Chapter 24. Pieces of a Puzzle

27 September, middle night 

As it turned out, Paladin didn’t have to waken anyone to take his place. As the dwarf-made clock in the parlour struck midnight, he looked up to see Dobbin hovering in the doorway. ‘Nob sent me,’ the hired hobbit said. ‘Said the Missus told him you’d be sitting up with Ferdi this night, just to see if he’d have anything more to say in his sleep.’ The older hobbit gave Paladin a keen-eyed look. ‘Was that a lullaby I heard you humming just now?’

‘Seems to help, somehow,’ Paladin replied with a nod. ‘He looks better, if you take my meaning, to hear something pleasant: a story, a chuckle, a song. What’s the old saying? Light talk makes for a light heart…’

‘He looked better in the light,’ Dobbin said thoughtfully. ‘Sun-light. Light talk. Light heart?’ He shook himself. ‘But that’s not getting you the sleep you need, Dinny. Tomorrow’s another day, and the hay won’t get any lighter – gets heavier, I mind, the more tired you be.’

‘You have the right of it, Dobby,’ Paladin said. ‘You bide with him a bit, and then waken Nod or Tam or…’

‘Don’t you worry about me, Dinny,’ Dobbin said. ‘Nod and me, we’ve got it all worked out, who’s to watch, and when.’

Paladin arose and took himself off to the bed, careful not to disturb his slumbering wife. As he punched up his pillow, preparatory to settling his head, and pulled up the bedcovers, he had the sudden thought that Dobbin’s words who’s to watch, and when could have more than one meaning. He thought again about the watchfulness of Daw’s three young nephews, and how his hired hobbits had taken turns hovering near him as they’d finished yesterday’s haying. He thought of his own unsettled feeling that lingered still, since seeing the bodies of Ferdi’s ponies. Somehow the sight mingled with the memory of Ferdi's and Tolly's pale faces and Vinca's he looks... dead as if they were pieces of a whole. But what whole?

He drew a deep breath and let it out again, and another, but the unsettled feeling persisted, rather like butterflies fluttering somewhere in his middle. It wasn’t something he could put his finger on. He couldn’t call it a spot of indigestion from too much spice. He could not say he was indisposed. He had no feeling that some sort of illness was threatening, “that coming down feeling” as his wife would have called it. Thus it was no physical malady, but what else could he call it?

He breathed deeply, trying to empty his thoughts of all but the most mundane matters. They’d finish the south field, he thought by the end of this day, if there were no more interruptions, even if he set a hobbit or two to harvesting vegetables in the kitchen garden. Half the carrots ought to be pulled and laid in sand, and the potatoes ought to be dug, and the winter onions, and… but Eglantine could oversee that process. He need only worry about the hay.

Soon, too, it would be time to kill the pigs they’d raised through the summer months, and smoke the hams and bacon. The nights were growing cooler, and the days would inevitably follow suit.

In going over the myriad details of readying the farm for the winter season, Paladin suddenly fell asleep.

He dreamed.

And in his dream, two vague figures arose. At first they looked to him as vapours might, one dark as smoke, the other white as steam, rising into the air, twin columns, one seeming a shadow of the other. They appeared to take on form as they rose, heads, bodies, limbs, and resolved into the figures of two warriors, as he’d seen in a book of old tales once, on a day when he was whiling away a rainy day in Bilbo’s study at Bag End, when he was only a tween.

He remembered little about the story, now, but the picture rose in his mind, clear, a warrior clad in black mail, and another in silvery mail that shone bright in the light of the sun. The two raised swords, one of light and the other shadow, and the battle began…

And Paladin sat up, abruptly awake, panting, a strong sense of foreboding resonating through his bones, the clash of the swords ringing in his ears, his heart pounding in his chest. He remained upright, his body slowly calming, his breath coming more easily at last. As his pulse steadied, his head began to clear. ‘Twas a dream,’ he whispered, and looked guiltily over at Eglantine, who (thankfully!) slumbered on. ‘Only a dream,’ he repeated.

The dream faded in the sleeping quiet of the smial, but the warning remained, along with the feeling that the dream had meant something, if only he could remember, if only he could... He had the feeling that he stood before a curtain, that he must put out his hand to draw the curtain aside, that he must face what lay beyond, for good or ill.

He lay himself back down, but sleep was far from him, and his thoughts raced. Once more he went over all that had happened since Ferdi and Tolly had left on their ill-fated hunting trip. They’d been found atop a hill that commanded a wide view of the area. Their ponies had evidently run in blind, unreasoning fear – for no intelligent beast in its sane mind would simply walk off a precipice.

Ferdi had seen a Man, or Men. Had he and Tolly been lured to the top of the hill, perhaps with ill intent? Had they been meant to fall to their deaths with the ponies? And… Paladin suddenly remembered Ferdi’s unnerving nightmare, and Tolly’s chilling response. What did this all have to do with Frodo?

He sat up and swung his legs out from under the bedcovers, stood halfway to his feet, and sat down again. It was the middle night. What was he expecting to do about anything, this time of night?

Eglantine murmured in her sleep, and then turned over with a sigh. Paladin sat very quietly, that he might not waken her, and continued his pondering.

The unsettled feeling that had haunted him since seeing the ponies’ broken bodies… the obvious unease of the Shirriff’s nephews, acting more as if they’d been Mustered than tracking down missing animals. The protectiveness that his hired hobbits had shown… Surely he was simply feeling a natural reaction to the other hobbits’ attitude.

Then why did thinking through the issues not make him feel any better about matters?

He gave a firm nod to himself. First thing on the morrow, he’d send Tam into Whitwell, to engage a Quick Post rider, to take a message to Frodo at Crickhollow. Just what message, he wasn’t sure.