It is, without question, the best bit of luck we have had in days.

Barrels cracked open, bread stacked high, salted meats enough to make a Hobbit weep with gratitude. And pipe-weed — glorious, fragrant pipe-weed — tucked away like a gift from the Valar themselves.

Merry collapses back against a crate, already chewing. “We have stumbled into paradise.”

“I told you wandering off was strategic,” I reply around a mouthful of stolen bread.

We are filthy. We are exhausted. We are very pleased with ourselves.

The sun is warm. The field is quiet. No shrieking orcs. No thunder of pursuit. Just food, smoke, and relief. I lean back against a sack of grain, pipe between my fingers, exhaling contentedly into the open air.

“Do you think they’ll be cross?” Merry asks lazily.

“About what?” I wave the thought away. “We survived.”

The words come easily. Too easily.

I do not think about who might still be searching. I do not think about the way she tracks sound across distance, the way she listens for my breathing in the dark. I do not imagine her cutting through brush, blade drawn, following the faintest trace of where we might have gone.

I take another drag and grin toward the sky.

Boots thunder somewhere behind us.

Merry sits up first. “Ah.”

I turn, already smiling. “Rescue party.”

They crest the rise all at once, not dramatically but with unmistakable force — Gandalf at the forefront, staff in hand; Legolas beside him, sharp and alert; the others fanning out in a tight line behind. And there — among them — Ellariel.

On foot.

Tall even without the height of a saddle, white hair catching the sun. She moves with steady precision, but something in her posture is different from the moment I see her.

I lift a hand in greeting. “You’ll never guess what we found!”

Merry waves his mug enthusiastically.

No one laughs.

They stop a short distance away, and the silence that settles is heavier than any scolding could be.

Ellariel stands still. Not tense in her usual way — not composed and distant — but rigid. Her shoulders are set too square. Her chin angled just slightly higher than normal. Her face… her face is carved into something I have never seen before.

Not cold.

Angry.

The wind shifts and carries the scent of pipe-weed toward them.

Toward her.

The smoke.

The salt.

The unmistakable evidence of leisure.

I lower my pipe without realizing I’ve done it.

“We thought—” I start lightly, but the words feel thin in the air between us.

She does not move closer.

She does not speak.

But I see it now — the tightness in her jaw, the restraint in the stillness of her hands at her sides. She has been fighting. Her boots are scuffed with travel. There is dirt along the hem of her cloak.

She had been looking for us.

Looking for me.

And I have been sitting in the sun, laughing.

Gandalf’s staff strikes the earth with a sharp crack that makes Merry flinch.

“You let your Wife search for you,” he says, voice low and cutting. “While you feasted.”

“Peregrin Took.”

I swallow.

“I didn’t know—”

“That you were missed?” Gandalf snaps. “That you were sought? That others were not at leisure?”

The words sting because they are true.

Legolas says nothing, but his expression is tighter than I have seen it.

Ellariel finally moves.

Not toward me.

She turns on her heel with precise control and walks away.

No flourish. No dramatic gesture. Just a decision.

The absence of her voice is worse than any rebuke.

I have seen her furious in battle. I have seen her lethal and unyielding. But this — this quiet withdrawal — is new.

It is personal.

The field feels smaller now. The barrels foolish. The pipe-weed ridiculous beneath my feet.

“She was worried,” someone mutters.

Of course she was.

She would have followed every broken branch. Every misplaced stone. Every faint vibration of where we had run.

And I had not thought of her at all in that moment, not once.

Merry lowers his mug slowly, shame creeping across his face.

Gandalf’s gaze remains "Your Wife would not rest until she found you.. while you sat here smoking and feasting."