Chapter Text
Estel’s father died many years ago, and Estel does not remember him, but he knows that the faraway look in his mother’s eyes is because of Father-who-is-dead. Lord Elrond is not Estel’s father, but he teaches Estel to read and write, sends him to tutors who teach him swordplay and history and geography. Mother teaches him to be swift and silent in the woods, to ride a horse and shoot a bow, and Estel thinks she is the best warrior in the world. When he tells Glorfindel this, Glorfindel laughs for a long time, and then he tells Estel that Estel is absolutely correct.
Most of the people in Rivendell are elves, except Estel and Mother who are Men, and sometimes Prince Bilbo visits and brings dwarves with him, and Estel follows Gimli son of Gloin around the one time he visits, because Gimli is young and curious too, and Estel asks him all sorts of questions about dwarves and hobbits because they’re so short compared to the elves and Mother, and Prince Bilbo has furry feet and Lady Dis has a long black beard and lots of braids, and it is all very exciting. Estel asks his mother if he will have a beard when he grows up, and she laughs and tells him that he can if he wants to but most Rangers shave because it is easier to stay clean.
All of the elves of Rivendell pat Estel on the head and tell him how fast he is growing, how soon he will be a man. They give each other strange looks, sometimes, when they say that, and Estel is clever enough and observant enough to know that there is some great secret attached to his coming of age. The Rangers, too, treat him oddly, and with great deference even though he is so young, and sometimes they speak privately with his mother, in low voices and with serious expressions. He asks his mother about it when he is thirteen, and she smiles, but there is something very sad behind the smile. “Yes,” she tells him, “there is something I will tell you when you are old enough. Please try to be patient until then, dear heart.”
Estel is an obedient child, and so he is patient. It is hard sometimes, because everyone seems to know the secret except him, even Elladan and Elrohir who get into trouble all the time because they run around and poke their noses into things and sometimes accidentally break important pieces of art, and Lord Elrond gets a funny line between his eyebrows and mutters under his breath. But there is much to do and learn in Rivendell, and even when Estel is seventeen, he is still finding new places, hidden rooms and little side gardens, books in the library he’s never seen before, so the secret does not bother him too much, except for every year on his birthday, when he wonders a little whether this will be the year he is old enough to know.
When Estel is nineteen, he is still not old enough, apparently, either to know the secret or to go on the Quest of the Ring. Estel is more than a little dismayed by this, because it’s a quest. Half the history books in the library are about epic quests, and Estel had a good six months of quiet mortification every time he saw Glorfindel after the time he read about Glorfindel killing the Balrog, and Mother is going on the Quest, and Estel wants so very, very badly to be a hero. If he is a hero, then Mother will be even prouder of him, and Lord Elrond will be proud of him, and Elladan and Elrohir will have to stop tugging on his ears and calling him ‘little one,’ and maybe – just maybe – the astonishingly beautiful Lady Arwen will smile at him.
The months until Mother returns are long and tense. Lord Elrond looks constantly stressed, the little line between his eyebrows never fading; Elladan and Elrohir do not joke; Glorfindel does not tell stories. Sometimes there is news, from one source or another: Lady Galadriel sends word from Lorien that Gandalf the Grey has fallen, and the Fellowship is now led by Lady Gilraen. Estel frets over her safety; if something could slay Gandalf, of all people, how will his mother survive?
Then there is word that Gandalf is not dead, by some strange fate and the will of the Valar; and then a great shudder throughout the world, like an earthquake, like the shudder when Estel was seven that meant that Gandalf had defeated the Necromancer. Lord Elrond sighs, and a little of the tension goes out of his shoulders, and Glorfindel smiles his tiny smile again, but still they wait in hope for word of the Fellowship.
Word comes first from Belegost, that King Thorin has recovered from his madness, and Lord Elrond seems pleased to hear it, but though this is proof the Ring has been destroyed, it is not yet proof that the Fellowship has survived its destruction. So they wait, and wait, and Estel haunts the lookouts which watch the southern approaches and does not dare to ask for news.
The day the Fellowship rides over a hill and into sight, nine of them hale and well, is one of the best days Estel can remember, better than any of his birthdays or the day he managed to get a touch on Glorfindel. His mother is riding near the front of the Fellowship, tall and stern and beautiful with her sword at her side, and Estel hangs over the edge of the parapet and fills his eyes with the sight of her, safe and coming home at last. He does not even care, for once, that Lady Arwen is also visible. His mother is coming home a hero, and safe, and that is all that matters.
That night, Gandalf and Gilraen and Dis and Primrose tell the story of the Quest of the Ring, and Estel hangs upon their every word. His mother, it turns out, is a mighty hero, as he has always suspected: Gilraen Nazgul-Slayer, savior of Minas Tirith! He claps and cheers when Primrose finishes her part of the tale, describing the tall Nazgul on his black horse and Gilraen’s clever tactics against him. His mother grins at him across the table, proud and embarrassed in equal measure, and Prince Bilbo, at the head of the table beside Lord Elrond, toasts to Gilraen the Great, and everyone drinks.
Estel want to grow up to be even half the hero his mother is.
The next morning, after Prince Bilbo and Lady Dis and Kili and Primrose and Gimli all set out for Belegost, Prince Bilbo beaming at the news that King Thorin has been cured of Ring-madness, Gilraen and Gandalf bring Estel to a small room, and his mother looks gravely up at him – he has finally grown taller than her. His mother takes a deep breath.
“Estel,” she says solemnly, “I have often told you that you have a high destiny; that is why you are fostered with Lord Elrond, instead of raised among the Dunedain.” Estel realizes, with a sudden shock of wonder, that he is about to learn the great secret. He leans forward. “It is time now that I tell you of who you truly are,” his mother finishes slowly.
“Am I not Estel of the Dunedain?” Estel asks curiously. Certainly all of the Rangers who come to Rivendell greet him as one of their own.
“You are,” his mother tells him, “and you are more.” She takes a deep breath, as if the telling is hard for her. “For at your birth, your father named you Aragorn, son of Arathorn, of the line of Isildur, and true heir to the throne of Gondor.”
Estel’s jaw drops. Whatever he was expecting, this was not it. “I am Isildur’s heir?”
Estel goes to bed that night as Aragorn, son of Arathorn and Gilraen, heir of Gondor, with a prophecy ringing in his mind and his mother’s promise in his heart, and for a little while, alone in his bed with nothing but his thoughts for company, he thinks that perhaps he would have preferred to be Estel, son of no one in particular, who grew up to be a hero like his mother. But fate does not work like that, and it is Aragorn who rises from his bed in the morning. He will not reach his majority for a year and a half, but yesterday, Estel was a boy, and this morning, Aragorn is a man.