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Rey is patrolling the Greenfields border when she hears the shrieking. “I didn’t know there were lady-rangers,” the hobbit with the shock of bright-orange hair says, after Rey has beaten off the goblins attacking her and snarled a warning at their retreating backs.
“And I didn’t think halflings ventured so far from home,” Rey answers, helping the little one to her feet.
Her name is Bertina Baggins the Eighth, although her long-suffering parents, who made the grave mistake of giving all their children ‘B’ names, have since resorted to calling her BB-Eighth.
“Do you have any family?” BB-Eighth asks, and graciously lets it pass when Rey flinches and does not answer as to why so young a woman is alone in the northern wild.
It takes Rey two bowls of gruel and several hours to earn enough trust to get more than that out of BB-Eighth. She’s carrying a message from one of the elves who pass through the Shire on occasion, a friend—supposedly it is a map to the secret hiding place of the great grey wizard, Skywalker.
Her elf friend was tasked with bringing it to the Grey Lady of Gondor, but he was being chased, cornered by orcs of the Black Army before he could escape.
“And now you are going to Rivendell?” Rey asks, trying not to sound too amused. “Have you ever been outside Hobbiton before?”
This is—somehow—the story of how Dunedain Rey ends up on the road to Rivendell, with a tiny chattering hobbit at her side.
Finn is one of the soldiers from Far Harad, pressed into service of the dark army, but wracked by doubt around fighting in this strange land, this strange war. When he is told by the Nazgûl-prince to slaughter the village, he cannot even raise his bow.
The captured elf is no secret (an object of fascination, they have no such creatures in Far Harad) and it is not hard to march him away from his guards, to convince him to help steal one of beasts the orc captains ride into battle.
“I’m better with horses!” he shouts as Finn clings to him desperately—he was taught to string a bow and wield a spear and grapple with a man, not ride things into battle the way they do in the north, and now this mad elf is trying to get them both killed by heading towards exactly where they took him from.
Unfortunately, in the flight their mount is wounded, and they plunge over the edge of a cliff—when Finn comes-to, it looks like the elf is dead beneath the carcass of the beast.
When he stumbles towards the road looking for civilization, he finds a pale woman with a deadly staff and what looks like a child, with a shock of bright hair.
“You stole her friend’s cloak!” the pale girl snarls as they struggle, and it takes Finn several tries to get her to listen to his story.
They steal horses from a nearby town, and Finn gets a very quick lesson in how to shoot from the back of a moving animal.
The Grey Lady of Gondor—Steward of the White City, Lady Leia of House Organa—is somewhat notorious for marrying a mercenary who served in the armies of Gondor. She is very notorious for her rumored origins, that it was the dark Witch-King who gave her birth along with her brother. (Rumors of Istari blood do not fade, too full of strangeness and fascination to be quelled.)
She is tragic for the loss of her son—a casualty of these warlike times, they say, stolen on the road, killed. She does not speak of him.
When Rey—just Rey, Rey of the north, dressed in white beneath her armor—is taken, Finn is the only one familiar enough with the Black Lands to retrieve her, and destroy the terrible siege weapon they are building. (To be fair, the aging mercenary and his hairy Druedain are a surprise.)
There is still a sword. It still fits to Rey’s hand, even though the Nazgûl-prince (just a boy, after all, beneath the heavy metal mask) reaches for the reforged blade of the Witch-King.
And at the end, there is still a wizard, dressed in grey, on an island that all of Middle Earth thought lost to the great and terrible wave.
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