking. ‘No cushion to him at all,’ he muttered to himself, nudging Ned to steer to the middle of the road when the verge ahead appeared overly rough. ‘All bone!’

Meadowsweet and Mardi were doing their best to remedy the situation. Baskets of food had been handed in before the coach had departed, and they were doing their very best to feed the better part of the food to Tolly, along with taking a bit themselves.

‘And so, Woodruff had given you up,’ Mardi was explaining to his wide-eyed brother, to the accompaniment of Freddy snoring in the far corner seat, his head comfortably pillowed.

‘Given me up!’ Tolly echoed, looking to Meadowsweet as if he expected her to deny his brother’s overly dramatic rendering of the tale. Not that Mardi was given to dramatics, he reminded himself – for Meadowsweet hastily wiped at her face and gave him a watery smile. ‘For a mere fever!’

‘A fever that burned for more than a week, and showed no signs of abating,’ Mardi said. ‘A fever that ran its course in five days, in the worst of cases – and yours ran longer, and we’d lost hope that you might outlast it…’

Tolly shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I’m never ill,’ he said. ‘I cannot remember the last time…’

‘Well then, you’ve made up for all the times you didn’t fall ill in the past,’ Mardi said.

Tolly fixed him with a severe look. ‘Now you’re the one spouting nonsense,’ he warned.

But Mardi only laughed, and pulled his brother into yet another hug, and said, ‘And glad to have the opportunity to spout such, to you of all people! Glad I am, indeed!’

Tolly pushed him away, but he was smiling, and he slipped his arm around Meadowsweet and laid a kiss against her hair. ‘Ah, my love,’ he said. ‘You ought to know that nothing could ever take me away from you…’

Meadowsweet gulped and smiled, but the look in her eye spoke a wealth of words that she could not, or would not voice.

‘And so you came up with a mad plan, to shove me in a coach and carry me who-knows-where for who-knows-what reason!’ Tolly said. ‘As if you could outrun Death himself!’

‘We tried, we did indeed, but as it was he very nearly caught us,’ Mardi said. ‘And it wasn’t my “mad plan”, but…’

‘The Thain’s, I imagine?’ Tolly said.

Mardi shook his head, and then nodded, ‘Well, he put the plan into motion, but it was actually Ferdi’s plan in the first place…’

‘Ferdi!’ Tolly said. ‘But… how in the world? How could that hobbit, with his brains half-scrambled, and no ability to speak – isn’t that right?’ Mardi nodded. ‘He’d no words,’ Tolly said, and stopped to swallow hard, grief hitting him once more for his good friend’s straitened circumstances… and would Ferdi remain an invalid for the rest of his life? Would he even still be in the world to greet them on their return to the Smials? Mardi had sounded doubtful, when he’d earlier described Ferdi’s condition, on his rescue from the grave.

‘He’d no words,’ Mardi agreed, ‘but he made his wishes plain somehow, anyhow, and the next I knew the Thain had ordered his best coach made ready, and we were to wrap you warmly against the winter chill, and carry you to the King…’

‘To the King!’ Tolly said in wonder. ‘But, surely, I should remember such a thing!’ His look turned inward, and he said as if to himself, ‘But then, perhaps… I dreamed… But…’

He looked back to Mardi. ‘But we came just this morning from the Goose,’ he said. ‘I recognised the place. We did not begin on the far side of the Brandywine Bridge, where the King might be found – where the Thain and his family, Master and Mayor are to meet the King, or met him already, or…’ He still wasn’t sure of the day or date, having by all accounts lost many days wandering in fever delirium.

‘Are meeting him,’ Mardi said. ‘Today, and on the morrow, and the morrow after, or so the Thain said, three days of hailing and farewelling and then back to planning for the spring ploughing and planting and other everyday concerns…’

Hilly had been there when he’d first awakened, that much Tolly knew, though the events of the previous day were rather misty in his mind, and he wasn’t with them now because he’d escorted the Thain to the Bridge, to the ordained meeting with the King and Queen and their party.

‘So I got better all on my own, without any need of the King,’ Tolly said, ‘and all this desperate journey for naught! What foolishness!’ But his look turned uncertain as Meadowsweet nestled closer and stifled a sob.

‘We stopped at the Goose,’ Mardi said quietly, and then seemed to find it necessary to pause for several breaths. ‘We stopped,’ he said again, and had Tolly’s full attention for the remembered anguish in his face, ‘stopped so that you could die, decently in bed, and not jostling along in a coach on a vain errand.’

‘The same bed where I awoke?’ Tolly said, only half believing. But Mardi had never had reason to use falsehood with him before.

‘The very same,’ Mardi said. ‘And the Thain went haring off, who knows where, as you were sinking. O my dear brother, but you were sinking, your hands and feet gone cold, the chill of Death slowly creeping inward towards your heart…’ He had to stop, to breathe deeply again, and Tolly found himself in the position of comforting his older brother, taking Mardi’s hands in his own and chafing them gently.

‘But I didn’t die,’ he said at last, when it seemed that neither Mardi nor Meadowsweet could go on. ‘And I can only assume it had something to do with the Thain haring off, as you put it…’

At last Mardi mastered himself with a shudder, and took hold of Tolly’s hands, squeezing them a little to add emphasis to his words. ‘He returned with a son of Elrond,’ he said at last, as if this explained everything, and perhaps it did.

Tolly was speechless for a long moment, and then whispered, ‘One of the fair folk! Even as Hilly and Posey have told us…!’ For his younger brother, and Hilly’s wife, had met the children of Elrond on an earlier visit to the Lake with the Thain. He could scarcely credit it, but for the improvement he had seen in Posey on her return. There had been colour in her pale cheeks, and she’d gained weight and health, and she laughed again, after a long and solemn time of grief. Tolly had feared, before that visit, that Hilly would lose his beloved sooner than later, and choose to follow her in death, but no! Both had returned from the Lake renewed somehow.

He looked to Meadowsweet, and she nodded solemnly. ‘A giant, he was,’ she said. ‘Wrapped in a cloak. He knelt by your bed, and took up your hand, and the Thain shooed us all from the room, sent us away that we might not disturb the Healer’s work…’

They all looked up as the coach slowed and began to turn. ‘Ah!’ Mardi said brightly, letting go of Tolly’s hands to sit up, all brisk business once more, tender older brother put away – for Tolly was well! And looking better by the moment… ‘Here we are at the Cockerel, already! And just in time for tea!’





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