From time to time certain readers beg that I do a certain something to Elrond. Well, now I have done it. There is also Glorfindel/Anomen bonding in this story, which is always a request.

‘Burzum’ means ‘darkness’ in Black Speech. Certain of the more daring Elves utter it as a curse.

Thanks to the following reviewers: JastaElf, Lilandriel, Lonekit of Thunderclan, Lady Ambreanna, Foxgurl0000, Elfinabottle, RumorUnderOath, vectis, and CAH. I am delighted to receive any and all responses, whether reviewers are logged in or not. If you do happen to be logged in, I will use the reply feature to get back to you.

Beta reader: None. I take my chances on the shorter stories and only inflict the longer ones on Dragonfly.

Episode 5: An Arm for an Arm

Elrond grimaced. “Hold still,” Erestor scolded. “You are as bad as an elfling.”

“I must look like an elfling,” retorted Elrond. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t behave like one.”

“He sounds like an elfling, too,” observed Gandalf, taking his pipe from his mouth.

“I should remain silent if I were you,” observed Glorfindel, “as it is in part your fault that Elrond looks as he does.”

“How is it my fault?” protested Gandalf.

“You left your staff lying about.”

“It wasn’t ‘lying about’, Glorfindel. It was in my chamber.”

“It should have been locked in the armory, for it is as good as a weapon.”

“Oh, be silent the lot of you!” Elrond exclaimed. “Erestor, have you finished with my hair? I want to know how I look.”

The others studied the back of Elrond’s head.

“Well, how much hair have I got left?” Elrond demanded.

“Now that Erestor has removed the singed patches,” said Glorfindel, “it is plain that you haven’t lost all that much hair after all.”

“I agree,” said Gandalf. “Why, the damaged portions are hardly noticeable. Certainly you are nowhere near bald, which I believe is what you feared.”

“Aye, I did not want to look like those scamps.”

Those ‘scamps’—Anomen and the twins—had entirely lost their hair on several occasions, so Elrond had a good idea of what he would have looked like had he lost his. Now he sighed with relief and turned to face his friends. They blanched. Elrond noticed their appalled expressions. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously. He raised his hand to his face. When he drew it back, it was blackened. Frantically, he swiped his hand over his face again. “I shall skin him!” he shouted.

“My line,” Glorfindel said gloomily.

“I am sure,” Erestor tried to soothe the Elf, “that we shall be able to compound an ointment that will help matters.”

“What am I to do in the meantime? How may I face my folk and give such commands as are needful?”

“You still have your voice,’ opined Erestor.

“You can use hand gestures,” suggested Glorfindel.

“Have you tried wiggling your ears?” asked Gandalf.

The three Elves stared at the wizard dumbfounded. “Wiggle my ears,” repeated Elrond. “I thought I heard you say wiggle my ears. But I can’t have heard you say that I should wiggle my ears. My ears must not be working—let alone capable of wiggling!”

Elrond’s voice had gone up in pitch as he spoke, and Gandalf raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Now, now, Elrond,” he said in an attempt to appease his friend, “there are people who get along without even one of them, let alone two.”

“We are not talking about his testicles,” said Glorfindel, who could not let this opportunity pass. “He really does need his eyebrows, Mithrandir.”

Elrond glared at Glorfindel. “If you want to keep both of yours, you’d better leave off joking at my expense.”

Gandalf was backing up by now, and Glorfindel began to edge away as well. “I think,” Erestor said nervously, “that I have a manuscript needs copying. A very long manuscript, by the way. It will take me a long time, I should think. Several months, really.”

By now Erestor was babbling, and suddenly Elrond realized how truly ludicrous the situation was. His fists had been clenched, but now he relaxed them. His shoulders had been hunched, but now he relaxed those muscles as well. Next he began to smile, and then he began to chuckle.

“Several months?” he laughed. “It will take several months for my eyebrows to grow back in, but what are several months in the life of an Elf? At worst I shall have to endure the smiles of my friends, and in my life I have been on the receiving end of much worse!”

Elrond’s words were immediately proved true, for Gandalf, Glorfindel, and Erestor commenced beaming. Before too long, all four were laughing heartily.

“Well,” Elrond said as he removed the cork from a bottle of wine, “I suppose poor Anomen is halfway to Lothlórien by now. Glorfindel, you will have a time of it catching him and bringing him back. Whatever was he doing with your staff in the first place, Mithrandir?”

“I don’t know, Elrond,” Gandalf said, shaking his head bemusedly.

“He tried to take it once in order to keep you from departing Rivendell,” Erestor pointed out.

“True, but I have only just arrived, and he knows I mean to stay here for several weeks. I don’t think he took it for that reason—not this time, anyway.”

“I should ask Elrohir if I were you,” Glorfindel suggested to Elrond. “I saw the two of them with their heads together after the noon meal.”

Having no eyebrows, Elrond tried rolling his eyes, and his friends assured him that the results were impressive. “Now as to Elrohir,” the elf-lord sighed after this ocular exercise, “yes, I should not be surprised if he were mixed up in this somehow. Likely he dared Anomen to purloin Mithrandir’s staff. That is one of Anomen’s weaknesses: he will allow Elrohir to goad him into mischief.”

“Well,” said Glorfindel, setting down his empty glass, “I had best be on my way, for it wouldn’t do for Anomen to be out after dark. My scouts have picked up the tracks of a lame wolf, and such a creature might be hungry enough to stalk an elfling.”

“If Anomen still has my staff, as seems likely,” Gandalf said dryly, “I should be sorry for the wolf!”

And Anomen did indeed still have the wizard’s staff. Clutching it, he tramped miserably through the undergrowth, heading in no particular direction. ‘Now both Elrond and Mithrandir will be angry at me’, he said to himself. Elrohir’s dare had seemed such a simple one. Fetch Mithrandir’s staff, show it to the twins, and return it to the wizard’s chamber. Unfortunately, as Anomen had crept through the garden bearing the staff, he had unconsciously murmured aloud some words he had overheard the wizard uttering whilst setting off a display of fireworks for his elven friends. A bolt of flame had shot out the end of the staff, and it had enveloped the head of Elrond, who had been enjoying an afternoon stroll in the garden. Elrond shouted in surprise but had the presence of mind to instantly dunk his head in the fountain. Anomen, meanwhile, shrieked and fled the garden. As he fled heedlessly, he had carried off the staff without meaning to.

When the elfling recovered his wits, he was deep in the forest. He held the staff at arms length, staring at it with big eyes. He wanted to cast it aside; fortunately, however, in spite of his fear he somehow understood the danger that would be posed by the object if it fell into the wrong hands. ‘It is a thing of power’, he murmured. ‘I cannot abandon it in the forest, lest it be found by someone who might misuse it’. Here Anomen winced. ‘As I did’, he added sadly. He took a deep breathe. ‘I must return it to Mithrandir’, he said to himself.

Anomen had not paid any attention to where his feet had carried him. ‘I had better climb a tree to get my bearings’ he said to himself. With his belt he devised a hanger for the staff. Allowing it to dangle behind him, he nimbly ascended a tall pine tree whose top rose above the forest canopy. To his relief, he saw that in his wanderings he had ended up only a few miles from Elrond’s Hall. Anxious to return to the Hall before darkness fell, he descended and commenced walking briskly toward Rivendell.

The elfling had very nearly reached his destination when he sensed an unaccustomed presence in the forest. Spinning about, he caught sight of a grey shadow slipping between the trees. Acting upon instinct, Anomen at once leaped up and caught hold of a tree limb. Swinging his legs up over the limb, he laid flat upon its length. He had no sooner stretched out upon the branch than a wolf limped out into the open. The creature circled haltingly around the base of the tree and then stopped under the limb upon which Anomen sheltered. Snarling, it attempted to leap up, but, unbalanced because of its lameness, it fell back awkwardly. Hastily, Anomen climbed to a higher limb, where he watched as the wolf circled the tree several more times. At last the beast settled itself upon its haunches at the base of the tree, from which spot it intently watched the elfling.

Anomen considered what to do. Had the forest been thicker at this point, he would have tried leaping from tree to tree and so returning to the Hall in that fashion or, at the very least, drawing near enough to shout for help. Had he his bow, he would have tried to bring down the creature. The only weapon he carried, however, was the small knife that he bore everyday as a matter of course, and this was more a tool than a weapon. He had Mithrandir’s staff, of course. He could set fire to the wolf’s fur and so escape in that fashion. Anomen considered. ‘No’, he decided at last. ‘The staff should be used only at great need. I am safe for now, and perhaps by morning the wolf will have given up and gone in search of other prey’. Thus resolved, Anomen settled himself securely in the crotch of the tree and prepared to sleep.

While Anomen had been wandering the woods, Glorfindel had been tracking him. It was a more frustrating task than usual because there was no pattern to the elfling’s movements. At last, after several hours of meandering, Glorfindel realized that Anomen had struck out on a direct path for Elrond’s Hall. ‘That’s a good lad’, the balrog-slayer smiled to himself. ‘He is going home to face his punishment. I do hope he has got the staff with him so that he may restore it to Mithrandir straight away. Such a gesture will both mitigate the lad’s punishment and save me from having to arrange a scouring of the forest to retrieve that wretched block of wood’.

The sun was sinking below the horizon, but Glorfindel had no further need of its light for he no longer needed to track Anomen. Instead, he set out on the same direct path as Anomen had taken. As he walked, he entertained himself with thoughts of the dinner that would be waiting for him when he returned to the Hall. He also entertained himself with thoughts of ‘dessert’, which he very much hoped would take the form of a certain elleth visiting from Lothlórien who in the Hall of Fire had seemed enraptured by the accounts he had been giving of his various exploits over the centuries.

Suddenly Glorfindel’s ruminations were interrupted as he was thrown violently to the ground. He cried out at a sudden pain in his shoulder. In his distraction, the Elf had walked heedlessly, and almost literally, into the maw of the lame wolf. The beast had leaped for his throat, but fortunately for Glorfindel, the crippled wolf missed its mark and sunk its teeth into the Elf’s shoulder instead. Now wolf and Elf rolled about on the ground, the wolf trying to maintain its grip and the Elf scrabbling at the creature’s throat with one hand while trying to reach his knife with the other.

Above, Anomen awoke to the sounds of snarling wolf and cursing biped. He heard the word ‘Burzum’, which he knew to be Black Speech, but the voice was not that of an Orc. Peering down, he saw the wolf and a figure struggling beneath him, and he realized at once that this was just the sort of ‘great need’ that would justify wielding the wizard’s staff. Without hesitation, he seized the staff, pointed it as best he could at the wolf, and pronounced the words of Command—but much more loudly than he had uttered them earlier that day. A ball of flame exploded from the end of the staff and Anomen was thrown backward. Fortunately, the elfling landed flat upon his back upon a soft windrow of leaves so that the force of the blast was both dissipated throughout the whole of his body and absorbed by the leaves. Dazed only a little, he heard yelps and saw a flaming quadruped hurling itself through the forest, quickly vanishing behind the trees. Sitting upon the ground, panting, smoke arising from his hair, was an Elf. As the smoke cleared, Anomen saw that it was Glorfindel. “Are you badly hurt?” Elf and elfling cried simultaneously. Glorfindel began to laugh with relief and opened his arms, and Anomen gladly crawled into his embrace, hiccoughing a little as he tried not to cry his own relief.

“Where is Mithrandir’s staff?” Glorfindel said at last when both he and Anomen were breathing normally.

“I went one way and the staff went another,” Anomen said, “but it cannot have been thrown far.” He began to search for it, starting from the tree trunk and working outward. The moon had at last arisen, and with its help in a very little while he had found the staff lying under a bush. It looked no worse for its adventure, and Anomen brought it to Glorfindel, who used it to lever himself onto his feet, with some assistance from Anomen as well. Leaning heavily upon the staff, the balrog-slayer began to lead the way toward Elrond’s Hall. They had not gone far, however, when they heard Elrond and other Elves shouting their names. Gandalf had seen and heard the explosion from his balcony and had told the Elves in what direction to search.

Elrond was much too relieved to see both Glorfindel and Anomen alive to scold the elfling. In any event, it was not his custom to upbraid his sons publicly. He merely took Anomen’s hand and led him to his chamber. There the elfling gladly assisted his foster-father as he tended to Glorfindel’s injuries. Eagerly he handed Elrond this and that vial or instrument, sometimes anticipating the need and reaching for an object even before it had been requested.

Glorfindel’s shoulder was of course of greatest concern. However, once Elrond had cut away the balrog-slayer’s tunic, he saw that the wolf had in fact done little damage. No doubt the lame creature had been famished, a condition that had led him to attack a full-grown Elf, but also one that had left him weak and incapable of savaging his prey.

As for Glorfindel’s hair, it was scorched even worse than Elrond’s had been. It looked very ragged after Elrond had cut out the burnt portions. Moreover, the balrog-slayer had lost both his eyebrows and his eyelashes. After Glorfindel had washed the soot from his face, he was left with an expression of perpetual surprise. Oddly, though, the balrog-slayer was laughing and joking continually, even when he saw himself in the mirror. Anomen wondered at his demeanor, but Elrond did not. He knew that the balrog-slayer was so relieved that Anomen had not fallen prey to a rogue wolf that he cared not one whit about his own injuries.

After Glorfindel had been seen to, Elrond tended to Anomen. Carefully he examined the elfling, but it seemed that the young one had suffered nothing worse than some bruises and scrapes. Satisfied, Elrond ordered that food and drink be brought to his chamber, and he relaxed with a glass of wine, smiling beneficently upon his friend and his foster-son as they gratefully ate their belated dinner. Midway through the meal, Gandalf knocked upon the door. Anomen paused in mid-bite. “Mithrandir,” he cried remorsefully, “I am sorry that I took your staff, and I did not mean to carry it off into woods.”

“I am sure you did not,” replied the Istar, “but since you scampered into a place that proved dangerous, I am glad you did carry it with you.”

“But he shouldn’t have run away in the first place,” Elrond interjected, “and before that he should not have taken that which did not belong to him.”

“True, but once he panicked and fled, I would rather he have the staff than not. By the by, Anomen, you showed great presence of mind in wielding it as you did.”

For the second time that day, Elrond rolled his eyes. One would think Anomen the hero of the piece rather than a mischievous elfling who deserved punishment. Presence of mind, indeed! Pity he had not shown such ‘presence of mind’ when Elrohir dared him to take the staff. (Elrond knew for a certainty that this was the case, for the older elfling had confessed to the deed whilst Glorfindel had been out searching for the younger one.)

“Anomen,” Elrond said sternly, “you may have shown presence of mind, but the need to demonstrate that quality would not have arisen had you not run away, and you wouldn’t have run away if you hadn’t singed my hair, and you wouldn’t have singed my hair if you hadn’t taken Mithrandir’s staff.”

This was an impressive recitation, and Anomen looked suitably contrite at the end of it. Elrond fought the desire to roll his eyes yet again. How was he to maintain his stern demeanor in the face of that woeful expression? His resolution dwindling, the elf-lord pressed on desperately.

“As a result of your actions, Anomen,” Elrond said with forced severity, “Lord Glorfindel will not have the use of his arm for several days—perhaps several weeks! Therefore, until such time as he has fully recovered, you will remain by his side and assist him in his duties. That is, you must furnish an arm to replace the one you have deprived him of. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Ada,” Anomen said meekly. Elrond frowned. He could not say why, but he felt dissatisfied with the outcome of the conversation. Oddly, he would have been happier if Anomen had not been so meek.

The next day Anomen cheerfully set off for the Armory immediately after breakfast. Suddenly Elrond perceived that there had been a flaw in his plan for punishing the elfling: through his attendance on Glorfindel, Anomen was by necessity excused from his lessons with Erestor! Elrond groaned, and the eyebrows that were not there shot up and contracted. If Elrond had been a Man, he should have had a headache.

When Anomen presented himself before Glorfindel, the balrog-slayer pointed him toward a pile of feathers and shafts, and the elfling spent the morning patiently gluing fletching upon arrows. In the afternoon, Glorfindel set the elfling to polishing shields. To this task the elfling brought the same care that he had expended on fletching the arrows.

The next day, there were no arrows to fletch or shields to polish, and Glorfindel decided to teach Anomen how to use the grinding wheel. Anomen was familiar with the use of the whetstone, but he had never used the wheel. Fascinated, he stood by Glorfindel as the balrog-slayer demonstrated. Then Glorfindel laid his hands over the elfling’s and guided him in sharpening a sword. Glorfindel gradually allowed Anomen to take over, and soon Anomen was happily seated before the wheel, carefully honing the edges of swords and knives.

The following day, Glorfindel arrived early at the Armory and examined with approval the weapons that Anomen had sharpened. When Anomen arrived, the balrog-slayer handed him one of the swords and then with his uninjured arm picked out one for himself. “I must keep in training,” he said to the elfling. “You shall be my sparring partner.”

Anomen’s eyes went so very wide that Glorfindel had to suppress a laugh. Carefully Glorfindel led Anomen through a series of maneuvers. Soon the elfling was parrying Glorfindel’s blows with more and more confidence, until at last Anomen suddenly feinted to one side and then thrust his sword past Glorfindel’s guard, whacking Glorfindel upon the thigh with the flat of his sword. Glorfindel dropped down upon one knee. “I yield, I yield, O mighty warrior!” he laughed. He arose and tousled Anomen’s hair. “Come. Let us eat lunch.”

As they ate, Glorfindel told the elfling of campaigns in which he had fought, and if Elrond could have seen how attentive Anomen was, he would have realized that the youngster was learning at least as much geography and history as he would have mastered had he been sitting at a desk in the library listening to one of Erestor’s lectures.

And so Anomen passed the period of ‘punishment’ very profitably indeed. Each day the young Elf strengthened his skills, developed new ones, and learned a little more about the peoples and history of Arda. So absorbed was he in his daily tasks that he was not at all distressed when Gandalf announced one day at dinner that he was departing for Lothlórien on the morrow.

“I think,” Elrond said later that evening as he strolled in the garden with the wizard, “that this time Anomen will not be stealing your staff to prevent you from leaving Rivendell.”

“No, he will not,” agreed Gandalf, smiling a little ruefully. “By the by, isn’t it taking an unusually long time for Glorfindel’s shoulder to heal? I should have expected him to have been better several weeks ago.”

“Yes, I had noticed that,” agreed Elrond, who now was smiling as well. “Certainly enough time has passed for his hair to grow back!”

“Yours likewise,” observed Gandalf. “Your eyebrows are as impressive as formerly.”

“Good! For even though Anomen has kept out of mischief these past several weeks, I am sure I shall still have need of my eyebrows in the future.”

“Ah, so you do not think Anomen has entirely learned his lesson?” said Gandalf. “Perhaps,” the wizard continued with a smile, “the supposed punishment has not been sufficiently rigorous.”

“I have been considering the subject of punishment, my friend,” said Elrond, also smiling, “and I have concluded that I do not truly expect Anomen’s behavior to improve on account of any penalty, either slight or severe. Nor would I want him to improve for such a reason, for that would mean that his obedience would be the result of fear. There is no virtue in doing something merely because you are constrained to do it. You want to behave well, you admire others and wish to emulate them—those are far better motives for good behavior.”

“Anomen does wish to behave well, and he admires you and Glorfindel, among others.”

“Exactly,” agreed Elrond. “It is thus merely necessary to encourage him to do what he naturally wishes to do and to wait patiently for the encouragement to have an effect. Anomen is young, and he is therefore impulsive and does not always think through the consequences of his actions. For the moment, the prospect of imminent punishment does serve as a useful substitute for the foresight that Anomen has not yet perfected. It does deter him from some acts of mischief. It is, however, the passage of time and Anomen’s innate goodness that will ultimately bring about better behavior on his part.”

“So you see punishment as an imperfect but temporary measure that shall be less and less needful as Anomen matures.”

“Yes, Mithrandir, and the punishment itself is not what will lead him to permanently amend his behavior in any way that truly matters. Indeed, severe punishment would probably have the opposite effect, causing him to fear and distrust his elders—not sentiments likely to cause him to wish to emulate their virtues!”

“So,” Gandalf chuckled, “I would surmise that you are not troubled by the fact that Anomen has not been suffering daily at the hands of Glorfindel—metaphorically speaking, of course, as he has only got the one hand.”

“No, now I think on it, I am not at all troubled. Indeed, Anomen seems to be thriving on his ‘punishment’. In fact, I deem it a pity that Glorfindel will soon have to experience a miraculous recovery. Some strange Men have come too close to our southern border, and I must ask our friend to lead a scouting party to that district. I expect that Glorfindel will arise from his bed tomorrow exclaiming over how much stronger his limb has grown overnight.”

“Do not let him make the announcement until I have departed!” Gandalf exclaimed hastily. “Anomen may decide to steal my staff after all once he realizes that you mean to send him back to the schoolroom!”

Glorfindel did indeed wait until after Gandalf’s departure before letting it be known that his shoulder was fully healed and that his arm had regained its strength. Oddly, he looked down-hearted as he made the announcement, but perhaps the shadow that passed over his face was merely the last trace of the event that had singed his eyebrows and eyelashes. As for Anomen, he, too, seemed inexplicably sad that his punishment had nearly come to an end. I say nearly because Glorfindel assigned him one more task. “You are not half bad at sharpening weapons,” Glorfindel said to the elfling with seeming casualness. “Very well, then! You shall sharpen the sword that I shall bear with me on this mission.”

Anomen’s face lit up without benefit of flame or explosion, and he hastened to the Armory. There he set the grinding wheel in motion and honed the edge of Glorfindel’s sword until it could have split the proverbial hair.

When he returned to the Hall and proffered the sword to Glorfindel, the balrog-slayer took it and examined it carefully. “Well,” he said at last, trying to sound gruff, “you have done a creditable job.”

“I like to sharpen the weaponry” Anomen blurted out. Then he looked horrified. “Oh, please don’t tell Lord Elrond,” he begged.

“You like that task, do you?” said Glorfindel, pretending surprise. “Well, I shall not lie: you have been very helpful to me. Indeed, I should not like Elrond to know that you enjoy working with the weaponry, for then he should forbid you the Armory any time he wished to punish you. Very well, then. If I find that you have behaved yourself in my absence, I shall say nothing to Elrond and upon my return you may accompany me into the Armory and perform such tasks as are within your capacity. But mind you don’t get into mischief or I shall hold the agreement as naught! Do we have an accord?”

Anomen gladly assented to Glorfindel’s terms, and it must be said that the prospect of a reward proved as effective as the prospect of punishment as an inducement to good behavior. Of course, as Elrond pointed out to Glorfindel, it is no more virtuous to act in hopes of gaining a reward than it is to act in hopes of avoiding a punishment. Still, Elrond allowed that, if punishment could be a useful but temporary measure, so, too, could recompense. Thus, encouraged toward good behavior, discouraged from the bad, Anomen continued on his path toward adulthood.