Title: Small Mercies 3/?
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laguera25
Fandom: LOTR(TTT movieverse)
Rating: FRM/R
Pairing: Haldir/OFC, with long stretches of gen
Spoilers: The LOTR trilogy
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are the property of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Tolkien estate, and New Line Cinema. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
Prologue Part I Part II
Pride, Galadriel reflects as she waits for the arrival of her guest, is a bittersweet flame. It is fierce and eternal, and though it has been tempered by hard experience and its belated child humility, it still burns within her. It sustains through the ugliest adversity and provides an anchor to which to cling when the bedrock beneath your feet has fallen away along with most of your sole. Pride it was that had allowed her to rule Lothlorien so well for all its long years, and pride would like her to believe the whispers that had once proclaimed it as a parcel of Valinor brought across the sea, though this she knows to be hyperbole spoken by those who had never seen its wonders, never bathed in the light of the Two Trees. Pride is the last, desperate bulwark against defeat and surrender, the last defiant cry against onrushing death.
But pride is a hard master, and the tribute it demands is dear. Pride it was that drove her to flee Valinor without consent of the Valar, haughty and intractable amid the throng that marched from paradise to the hard, untested shores of Arda, and that same pride had driven her to cross the frozen, inhospitable wastes of the Helcaraxe, indomitable in the face of the wind that scoured the flesh from her face and untiring as her boots rotted from her feet and left them to the ravaging mercy of the ice. Pride it was that bid her reject the mercy of the Valar, that gift so seldom extended. Even Feanor, the mightiest of them, is denied it, and he waits in Mandos' hall until the End of Days.
But perhaps this last was not the bane she had once called it, for if she had seized the proffered mercy in both hands and returned joyfully to her kin, then she would not have been there to aid the Fellowship in their quest or tend Mithrandir's wounds and see him reborn as Gandalf the White. No succor could she have rendered to Frodo, he whose burden was the greatest. Lorien would not have stood against the fell forces of Dol Guldur, and perhaps its black walls and spires would stand still, a blight upon the landscape that invited darkness and ill purpose to nest and brood within its damp, lichened walls.
Or perhaps such thoughts are merely pride reflected back upon itself. Maybe the War of the Ring would have come to the same end without her. Celeborn was a formidable leader, skilled in battle and the leadership of men, and the rest of the Galadhrim were not without pride.
Galadhrim. Even there, there is vanity and the lust for power. Other names they possessed before the establishment of her fair realm, and no doubt they would have had another had she departed from them.
Be it bulwark or corrupting poison, pride, too, recognizes its kin, and she had seen it shining in the face of Haldir from earliest childhood, when he had been all sturdy legs and sun-kissed hair and imperious voice lording authority over his younger brothers, who followed dutifully in his wake. Confident from the first, he had demonstrated aptitude with sword and bow and reverence for them. Though he used them roughly in the way of boys, he tended them with assiduous care, cleaning them with rags and polishing them with scrupulous attention to every nick and scratch, bottom lip trapped between his teeth and brow furrowed in concentration.
He had delighted in games of war and playing at warden with wooden sword and child's bow, and he and his brothers had spent untold hours practicing the men they would become, Haldir barking orders and organizing formations and battle strategies and his brothers rushing to see them done, Rumil more eagerly than Orophin, who always hung back to consider the thing to his own satisfaction. Their antics had so amused the older men that they had gladly erected a small gaggle of orcs fashioned from dead wood and old clothes and dented armor destined for the foundry and set them against it. They had, she remembers now as she watches the sunlight turn the waters of the pond to diamonds, set upon this ramshackle menace with hoots and war cries, and the strident crack of wood on wood and the astonished twanging of bowstrings had echoed throughout the wood, accompanied by the laughter of the the men and older boys who had gathered to watch the spectacle.
So merry and raucous had the clangor grown that Celeborn had descended from the talan for a closer look. He had returned with amusement in his eyes and laughter on his lips. "Methinks the future of the Royal Guard rests in fine hands," he had chortled, and returned to the leisure of his book.
For all his swagger and obstreperousness, he was not without gentleness. He spent hours climbing happily among the boughs and peering into the birds' nests that hid behind the golden leaves, and he was ever patient with his brothers, with Orophin's need for certitude and Rumil's eager distractions from their carefully-planned games. He was generous with his toys, lending them for the amusement of the little ones who tugged at the fabric of his shirt and breeches.
As childhood had given way to youth and the first blush of adulthood, rambunctiousness had been supplanted by thoughtfulness, and though he was still diligent in his practice with sword and bow, he also devoted himself to the exploration of the Wood, and to jewelry-craft. Often she had seen him sitting beneath the canopy of his family's talan, head bent to the delicate working of some small craft. Nimble fingers and watchful eyes and a gentle spirit behind the bravado, and Galadriel had known that Celeborn's idle jest carried the ring of prophecy.
The prophecy had come to pass when Haldir came of age. He had presented himself for consideration as a bowman, and he and the other hopefuls had gathered in a clearing and showcased their skill with the Lorien longbow. Most were dismissed after the first wave of shots. Those who acquitted themselves well throughout the tests arranged for them by the marchwarden were bidden to wait in the Lord's private gardens, and there they were judged by her, Celeborn, and the marchwarden, a grave, unsmiling man who brooked neither failure nor insolence.
Age comes not to the eyes, limbs, and hearts of the Eldar, and so admission to the bowmen, scouts, or the elite Royal guard was rare, indeed, come only when a member either died in battle or abdicated his position to sail into the West. Those assembled in the gardens that day had well understood the prize for which they fought, and thus the competition had been hot and furiously contested.
As Lady of the Wood, protocol had demanded impartiality, but she had kept a keen eye on Haldir, and she had been well pleased when he had been chosen as one of the three new recruits into the ranks of bowmen. Though time and maturity had done much to temper his swagger, it had done nothing to dampen his pride, which had shone in his eyes as Celeborn and the marchwarden had welcomed him into a new brotherhood. He had stood straighter then, and held his head high, and as she had presented him with a bowman's cloak, she had resolved to watch his progress with great interest.
The faith of Celeborn and the marchwarden had been richly rewarded. He had blossomed into a fine bowman and quickly shown himself as a leader of men. The lessons of his childhood games with his brothers had served him well, and within fifty years, he had been appointed leader of the bowmen's corps and had served as a trusted Lorien scout and spy. He had been hard but fair, and though not all of the men under his command had liked him, they had respected him, and none could fault his tactics when it had come to securing the borders and slaughtering those orcs foolhardy or brazen enough to venture into the realm.
And pride had been his constant companion. His weapons he had tended with fastidious care, had polished and oiled until they gleamed, and his appearance had always been immaculate--plaits tight cords tucked neatly behind the points of his ears and the folds of his cloak crisp and clean. He was a child of Lorien, and he had reveled in it, and so great had been his love for his post and his wood that she had thought he had no room for aught else in his heart.
And then he had seen Anariel, and everything had changed. The man of steel had discovered a softer marrow within himself. He had been ever faithful in his duties, unmoving and inscrutable as he stood before their thrones, yet the mind that had once thought only of duty rosters and scouting rotations and the latest reports from the field had suddenly turned to reveries of a young woman with golden hair and ruminative eyes and a silver pitcher in her hand.
What is her name? she had asked idly one late summer afternoon.
Haldir, who had been facing front at attention, had turned. My Lady?
The woman of whom so so often think of late.
Her unflappable guard, who would one day be her most trusted marchwarden, had blinked at her in comical dismay, and a flush had crept into the tips of his ears.
It was not my intent to intrude upon your mind, Haldir. Thoughts of her were so strong that I could not help but see them.
The flush had deepened. I do not know, he had admitted.
But you would wish it.
He had shuffled from foot to foot, opened his mouth to speak, and then simply given a single brusque nod.
She had said nothing, but when his back was turned, she had allowed herself a small smile.
They had not spoken of it again, but she had often betaken herself to the forest floor to mingle among the people and search for the maiden who had caught his single-minded eye. It had not taken long, for Anariel often came to the spring nearest their hall to draw of its water or simply sit upon its banks with a bit of sewing. Over the course of weeks, she had watched the girl at her work, and now and then, she had skimmed the idle thoughts of her mind.
Comely, she was, in the way of all elves, and disciplined in her toil. She had been disciplined of habit and possessed of a dogged determination to acquit herself well. A seamstress by trade, she had wrought things of exquisite craft, robes that flowed like water over the contours of the body and hoods that concealed without constriction. Breeches and scarves, gloves and fine embroidery.
Galadriel had often perused her wares as a pretext for conversation, and she had found the girl quick of mind and civil of tongue, but direct. She had inclined her head and bent her knee as politeness demanded, but her eyes had never lowered or softened with hopeless devotion. Her gaze had been steady and curious inside a thoughtful face, and behind sealed lips, she had seen the whirr of counsel carefully kept.
As stubborn and proud as Haldir, but not impetuous. Good, she had mused. Perhaps they are well matched.
Ever the disciplined soldier, neither Haldir's posture nor his countenance had betrayed him when she had led Anariel up the winding staircase of the royal talan that autumn, but she had seen the surprise in his eyes and the subsequent hope when Galadriel had announced she had want of a new gown and would therefore call upon her skill with needle and thread.
For all her machination, the match might never have happened but for luck and the persistence of fate. Her customarily-forthright guard had suddenly gone mute, lapsing into mulish silence whenever Anariel came to take measurements or discuss colors and fabrics and the lovely frippery of dress-making. Indeed, so aloof had he been that Anariel had judged it as coldness and begun to avoid him, and Galadriel had begun to despair.
And then, Haldir had torn his cloak on the nettles of a bush during a routine patrol, and Anariel had offered to mend it.
And thusly did fate bind them together. When next she came to the hall, she had not only mended his cloak but sewn him another of warmer, sterner material. Such a gift he had not expected, but the kindness had penetrated his gruff facade, and he had offered her a pleased smile and a stiff, courtly bow.
I thank you for your generosity, he had said quietly, and pressed his hand to his heart.
Ah, so you do speak for the pleasure of it, she had teased, and her eyes had twinkled with mischief.
Theirs had been no courtship for the ages, full of pomp and splendor, but it had been steady and true, and though Haldir had remained a prudent and loyal soldier, Anariel had softened him, tempted him to a life beyond the measure of duty rotations and border patrols. Hands that had once known only the heft of a sword or the curve of a bow now carried flowers and bits of ribbon and found joy in the interlacing of fingers. He never refused a task set before him, but neither did he decline the leaves and free days offered him, and he would tender the deference due and hurry down the winding stair with ill-disguised anticipation.
Anariel had found tenderness in him and nurtured it with patience and care. Galadriel had glimpsed them by the banks of the Anduin once, foreheads pressed together and fingers intertwined, and there had been such peace upon their faces that she had smiled. It had come as no surprise when Haldir had announced their betrothal three winters later, and when they had wed the following spring, she and Celeborn had watched from the terrace of their talan as they had spun across the glade in a lively reel.
How alive his face had been, how suffused with joy as he had lifted Anariel off her feet for two steps and set her lightly down again. He who smiled but rarely and never while on the watch had laughed long and freely, and he had spared no opportunity to touch she who had so clearly mastered his heart, cupping her upturned face in his hands and bending close to hear what secrets she would impart. Such youth he had shown then, and though he had not seen it, too preoccupied with his smiling, effervescent bride to care for the world about him, Galadriel had raised her goblet in salute and quiet hope for future happiness.
No trace of that happiness remains to him now as he stands beside Glandur at the door to her private veranda. He is mute and expressionless, gaze fixed on a point far behind her head. He is still a good soldier, still obedient and swift to fulfill her every need, but there is no pride in him, no love of land or lord. He is but an automaton, a body forced to endure against his will, and though she meets his stony gaze every morning, this transformation is terrible to behold.
It is an abomination, whispers a sibilant, accusatory voice inside her head, and she thinks of Manwe and the terrible doom he had passed to her and all her kin from the grand terrace of Taniquetil. It is the voice of damnation, and she suppresses a shudder with a sip of morning nectar.
If there were some other way, I would take it, she tells herself uneasily. It is the only chance I have to save him.
And for that slimmest of chances, you would bind him to you in wretched servitude, a trammeled, broken creature who lacks even the strength to gnaw off the limb that ensnares him within the jaws of the killing trap? This you would call salvation? This is not life, but a living death, without mercy or reason. Hubris, too, it might be called. After all, you presume to meddle in affairs not of your concern.
I would mend an undeserved hurt, she counters hotly.
Hubris. Yes. Ever your weakness, the voice purrs. Ever has it brought you to rue and to ruin, and it has found you here. You clothe it in the garb of righteousness, Nerwen, daughter of Finarfin, but this is yet another game for you, another means by which you can flout the will of fate.
And yet you counted such hubris a blessing when it sought to thwart the plans of the Dark Lord, she points out irritably. Methinks you would call a virtue a vice to suit your purpose.
The Ring was destroyed through no work of your hands, the voice asserts implacably. 'Twas the resolve of the Ring-Bearer and the steadfastness of Samwise Gamgee that undid evil's work. Had the sole hope of success rested with you, the world would have fallen into darkness and despair.
I resisted, she tells the voice, and pride flares within her, stark and white-hot.
So you did, the voice concedes, but it will not be swayed from its indictments. And for that moment of humility, your ban was lifted, but that was not your only curse. For your arrogance, it was decreed that all to which you set your mind and turned your will should fade, and so it has. Were it not for Celeborn's leadership and the heart of its defenders, Lorien, too, would have collapsed, set to flame and torch by invading armies. Are you sure that doom, too, has lifted?
What will you do if it was not? Will you damn him with your sin?
If I do nothing, it will come to the same end. I must try, for my own peace.
That hubris again. Why? Why should he be so precious to you? He was neither your first marchwarden nor your only, nor was he the only one to be sundered from his beloved wife by bow or sword. Your own kin you have seen slain. Why should his fate move you so?
Because I saw him by the river, stripped of all pretense and given over to the woman he loved, and because I saw him dancing in the glade, for once shut of his strict, martial bearing and lost to life's joy. Because I saw him shed of his soldierly vestments, a besotted husband agonizing over which blossoms to pick for his wife and fashioning tiny gifts with bits of metal and common gems. Because he took as much pride in making Anariel laugh as he did in the execution of his appointed duties, and because he shielded her from the rain with the folds of his cloak as they walked the paths beneath the golden boughs.
Because he volunteered, she answers. He was the first, his step sure even if his heart was not. His unwavering loyalty gave courage to the others, and they followed his lead. We could have ordered them to the march, and would have done if it came to it, but courage is as contagious as fear, and they would not be seen as cravens in the eyes of either their lords or their marchwarden.
He volunteered, and in the doing, wounded himself and the heart of his Evenstar. No confession did he make, no recriminations did he offer when the deed was done, but its mark was plain to see in his eyes and on his somber face. To fulfill one oath, he must needs injure and test another, and the injury would prove grave, indeed.
Because he volunteered for the love of us, the lords he so gladly served. Even as a green youth but newly come to the guard, he was possessed of great deference and zeal. His gaze was awed when he looked upon us, and though our faces must surely have grown as familiar as his own with the passing of years, the awe never left him. He looked upon us as an innocent child beheld a delivering god, and our slightest whim was as the force of law. His reverence for us was a thrall that led him wherever we desired, and we knew well of this when we sent out the call for volunteers to aid the men of Rohan. We knew the likely end he would find there--that they would all find there--and we sent them all the same, lambs prettily arrayed for the slaughter. We offered them up as sacrifices to the feeblest of hopes and spared little thought for the agonies of those left behind.
The screams are what she remembers most vividly, screams such as had never sounded in Lothlorien. Anguish and confusion and panic. They had hurried from the talan at the first shrill, piercing cry and stepped into the night, bundled against the rain that had pattered on the broad, golden leaves and soaked the earth beneath their feet. Soft loam had turned to mud as they had drifted from talan to talan, from one bewildered figure to the next. Death, unknowable as the fathomless depths of the Void, had accosted them unawares, and they had been helpless before its ruthless onslaught.
Young wives had swayed and staggered beneath the rain like drunkards, mouths open and arms outstretched to embrace phantoms. Beseeching fingers had scraped her skin and snagged her sleeves as she had passed, and ragged, grief-stricken voices had bid her wake them from this terrible dream. But she could not, and so she had bowed her head and walked on.
Anariel on her knees in the mud, rain stippled in her hair like a net of delicate diamonds and running down her face. No tears, not yet, not then. On her knees in the mud, laid bare, and too stunned to weep. She had blinked at them in numb incomprehension, chest heaving, and then she'd dropped to all fours and crawled, fingers digging deep gouges in the wet soil until they found Celeborn's boot. The first sound, then, a strangled mew. Diamonds at her crown and mud in the ends of her hair, and she had shuddered with the effort of stifling the wretched truth.
Celeborn, ever a stalwart presence at her side, had bent and lifted Anariel from the muck. She had gazed at him with that dreadful expression that was at once uncomprehending and possessed of anguished realization. Gone, her face had said, even as her mouth had remained resolutely shut.
She had turned that blank gaze upon her, dead-eyed and wan, and then she had found her voice. He was the captain of your guard, she had hissed with surprising vehemence, and yet you do not weep for him. Cutting as a lash, and Galadriel had flinched, startled by the venom in it.
As quickly as it had come, the rage had evaporated, replaced by a flicker of shame.
It is no weakness to weep for that which is lost, Celeborn had murmured.
Anariel had resisted grief's relentless pull a moment longer, and in her brief, wordless struggle against the cruel inevitable, Galadriel had seen so much of Haldir. Stubbornness and pride and misplaced faith. Then the dam had broken, and Anariel had howled her loss to the heavens, blind and clutching and borne up only by Celeborn's frame. He had said nothing, only cupped the back of Anariel's head and shared a bleak, mournful gaze over her convulsing shoulder.
There had been others to console that night, other griefs to witness, and so they had left her long ere her misery was spent. Without Celeborn to support her, she had returned to the sucking embrace of the mud, had wilted like a hewn willow, heedless of the cold and the rain that soaked her clothes and plastered her hair to her scalp. Sobs wrenched from heaving chests and spiraled to the heavens.
Gone, they had said. Lost, And so the withering of Lothlorien had begun.
I have seen those eyes before, she thinks as she watches Haldir stare into the nothingness over her shoulder. I saw them and did nothing. I will not make the same mistake.
Celeborn's fingertips skim the back of her hand, light and intimate, and her lips part with the pleasure of it. "I feared I had lost you on reflection's winding paths," he says, and offers her a slice of ripe plum.
She takes it with a smile and a nod of thanks. "I merely consider my course." She takes a bite of plum and savors its cool, sweet nectar.
Celeborn picks up his goblet and takes a considered sip. "It will not be an easy road," he admits after he swallows. "Though I expect Mithrandir will be amenable, and his diplomacy, wisdom, and gilded tongue might yet conjure success."
"It is not Mithrandir who worries me. Indeed, I count him as the surest part of the plan. It is the Valar who concern me. No great love have they for me, a wayward daughter of the Noldor, and no favor can I hope to curry with them."
"True enough, but it is Mithrandir who must convince them, and I suspect he has rather more."
"Perhaps. And perhaps not. That his heart is kind is to our favor, but he has more than a little of the imp in him." Her mind turns to the White Council and the skilled distractions and idle deceptions that had allowed Thorin Oakenshield and his band to slip from Rivendell beneath the imperious nose of Saruman.
"His rebellious nature might also work to our benefit." He plucks a grape from a succulent bunch on a silver tray and pops it into his mouth.
"I would not have him suffer a doom on my behalf," she says quickly, and casts a furtive glance at Haldir, who stands unmoving by the door, sword sheathed at his silver belt and hands clasped behind his back.
"Not even one freely risked?"
"Not even then."
"Mithrandir wants no mother," he says, and reaches for another grape.
Before she can reply, Glandur appears. "My lady, my lord," he says, and bows, and behind him, a familiar shadow looms. "Mithrandir has arrived." At a nod from Celeborn, he glides into the room on slippered feet and ushers Mithrandir inside.
"Old friend," she greets him warmly, and rises to meet him.
Given life before the long ages of the world, the man before her has worn many faces and known many names, and he has been a friend in all of them. She has known him as Mithrandir, friend of the Eldar, but for many long ages, he has simply been Gandalf, a wanderer of paths and a light in the dark places of the world. He is unassuming in his simple garb and with the kindly, twinkling face of a beloved grandfather, conjurer of children's magic and a storyteller before a cozy hearth, but he has battled balrogs and crossed swords with dark lords and worm-tongued deceivers and fell beasts that scuttle in the damp and dark. In the hand currently wrapped around a stout staff of white ash is power sufficient to level the walls of a city and reduce the stunned, cowering inhabitants to blood and bone meal. Fortunately, it is coupled with wisdom and a tender heart enamored of the world and all of Illuvatar's children.
Blue eyes twinkle beneath bushy, white brows, and a smile emerges from the thicket of a long, snowy beard. Lady Galadriel," he replies, and his voice is the low, soothing purr of a large cat. He turns to Celeborn, who stands beside her. "Lord Celeborn. Long has it been since last we met."
"Too long," Celeborn agrees, and clasps his shoulder. "I trust you are well?"
"Oh, indeed," he answers heartily. "I find the gardens most restful, though I daresay a bit of spectacle would liven them up."
"Spectacle of what sort?" Celeborn asks suspiciously.
"Nothing dangerous," Mithrandir insists innocently. "I merely thought to entertain with some fireworks."
"Of the sort that nearly burned Hobbiton to the ground?"
Mithrandir tuts. "A gross exaggeration, I assure you. The colors are quite remarkable."
"It is something to consider for the next festival, I should think," Galadriel interjects smoothly before Celeborn can voice another objection and spark a debate that devours the rest of the afternoon and bleeds into the dusk. "Please, sit. The fruit is fine, and made better by the company."
Mithrandir obligingly settles into a chair and rests his staff between his knees with a satisfied sigh. "This is a fine place for a home," he muses to no one in particular. "It reminds me of Imladris."
In truth, she cannot see the resemblance. Imladris was a hall of stone nestled among the mountains. Splendid, it was, and ostentatious in its craftsmanship, a showcase of scrollwork and latticework and the expertise of stonemasons with centuries of experience with hammer and chisel. Its sprawling rooms had been filled with tapestries and art, and its studies and libraries had been filled with books and scrolls, repositories of Elvish knowledge where scholars pored over ancient texts and refreshed themselves in the cooling mists of a waterfall.
It had been the second home of her precious Celebrian, and her daughter had been as besotted with it as she had been with her chosen husband. Her grandchildren had been begotten and birthed within its solid walls, and Elrohir and Elladan's feet had thundered through its wide corridors and trodden the rich loam of its glades and gardens. Arwen had played in its solars and hidden beneath its desks to tug on her father's robes and flee, giggling, when he bent to discover the culprit. She had blossomed into womanhood there, Luthien reborn, it was said in whispers murmured over the loose lips of wine goblets, and it was there that she had first beheld Elessar, the mortal who would capture her heart.
There is life in this home, it is true, but it is not the last homely house, nor is it the Wood. The peace it affords is melancholy, wistful, and few familiar faces brighten its halls. Arwen has never walked these halls and never will, bound to the fate of her husband, whose soul now moves beyond the circles of the world. Elrohir and Elladan tarried long in Arda, and when the time of choosing pressed upon them, they elected to follow their sister into mortality's embrace. Celebrian comes now and again to sit with them here and watch the sun warm the clear pools and nourish the bounty of their gardens, but though the wounds of her captivity and torment have healed, the loss of her children aggrieves her to the marrow, and she smiles but seldom despite their efforts to raise her spirits with song and music and idle chatter. Elrond sometimes joins her on these visits, and he is attentive and convivial and quick to join the conversation, but there is age in his eyes now, a quiet awareness of the empty spaces at the table.
But she can say none of this to the man before her. He is her friend, not her confessor, and so she draws the veil over her innermost thoughts and says, "Much peace has it brought us."
But not so much of late. His voice brushes against the veil, the languid, stealthy caress of exploratory fingers, but he does not intrude.
No, she admits, but no more. "Haldir, leave us."
Mithrandir's eyes widen at the name, and he turns in his seat. "Haldir. That is a name I have not heard in a very long time. You have come home at last."
Haldir bows, but he neither smiles nor unclasps his hands. "Indeed." Dry and brittle, the dusty scrape of stone on barrow steps. He straightens, and his eyes are dull and lifeless as milkglass inside his face.
You see it, too, Galadriel thinks as Mithrandir's lips twitch in dismay.
"By your leave, Mithrandir." Another bow, and then Haldir trudges from the room.
"Most curious," Mithrandir murmurs, and studies the door through which her marchwarden has departed.
"It is on his account that I have requested this meeting. Great sorrow has befallen him, and I seek counsel."
"Of course." Mithrandir straightens in his chair.
"He awoke from his repose in Mandos to find that his wife has not yet crossed the sea."
He does not greet this news with the surprise she expects. Instead, his expression clears, and he strokes his beard thoughtfully. "No? Indeed."
She narrows her eyes. "You know something."
"Mmm? Not so much as you expect."
"But more than most who have heard this woeful tale," she prods.
He blinks at her, all serene innocence. "I have heard no tale, only an unfortunate scrap of news."
So, she recounts the sad tale as she knows it, and when she is finished, she sits back in her chair and slakes her thirst with a sip of water.
For his part, Mithrandir merely hums and strokes a beard long since made smooth by his absent ministrations. Then he avails himself of a grape. "So it is she." He plucks another grape from the bunch and lets it settle into the hollow of his palm.
"Explain." Celeborn's eyes are alight with curiosity.
"When last I went to Arda, I thought I sensed a child of the Eldar, but there was no time to investigate, and I dismissed it as wishful thinking." At Celeborn's quizzical expression, he says, "The world might have been better off if the elves had never left it."
"Is it so changed, then?"
"Immeasurably."
A silence descends. It is not uncomfortable, this quiet, but reminiscent of past days, when they had often sat in happy communion among the lights and golden boughs of Lorien. Mithrandir partakes of more grapes and sliced melon with sloe-eyed contentment, and his tranquility soothes her, lightens her limbs and eases her troubled heart.
"Was it strong, this presence?" Galadriel asks at length.
Mithrandir chews thoughtfully as he considers the question. "Stronger than it had any right to be. Though it must be noted that it has been some time since my last foray to Arda."
"How long?"
"An age, at least. Who can say what has happened in the meantime?" He finishes the melon and taps his fingertips on the knees of his robes. "What is it you would have me do?" he asks shrewdly.
"I would have you return, have you bring her here if it is possible."
"Always you were audacious," he says, amused. "As if it is a small matter of crossing a pond and retrieving a recalcitrant child."
"I know what it is I ask."
"And yet you ask it all the same."
"We have tried more dangerous pursuits and tempted darker wraths," she points out.
"So we have," he concedes quietly, and his eyes soften. She knows he treads distant paths, revisits old friends in the secret cloisters of his heart.
She waits for him to continue, and when he does not, she presses. "I would do my most faithful marchwarden a small kindness."
Mithrandir chuckles. "A small kindness," he repeats.
"The hardest things are often most worth the doing," she says doggedly.
Mithrandir makes no reply, but she is patient. A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. As it is true of journeys, so it is true of decisions, and she knows he will come to his in his own time. No more can she entreat, or prevail, or hector. His answer will come when it comes.
She takes a deep breath, reaches for her goblet, and waits.
While Galadriel waits for her answer, Rumil, too, holds a vigil. He sits cross-legged on his narrow bed, his shortbow on his lap and a chamois in one hand. His head is seemingly bent to the task of oiling his bow, but in truth, he is watching his brother from behind the abetting fall of his hair.
Haldir, too, sits upon his bed, but the emptiness of his hands is matched only by the emptiness in his eyes. He looks but does not see, stares, unblinking, at the wall opposite, and the only sign of life is the steady rise and fall of his chest. He has been thus since he clattered down the stairs and shuffled into the room an hour past, and at first, Rumil had thought him on the path of waking dreams or lost in comforting meditation, but there had been no peace in his eyes or in his posture, and gladness had gradually been supplanted by concern. Haldir has seldom been called gregarious, but never has he been so morose, so dispirited.
It is as though the news of Anariel's fate has robbed him of the soul so recently returned to awareness, he muses unhappily as he shifts on the bed and pretends to polish the bow's delicate arch. He has been prostrate with grief since the Lady's terrible tidings so gently delivered. He bestirs himself to his duty and no more. He scarcely eats, speaks even less, and drifts through the corridors like a ghost. We can entice him to no pleasures, and though he obliges when we ask his company or his help, only his body is there. His mind is elsewhere, searching hopelessly for a respite and a kinship he cannot find.
The shock is still fresh, reasons a practical voice inside his mind. It has been but a few days, and this is no minor wound, no trifling scrape easily bested by poultice and salve. This is a terrible sundering, and it will take time to heal.
Time they have in plenty, an endless surfeit of it, but he is not so certain of his brother's will. That was once formidable and indefatigable, but now it is but a frail wisp behind his eyes, and though he and Orophin have tried to nurture it, no improvement can they discern. Haldir remains listless and stony in his silence, and neither reminiscence nor the spinning of happy futures rouses his interest.
Resentment simmers in his chest and belly like a banked ember. At Haldir, for his lassitude and interminable sorrow, and at the Lady for her indifference to his brother's private agony. Since she enjoined him to an oath made unwittingly by his charitable tongue, she has not treated with him, has not sought to counsel him. He is just another servant in her house, a warden of doors and a bearer of cups and the anonymous arms that help her lord with his morning ablutions. Reason, ever sensible in the face of emotional tempest, tells him that there is naught else she could or should do, that to coddle him would be a disservice to them both, but a mutinous, childish corner of his mind refuses to accept it. She is the Lady, yes, but she is also a healer, and her powers are of legend among their kind. Perhaps it is beyond her skill to mend the wound entirely, but surely she could ease its pernicious sting and stanch the steady ebb of his soul through their clutching fingers.
But the wealth of his resentment he reserves for Anariel, she whose stiff-necked pride has brought them to this. It is useless and unfair, he knows; she was as much a captor to her grief as Haldir is to his, but anger is the easier course, and at present, he has not the energy for both stewardship of his pining brother and compassion for his stubborn sister-in-law. If he must choose between them, then the bonds of brotherhood must prevail.
She should have gone to the havens, he thinks bitterly as he draws the chamois over the gleaming wood and watches his brother from the corner of his eye. If she had but come with me, none of this would have happened.
The same can be said of Haldir's decision to volunteer, points out the voice of pragmatism.
He had no choice. As marchwarden, it was his duty to defend the realm.
The realm. Not the whole of Middle-Earth. For thousands of years, the affairs of Men were beneath our concern, but of a sudden, we must race to the aid of Men who have spared no thought for us save to spread rumors of witchery? If Elrond were so concerned with the alliances of old, why did he not raise a host? After all, it was he who was there when the courage of Isildur failed, and he who failed to act when Isildur did not cast the Ring into the flames. If he had contested with him, he might have wrested it from his grasp and done the deed himself. He was superior in strength, and Isildur was battle-weary. Yet he did nothing but issue feeble entreaties to a heart well-ensnared by the Ring's malice. Perhaps the blame can be laid at his feet as well.
Ridiculousness and folly, he counters disagreeably. He could not have known the course events would take.
Indeed not. In fact, he had reason to suspect that ill would manifest faster than it did, and it would have done if the Ring had not been swallowed by river silt and stumbled upon by Gollum, who loved it dearly and bore it deep into the Misty Mountains. Chance alone thwarted Sauron's designs for two and a half thousand years, and chance it was that authored these unkind circumstances.
She could have chosen another path, a more sensible one, he insists pettishly, thin-lipped and disagreeable as he inspects his bowstring. It will need replacing soon, he decides after an experimental pluck.
Do you truly think she could have seen it then, when the whole of her world had been so rudely plunged into loneliness and despair? You were little better then, the voice says calmly, and he wishes it would leave him in peace, because he has no patience for its reason, steady and implacable as the march of days. It stirs recollections he would gladly leave to the past. But it is relentless. You, too, were lost in a fog of grief. You had never known life without your brothers, and they were gone, buried beneath the dusty, alien soil of Helm's Deep. Yet even as your heart acknowledged their loss, it sought for them. Though you knew it could not be, you heard the scratch of Rumil's quills upon his parchments and heard Haldir prowling through the treetops. Once, you even thought you heard them by the river, murmuring in companionable conversation, but when you followed the sound, you found only the river, rushing over the stones with a glottal, throaty roar.
If you were haunted by phantoms and tormented by the longing for what was, then how could she not be, she who was bound to your brother by long years of matrimony and the sharing of his body? For three thousand years, his breath was her breath, and his heart was her heart. How deep and dreadful the silence must have been to her when she could no longer feel his heart beat in time with hers, no longer hear the steady drum of it in her ears, feel its pulse beneath her skin. Such complete stillness must have been as damnation, an invitation to lunacy.
And yet, she endured, if imperfectly. She wept and clung to Haldir's cloak as though it were the last light of Earendil, but she also tended your wounds and mended your clothes and brought you broth and bread until you recovered sufficient strength to see to yourself. As you told the Lady scant hours ago, she was your sister when you had no brothers left, and she sought neither comfort nor aid in return. Does she not deserve your charity now, if only in thought and spirit?
It is my brother I must worry for now, he answers gruffly. My brother, whom she has so selfishly abandoned to this fate.
To this, the voice has no rejoinder, he notes with grim satisfaction. His unbecoming celebration of this sad victory is short-lived and interrupted by Haldir's voice.
"You have been oiling the same spot for a quarter of an hour." Dry and raw, as though he has already begun the forgetting of speech.
Rumil blinks in dismay and tries in vain to suppress the flush of embarrassment that floods his nape and steals into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. "My mind wanders," he says lamely. He gives up the pretense ans sets bow and chamois aside at the foot of the bed.
"I should not wonder what leads it astray." Haldir's gaze is still fixed on the opposite wall.
The unblinking stare and expressionless face unnerve him, but at least he is talking, and Rumil is eager to encourage him in the endeavor. "I worry for you," he concedes. "We both do. You are not yourself."
A mirthless laugh. "Did you truly expect me to be?"
"We did not expect this. You walk as a man already dead, a corpse that resists the final authority of death."
"You flatter me, brother." Wry, and the meager flicker of emotion is a balm to Rumil's troubled heart.
Still there, he thinks with swooning relief. He has not yet surrendered entirely. "I meant no insult. It is just-"
"And you have delivered none," Haldir reassures him in that bland, scoured voice.
It is as though he were screaming within his own head, Rumil thinks dismally, and gooseflesh prickles on his arms. He fumbles for something to say, but Haldir speaks before he can collect his thoughts. "There are so few trees here. I wonder that the Lady should choose such a place for her dwelling."
The non sequitur baffles him, but he is determined to keep the conversation going, no matter how bizarre it might become. "I expected she would build within sight of the sea," he confesses. "Perhaps in Alqualonde, though mayhap that ground holds memories too bitter to rediscover. Tirion would be suitable, or so I should have thought."
"It seems you have considered this at great length," Haldir replies with faint amusement.
Embarrassment surges in his veins anew, and he fights the impulse to fidget like a small boy. "Not really. It was just an idle train of thought with which I distracted myself on my journey from Mandos' halls. Besides, she spoke often of the sea near the end."
"She did," he agrees. "But so did many of us. The sea was a great myth, a wistful tale told 'round the cookfires. So few of us had seen it with our own eyes. The prospect of seeing it for ourselves at last... Even so, not all of us settled where the water laps the shore."
"Only because there was insufficient room, I suspect."
"It was your choice?"
A nod. "I was lost to it the moment I saw it. At night, it can be black as pitch or shimmer with the reflected glory of the heavens, and during the day, the sun transforms the waters to so much sapphire and silver, and diamonds rise on the crests of waves and beckon from the troughs."
"And there is the poet in you."
Dare he hope that Haldir has found it within himself to tease? "Well, our parents were of the same mind, since they, too, established a homestead there."
"Perhaps our parents have depths as yet unplumbed."
"You suspect father of clandestine poetry?"
"Mother, more like. Father is the soul of practicality."
"It does not captivate you, the sea?"
He shrugs. "It was lovely enough, but it inspired no great passion."
"If it is trees you desire, perhaps we could visit the forest of Orome. There are trees aplenty, the air is sweet, and you could avail yourself of Lord Elrond's most impressive library."
He snorts. "That last is more to your liking than mine."
"You have the truth of it." He brushes his braid behind his ear. "Still-"
"Still, it is not home," he says gently.
And just like that, the sure footing on which he had thought himself vanishes and leaves him to flounder gracelessly in dangerous territory. "Yes, it is Haldir. Lothlorien is gone."
He realizes his mistake too late. The shadow that had momentarily lifted from Haldir's features returns, and his eyes darken with old memories grown painful for their bittersweetness. "I thank you for the invitation," he says stiffly, "but my duties require that I remain."
"Haldir-"
"I would, however, go with you the next time you go to Tirion. I have a debt that wants paying, and I would see to it as soon as possible. Debts are harder masters than habit and reluctant to set you free."
"Lady Galadriel?"
Haldir does not answer.
Rumil takes his silence for confirmation. "Then why agree to be her manservant?"
It is a long time before answer comes, so long that Rumil's hands itch for the heft and security of quill or brush.
"I thought it would be different," he says simply, so softly that the words are but a dolorous prickle against his ears.
And what can he say to that, unmarried and ignorant of a woman's warmth and wiles and secret glories as he is? So he nods dumbly and busies himself with the empty work of nothing, and he is pitifully grateful when Orophin raps once upon the door and enters with a bowl of porridge in hand.
He blinks at the sight of Haldir and settles himself on the edge of Rumil's bed. "What are you doing here? I thought you were attending the Lord and Lady?" He dips a hunk of bread into the porridge and takes a bite.
"I was dismissed. She is in conference with Mithrandir."
Orophin looks up sharply at the name, interest clearly piqued. "Mithrandir? Is there new mischief afoot?"
"It is none of my affair," Haldir answers listlessly, and the blankness in his expression makes Rumil's chest ache.
Yet more of him bleeds out, and I can do nothing to stop it, he thinks bleakly.
"They are friends of old," Rumil points out to distract himself from the ever-expanding well of despair that wears Haldir's face.
"True," Orophin acknowledges between bites of bread and porridge. "But what need has she for secrets now?"
"It does not matter," Haldir answers.
Orophin narrows his eyes, lips pursed in a moue of stifled rebuke. "You should eat," he declares, and holds out the bowl of porridge.
Haldir does not look at it. "I have no appetite."
"And I care not," Orophin snaps, and thrusts the bowl at him.
Haldir accepts it, but the spoon remains untouched, congealing in the thick clots of porridge.
"Eat," Orophin prods, but though Haldir picks up the spoon and idly stirs the contents, not a single bite passes his lips.
Author:
laguera25Fandom: LOTR(TTT movieverse)
Rating: FRM/R
Pairing: Haldir/OFC, with long stretches of gen
Spoilers: The LOTR trilogy
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are the property of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Tolkien estate, and New Line Cinema. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
Prologue Part I Part II
Pride, Galadriel reflects as she waits for the arrival of her guest, is a bittersweet flame. It is fierce and eternal, and though it has been tempered by hard experience and its belated child humility, it still burns within her. It sustains through the ugliest adversity and provides an anchor to which to cling when the bedrock beneath your feet has fallen away along with most of your sole. Pride it was that had allowed her to rule Lothlorien so well for all its long years, and pride would like her to believe the whispers that had once proclaimed it as a parcel of Valinor brought across the sea, though this she knows to be hyperbole spoken by those who had never seen its wonders, never bathed in the light of the Two Trees. Pride is the last, desperate bulwark against defeat and surrender, the last defiant cry against onrushing death.
But pride is a hard master, and the tribute it demands is dear. Pride it was that drove her to flee Valinor without consent of the Valar, haughty and intractable amid the throng that marched from paradise to the hard, untested shores of Arda, and that same pride had driven her to cross the frozen, inhospitable wastes of the Helcaraxe, indomitable in the face of the wind that scoured the flesh from her face and untiring as her boots rotted from her feet and left them to the ravaging mercy of the ice. Pride it was that bid her reject the mercy of the Valar, that gift so seldom extended. Even Feanor, the mightiest of them, is denied it, and he waits in Mandos' hall until the End of Days.
But perhaps this last was not the bane she had once called it, for if she had seized the proffered mercy in both hands and returned joyfully to her kin, then she would not have been there to aid the Fellowship in their quest or tend Mithrandir's wounds and see him reborn as Gandalf the White. No succor could she have rendered to Frodo, he whose burden was the greatest. Lorien would not have stood against the fell forces of Dol Guldur, and perhaps its black walls and spires would stand still, a blight upon the landscape that invited darkness and ill purpose to nest and brood within its damp, lichened walls.
Or perhaps such thoughts are merely pride reflected back upon itself. Maybe the War of the Ring would have come to the same end without her. Celeborn was a formidable leader, skilled in battle and the leadership of men, and the rest of the Galadhrim were not without pride.
Galadhrim. Even there, there is vanity and the lust for power. Other names they possessed before the establishment of her fair realm, and no doubt they would have had another had she departed from them.
Be it bulwark or corrupting poison, pride, too, recognizes its kin, and she had seen it shining in the face of Haldir from earliest childhood, when he had been all sturdy legs and sun-kissed hair and imperious voice lording authority over his younger brothers, who followed dutifully in his wake. Confident from the first, he had demonstrated aptitude with sword and bow and reverence for them. Though he used them roughly in the way of boys, he tended them with assiduous care, cleaning them with rags and polishing them with scrupulous attention to every nick and scratch, bottom lip trapped between his teeth and brow furrowed in concentration.
He had delighted in games of war and playing at warden with wooden sword and child's bow, and he and his brothers had spent untold hours practicing the men they would become, Haldir barking orders and organizing formations and battle strategies and his brothers rushing to see them done, Rumil more eagerly than Orophin, who always hung back to consider the thing to his own satisfaction. Their antics had so amused the older men that they had gladly erected a small gaggle of orcs fashioned from dead wood and old clothes and dented armor destined for the foundry and set them against it. They had, she remembers now as she watches the sunlight turn the waters of the pond to diamonds, set upon this ramshackle menace with hoots and war cries, and the strident crack of wood on wood and the astonished twanging of bowstrings had echoed throughout the wood, accompanied by the laughter of the the men and older boys who had gathered to watch the spectacle.
So merry and raucous had the clangor grown that Celeborn had descended from the talan for a closer look. He had returned with amusement in his eyes and laughter on his lips. "Methinks the future of the Royal Guard rests in fine hands," he had chortled, and returned to the leisure of his book.
For all his swagger and obstreperousness, he was not without gentleness. He spent hours climbing happily among the boughs and peering into the birds' nests that hid behind the golden leaves, and he was ever patient with his brothers, with Orophin's need for certitude and Rumil's eager distractions from their carefully-planned games. He was generous with his toys, lending them for the amusement of the little ones who tugged at the fabric of his shirt and breeches.
As childhood had given way to youth and the first blush of adulthood, rambunctiousness had been supplanted by thoughtfulness, and though he was still diligent in his practice with sword and bow, he also devoted himself to the exploration of the Wood, and to jewelry-craft. Often she had seen him sitting beneath the canopy of his family's talan, head bent to the delicate working of some small craft. Nimble fingers and watchful eyes and a gentle spirit behind the bravado, and Galadriel had known that Celeborn's idle jest carried the ring of prophecy.
The prophecy had come to pass when Haldir came of age. He had presented himself for consideration as a bowman, and he and the other hopefuls had gathered in a clearing and showcased their skill with the Lorien longbow. Most were dismissed after the first wave of shots. Those who acquitted themselves well throughout the tests arranged for them by the marchwarden were bidden to wait in the Lord's private gardens, and there they were judged by her, Celeborn, and the marchwarden, a grave, unsmiling man who brooked neither failure nor insolence.
Age comes not to the eyes, limbs, and hearts of the Eldar, and so admission to the bowmen, scouts, or the elite Royal guard was rare, indeed, come only when a member either died in battle or abdicated his position to sail into the West. Those assembled in the gardens that day had well understood the prize for which they fought, and thus the competition had been hot and furiously contested.
As Lady of the Wood, protocol had demanded impartiality, but she had kept a keen eye on Haldir, and she had been well pleased when he had been chosen as one of the three new recruits into the ranks of bowmen. Though time and maturity had done much to temper his swagger, it had done nothing to dampen his pride, which had shone in his eyes as Celeborn and the marchwarden had welcomed him into a new brotherhood. He had stood straighter then, and held his head high, and as she had presented him with a bowman's cloak, she had resolved to watch his progress with great interest.
The faith of Celeborn and the marchwarden had been richly rewarded. He had blossomed into a fine bowman and quickly shown himself as a leader of men. The lessons of his childhood games with his brothers had served him well, and within fifty years, he had been appointed leader of the bowmen's corps and had served as a trusted Lorien scout and spy. He had been hard but fair, and though not all of the men under his command had liked him, they had respected him, and none could fault his tactics when it had come to securing the borders and slaughtering those orcs foolhardy or brazen enough to venture into the realm.
And pride had been his constant companion. His weapons he had tended with fastidious care, had polished and oiled until they gleamed, and his appearance had always been immaculate--plaits tight cords tucked neatly behind the points of his ears and the folds of his cloak crisp and clean. He was a child of Lorien, and he had reveled in it, and so great had been his love for his post and his wood that she had thought he had no room for aught else in his heart.
And then he had seen Anariel, and everything had changed. The man of steel had discovered a softer marrow within himself. He had been ever faithful in his duties, unmoving and inscrutable as he stood before their thrones, yet the mind that had once thought only of duty rosters and scouting rotations and the latest reports from the field had suddenly turned to reveries of a young woman with golden hair and ruminative eyes and a silver pitcher in her hand.
What is her name? she had asked idly one late summer afternoon.
Haldir, who had been facing front at attention, had turned. My Lady?
The woman of whom so so often think of late.
Her unflappable guard, who would one day be her most trusted marchwarden, had blinked at her in comical dismay, and a flush had crept into the tips of his ears.
It was not my intent to intrude upon your mind, Haldir. Thoughts of her were so strong that I could not help but see them.
The flush had deepened. I do not know, he had admitted.
But you would wish it.
He had shuffled from foot to foot, opened his mouth to speak, and then simply given a single brusque nod.
She had said nothing, but when his back was turned, she had allowed herself a small smile.
They had not spoken of it again, but she had often betaken herself to the forest floor to mingle among the people and search for the maiden who had caught his single-minded eye. It had not taken long, for Anariel often came to the spring nearest their hall to draw of its water or simply sit upon its banks with a bit of sewing. Over the course of weeks, she had watched the girl at her work, and now and then, she had skimmed the idle thoughts of her mind.
Comely, she was, in the way of all elves, and disciplined in her toil. She had been disciplined of habit and possessed of a dogged determination to acquit herself well. A seamstress by trade, she had wrought things of exquisite craft, robes that flowed like water over the contours of the body and hoods that concealed without constriction. Breeches and scarves, gloves and fine embroidery.
Galadriel had often perused her wares as a pretext for conversation, and she had found the girl quick of mind and civil of tongue, but direct. She had inclined her head and bent her knee as politeness demanded, but her eyes had never lowered or softened with hopeless devotion. Her gaze had been steady and curious inside a thoughtful face, and behind sealed lips, she had seen the whirr of counsel carefully kept.
As stubborn and proud as Haldir, but not impetuous. Good, she had mused. Perhaps they are well matched.
Ever the disciplined soldier, neither Haldir's posture nor his countenance had betrayed him when she had led Anariel up the winding staircase of the royal talan that autumn, but she had seen the surprise in his eyes and the subsequent hope when Galadriel had announced she had want of a new gown and would therefore call upon her skill with needle and thread.
For all her machination, the match might never have happened but for luck and the persistence of fate. Her customarily-forthright guard had suddenly gone mute, lapsing into mulish silence whenever Anariel came to take measurements or discuss colors and fabrics and the lovely frippery of dress-making. Indeed, so aloof had he been that Anariel had judged it as coldness and begun to avoid him, and Galadriel had begun to despair.
And then, Haldir had torn his cloak on the nettles of a bush during a routine patrol, and Anariel had offered to mend it.
And thusly did fate bind them together. When next she came to the hall, she had not only mended his cloak but sewn him another of warmer, sterner material. Such a gift he had not expected, but the kindness had penetrated his gruff facade, and he had offered her a pleased smile and a stiff, courtly bow.
I thank you for your generosity, he had said quietly, and pressed his hand to his heart.
Ah, so you do speak for the pleasure of it, she had teased, and her eyes had twinkled with mischief.
Theirs had been no courtship for the ages, full of pomp and splendor, but it had been steady and true, and though Haldir had remained a prudent and loyal soldier, Anariel had softened him, tempted him to a life beyond the measure of duty rotations and border patrols. Hands that had once known only the heft of a sword or the curve of a bow now carried flowers and bits of ribbon and found joy in the interlacing of fingers. He never refused a task set before him, but neither did he decline the leaves and free days offered him, and he would tender the deference due and hurry down the winding stair with ill-disguised anticipation.
Anariel had found tenderness in him and nurtured it with patience and care. Galadriel had glimpsed them by the banks of the Anduin once, foreheads pressed together and fingers intertwined, and there had been such peace upon their faces that she had smiled. It had come as no surprise when Haldir had announced their betrothal three winters later, and when they had wed the following spring, she and Celeborn had watched from the terrace of their talan as they had spun across the glade in a lively reel.
How alive his face had been, how suffused with joy as he had lifted Anariel off her feet for two steps and set her lightly down again. He who smiled but rarely and never while on the watch had laughed long and freely, and he had spared no opportunity to touch she who had so clearly mastered his heart, cupping her upturned face in his hands and bending close to hear what secrets she would impart. Such youth he had shown then, and though he had not seen it, too preoccupied with his smiling, effervescent bride to care for the world about him, Galadriel had raised her goblet in salute and quiet hope for future happiness.
No trace of that happiness remains to him now as he stands beside Glandur at the door to her private veranda. He is mute and expressionless, gaze fixed on a point far behind her head. He is still a good soldier, still obedient and swift to fulfill her every need, but there is no pride in him, no love of land or lord. He is but an automaton, a body forced to endure against his will, and though she meets his stony gaze every morning, this transformation is terrible to behold.
It is an abomination, whispers a sibilant, accusatory voice inside her head, and she thinks of Manwe and the terrible doom he had passed to her and all her kin from the grand terrace of Taniquetil. It is the voice of damnation, and she suppresses a shudder with a sip of morning nectar.
If there were some other way, I would take it, she tells herself uneasily. It is the only chance I have to save him.
And for that slimmest of chances, you would bind him to you in wretched servitude, a trammeled, broken creature who lacks even the strength to gnaw off the limb that ensnares him within the jaws of the killing trap? This you would call salvation? This is not life, but a living death, without mercy or reason. Hubris, too, it might be called. After all, you presume to meddle in affairs not of your concern.
I would mend an undeserved hurt, she counters hotly.
Hubris. Yes. Ever your weakness, the voice purrs. Ever has it brought you to rue and to ruin, and it has found you here. You clothe it in the garb of righteousness, Nerwen, daughter of Finarfin, but this is yet another game for you, another means by which you can flout the will of fate.
And yet you counted such hubris a blessing when it sought to thwart the plans of the Dark Lord, she points out irritably. Methinks you would call a virtue a vice to suit your purpose.
The Ring was destroyed through no work of your hands, the voice asserts implacably. 'Twas the resolve of the Ring-Bearer and the steadfastness of Samwise Gamgee that undid evil's work. Had the sole hope of success rested with you, the world would have fallen into darkness and despair.
I resisted, she tells the voice, and pride flares within her, stark and white-hot.
So you did, the voice concedes, but it will not be swayed from its indictments. And for that moment of humility, your ban was lifted, but that was not your only curse. For your arrogance, it was decreed that all to which you set your mind and turned your will should fade, and so it has. Were it not for Celeborn's leadership and the heart of its defenders, Lorien, too, would have collapsed, set to flame and torch by invading armies. Are you sure that doom, too, has lifted?
What will you do if it was not? Will you damn him with your sin?
If I do nothing, it will come to the same end. I must try, for my own peace.
That hubris again. Why? Why should he be so precious to you? He was neither your first marchwarden nor your only, nor was he the only one to be sundered from his beloved wife by bow or sword. Your own kin you have seen slain. Why should his fate move you so?
Because I saw him by the river, stripped of all pretense and given over to the woman he loved, and because I saw him dancing in the glade, for once shut of his strict, martial bearing and lost to life's joy. Because I saw him shed of his soldierly vestments, a besotted husband agonizing over which blossoms to pick for his wife and fashioning tiny gifts with bits of metal and common gems. Because he took as much pride in making Anariel laugh as he did in the execution of his appointed duties, and because he shielded her from the rain with the folds of his cloak as they walked the paths beneath the golden boughs.
Because he volunteered, she answers. He was the first, his step sure even if his heart was not. His unwavering loyalty gave courage to the others, and they followed his lead. We could have ordered them to the march, and would have done if it came to it, but courage is as contagious as fear, and they would not be seen as cravens in the eyes of either their lords or their marchwarden.
He volunteered, and in the doing, wounded himself and the heart of his Evenstar. No confession did he make, no recriminations did he offer when the deed was done, but its mark was plain to see in his eyes and on his somber face. To fulfill one oath, he must needs injure and test another, and the injury would prove grave, indeed.
Because he volunteered for the love of us, the lords he so gladly served. Even as a green youth but newly come to the guard, he was possessed of great deference and zeal. His gaze was awed when he looked upon us, and though our faces must surely have grown as familiar as his own with the passing of years, the awe never left him. He looked upon us as an innocent child beheld a delivering god, and our slightest whim was as the force of law. His reverence for us was a thrall that led him wherever we desired, and we knew well of this when we sent out the call for volunteers to aid the men of Rohan. We knew the likely end he would find there--that they would all find there--and we sent them all the same, lambs prettily arrayed for the slaughter. We offered them up as sacrifices to the feeblest of hopes and spared little thought for the agonies of those left behind.
The screams are what she remembers most vividly, screams such as had never sounded in Lothlorien. Anguish and confusion and panic. They had hurried from the talan at the first shrill, piercing cry and stepped into the night, bundled against the rain that had pattered on the broad, golden leaves and soaked the earth beneath their feet. Soft loam had turned to mud as they had drifted from talan to talan, from one bewildered figure to the next. Death, unknowable as the fathomless depths of the Void, had accosted them unawares, and they had been helpless before its ruthless onslaught.
Young wives had swayed and staggered beneath the rain like drunkards, mouths open and arms outstretched to embrace phantoms. Beseeching fingers had scraped her skin and snagged her sleeves as she had passed, and ragged, grief-stricken voices had bid her wake them from this terrible dream. But she could not, and so she had bowed her head and walked on.
Anariel on her knees in the mud, rain stippled in her hair like a net of delicate diamonds and running down her face. No tears, not yet, not then. On her knees in the mud, laid bare, and too stunned to weep. She had blinked at them in numb incomprehension, chest heaving, and then she'd dropped to all fours and crawled, fingers digging deep gouges in the wet soil until they found Celeborn's boot. The first sound, then, a strangled mew. Diamonds at her crown and mud in the ends of her hair, and she had shuddered with the effort of stifling the wretched truth.
Celeborn, ever a stalwart presence at her side, had bent and lifted Anariel from the muck. She had gazed at him with that dreadful expression that was at once uncomprehending and possessed of anguished realization. Gone, her face had said, even as her mouth had remained resolutely shut.
She had turned that blank gaze upon her, dead-eyed and wan, and then she had found her voice. He was the captain of your guard, she had hissed with surprising vehemence, and yet you do not weep for him. Cutting as a lash, and Galadriel had flinched, startled by the venom in it.
As quickly as it had come, the rage had evaporated, replaced by a flicker of shame.
It is no weakness to weep for that which is lost, Celeborn had murmured.
Anariel had resisted grief's relentless pull a moment longer, and in her brief, wordless struggle against the cruel inevitable, Galadriel had seen so much of Haldir. Stubbornness and pride and misplaced faith. Then the dam had broken, and Anariel had howled her loss to the heavens, blind and clutching and borne up only by Celeborn's frame. He had said nothing, only cupped the back of Anariel's head and shared a bleak, mournful gaze over her convulsing shoulder.
There had been others to console that night, other griefs to witness, and so they had left her long ere her misery was spent. Without Celeborn to support her, she had returned to the sucking embrace of the mud, had wilted like a hewn willow, heedless of the cold and the rain that soaked her clothes and plastered her hair to her scalp. Sobs wrenched from heaving chests and spiraled to the heavens.
Gone, they had said. Lost, And so the withering of Lothlorien had begun.
I have seen those eyes before, she thinks as she watches Haldir stare into the nothingness over her shoulder. I saw them and did nothing. I will not make the same mistake.
Celeborn's fingertips skim the back of her hand, light and intimate, and her lips part with the pleasure of it. "I feared I had lost you on reflection's winding paths," he says, and offers her a slice of ripe plum.
She takes it with a smile and a nod of thanks. "I merely consider my course." She takes a bite of plum and savors its cool, sweet nectar.
Celeborn picks up his goblet and takes a considered sip. "It will not be an easy road," he admits after he swallows. "Though I expect Mithrandir will be amenable, and his diplomacy, wisdom, and gilded tongue might yet conjure success."
"It is not Mithrandir who worries me. Indeed, I count him as the surest part of the plan. It is the Valar who concern me. No great love have they for me, a wayward daughter of the Noldor, and no favor can I hope to curry with them."
"True enough, but it is Mithrandir who must convince them, and I suspect he has rather more."
"Perhaps. And perhaps not. That his heart is kind is to our favor, but he has more than a little of the imp in him." Her mind turns to the White Council and the skilled distractions and idle deceptions that had allowed Thorin Oakenshield and his band to slip from Rivendell beneath the imperious nose of Saruman.
"His rebellious nature might also work to our benefit." He plucks a grape from a succulent bunch on a silver tray and pops it into his mouth.
"I would not have him suffer a doom on my behalf," she says quickly, and casts a furtive glance at Haldir, who stands unmoving by the door, sword sheathed at his silver belt and hands clasped behind his back.
"Not even one freely risked?"
"Not even then."
"Mithrandir wants no mother," he says, and reaches for another grape.
Before she can reply, Glandur appears. "My lady, my lord," he says, and bows, and behind him, a familiar shadow looms. "Mithrandir has arrived." At a nod from Celeborn, he glides into the room on slippered feet and ushers Mithrandir inside.
"Old friend," she greets him warmly, and rises to meet him.
Given life before the long ages of the world, the man before her has worn many faces and known many names, and he has been a friend in all of them. She has known him as Mithrandir, friend of the Eldar, but for many long ages, he has simply been Gandalf, a wanderer of paths and a light in the dark places of the world. He is unassuming in his simple garb and with the kindly, twinkling face of a beloved grandfather, conjurer of children's magic and a storyteller before a cozy hearth, but he has battled balrogs and crossed swords with dark lords and worm-tongued deceivers and fell beasts that scuttle in the damp and dark. In the hand currently wrapped around a stout staff of white ash is power sufficient to level the walls of a city and reduce the stunned, cowering inhabitants to blood and bone meal. Fortunately, it is coupled with wisdom and a tender heart enamored of the world and all of Illuvatar's children.
Blue eyes twinkle beneath bushy, white brows, and a smile emerges from the thicket of a long, snowy beard. Lady Galadriel," he replies, and his voice is the low, soothing purr of a large cat. He turns to Celeborn, who stands beside her. "Lord Celeborn. Long has it been since last we met."
"Too long," Celeborn agrees, and clasps his shoulder. "I trust you are well?"
"Oh, indeed," he answers heartily. "I find the gardens most restful, though I daresay a bit of spectacle would liven them up."
"Spectacle of what sort?" Celeborn asks suspiciously.
"Nothing dangerous," Mithrandir insists innocently. "I merely thought to entertain with some fireworks."
"Of the sort that nearly burned Hobbiton to the ground?"
Mithrandir tuts. "A gross exaggeration, I assure you. The colors are quite remarkable."
"It is something to consider for the next festival, I should think," Galadriel interjects smoothly before Celeborn can voice another objection and spark a debate that devours the rest of the afternoon and bleeds into the dusk. "Please, sit. The fruit is fine, and made better by the company."
Mithrandir obligingly settles into a chair and rests his staff between his knees with a satisfied sigh. "This is a fine place for a home," he muses to no one in particular. "It reminds me of Imladris."
In truth, she cannot see the resemblance. Imladris was a hall of stone nestled among the mountains. Splendid, it was, and ostentatious in its craftsmanship, a showcase of scrollwork and latticework and the expertise of stonemasons with centuries of experience with hammer and chisel. Its sprawling rooms had been filled with tapestries and art, and its studies and libraries had been filled with books and scrolls, repositories of Elvish knowledge where scholars pored over ancient texts and refreshed themselves in the cooling mists of a waterfall.
It had been the second home of her precious Celebrian, and her daughter had been as besotted with it as she had been with her chosen husband. Her grandchildren had been begotten and birthed within its solid walls, and Elrohir and Elladan's feet had thundered through its wide corridors and trodden the rich loam of its glades and gardens. Arwen had played in its solars and hidden beneath its desks to tug on her father's robes and flee, giggling, when he bent to discover the culprit. She had blossomed into womanhood there, Luthien reborn, it was said in whispers murmured over the loose lips of wine goblets, and it was there that she had first beheld Elessar, the mortal who would capture her heart.
There is life in this home, it is true, but it is not the last homely house, nor is it the Wood. The peace it affords is melancholy, wistful, and few familiar faces brighten its halls. Arwen has never walked these halls and never will, bound to the fate of her husband, whose soul now moves beyond the circles of the world. Elrohir and Elladan tarried long in Arda, and when the time of choosing pressed upon them, they elected to follow their sister into mortality's embrace. Celebrian comes now and again to sit with them here and watch the sun warm the clear pools and nourish the bounty of their gardens, but though the wounds of her captivity and torment have healed, the loss of her children aggrieves her to the marrow, and she smiles but seldom despite their efforts to raise her spirits with song and music and idle chatter. Elrond sometimes joins her on these visits, and he is attentive and convivial and quick to join the conversation, but there is age in his eyes now, a quiet awareness of the empty spaces at the table.
But she can say none of this to the man before her. He is her friend, not her confessor, and so she draws the veil over her innermost thoughts and says, "Much peace has it brought us."
But not so much of late. His voice brushes against the veil, the languid, stealthy caress of exploratory fingers, but he does not intrude.
No, she admits, but no more. "Haldir, leave us."
Mithrandir's eyes widen at the name, and he turns in his seat. "Haldir. That is a name I have not heard in a very long time. You have come home at last."
Haldir bows, but he neither smiles nor unclasps his hands. "Indeed." Dry and brittle, the dusty scrape of stone on barrow steps. He straightens, and his eyes are dull and lifeless as milkglass inside his face.
You see it, too, Galadriel thinks as Mithrandir's lips twitch in dismay.
"By your leave, Mithrandir." Another bow, and then Haldir trudges from the room.
"Most curious," Mithrandir murmurs, and studies the door through which her marchwarden has departed.
"It is on his account that I have requested this meeting. Great sorrow has befallen him, and I seek counsel."
"Of course." Mithrandir straightens in his chair.
"He awoke from his repose in Mandos to find that his wife has not yet crossed the sea."
He does not greet this news with the surprise she expects. Instead, his expression clears, and he strokes his beard thoughtfully. "No? Indeed."
She narrows her eyes. "You know something."
"Mmm? Not so much as you expect."
"But more than most who have heard this woeful tale," she prods.
He blinks at her, all serene innocence. "I have heard no tale, only an unfortunate scrap of news."
So, she recounts the sad tale as she knows it, and when she is finished, she sits back in her chair and slakes her thirst with a sip of water.
For his part, Mithrandir merely hums and strokes a beard long since made smooth by his absent ministrations. Then he avails himself of a grape. "So it is she." He plucks another grape from the bunch and lets it settle into the hollow of his palm.
"Explain." Celeborn's eyes are alight with curiosity.
"When last I went to Arda, I thought I sensed a child of the Eldar, but there was no time to investigate, and I dismissed it as wishful thinking." At Celeborn's quizzical expression, he says, "The world might have been better off if the elves had never left it."
"Is it so changed, then?"
"Immeasurably."
A silence descends. It is not uncomfortable, this quiet, but reminiscent of past days, when they had often sat in happy communion among the lights and golden boughs of Lorien. Mithrandir partakes of more grapes and sliced melon with sloe-eyed contentment, and his tranquility soothes her, lightens her limbs and eases her troubled heart.
"Was it strong, this presence?" Galadriel asks at length.
Mithrandir chews thoughtfully as he considers the question. "Stronger than it had any right to be. Though it must be noted that it has been some time since my last foray to Arda."
"How long?"
"An age, at least. Who can say what has happened in the meantime?" He finishes the melon and taps his fingertips on the knees of his robes. "What is it you would have me do?" he asks shrewdly.
"I would have you return, have you bring her here if it is possible."
"Always you were audacious," he says, amused. "As if it is a small matter of crossing a pond and retrieving a recalcitrant child."
"I know what it is I ask."
"And yet you ask it all the same."
"We have tried more dangerous pursuits and tempted darker wraths," she points out.
"So we have," he concedes quietly, and his eyes soften. She knows he treads distant paths, revisits old friends in the secret cloisters of his heart.
She waits for him to continue, and when he does not, she presses. "I would do my most faithful marchwarden a small kindness."
Mithrandir chuckles. "A small kindness," he repeats.
"The hardest things are often most worth the doing," she says doggedly.
Mithrandir makes no reply, but she is patient. A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. As it is true of journeys, so it is true of decisions, and she knows he will come to his in his own time. No more can she entreat, or prevail, or hector. His answer will come when it comes.
She takes a deep breath, reaches for her goblet, and waits.
While Galadriel waits for her answer, Rumil, too, holds a vigil. He sits cross-legged on his narrow bed, his shortbow on his lap and a chamois in one hand. His head is seemingly bent to the task of oiling his bow, but in truth, he is watching his brother from behind the abetting fall of his hair.
Haldir, too, sits upon his bed, but the emptiness of his hands is matched only by the emptiness in his eyes. He looks but does not see, stares, unblinking, at the wall opposite, and the only sign of life is the steady rise and fall of his chest. He has been thus since he clattered down the stairs and shuffled into the room an hour past, and at first, Rumil had thought him on the path of waking dreams or lost in comforting meditation, but there had been no peace in his eyes or in his posture, and gladness had gradually been supplanted by concern. Haldir has seldom been called gregarious, but never has he been so morose, so dispirited.
It is as though the news of Anariel's fate has robbed him of the soul so recently returned to awareness, he muses unhappily as he shifts on the bed and pretends to polish the bow's delicate arch. He has been prostrate with grief since the Lady's terrible tidings so gently delivered. He bestirs himself to his duty and no more. He scarcely eats, speaks even less, and drifts through the corridors like a ghost. We can entice him to no pleasures, and though he obliges when we ask his company or his help, only his body is there. His mind is elsewhere, searching hopelessly for a respite and a kinship he cannot find.
The shock is still fresh, reasons a practical voice inside his mind. It has been but a few days, and this is no minor wound, no trifling scrape easily bested by poultice and salve. This is a terrible sundering, and it will take time to heal.
Time they have in plenty, an endless surfeit of it, but he is not so certain of his brother's will. That was once formidable and indefatigable, but now it is but a frail wisp behind his eyes, and though he and Orophin have tried to nurture it, no improvement can they discern. Haldir remains listless and stony in his silence, and neither reminiscence nor the spinning of happy futures rouses his interest.
Resentment simmers in his chest and belly like a banked ember. At Haldir, for his lassitude and interminable sorrow, and at the Lady for her indifference to his brother's private agony. Since she enjoined him to an oath made unwittingly by his charitable tongue, she has not treated with him, has not sought to counsel him. He is just another servant in her house, a warden of doors and a bearer of cups and the anonymous arms that help her lord with his morning ablutions. Reason, ever sensible in the face of emotional tempest, tells him that there is naught else she could or should do, that to coddle him would be a disservice to them both, but a mutinous, childish corner of his mind refuses to accept it. She is the Lady, yes, but she is also a healer, and her powers are of legend among their kind. Perhaps it is beyond her skill to mend the wound entirely, but surely she could ease its pernicious sting and stanch the steady ebb of his soul through their clutching fingers.
But the wealth of his resentment he reserves for Anariel, she whose stiff-necked pride has brought them to this. It is useless and unfair, he knows; she was as much a captor to her grief as Haldir is to his, but anger is the easier course, and at present, he has not the energy for both stewardship of his pining brother and compassion for his stubborn sister-in-law. If he must choose between them, then the bonds of brotherhood must prevail.
She should have gone to the havens, he thinks bitterly as he draws the chamois over the gleaming wood and watches his brother from the corner of his eye. If she had but come with me, none of this would have happened.
The same can be said of Haldir's decision to volunteer, points out the voice of pragmatism.
He had no choice. As marchwarden, it was his duty to defend the realm.
The realm. Not the whole of Middle-Earth. For thousands of years, the affairs of Men were beneath our concern, but of a sudden, we must race to the aid of Men who have spared no thought for us save to spread rumors of witchery? If Elrond were so concerned with the alliances of old, why did he not raise a host? After all, it was he who was there when the courage of Isildur failed, and he who failed to act when Isildur did not cast the Ring into the flames. If he had contested with him, he might have wrested it from his grasp and done the deed himself. He was superior in strength, and Isildur was battle-weary. Yet he did nothing but issue feeble entreaties to a heart well-ensnared by the Ring's malice. Perhaps the blame can be laid at his feet as well.
Ridiculousness and folly, he counters disagreeably. He could not have known the course events would take.
Indeed not. In fact, he had reason to suspect that ill would manifest faster than it did, and it would have done if the Ring had not been swallowed by river silt and stumbled upon by Gollum, who loved it dearly and bore it deep into the Misty Mountains. Chance alone thwarted Sauron's designs for two and a half thousand years, and chance it was that authored these unkind circumstances.
She could have chosen another path, a more sensible one, he insists pettishly, thin-lipped and disagreeable as he inspects his bowstring. It will need replacing soon, he decides after an experimental pluck.
Do you truly think she could have seen it then, when the whole of her world had been so rudely plunged into loneliness and despair? You were little better then, the voice says calmly, and he wishes it would leave him in peace, because he has no patience for its reason, steady and implacable as the march of days. It stirs recollections he would gladly leave to the past. But it is relentless. You, too, were lost in a fog of grief. You had never known life without your brothers, and they were gone, buried beneath the dusty, alien soil of Helm's Deep. Yet even as your heart acknowledged their loss, it sought for them. Though you knew it could not be, you heard the scratch of Rumil's quills upon his parchments and heard Haldir prowling through the treetops. Once, you even thought you heard them by the river, murmuring in companionable conversation, but when you followed the sound, you found only the river, rushing over the stones with a glottal, throaty roar.
If you were haunted by phantoms and tormented by the longing for what was, then how could she not be, she who was bound to your brother by long years of matrimony and the sharing of his body? For three thousand years, his breath was her breath, and his heart was her heart. How deep and dreadful the silence must have been to her when she could no longer feel his heart beat in time with hers, no longer hear the steady drum of it in her ears, feel its pulse beneath her skin. Such complete stillness must have been as damnation, an invitation to lunacy.
And yet, she endured, if imperfectly. She wept and clung to Haldir's cloak as though it were the last light of Earendil, but she also tended your wounds and mended your clothes and brought you broth and bread until you recovered sufficient strength to see to yourself. As you told the Lady scant hours ago, she was your sister when you had no brothers left, and she sought neither comfort nor aid in return. Does she not deserve your charity now, if only in thought and spirit?
It is my brother I must worry for now, he answers gruffly. My brother, whom she has so selfishly abandoned to this fate.
To this, the voice has no rejoinder, he notes with grim satisfaction. His unbecoming celebration of this sad victory is short-lived and interrupted by Haldir's voice.
"You have been oiling the same spot for a quarter of an hour." Dry and raw, as though he has already begun the forgetting of speech.
Rumil blinks in dismay and tries in vain to suppress the flush of embarrassment that floods his nape and steals into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. "My mind wanders," he says lamely. He gives up the pretense ans sets bow and chamois aside at the foot of the bed.
"I should not wonder what leads it astray." Haldir's gaze is still fixed on the opposite wall.
The unblinking stare and expressionless face unnerve him, but at least he is talking, and Rumil is eager to encourage him in the endeavor. "I worry for you," he concedes. "We both do. You are not yourself."
A mirthless laugh. "Did you truly expect me to be?"
"We did not expect this. You walk as a man already dead, a corpse that resists the final authority of death."
"You flatter me, brother." Wry, and the meager flicker of emotion is a balm to Rumil's troubled heart.
Still there, he thinks with swooning relief. He has not yet surrendered entirely. "I meant no insult. It is just-"
"And you have delivered none," Haldir reassures him in that bland, scoured voice.
It is as though he were screaming within his own head, Rumil thinks dismally, and gooseflesh prickles on his arms. He fumbles for something to say, but Haldir speaks before he can collect his thoughts. "There are so few trees here. I wonder that the Lady should choose such a place for her dwelling."
The non sequitur baffles him, but he is determined to keep the conversation going, no matter how bizarre it might become. "I expected she would build within sight of the sea," he confesses. "Perhaps in Alqualonde, though mayhap that ground holds memories too bitter to rediscover. Tirion would be suitable, or so I should have thought."
"It seems you have considered this at great length," Haldir replies with faint amusement.
Embarrassment surges in his veins anew, and he fights the impulse to fidget like a small boy. "Not really. It was just an idle train of thought with which I distracted myself on my journey from Mandos' halls. Besides, she spoke often of the sea near the end."
"She did," he agrees. "But so did many of us. The sea was a great myth, a wistful tale told 'round the cookfires. So few of us had seen it with our own eyes. The prospect of seeing it for ourselves at last... Even so, not all of us settled where the water laps the shore."
"Only because there was insufficient room, I suspect."
"It was your choice?"
A nod. "I was lost to it the moment I saw it. At night, it can be black as pitch or shimmer with the reflected glory of the heavens, and during the day, the sun transforms the waters to so much sapphire and silver, and diamonds rise on the crests of waves and beckon from the troughs."
"And there is the poet in you."
Dare he hope that Haldir has found it within himself to tease? "Well, our parents were of the same mind, since they, too, established a homestead there."
"Perhaps our parents have depths as yet unplumbed."
"You suspect father of clandestine poetry?"
"Mother, more like. Father is the soul of practicality."
"It does not captivate you, the sea?"
He shrugs. "It was lovely enough, but it inspired no great passion."
"If it is trees you desire, perhaps we could visit the forest of Orome. There are trees aplenty, the air is sweet, and you could avail yourself of Lord Elrond's most impressive library."
He snorts. "That last is more to your liking than mine."
"You have the truth of it." He brushes his braid behind his ear. "Still-"
"Still, it is not home," he says gently.
And just like that, the sure footing on which he had thought himself vanishes and leaves him to flounder gracelessly in dangerous territory. "Yes, it is Haldir. Lothlorien is gone."
He realizes his mistake too late. The shadow that had momentarily lifted from Haldir's features returns, and his eyes darken with old memories grown painful for their bittersweetness. "I thank you for the invitation," he says stiffly, "but my duties require that I remain."
"Haldir-"
"I would, however, go with you the next time you go to Tirion. I have a debt that wants paying, and I would see to it as soon as possible. Debts are harder masters than habit and reluctant to set you free."
"Lady Galadriel?"
Haldir does not answer.
Rumil takes his silence for confirmation. "Then why agree to be her manservant?"
It is a long time before answer comes, so long that Rumil's hands itch for the heft and security of quill or brush.
"I thought it would be different," he says simply, so softly that the words are but a dolorous prickle against his ears.
And what can he say to that, unmarried and ignorant of a woman's warmth and wiles and secret glories as he is? So he nods dumbly and busies himself with the empty work of nothing, and he is pitifully grateful when Orophin raps once upon the door and enters with a bowl of porridge in hand.
He blinks at the sight of Haldir and settles himself on the edge of Rumil's bed. "What are you doing here? I thought you were attending the Lord and Lady?" He dips a hunk of bread into the porridge and takes a bite.
"I was dismissed. She is in conference with Mithrandir."
Orophin looks up sharply at the name, interest clearly piqued. "Mithrandir? Is there new mischief afoot?"
"It is none of my affair," Haldir answers listlessly, and the blankness in his expression makes Rumil's chest ache.
Yet more of him bleeds out, and I can do nothing to stop it, he thinks bleakly.
"They are friends of old," Rumil points out to distract himself from the ever-expanding well of despair that wears Haldir's face.
"True," Orophin acknowledges between bites of bread and porridge. "But what need has she for secrets now?"
"It does not matter," Haldir answers.
Orophin narrows his eyes, lips pursed in a moue of stifled rebuke. "You should eat," he declares, and holds out the bowl of porridge.
Haldir does not look at it. "I have no appetite."
"And I care not," Orophin snaps, and thrusts the bowl at him.
Haldir accepts it, but the spoon remains untouched, congealing in the thick clots of porridge.
"Eat," Orophin prods, but though Haldir picks up the spoon and idly stirs the contents, not a single bite passes his lips.
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