1 Gwirith (April), Third Age 3019
Radagast’s garden still smelled of wet cedar and bee-bread when I stepped through the willow gate for what I thought would be a lesson like any other. The Vales of Anduin breathed behind me, river speaking in silver syllables, birch leaves clapping softly, a late thrush stitching the air with its bright stitch of song. I carried no rope, no bit, no snare. Only the small satchel I have always worn: salves and linen, a bone needle, a few seeds to scatter where my boots had pressed too hard. Habit, more than need.
He was kneeling with his sleeves rolled, coaxing a hedgehog to release a thorn from its own side. The old brown wizard did not look up at once. He only hummed that half-tune he hums when his hands are busy and the world, for a moment, is not. The hedgehog eased, spined back like a drawn breath smoothing out. When at last Radagast stood, the thrush on the fence post hopped twice as if to approve.
“You took your time returning,” he said, and I heard the smile even if I did not see it yet. “There’s river on your boots and horse on your sleeve. Tell me the road.”
So I told it.
I told him of the winter-pale wolf I found on the high slope above the Old Ford, thick with hunger and holding its paw as if shame could numb iron. The trap was old, cruel, set by hands that had already moved on. I sat within the wolf’s breath and counted my own, slow as stones: one for the frost ferns melting on the coil, two for the wind, three for the small mercy of being seen. When the jaws opened at last, the wolf did not flee. He lay his head on the earth the way tired men pray. I left meat at the edge of the pines for him three nights running; on the fourth there were pup tracks beside his own. Not tamed, I told Radagast. Merely unafraid.
I told him of the dun mare near the Long Lake, all angles and lightning, who would not bear halter or hand. The fisherfolk had tried corn and curses both, and the boys declared her a spirit and a wager in the same breath. I tied no knots. I walked the shoreline and sang the low river-song I learned from the Beornings, about current that does not clutch and stones that do not force. The mare came to stand beside me up to her knees in the water, ears turned to catch whatever she could not name in my voice. We walked out together, her shoulder against mine. “If you go,” I told her aloud, “go. If you stay, we work.” She stayed for one summer’s work and then followed the geese south without asking leave. Wisdom often wears the shape of leaving; I am learning to bow to it.
I told him of the goat in the uplands whose horns had tangled in the hawthorn, bleeding her scent into the thorn’s spite; of the hawk with a broken left feathered wrist who took meat from my glove with eyes like knives cooled in snow; of the hive that swarmed from a cracked oak, humming like a kettle, and the way a queen will rest on a beekeeper’s old hat if the day is kind and the smoke is clean. I spoke of all the small ferocities and the bigger, quieter braveries: mothers who will not move from a fallen calf; stags whose fear smells of rain and iron; adders who keep their dignity even when a shepherd’s spade has forgotten it.
“Knowledge of Taming,” some might call it, as if there were a ledger in which patience is coin and obedience the purchased thing. What I have gathered is not that. It is a language, no, a grammar. The pauses matter more than the words. The ground underfoot speaks, the wind translates, and the eyes (beast and woman alike) decide whether the sentence is safe enough to be heard.
Radagast listened without interrupting, except to pinch a tendril of bindweed from the beanpole or to flick crumbs to the finches. When I finished, the day had leaned into afternoon. The hedgehog had ambled into the cucumber vines and fallen asleep with its nose in the shade.
“Do you know,” he said at last, “how I once taught you to tell the difference between a hurt that needs your hands and a fear that needs only your distance?”
“I remember,” I said. “You told me to ask myself, ‘Does the creature become smaller because you are near? Or larger?’”
He nodded. “And now?”
“Now I try to become smaller. Or to make room for them to be larger.”
He laughed softly, pleased, and the laugh scattered the thrush and drew it back again. Then he said words I had not expected, not today, not like this. “Rhovaniel Gilvellon,” he said, and my name in his mouth felt like the first time someone calls you by the true one you forgot you had, “you are no longer my pupil. You are a Tender of Beasts and a fellow steward of what still sings in Middle-earth.”
The garden seemed to notice. The bees lowered their hymn to a thoughtful drone; a wind came up from the river as if to carry the syllables to whatever ears wanted them. I felt something change and yet not change at all. No gift set upon my brow, no sudden knowing to replace the old bewilderments. Only a clearer weight: a promise that a back straightened can carry. I bowed, and when I stood, the world kept very still, as if to see whether I would break or blossom.
“I learned everything here,” I said. “By watching you watch them.”
He took my satchel and held it like a relic, then pressed into my palm a narrow braid of horsehair threaded with a small feather and a single whisker, tokens I recognized without knowing when he had gathered them. “Not trophies,” he said. “Reminders. Hair and feather are gifts already shed. Take no more than what the day leaves behind.”
After that there was tea, and he told me stories of the Greenwood when it was still called green, and of a fox who outwitted a giant in a riddle-mirror, and I told him I did not believe the half of it and asked for the other half besides. The light went thin and honey-colored. The river clicked its pebbles. It might have been any evening, except that it was this one.
I did not sleep in the house that night. I lay in the grass, nearer the ground that would recognize me when I was gone, with my cloak over me and my ear pressed to the living black. I dreamed what beasts dream: of running without pursuit; of eating until gnawing quiets; of finding shade when heat hunts you; of water. When I woke, there was dew on my lips and a field mouse arranging seed-husks by my elbow as if making an offering to a god she did not entirely trust.
Steward, he called me. Tender. The words are not crowns. They are verbs.
Since then I have kept to my rounds, though the rounds no longer feel like circles. Near the Carrock I found a bear cub whose mother had died badly and taught him, with a Beorning at my shoulder, that berries can be bribery and that even grief can be lured down from the pine if you promise enough sweetness and keep your promises. In the eastmost marches of the Wood, I stood between a logger’s blade and a nesting owl, and the man (who had his own mouths to feed) lowered his axe not because of law but because I asked him to see the world the way the owl’s heart hammered it. Later I guided him to a stand of elder whose sap would not choke him with spiders. He thanked me with a bundle of kindling, split thin as poetry.
There are still creatures I do not approach. Corruption has twisted some beyond my courage or my craft; there are webs you do not touch unless light is standing behind you in armor. I respect their distance as I expect them to respect mine, and when respect fails, I am not ashamed to be swift. Tender is not the same as soft. Steward is not the same as still.
Sometimes I go back to the lake and sing the river-song. Sometimes the dun mare comes out of the reeds with her foal to listen, and sometimes she is only wind eating the water’s back. Both are right. Once I saw the wolf again, his gait still uneven, his shoulders heavy with new winter. He looked at me like a fellow traveler at a crossroad who nods without stopping. The nod was enough.
People ask, now and then, whether the title changes anything. It does. When I step into a pasture or a patch of bramble, I do so as if my boot were a cup I am setting down, careful not to spill, careful not to crack. I listen first. The knowledge I carry is full of holes on purpose, so that air and song and paw-print can pass through. If I have any secret, it is the simplest one: not everything must bend. Much can be met. The meeting is the miracle.
Radagast says I will unlearn and relearn this a thousand times before the year is old. I believe him. I am young yet, and the world is older than its stories; even the river forgets and remembers itself each bend. But I have begun. I have set my shoulder where it belongs.
My name is Rhovaniel Gilvellon. I carry salve and seed and silence. When fear makes a creature smaller, I will make the world larger around it until it can stand. If that is taming, then may all taming be that. If that is stewardship, then I will wear it through season after season until my hair is the color of thistle-down and my hands smell of willow forever.
Tender of Beasts. Steward among many. The river keeps speaking. I keep answering.