The damp rucksack contained a change of clothes and a rather-sizeable book from the library. Even if the clothes hadn’t been a giveaway—Esmeralda had personally overseen the fitting of that brown shirt—the book would have. It was the one on the Old Forest that she had carefully put away, high and hopefully out of sight. She should have known that he’d find it; once Frodo Baggins got his sights on something, be it an idea or a thing, he was more tenacious than Prim and Drogo put together.

The bathhouse attendant who’d brought the bag—and the tale of eyes peering into the girl’s bath before luncheon—had left the Master’s quarters, shaking her head and fighting the smile that threatened to settle upon her features. This wasn’t the first time by a long shot that she’d tried to get the gardeners to prune that old oak closer.

It would get done now; she’d make book on that!

Saradoc settled back into his favorite chair and chuckled, propping up his feet on a stool. He’d been up since long before dawn that morning, making sure that candles and lamps were in the wine cellars to help with the unseasonable chill and damp, and now was ready to spend the afternoon with a pipe, then a well-deserved nap. He certainly was not prepared to worry over boyish pranks. "The lad’s growing up, Esme."

"So are the lasses, but you don’t see me laughing over it, do you?" she retorted. "There are healthy ways to cope with these things... sneaking about, climbing trees and peering into windows is not!"

"You think so?" Saradoc considered the four pipes sitting on the stand next to his easy chair, picked one. "I think it’s one of the most normal things I’ve seen Frodo do since he came here."

Esmeralda’s mouth tightened.

"Emmie," he said softly the pet name, "what do you expect? He’s nigh onto twenty as it is. We’ve just been lucky that he’s held off this long." He took a leathern bag from the stand, took a whiff of the contents, tucked his pipe into it, filling the bowl. "Guess I’d best have a talk with him. You should let it go. Let me deal with this. He’s just gotten out of trouble…"

"And he’s right back in it again, isn’t he? As usual." She glared at him, then swept the bag off the table and marched from the room.

Saradoc shook his head and sighed, contemplating his pipe.

* * * * * *

Frodo sighed, laid the old, fragile book flat against his thighs, angled his head back against the cushions of the daybed and rubbed at his eyes. He’d been trying for over an hour to concentrate on something pleasant. It wasn’t working.

Pippin was in the room as well, but had quickly given his cousin a wide berth as if sensing something wasn’t quite right. He was now quietly and contentedly ensconced in the upper bunk, making occasional small noises as he played with his toys. Since he had no hope of sleeping there on any sort of regular basis, he was determined to spend time in the coveted nest whenever possible. Frodo was just immensely grateful that Pippin hadn’t returned until well after luncheon; he had no wish to explain to the little hobbit why his big cousin had spent most of his mealtime curled up beneath the window, clad only in a towel and sobbing so hard that his belly muscles still quivered from retching.

He’d regained some form of control, cleaned not only himself up but the scattered items from the tipped-over washstand, gotten suitably and presentably dressed, but he was still, no matter how he tried to subdue it, one raw nerve. And he was cold. It wasn’t chilly, not at all—in fact the sun had finally broken through the grey cloud cover outside and was radiating through much of the smial’s exterior layer, but Frodo had on not only a shirt and waistcoat but also a jacket and was nevertheless occasionally giving into a small shiver. Slender fingers curled almost desperately on the worn vellum pages lying against his bent knees.

For the first time, Frodo was finding that not even his mother’s book of elvish tales had powers of bewitchment strong enough to pull him from the here and now.

He’d tried writing before this—well-sharpened quill and paper and a tightly-covered inkwell were on the floor next to him, but the parchments were blank. Normally it was a respite from ravaged feelings, the act of placing rows of carefully-scripted words on the thinned sheets—he had several reams of such ventings securely stacked in his locked cabinet—but nothing had come forth. It was as if his brain had shut down, frightened by this new rampage of the bodily shell which supposedly protected it.

He stared at his mother’s book without seeing it and fingered the key to that cabinet, where it hung in its place about his throat. He needed to find Merry. Explain, somehow. Tell him something. Anything.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I’m somehow running ahead of you and you can’t possibly keep up. I’m sorry that I can’t tell you about this. I’m sorry that all I seem to do lately is take you down with me…

Something dark hoved into his peripheral vision and landed heavily, damply and almost painfully on his feet. He started, stared, opened his knees then lowered them. His rucksack. Who and what...?

He raised his eyes slowly to meet his aunt’s furious gaze, then clambered quickly to his feet with a quiver of his frame, closing his book and sliding it quickly and safely into his jacket pocket.

Esmeralda gestured severely to the rucksack. "That’s yours, is it not?"

Frodo swallowed hard, uncertain of where this was going. She definitely seemed angry—and right now he was so tangled and confused that he wasn’t entirely sure which wretched occurrence out of the entire benighted day that she must have somehow found out about. He stared at her blankly, unmoving, not knowing what to do. Or how to do it. Or what any of it could mean, other than he was in trouble. Again.

It was, as usual, not the correct response. Esmeralda drew herself up and pointed to the bag, repeating, frostily, "I asked you a question, Frodo. Is that yours?"

He nodded, eyes darting from it to the floor then to his aunt, then back to the floor once again.

Pippin’s head popped over the edge of the top bunk. Esmeralda’s back was to him; she didn’t even see the movement.

"The girls’ bathhouse attendant brought that to me not fifteen minutes ago," she stated. "Along with a tale of someone, presumably its owner, climbing the oak just before luncheon and looking into the bathhouse window."

Frodo ducked his chin down into his collar, shoulders hunching, and looked sideways at her, his stomach twisting. Her own eyes narrowing, she continued, "There are a lot of things I could say to you right now, including what you’re doing with that Old Forest book in your pack when you know good and well I told you not to be reading it…

"You didn’t say I couldn’t read it," he said, low.

"Don’t be obtuse. When I took it away, you knew perfectly well why I did it."

He started to reply negatively, went so far as to open his mouth to say that no, he didn’t understand why she did anything that she did, but it choked a-borning in his throat and he dropped his gaze to fasten upon the flooring near his toes.

"That’s not the issue right now, anyway. The issue is, what were you doing in that tree?" she demanded, then sighed and turned from him slightly, shaking her head. "As if I didn’t know..."

Her accusation, unwarranted yet with a certain sting of truth, pinked him. "It wasn’t like that!" Frodo protested, straightening.

"Well, what was it like, then?" Esme whirled towards him; he took a small step sideways and back. "You’re so set on privacy, always on about it in fact—does that apply only to you? You’re special?"

"I didn’t..." he stammered, "I never..." Cheeks going scarlet, he trailed off, looking down at the floor.

"The girls aren’t entitled to some privacy?"

Frodo remained silent, eyes cast down, inching slowly away.

Behind Esmeralda and from above, now unnoticed by either of them, Pippin watched with mouth agape.

"Well?" Esmeralda charged, following his small progress away until she was almost atop him. Frodo tried to back another step, found himself neatly cornered against one of the clothing trunks; she stepped toward him in angry pursuit and he sucked in a quick gasp of air, realizing he had nowhere to go and that he was just as trapped and cornered and nigh unto powerless as… as…

He shuddered and his eyes went huge. This was different, this was his aunt… this was not the same thing… But if it wasn’t the same then why did it feel suddenly the same, like he was fair game for whatever unreasonable demands that were made? Why did it burn inward and hurt and, with or without his leave, slam up against him and try to take him?

His eyes flattened. Raised upwards. Clashed with hers, locked. Held.

Her gaze widened as if in disbelief, then narrowed and stared back. Frodo was riveted, unable to break the gaze—or his response to it. "Well?" Esmeralda demanded once more.

Frodo kept glaring at her, his face twitching, his slender frame quivering and his entire being wound tighter than a coiled spring.

"Answer me, Frodo Baggins!"

He couldn’t. It was as if he was hypnotized, his stomach burning with an excruciating mix of defiance and injustice and misery. He couldn’t halt it. No matter that it wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. No matter that she was growing angrier by the second at what she perceived as hard-headed defiance—although that didn’t even begin to describe what he truly felt right now—or that he was shaking like that dratted oak in a high breeze. Every moment from the day, every feeling and sensation pulled from him unwilling, every bit of tension in that heavy, coiled spring within his gut cranked down so tightly he would have cried out from it had he been able to make a sound. His gaze would not lower; his outrage would not let him submit. He was suddenly, coldly, seethingly furious.

Esme’s mouth tightened. Her right hand lashed out, smacking him soundly on the jaw.

The slap was fairly powerful, but it was more the shock of it that snapped his head sideways and staggered him. It released him from the horrific, drawn-out eye contact. His cheek stung and his ears rang; he put a shaking hand to his cheek, the odd, passionate rage draining from him.

It was almost a relief.

"Auntie Esme!’ Pippin cried out. "No! It wasn’t Frodo!"

Esmeralda whirled to stare at the little boy as he clambered down from the upper bunk; clearly she hadn’t realized he was there and just as obviously it floored her. Frodo still didn’t move; his eyes disbelievingly took in Pippin as he came over and stood fiercely next to him.

Esmeralda couldn’t seem to believe what she was seeing, either. She was speechless.

"Frodo didn’t do it, Auntie! He was just trying to get me out of the tree!"

"Pip..." The singular warning wrenched itself from Frodo’s chest.

The little boy stuck out his chin and clung to his side. "You’re always getting mad at Frodo when it’s not always his fault!"

"Pip..." Frodo gritted out, hand still to his face, "be quiet!"

"But it’s not fair, Frodo! I’m the one who did it and you’re the one Auntie Esme’s screaming at and it’s not fair!"

"Peregrin, stay out of this!" Esmeralda ordered shrilly.

He shut up.

"And you!" she turned back to Frodo. "You have nothing to say to me, you stare through me as if I was a window or a wall—but you seem to able to find enough voice to counsel him?"

"What would you have me say?" Frodo demanded suddenly. He knew his eyes were burning suspiciously; his voice quavered and he tried to regain control of it, couldn’t. "And would it make any difference if I did?"

She started to speak; Pippin interrupted again.

"Auntie Esme, Frodo didn’t do it! He didn’t!"

Neatly blocked on two fronts, their Aunt seemed confused. Frodo was more shocked at this than just about anything he’d witnessed so far—including Pippin’s bold, unwavering defense of him.

"He was just trying to get me out of the tree!" the child furthered. "I was up there, trying to see in, and I got stuck and Frodo came up to help me, and he was helping me down and..."

"And he just happened to accidentally look in the window?" Esmeralda pointed out.

Anger tried to prick behind Frodo’s eye sockets once again; he lowered his hand from his still-stinging cheek and started to reply but Pippin beat him to it.

"All the other lads try it!" The matter-of-factness in the reedy voice was startling, dissolving irritation and giving Frodo cause to fully turn and stare at Pippin.

"Well, maybe they don’t climb the tree that often. But they do try to look in, and it’s... it’s… I mean, if it was Merry instead of Frodo, would you still be so angry? You’re always giving Frodo more punishment when he and Merry get in trouble!"

Frodo winced and hunched his shoulders, fully expecting there to be murder done here and now. That was it. Aunt Esme would bury them both without a trace.

However, she didn’t even move. She just stood there, staring at Pippin with the oddest look Frodo had ever seen beginning to fill her features. It made him even more uncomfortable, the strange, indefinable something sparking in her eyes as she peered at her brother’s youngest child. Frodo stared at the two, struck suddenly by the resemblance between them.

Esmeralda’s mouth opened, shut, then opened again. When she did speak, it was strangely quiet. "I want you both to stay here for the rest of the day. Come down, get dinner, bring it back up here. You’re to stay in this room, except for meals, until tomorrow." Her gaze, still oddly subdued, refused to meet Frodo’s. "Do you understand?"

He nodded.

She hesitated, seemed as if she was going to say something further, then left.

Beside him, Pippin let out a huge sigh. "I thought we were really going to get it in the neck, Frodo. I really did." His voice, so strong moments before, was now quavery.

Curiously Frodo turned to his smaller cousin. The lad was trembling. He bent down in concern. "Pippin?"

Suddenly the little hobbit turned and latched onto him, wrapping skinny arms about his torso so fiercely that Frodo almost fell over. Instead he straightened; Pippin didn’t let go. "Pip..." he said, a bit helplessly.

Pippin’s answer was to just burrow tighter. The embrace gave Frodo a sudden, intense pang and he swallowed hard. "Pippin, let go. Please."

"It just wasn’t fair, Frodo!"

He thought that the slap had unwound him. It hadn’t. And Pippin’s insistent, unbending persistence of affection was not the normal asylum of fierce protectiveness that it normally engendered in him. Frodo felt as if he were choking, smothering in it. "Pippin..." He grabbed the slender arms, uncranked them from about his waist, pushed him back. It was a bit of a struggle; Pippin didn’t want to let go. "Pippin!"

"Ow!" The little hobbit winced and stared upward at him; Frodo let loose of him as if burned, leaving little white pressure marks where he’d grabbed too tightly. The two boys stared at each other for a long moment. Frodo backed away, shaking his head side to side quite slowly then, heart hammering in his ears, whirled and quit the room.

"Frodo!" Pippin called after him, then, softer, "Auntie Esme said we weren’t s’posed to leave."

The sound of feet, hammering rapidly across the floor then down the stairs. Then silence. Then Pippin flinched as from below there was the sound of a door opening and slamming.

* * * * * *

"Esme?"

Resolutely she ignored her husband’s voice, marched past him, disappeared into the back room where she kept her accounts and firmly shut the door. Dust motes danced in the thin stream of light which splayed from the lamp and across her desk and books and papers, then reflected thinly against the shelves which were filled with generations of Hall records. Surrounded by her haven, Esme leaned back against the door and stared through the gloom, fingers clutching the doorknob at her spine.

How in all the shades of time did this keep happening to her? She had always prided herself on her impartiality—the words ‘hard, but fair’ she’d long overheard being applied to the Mistress of the Hall and her works. She had spent the past years of her life in service to the Brandybuck legacy; indeed had thrown herself joyfully into a new realm. For being youngest of four children in a family of Tooks—and a line that was not, at that time, in consideration for the Thain’s mantle—had all but insured she would probably never be given the chance to do something practical with her canny brain.

And now. Now that she was comfortable, now that she successfully managed her realm and was happily wed to a hobbit that needed her as much as she needed him; now that she’d given him a son and heir who was as bonny as the morning and as agile-minded as herself...

How was it now that an orphaned boy-child could take her down with a mere glance?

More like, how was it that she could let him?

It hadn’t begun like this, she knew.

Or perhaps it truly had. Esme’s fingers tightened against the doorknob. The day Frodo had first come to the Hall to stay had been as mind-numbing as today had proven. And the memory of it was as plain as if it had happened only a fortnight ago…

Drogo’s stout, strong frame is shrunken to feeble, pasty nothingness, a gash laid open and washed thick upon his temple and one hand locked to his wife’s wrist. Primula is mottled and ghastly white; Esme kneels next to her, tries to close her eyes but can’t. She will never forget the sight of them: no longer glinting topaz, but faded and milky, staring endlessly into the first rosy lights of dawn...

Esme buried her face in her hands, not for the first time wishing she could forever purge that last memory of her beloved.

People arrive, some in the requested cart, others by foot, all curious, all concerned. There is no sign of the couple’s twelve-year-old son—it is Saradoc who decides they will have to start dragging, search for the smaller body downriver—then someone cries out and Esmeralda staggers to her feet from where she has been dragging a boat tarp over the stiff, sodden bodies. She witnesses the child padding from the porch of his home and across the green; he is darken-pale and ridiculously tiny-seeming, still in his nightshirt and twisting his fists sleepily into his eyes. His brows quirk in curiosity, then puzzlement, then a wierdling, comprehensive panic fills his gaze as Saradoc strides over to him, and Frodo cries out for his mother and father, struggling as his uncle easily picks him up and takes him away...

She walked slowly over to her desk, ran a trembling hand down the scarred, polished wood. No matter that day and its horrors, when Frodo had first come here he’d not been difficult. Quite the opposite, in fact; he’d for some unfathomable reason been afraid of Saradoc and instead had clung to her like a small, furtive and silent shadow, unsure of where else to go. Esme had understood him, then—in truth she had been the only one who’d really comprehended the pain lying behind his strangled, brutalized silence. She had also had the greatest difficulty articulating exactly what Primula’s death had laid bare within her.

All the old wounds: first passion, untold bliss and longing…

She stays, and the two girls are inseparable, sliding into a passionate intimacy that all but aligns their thoughts and wishes. Menegilda is the indulgent older sister, abiding by the two tweener lasses with easy familiarity, and the seasons pass by, all waxing into golden memory…

Sliding into jealousy and rejection…

So she sits, still and silent and stunned and stampeded as those terrible, perfect beings dance about the fires and sing in a tongue all too musical and wild to believe. She eats nothing, drinks nothing, touches nothing and watches with her heart in her throat as Primula and Bilbo, well-plied with whatever nectar the elves partake of, start dancing as well. One of the elves comes over to her, speaks unintelligibly and softly, holds out a hand. The wanting to comply, the wish to be one of them, to be something other, rises within her and overwhelms her and she cries out and backs away. The music clashes, wavers and dies, and they all turn to stare at her with expressions that combine deep consideration and mind-bending pain and something unknowing and unknowable…

Esmeralda stared blankly into the gloom. She’d reglimpsed that expression. Over and over. In Frodo’s eyes.

The walk home that long ago night had been excruciating. Primula had never forgiven her for her fright. She had never mentioned the elves again, and Esmeralda had swallowed the silence gladly.

But it had, she knew now, been the beginning of the changing. Sliding again, over the end. And this time into rejection, into denial and bewilderment…

"I want to go home. I don’t want to watch you with him… Come with me, Prim. Please! Come to Tuckborough with me, away from those elves and that mad old hobbit…!"

And a year later, when she’d come back to Brandy Hall with her mind made up—and not in a direction that Primula had hoped…

"Who isn’t even of age, yet! You don’t want Sara… you want his Hall!…"

Primula had bowed to the inevitable and agreed to stand witness to the handfasting—no legal marriage until Saradoc was of age—with Menegilda and Esmeralda both happy that it left plenty of time to plan a wedding thus, to get every detail right. Primula was strangely subdued, pale and composed and somehow fragile-seeming as the flowers that Saradoc had wrapped about his and Esmeralda’s wrists. Bilbo had been there, with his cousin Drogo.

Drogo was everything Bilbo was not: respectable, stolid, reassuring. Esmeralda had never believed that Primula would have him. Even Menegilda had commented with amusement how Rory’s sister was leading those two old bachelors a merry chase. To the amazement of all, it had been Bilbo who had returned to Bag End alone, and three months later Drogo Baggins had been the one to put the wreath of marriage blossoms upon Primula Brandybuck’s red-gold head, with a stunned, dreamy look in his dark eyes that suggested he’d never believed it would happen this way, either.

Happiness, again. Saradoc had come into his majority, they had been married, and it was as if any jealousy or possessiveness had mellowed with marriage’s comforts. Wintertide visits from everyone, including the Bagginses. Games and times of plenty. Years sliding into each other pleasantly. Esmeralda was in no hurry for children and kept a posset beside her bed, Paladin’s wife was already breeding and Primula, despite trying, remained barren for over eight years.

Then one harvest Bilbo had returned to the Hall, with mathoms procured for everyone in another, if smaller, adventure. The present he’d given to Primula had been a small, leather-bound book of elvish tales…

And it had begun again.

It is impossible to mistake Drogo’s changed manner. His normal reserved solicitousness seems brittle and forced, his manner towards his wife too watchful and painstakingly careful. Primula herself is pregnant at long last. Then during one of the Bagginses’ visits to the Hall, Esmeralda is up entirely too late with her favorite bitch as it birthed five pups, only to catch Primula sneaking into the side door with her waist-length hair all tangled and snarled from wind and rain and leaf wrack, clad scantily in nightgown and shawl, bare arms pimpled with chill, her eyes shining. The hectic expression upon her face is unnerving in the extreme, brilliant and wildish and abandoned, the same sort that Esme sees all too often upon individuals who have been recklessly imbibing too much of either alcohol or sex.

It was the first time she had been given cause to doubt the parentage of the baby Primula carried; it proved to be not the last...

"Is it?" Primula is not laughing, she is serious. Frighteningly so…

To sit through a long day and an even-longer night at a tiny house on the river as an unspeakably hard labor had nearly turned to death. The brutal, unseasonable heat and the light of a few candles and enough blood to soak through two mattresses as Primula had given birth to what would be her first and only child. One last push, one last wavering cry, and as she’d fallen back senseless against Esmeralda, from between her parted knees the midwife had lifted a blue-tinged, tiny form. It hung limply from her hands as if dead. Then it had squirmed, sucked in a huge breath and bawled an amazingly vigorous protest of interrupted slumber...

"Never had anything I could call my own, you know. Until now..." And her head lolls on Esmeralda’s shoulder. The midwife gives a cry of dismay and there is more blood. The baby begins to cry once more; Esmeralda removes herself from the way, takes the infant up, holding him close as the midwife desperately begins care that will in the end save his mother. He squirms, slippery and warm in her arms, nuzzles at her empty breast. His eyes are blue—not the uncertain, murky indigo of all newborns, but clear—and he suddenly quiets, blinks, peers at her with an stunning awareness she has never before witnessed in any other hobbitbairn…

In that moment all Primula’s insinuations and claims had solidified, all the clues had come together and Esmeralda had been struck beyond a doubt with what he had to be. Yet still it had been she that had bathed her childhood love’s infant with careful, trembling hands and wrapped him in the coverlet that Prim had made him, and it had been she that had been the first to call Frodo by the name his father had chosen, as if in vehement claim and fierce denial of what Primula had allowed changeling forces to shape.

And now, to heed what remained of her attempts at reclamation. Over the past few years Frodo had grown shatteringly aloof and self-contained; he was no longer an abandoned, anxious child but a bizarre, darkling tweener with something simmering in his breast that no word from her could help or speak to or set aside. And when the explosion came, it would take Merry along with it for somehow Frodo had witched her son so close they were all but inseparable!

"If it was Merry instead of Frodo, would you still be so angry...?"

Little Peregrin’s words had sliced through her, a hot knife through chilled butter. A tiny, righteous avatar of her brother, smiting her with reason and truth as Paladin had never hesitated to do. But oh, the truth of this… the reason behind the truth...

For Merry, such trouble would have been a normal thing. She was no longer sure what was normal for Frodo and what was not. What was simple mischief and what was the beginnings of true disturbance. She was no longer sure how to contain him.

It was still so incomprehensible to her that Primula’s son wouldn’t have a pleasant home with her for the rest of his life. But no more did she want history repeating itself. She didn’t want him dragging Merry into whatever pit he might immure himself in. She could see it already... Merry was changing, too, changing so swiftly that it promised early adolescence for him, an awakening that he was not ready for. It was as if Frodo somehow had kindled something within her son that grew every day they were together. He would go, Meriadoc would follow and, unknowing or by intent, Frodo Baggins would break her little boy’s heart.

As Primula had broken her own...

"Em?"

Saradoc was standing, limned by the light from their room, foreshadowed by the study’s darkness. Esmeralda hadn’t even heard him come in, but suddenly tears were welling up in her eyes and she lurched over to him, burying her face against his broad, solid chest and curling against him as if he could somehow take this taint of strangeness from her and her haven.

"Here, now," he said, startled, arms going about her firmly. "What’s happened, love? What’s happened?"

"I promised her," she said against his embrace. "I promised her I’d take care of him, you know. What are we going to do with him, Sara? I don’t know what to do!"

He pushed her back, wiped at her eyes. "What happened?" he asked again, in the patient insistent way that alternately warmed her and drove her to distraction. She told him what had transpired between herself and Frodo, was oddly gratified to see uncertainty fill his own gaze. But what he said next was not what she had expected to hear.

"You push that lad too far."

"Saradoc!"

"What would you expect him to do? Em, can’t you see it? There’s something deep in him, something altogether too hard."

"Hard? He’s too soft, Sara, that’s part of his trouble. He’s changeable as the banks of the Brandywine."

"You just don’t want to look too closely at him, and that’s a fact." She pulled back, threw him an uncertain glance. He held onto her arms, shaking slightly. "He’s hard as iron behind those soft eyes. Oh, he’ll back down whenever he has to, but that unyielding something in him eventually draws the line and refuses to take it any more. This time you pushed him too far." He peered at her, made her return his gaze by the insistence of his own. "You pushed him too far and you know it. Why else would you be in here crying like this?"

"It’s not that simple!"

"Then make me understand. Tell me why, of all the children we’ve fostered and had charge over, this one lad has the power to do this to you."

She shook her head, looking down, tears filling her eyes once more. He released her with a frustrated curse. "Emmie, why does it always come to this? It’s not like you to be this twisted up over one idiot child!"

"I can’t tell you. Not all of it. I’ve broken so many promises to her memory already..."

"Esmeralda, she’s dead. Primula Baggins is dead and her memory has no right to trouble either of us like this! Not even through Frodo does she have the right to hold to you like this!"

She turned away, tears rising to her eyes. "Sara, there’s something not… not right in him," Esmeralda shook her head as he started to protest, "There’s not, and you know it too."

"All right, then. But Em, pushing him past the point of endurance won’t make him fall into line either! You bend something too far, it’ll break. And then we will have another Primula on our hands!"

She flinched as if he’d struck her

"Look here. Frodo makes my eyes cross on a regular basis as well. But I can’t imagine that you mean to, intentionally or otherwise, hurt that boy."

Unwilling to trust her voice, Esmeralda shook her head vehemently.

"And I think you owe him an apology for this last bit. Peregrin needs to be punished, no doubt about that, but Frodo needs you to speak to him."

For long moments she said nothing, looking at the floor. Then Esmeralda slowly raised her head to look her husband in the eye. She nodded.

After a good twenty minutes of composing herself by the washbasin and stand in their bedroom, she girded herself as if she were going to face much more than a troublesome tweenager, then left. Saradoc didn’t begin to understand it, not any of it. But neither was he going to let their orphaned cousin’s stilted relationship with his wife continue upon this course. It could only mean disaster.

Perhaps he should just pack Frodo off to Smials. He knew Esme was not in favor of it because of Pearl’s over-the-top behavior, but realistically the only thing the lass could possibly want from Frodo would not endanger him unduly. At that, perhaps a few sexual detours would refocus the lad’s sights upon more normal things, stop him from longing after fancies and moonshine dreams that would in the end do him no good. Esme refused to see it, but that was all too common in females, that blind willingness to keep their lads babes in arms. After today there was no doubt in Saradoc’s mind that, while Frodo might not be yet actively using what nature had bestowed upon him, he was certainly thinking about it. Pippin might have been the one stuck in that tree, but Frodo hadn’t shunted the opportunity once it presented itself. And quite simply, that was as it should be. He was more than old enough, he’d passed puberty, it was time.

Frodo spent entirely too much time about lads that were too young for him. No wonder he was blossoming late—and coming to it hard.

Esmeralda wasn’t gone five minutes before she was back at their room. Saradoc looked up from his chair, and what he saw in her face had him on his feet immediately.

"He’s gone. Again."