[Envinyatar]

Orëmir looked curiously at Lindir as they walked along. ‘I see no pole, no line, no hook . . . no net, either,’ he said to himself. ‘How does he intend us to catch fish, I wonder.’ Orëmir looked down at his hands and flexed his long fingers. He remembered seeing an Elvish child once, lying along the bank of a river, where the water eddied in a deep pool. He had crouched down by the child, whose arm hung very still, immersed in the water. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked in a soft voice. ‘Letting the fish tickle my fingers,’ the child had said. ‘They start to think my fingers are just the long rootlets of some willow and they hide among them. Then, when they are quite unsuspecting I snatch them up and let them look me in the eye.’ The child had shaken his head when asked if he took them home for dinner. ‘No, I just let them go.’
Oremir had always meant to try this most interesting technique; now perhaps would be his chance. ‘Luckily,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’ve brought some of the dried meat strips to eat. This could be a long job of fishing.’

The fingers of Lindir’s right hand, he noted, strayed at times to the silver pin at his throat. Especially at those times when his gaze slid to the ruins of the old fortress that lay in the distance. Some charm against the memories that haunt this place, Orëmir wondered. If so, it didn’t seem to help him all that much. Behind the grey of his companion’s eyes lurked some uneasiness. ‘And what is that to you,’ Orëmir asked himself. ‘You have your own “uneasy” memories. It is too lenient a word, “uneasy” for that . . . place. Better the whole of Himring had slipped below the sea to lie with the other sunken lands.’

Shaking off this descent into grave musings, Orëmir tapped Lindir on the arm and offered him a strip of dried meat to chew on. ‘Not all that tasty, really. but it will stave off hunger until we can catch and cook some fish.’ He looked thoughtfully at the piece of dried meat. ‘And of course, if you wish, you can always use it for bait. That is,’ he went on, looking from one of Lindir’s hands to the other, ‘that is, if you have a hook to thread it on. Or have your years in Lindon taught you a new trick for luring fish from water to dish?’