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She had seen then from the windows late at night, when all the lamps were doused and the denizens of the Havens of Sirion were silently abed. Curfew was for queens and lords just as much as it was for cobblers and butchers; the only people who should have been abroad at that hour were the guards. And yet, when Elwing sat up in bed and stared out her window into the dark, she saw wavering wisps of white flitting in and out of the reed-forest, flickering like a candle flame, yet the light left no impression after she turned away.
On silent feet did Elwing creep out into the dark. Even the guards did not have lamps at night, for fear that some enemy (there were so many, now, more enemies than there were friends) would spy the lights from afar. He shadows were a shelter as encompassing as any dark cloak, and Elwing drew them about her as if they really were a cloak. No guard ever spotted Elwing out in the dark by herself.
Every so often, her eyes would track a wisp of light, like moonlight given substance, ephemeral and cold. Elwing followed it to the edge of the clearing, where the reeds loomed like Nellas’s tales of the beech-forests of Neldoreth. (Would that there was a barrier of terrible power at the borders of Lisgardh as there had been around Neldoreth. Would that Elwing had within her the power to cast such a barrier.)
Elwing stood, paralyzed, at the border of the reed-forest. Light trembled, further and further, fainter and fainter, until finally it would wink out, leaving her alone in the dark. The sea roared distantly. The wind blew on her face, full of salt and whispers.
-0-0-0-
Morning imposed a dream-like quality upon these encounters, their kinship seeming to lie more with the tales Elwing had heard wizened Edain tell their mayfly-like grandchildren than with the history Elwing learned from her tutor. There were fantastical tales that came out of history, and some of them were even recent. But they… they were not for this time. They were not for her. Ashes was her inheritance, cold ground and a cold hearth her birthright. The last ember had turned cold long ago.
Elwing was a queen—a child and queen of a refugee camp, without the wisdom and power of Melian, the cunning of Lúthien, or the bone-deep, intuitive knowledge of the arcane of Nimloth, but a queen, nonetheless. A child queen had few of the duties of a grown one, but she still had responsibilities. And she had, Elwing was quite certain, no time for fantastical tales.
While other children spent the day engaged in chores, drawing water from the Sirion for drinking or washing, cleaning their homes, assisting the smiths, and so many other things, Elwing whiled away her days in work of a different kind. She had her tutor, Sídhil, the lords who called themselves her vassals, even if, in truth, it was they who ruled this settlement while their queen crawled towards adulthood. They all taught her things, though it was sometimes difficult to keep track of just what they were teaching her. How to be a better queen, she hoped.
“I don’t suppose any of the Golodhrim lords have approached you lately,” Sídhil remarked, staring out into the street with a thin, pinched look on her dark face. The day was warm and the house so muggy that Elwing’s dark curls had turned into a rat’s nest; Sídhil had thought it better for them to have the lesson of the morning somewhere they could feel the wind on their faces.
Elwing shook her head, fiddling with one of the tips of her belt.
“Not even Lady Idril?”
“No.”
It had been the fourth anniversary of Gondolin’s destruction a week ago. Eärendil had been crying about… Elwing couldn’t even remember, anymore. She had sat there listening to him crying in numb silence, until numbness began to give way to irritation, until irritation boiled into unthinking rage and she pushed him into a puddle and stalked off, ignoring the horrified whispers that dogged her steps.
She still didn’t know why she had been so angry. When she went to examine her anger, it reared its head and screamed at her until she finally averted her eyes and it was quiet again. She knew that the Golodhrim had studiously avoided her since, and the thought of it made her skin prickle like someone was prodding her with a needle.
Sídhil sighed. “That may be for the best. There are others who think otherwise, but in my experience, the Iathrim have never profited from their dealings with the Golodhrim. Not in the long run.”
Somewhere in Sídhil’s lessons, somewhere swirling in Elwing’s mind, there was an account of Maedhros Fëanorion laughing at Thingol’s claim to rule over all of Beleriand. Laughing and rebuking that claim with the observation that a king was lord of the lands they could claim to rule and protect directly, and no more. Maedhros Fëanorion was a murderer and a Kinslayer, which made dismissing his words all the easier. What did it matter that his vigilance and the vigilance of his kin had kept Angband penned up in the north for a time? What did it matter that he had kept orcs from clamoring at Doriath’s borders for a time, if he came and tore Doriath apart himself later?
The Golodhrim walked among them now, anyways. Elwing liked Lady Idril, and—for the most part—liked Eärendil. She was not so sure of the rest, though. The Gondolindrim had allowed themselves to forget the law of her great-grandfather in their time isolated from the rest of Beleriand. They had forgotten, and the opprobrium of a child queen meant less to them than whether all the stars shone in their sky. Blithely they whispered amongst themselves in their outlawed tongue, their words worryingly incomprehensible to one who could not speak it herself.
Outlawed tongue or no, there was no being rid of them now. Elwing had heard the lords talking. The influx of refugees from Gondolin had made it more difficult to hide the settlements dotted through Lisgardh, but they had also brought more skilled craftspeople than the Iathrim or Edain already living by the Mouths of Sirion could boast.
When I am grown, it will be my decision whether to keep them or expel them. And she would not make that decision from Menegroth. She would not make that decision with her parents to advise her, or her brothers to comment. She would make it from a low house hidden away in a reed-forest, where all the lamps were doused at night and nearly all lived in mortal terror of the dark.
“Well,” Sídhil murmured, adjusting her weight on the stone stoop of the house, “I do hope the Golodhrim do not trouble you again, not for a long while. Now, today’s history lesson was supposed to continue the march away from Cuiviénen, correct?” she prompted.
Elwing nodded. “Yes. You were talking about the Hithaeglir…”
A warm smile unfurled on Sídhil’s face. “I’d wondered if you were paying me any mind; good. Before we get into the lesson, how about a story?”
“Alright…”
Sídhil stared out of the house, but Elwing had the idea, looking at her, that she wasn’t really seeing the settlement at all. That she wasn’t imagining it, not any of the other clusters of houses and shops that dotted the reed-forest. Her steel-gray eyes were glazed over, abstracted and transported. “We,” Sídhil said softly, “are close, so very close, to the place where the Falmari left Ennor for the Undying Lands. Follow the river to the Sea, and you’ll be there. The Isle of Balar is what remains of the island on which they forsook this land.” Elwing wondered how anyone could sail anywhere on an island, but thought better of asking. Interrupting Sídhil now would mean never knowing what she would have said.
“The Falmari left,” Sídhil went on, “but other peoples of the Lindar had been with them—the Iathrim, the Falathrim. I was not there; I was not born until later, until Thingol and Melian the Queen made Doriath their kingdom. But I have heard the stories.”
She fell silent, and Elwing frowned at her, her curiosity reluctantly piqued. “What stories?” she asked quietly.
“I’m getting there, your Highness. Don’t try to rush the story along.” Elwing opened her mouth to protest, but before she could say anything, Sídhil resumed the telling of her tale. “The Eldar were not alone on the shores of Belegaer, you see. Even when the world was young, we were not alone in it. Belegaer is full of Maiar, some of terrible power, others as substantial as wisps of air. They heard the Lindar’s songs and swam to the shore to greet them.”
The interruption that followed could not be helped, not truly—the words flowed more easily from mind to mouth than any words had in years, and Elwing, unaccustomed to speech coming so easily to her, blurted out, thunderstruck, “The Maiar? They were here?”
Sídhil’s open face slammed shut. “Why don’t we move on to today’s lesson?”
“Sídhil?” Elwing hated the almost whining tone that curdled in her voice, but still, she pressed, “What about the story?”
Sídhil wrinkled her nose. “If you can’t listen to my stories without interrupting me, we might as well move on to something where discussion is actually encouraged. Come along, your Highness. Anor will not stay high in the sky forever.”
As Elwing followed her inside, she heard so faintly the sound of children laughing. There was bitterness in her mouth, and she wasn’t sure if it was the sound of laughter that turned her tongue to silent ash, or if her tongue had been ash all this time, and it was only now that it had finally crumbled.
-0-0-0-
Elwing did not find sleep in her bed when night fell over Lisgardh. Her mind just kept on racing and racing as the day wore on, like the little blue-striped lizards that lived on the great boulders by the Sirion. When the lamps were doused and all voices fell tautly silent, her mind did not stop racing just because her people had decided the world should stop.
My people… Elwing pressed her forehead against the chill windowpane, her silver eyes poring over the dark. Her heart beat a slow, painful tattoo on her ribs. Her ears were stopped with the kind of silence with which a rabbit willed a fox to pass its warren by.
Her people had to make do with a child queen, a child who knew nothing but what her minders told her. A queen with the power of Melian, the determination of Lúthien, or the steadfastness of Nimloth might have been able to do better, but a network of settlements in Lisgardh, nothing more than refugee camps, they must make do with Elwing.
I have Maiarin blood. Will they acknowledge that if they consent to speak with me?
For a split second, the face that stared back at her from the windowpane was not her own.
Elwing jerked back from the window, her heart in her throat. Somewhere in the reed-forest, a cold white light had kindled, wavering like a guttering candle flame. Sparks of light shot through the narrow walkways between houses, through the alleys and muddy streets.
Mayhap… mayhap she was simply dreaming. Elwing wondered about that, at times, wondered how she was ever supposed to be completely sure of whether she was awake or dreaming. She’d been told that there was no pain in dreams, but she felt pain when she was sure she had been dreaming, like being sewn up with a thick needle and coarse thread. How can I ever hope to know the difference? Elwing wondered, caught between irritation and helpless despair.
She craned her neck, watching the windows in other houses, those that she could, out of wide eyes. Might the Golodhrim, as wise and discerning as they always claimed to be, notice the lights? Might anyone else?
But no light kindled in any window, the only light outside little sparks that bobbed lazily like fireflies. Clouds veiled Ithil. The night was dark, but for this.
If this is a dream, I am in no danger.
Elwing crept out of bed, ears pricked for any sound coming from elsewhere within the house; it would not do for this exercise to be brought to a halt before she could even step outside the door. She threw on one of the dresses in her lacquered wicker chest, a pale, brownish-green dress with vertical gray stripes; effective camouflage in the reed-forest, or so Elwing hoped. She pinned the skirt at the knees and picked her sandals up off the floor, pausing to put them on once she got to the stoop.
Outside, Elwing’s ears were full of frogs’ hoarse croaking and crickets’ high, taut chirps. The sea sang its rough, ageless song. Here the ground was level with the sea and lapped the water up eagerly, but some miles north, the ground reared up abruptly in sheer cliffs, and the beach was nothing more than a strip of land maybe twenty feet wide, more stone than sand. There, the sea roared in anger, no trace of any melody that could make itself into a song. It battered against the cliffs, and all Elwing could suppose was that it was trying to break the rock to pieces.
I am in no danger. I should… I should follow…
The short walk from the house to the borders of the reed-forest was made unchallenged. Where the guards were, Elwing could not say. Perhaps they were on their rounds elsewhere; perhaps the guard who should have been on duty nearby had overslept. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh, all the hairs on her arms and legs standing on end.
Far off, a light flickered and shone.
Elwing pushed the reeds aside, and left the settlement behind her.
There was relatively little land around the Mouths of Sirion that could properly be called inhabitable. Islands of dry ground were surrounded by miles upon miles of muddy marsh, reeds and pools and streams and small, twisted trees, where no house could be built without it sinking into the earth shortly thereafter. There were paths cut in the reeds when need be, but these paths were few and far between, and the reeds grew back so quickly that within a couple of months, it was as if a particular path had never been cut at all.
Elwing huffed as she struggled through the reeds. A flash of white light in the distance told her which way to go, but her strength was not such as to make the task of following after easy. The reeds were man-high and higher, far taller than a child whose height was unequal to what would expect from a scion of the House of Thingol, and packed close together, except when they fell away in favor of pools and rivulets teeming with fish and frogs and other creatures of the marsh. The reeds were so densely leaved that Elwing constantly had to push them apart to have any idea of where she was going; she had no idea if she was going to leave a patch of reeds for open mud until she was at the threshold. There could be anything out here, she thought to herself, biting her lip, and I would never know until I was right in front of it.
Thick, sucking mud was the ground, sucking greedily on her sandals with every step that Elwing took. She struggled through a particularly dense patch of reeds and watched the horizon, white-lipped, for any sign of light. Any flicker, any flash, any firefly-like sparks.
Nothing. All was darkness.
She was a fool. Elwing wasn’t sure what it was, whether she had been a fool to think that she of all people could follow the light to its source, or whether she had been tricked, and was a fool to believe she was seeing what she thought she was seeing at all.
I wonder what the rest of Sídhil’s story would have been, Elwing wondered bitterly, a salt-choked breeze hitting her face and making her eyes sting. Would it, perhaps, have been the story of how a foolish little girl followed lights out into the marsh and never returned?
She took a step forwards into what she thought was a wide puddle.
“Ahh!”
Cold, slimy water rushed up to greet her. It was not, as it turned out, a puddle.
Elwing let out a strangled cry, struggling to fight her way out of the pool. The dark water, shimmering with brine as though it had captured thousands of stars in its depths, enveloped her body past the waist. Her legs were immobilized in the mud; they had sank all the way up to her knees. Her nostrils were filled with the reek of rotting fish; the cries of the marsh crickets reached a fever-pitch, shrill screams that stabbed like knives in her ears.
Heart racing, Elwing scrabbled for purchase in the mud, her fingernails digging shallow furrows that the water cruelly washed away. Something squirmed under her fingers and she shrieked, jerking her hand back and sinking further yet into the mud. A pallid crab scuttled away, disappearing into the gloom.
It was all Elwing could do not to scream for her father.
Eventually, Elwing managed a grab at the exposed roots of a gnarled tree sitting on the edge of an island of solid ground. She pulled with all her might, kicking at the mud, until at last her legs were free and she was able to hoist herself onto the bank.
Several short, gasping breaths, torn from her lungs like screams. Elwing’s muscles felt as though they were made of water, weak and wobbly and too feeble to so much as stand on. Her sandals were gone, swallowed whole by the mud, and Elwing had no desire to go diving for them. She was covered in mud, her dress caked in layers of it. Do I even know how to get back? Elwing wondered to herself. Wouldn’t I just get lost? I should have stayed at home.
She looked up, and the air around her was filled with light.
“Now you come to me,” she muttered to the glowing white sparks. They gave her no reply, swirling around her head, before shooting away west.
Elwing sighed and got to her feet, listing dangerously from side to side before she found her balance. The muscles in her legs didn’t feel like they were made of water anymore; they felt like they were made of sand, weighted with ground lead. The song of the sea floated to her ears again, maybe a little closer than before, but still…
She sighed and kept going.
Mercifully, there were no repeat incidents of her dip in the pool. The clouds shifted away from the moon, drenching the marsh in a soft, silvery glow. At length, the tall reeds, swaying gently in the salt-laden breeze, gave way to soft sand bleached white in the moonlight. Foam-capped waves lapped gently against the shore; the tide pools that dotted the beach glimmered like polished sheets of black glass. Elwing almost smiled.
Off to her left, a light kindled.
Elwing looked off to her left and spied several figures standing atop tall boulders. Her mouth dropped open, but no sound came out; night it might have been, but her tongue was still made of ash. She could only step closer, slowly.
The figures did not acknowledge her as she drew near, picking her way carefully through the sand to avoid stepping on sharp rock or the jagged edges of broken shells. She could not see their faces; they were wrapped in white shrouds that fell to their feet, that did not stir even though the wind was blowing Elwing’s hair all over her face. The light grew brighter and brighter the closer she came, but it was not the white light of the lights that Elwing had seen from afar when she was ensconced in her house. The figures were haloed with a watery green glow that wavered like light shining upon running water.
Elwing came to stand before them and stopped. They stood still as stone. She could not make out their faces from under the shrouds.
Her first instinct was to shrink away from them, but Elwing stood as straight and tall as her meager height allowed, and waited. She stood there for what felt like forever, and still, they said nothing.
“Hello?” she called to them. The sea’s voice rose in volume, less a song and more a shout, so that she too had to shout to be heard over them. “C-Can you hear me?”
Still they were silent, staring at nothing, statues of living stone.
“Please, I wished to speak with you.”
It was as if she truly spoke to stone, and Elwing thought she felt her heart calcifying to match them, growing heavy and still and dead within her chest. She had no power to move them. She didn’t know why she had expected anything else.
But there was something…
There was…
Was that a voice?
It was like a whisper, like someone tickling her earlobe with a feather, but it was like fishhooks in her flesh as well, and Elwing could not help but turn round to face it; the longer she ignored it, the more painful the tugging became. There was a glow in the water, but it was not moonlight she saw. This light was green and patchy, swirling and undulating in the water, coiling and uncoiling as a snake slithering through mud.
The wind buffeted Elwing to and fro as she descended the shore towards the sea, her eyes fixed on the light. She came to the place where the sand was ever soaked with seawater; her muddy feet were washed clean by the rolling tide, only to reveal long, dark scratches that bled out into the sea.
The green light flared, bright as any fire. Elwing saw in the shallows figures that furled and unfurled like flags like seaweed caught in rough currents. Their faces were hollow and waxen; their eyes shone like burning coals. They spoke to her in voices of crashing waves and bubbling currents. They spoke not a word that Elwing could understand, but her heart was filled with foreboding nonetheless.
Cloud drifted over Ithil, and they all winked out. The feeling of fishhooks in her flesh left her, and Elwing whipped around, staring up the shore to the boulders, only to find them empty.
Elwing wrapped her arms around her chest and drew a shuddering sigh, exhaustion beating down on her. This was no dream. Dreams were not supposed to leave the dreamer empty.