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Chapter Text

Arwen opened her eyes in the heart of a dark wood, and for a moment she didn’t know whether she was dreaming or awake.

The trees were so thick the sky was almost invisible, a starry twilight-purple beyond the dark boughs. They were old trees, and the wood was full of their whispering. The grass Arwen was laying on was cushiony-deep, and starred and studded with white niphredil. There were white moths fluttering through the dark. It was very beautiful, but she knew from the first moment of consciousness that she was somewhere entirely foreign to her, somewhere she had never been before.

In Imladris there were trees and woods too, but it was a valley held in her father’s cupped hand, bounded and kept safe, and the trees knew it. Lothlórien was beautiful, and its trees were great and old indeed, but they were mellow. The songs of Elves had soaked deep into their bark and layered themselves into their growing, decade on decade, hundred-year upon hundred-year, and the trees sung them back. They were full of memory, and beauty, and sadness, for they remembered Elves who had sung to them and lived in their branches and yet taken ship over the sea, and they knew that those who lived and loved among them yet would one day take ship in turn.

These thick and ancient trees knew only their own songs, and those songs were very strange.

Was this Lasgalen? She had never been there, but she had heard it had been beautiful before the Shadow touched it. Perhaps it was beautiful yet.

If it was Lasgalen, there were worse things than moths to fear. There were spiders with a hundred eyes and poisonous stings, and betraying billows of sticky silk waiting to catch the unwary, and there were Orcs moving beneath the tree cover, and unnamed and unnumbered dark things and wrong things breeding and growing.

Whoever had taken her – had she been taken? – had seized her from her father’s house. She was still wearing one of her day-gowns, a lovely summer thing in gossamer silk that she would never wear for travel or on horseback, almost entirely useless to her outside the halls of Imladris. It was not even a dress for working in, and it offered little protection against the oncoming night. She had been left no weapon, either – that made sense – but whoever had left her in the clearing had not taken her chatelaine from her waist, which suggested a level of respect for her person that belied her abandonment here, or else fortunate ignorance.

What did she have, then? Her embroidery shears, wickedly sharp. A small paring knife, as might be used for fruit. Household seals and keys – less than useless. A needle-case and several spools of thread. A small silver vial of mirúvor, more a statement of her position as Elrond’s daughter than a tool. She was not a true healer, though she could put her hand to small hurts.

A silver thimble and a silver whistle, each chased with

decorative spirals and leaves, and a tiny purse of silver-mesh. Aragorn’s ring was still around her neck, tucked between her breasts. They had not despoiled her of it.

The knife and the shears were better than nothing - indeed, the shears would make a better defence than the knife, twisted apart, but that she would not do yet, lest she need them for their first purpose. She had some weapon, but she was cold, and lightless except for the faint and faraway stars, and she had no food, and nothing to drink but mirúvor, and to drink that lightly in place of water would be foolish.

Provisions for herself she might find. Somewhere there would be water, and there could not be only foul things in this wood. Something must be edible, or else Thranduil’s people – if this was Lasgalen – would be bound even tighter to Dale and through them to Erebor in trade than they already were. Dale, or Erebor – either might give her aid, and Erebor at least, for all the little love they bore Thranduil, would remember her father’s once-given succor to the company of Thorin.

It was growing darker, and the choice of whether to stay or to go on had to be made. There were unknown things in the trees, but there too was shelter, and perhaps aid. The persons who had brought her here might return, and that was an unknown. If they were friends, it would be better to wait; but she could not risk that guess, and so Arwen went on.

-

She moved deeper into the forest, hoping her senses would lead her truly, and the white moths continued to cluster around her like a cloud, trailing in her wake as she made careful, stealthy progress under the trees. The hems of trailing skirts she had pulled up between her legs and fastened at her waist for ease, but her slippers were too thin and fine for this kind of wood-work, and would not long stand it.

The very birdsong sounded strange to her ears. Could Lasgalen be so very different, even under the Shadow? It didn’t feel dark to her. There wasn’t the foul taint on the water and the air she had girded herself against every journey between Imladris and Lothlórien, the sickness deep in the soil and the feeling of too many things alive in the earth and in the rotting forest cover.

-

“Halt,” said someone unexpectedly, their voice slicing through the air; and there was a sword at her chin, and when she breathed out it kissed her throat. The white moths beat their wings in distress.

She hadn’t sensed him at all. How had she not sensed him?

“Who are you, elf-maid?” the Elf asked. His dark hair was in braids so tight that his eyes were tilted, cat-like, at the corners, and his face was as cold and hard as a helm-plate. Thranduil was supposed to be unduly hostile to strangers in his lands, but not to any of the Eldar, surely - not a woman alone. “What leave have you to be in these lands? How came you hence?”

“I don’t know,” Arwen said, and gesturing her intent first, lest the sword slip, put her hand to her waist and drew forth her father’s seal and held it out as a token.

It was a beautiful design, with a Second Age antiquity to it. The six-pointed star at its heart was Eärendil’s, but the burst-petals that surrounded it were Lúthien’s, and the eight-pointed stars in the black void between the petals of niphredil were half a nod to Gil-galad’s starry field, and another to Elrond’s fosterage, of which he had never spoken. It was statement enough to put them there.

Her own seal dangled from the same chain, smaller and more delicate. There, the eight-pointed stars had been changed for Finarfinwion sun-rays. Celeborn her grandfather thought there was too much Noldor altogether in her sigil, and that Elrond her father’s pairing of eight-rayed stars and flowers was unspeakable blasphemy.

The Elf seemed to share her grandfather’s opinion. Her own seal only drew a raised brow from him, but her father’s kindled hard-eyed fury.

“Golodh,” he said, and the sound was like spit.

“I am Sindar,” Arwen said. “In part, at least.”

“So say you,” he said, and looked her up and down. “We shall see what the King says.”

-

Her eyes he bound, and Arwen went with him blindly through the woods.

Her guide was very sure and very skilled, and with him leading, she did not stumble. How long she moved with him in the dark, she could not say, only that it seemed a very long time before they stopped the first time, and he gave her water before they moved again. There was a second stop where he met with some companion. They had a hushed conversation too softly for her to follow, and then there were two of them, one at each of her elbows. The journey was swifter after that, and there were moments where one or other swept her up into his arms entirely, and crossed whatever hazard had been deemed too dangerous for her to attempt on her feet.

Then – “Unhood her,” said her guide’s companion.

“That is my call to make, Cúthalion.”

“If she is kin, you would bring her blind before the King?”

“If she is not, you would bring her seeing into our halls? It is on me that the worst will fall if I have brought one of the golodh this deep!”

“Unhood her,” said the one called Cúthalion implacably. The cloth around her temples was loosened, and then fell away to her throat to rest where the blade had stung.

They were still in the forests, but now the trees were sparser, and the sky greater. Her guide was still cold and darkly furious, but his previously unseen companion was only stern. His hair was long and silver, like her grandfather’s, and his eyes seemed at least as old, which was almost impossible. They widened as he saw her full face unshielded.

“You see,” said her dark guide.

“I do,” said Cúthalion. Then, “When did you last eat, khíril? Allow me to give you my cloak, and to share food and drink with you.”

“You dare,” said the guide incredulously.

“Thank you,” Arwen said, with a composure that was in part her own, but owed much to many years at her grandmother’s side. Galadriel was not imperious: yet she was obeyed. It was less a matter of authority than the power she held but did not mention, and she did not command, only asked. The thick white cloak Cúthalion gave her was still warm from his body, and it was no help to Arwen’s dignity to shiver gratefully under it - but she was grateful. He gestured to the grass, and went to his haunches.

Arwen sat, more delicately, and with a grunt Dark-hair sat as well. The cloud of moths had long since been outrun by the pace these strangers had set, but now one came to settle on her shoulder, its white wings almost translucently fine, and as veined as white opal.

Cúthalion gave her another long look, and then gave another to the moth, as though he suspected it of conspiracy.

“You see,” said Dark-hair.

“Food,” said Cúthalion, ignoring him, and from the leather wallet at his waist he gave her way-bread. The seals on its wrappings were broken beyond hope of deciphering, but Arwen had heard of the fate of Thranduil’s queen. He could not have wed again, that was impossible. She knew he had sons, however, and perhaps one of them had wed. “Drink?”

“I gave her water,” Dark-hair said.

“That won’t do,” said Cúthalion, and got to his feet again. He came back with a strip of silver birch-bark. In his hands it was folded swiftly into a cup, and then he filled it with wine from a flask somewhere at his waist and gave it to her.

There were laws about sharing food and drink with strangers. He had taken a responsibility for her that Dark-hair had not – would not – and it was in his hands that her fate rested now. However hungry she was, Arwen met his eyes very deliberately before she ate or drank, to show that she understood and was entering into the compact of her own will. It was a knife that cut two ways. Cúthalion gave her a small nod back.

Dark-hair still had her knife, but he had left her shears at her belt. She had not used them against him, because he seemed her best and quickest path to food and shelter, so she had them yet. She did not think his companion would have left them to her, but neither did she think this was yet the moment to draw them.

“So, khíril,” Cúthalion said, once she had eaten and drunk her fill, and the cloak had stopped her shivering, and the white moths had come to settle around her like falling rose petals. “What is your name, and how came you here?”

Her mother had given her her name. Arwen was a name for a woman of her line, and from them. Celebrian wore for daily use a name given to her by her father, but her unutterable Quenya mother-name had the wen in it that linked her to her own mother. Galadriel had not likes to be called Nerwen even before she set foot in Middle-Earth, but it was her mother-name, and her own mother’s name had been Eärwen. Like links in a chain, it bound them, woman to woman back to the Swan-Maiden, a hidden and silent river running underground back to the source.

Arwen itself meant ‘noble woman’, the wen of the women of her family joining itself to the many Ars that rang like golden bells back through her grandmother’s line, male and female. Artanis-Galadriel, Artafindë-Finrod, Artaresto-Orodreth, Artanaro-Gil-gilad, Artanga-Angrod, Artambar-Aegnor, Arafinwë-Finarfin. Her name was as much her family’s as her own.

Arwen’s father had been the first to call her Undómiel, less a formal father-name – for he was not Noldorin in that way – than an epessë. She had been almost grown before she discovered that her father’s beloved twin, the uncle who had died a mortal death in a land that had been drowned by the sea long before Arwen was even born, had named his own only daughter Tindómiel, Star of the Morning, for Gil-Estel their grandfather, and for that bright and hopeful dawn in the star-shaped Land of Gift an Age before. Her father had never spoken of that, either.

“Arwen Undómiel,” Arwen said truthfully, and Cúthalion’s face did not change, but Dark-hair raised a brow. Either they had known her already from the seal, or it meant nothing - or it meant nothing more than a declaration of nobility, the title Cúthalion had already given her.

“Well, then, Lady Evening Star,” Cúthalion said. "Whence came you, and why?”

“That is more than I know myself,” Arwen said. “I came from Imladris, but how, I do not know.”

“And where is Imladris?” Dark-hair asked.

“You know very well! And if you do not, it is not for me to reveal it.”

Her guide-captors exchanged glances.

“You claim to be Sindar,” said Dark-hair. “Yet you move through the trees heavy as a golodh, and bear golodh tools at your waist, and there is a tang to your speech that is not natural to us.”

It would not be wholly polite to share her grandfather’s opinion of Lasgalen’s separatists. She knew Celeborn had loved Oropher as much as he had cursed him, and that there was much love in him for Elu Thingol’s Grey-elves wherever they yet lingered. Yet he had been known to speak of certain of Thranduil’s people as backwoods hicks, and of their uneducated accents, and gone Green-elf ways when they were annoying him particularly. She had never heard Celeborn refer to any Noldor as a golodh. He would rail against them, certainly, in stronger language than he would ever use for those of Lasgalen, for he loved them not, but not as golodhrim. That word was not permitted: not when his wife was Noldor, and there was Noldor blood in his beloved daughter and his beloved grandchildren.

So Arwen said nothing, but perhaps her face spoke for her, for Dark-hair glowered and Cúthalion looked faintly amused.

“If you will not answer us straight, you will answer to the King,” he said, and returned to his feet in one smooth ripple, like a spring released. He did not ask for his cloak back. “We had best keep going.”

“Hood her,” Dark-hair said, and then everything was dark again.

-

They did not unbind her eyes until they stopped a final time, and then it was in a place that echoed and there were voices around her like the murmuring hum of bees in the hive.

Arwen blinked at the sudden light, at the sudden and overwhelming strangeness.

“Aran,” said Dark-hair, and went to one knee. Cúthalion did not kneel, but his hand was still wrapped around Arwen’s upper arm, as though she might yet flee, or spring.

She was underground. She had known that already, from the changing feeling of the air, and the disappearance of her tree-sense, and the overwhelming sense of massed stone above and about her. And yet she might have been again opening her eyes in a strange forest. There were trees everywhere, and the small jewel-bright eyes of tiny creatures, and the sound of water.

But there were no trees. She couldn’t feel them, or hear the small pulsing hearts of hare and squirrel and fox. She might have taken it for some fell darkness of Sauron, a dead-alive mockery, but it was very beautiful to her eyes, and it still did not feel foul.

There were bright gems set like stars above her, and silver mirror speaking to silver mirror to fill the strange dead-tree hall with gentle light. Stars were something the wood-elves loved, perhaps more dearly even than the other Eldar did, but the level of detail and fabrication here was not something that made sense to her as their work, because they loved the work of Ivon Earth-queen far beyond any art of lesser devisers.

It was alive: but it was dead. It was beautiful and rich as a densely worked tapestry, as jewelled and as worked as Noldorin finery, but the style was something entirely different.

There were Elves as thick around her as the moths had been, staring.

And there was a king on his throne staring down at her, long silver hair falling from his shoulders like a great hoary waterfall, his brilliant starry eyes wide-open, and a jewel on his breast that burned with a brightness too painful to bear.

There was a woman by his side, and her face, radiant as one of the silver mirrors, outshone the jewel.

Arwen had heard that Thranduil kept great state in his underground halls, but this was not Thranduil. She had never met him, but she knew it could not be he. He was too ancient and too proud, and the light in his eyes was too like her grandmother’s.

The murmurs grew. Arwen caught only fragments of them: Meril? and golodh? and, again and again, overwhelmingly, Lúthien. Lúthien, Lúthien.

“Who are you?” asked Thingol Grey-mantle in his perfect antique Sindarin, his voice almost a whisper, and yet a whip.

And then a woman whispered in Arwen’s ear clear as a nightingale, although there was no woman there,

Welcome, little daughter.

Chapter Text

“I know who she is,” said Melian the Queen, and the faces in the great stone forest of Menegroth all turned at the sound of her voice, including her husband the King’s.

It was the same crystal voice that had spoken in Arwen’s ear.

“And who, precisely, is she?” said Thingol.

“It is a matter for our private attention,” said Melian.

She put out her hand to Thingol, and rising, he took it, and for a moment Arwen was so reminded of her grandparents in Lórien she was almost dizzy.

These were also her grandparents; at two removes. Either she was dead, and this was Aman, or it was Menegroth that had been, Menegroth the Many-Caved in drowned Beleriand.

She did not think she was dead.

Which meant that this was Doriath, the Hidden Kingdom. In some strange way, she was in Menegroth where the early Dwarves had delved out wonders alongside the Elves in a time before the Sun and Moon, before they had turned on each other in first one massacre and then another. Doriath, which she had heard of in songs all her life. Doriath, which had become one great grave from which few had escaped, with its many halls through which the sons of Fëanor and their people had moved through like Orcs.

There were many Elves around her now. If this was Menegroth, surely many of these wondering faces would die. They would all die – she knew it already. Thingol would fall surrounded by Dwarves hacking at his body, his long silver hair matted with blood. Melian would unwind her spirit from the body she had made for it and release that form back into the air, and go over the Sea and never be seen again.

Cúthalion was still holding her arm. He was all but holding her upright now. “Are you well, khíril?”

Arwen looked at him, and realised distantly, at last, that his name was not mere Lasgalen boasting. This was Beleg Strong-Bow, hero of a thousand Sindar children’s tales, and of their great tragedies, too. As she stared at him she could almost see the point of a black sword coming through his chest.

“Mablung,” he said sharply, and Dark-hair caught at her other arm in time to stop her falling to her knees.

The other great hero of Doriath; he had died – would die – with Thingol. She had thought him sulky!

Mablung of the Heavy Hand, hero of the Wolf Hunt, muttered something under his breath and swept her into his arms once more. When the King and Queen of Menegroth gestured, he followed, carrying her.

-

The king’s withdrawing chamber was far smaller, its roof more densely crowded with jewelled stars. Even away from so many dead elf-eyes, Arwen felt overwhelmed. Thingol was half a head taller than anyone she had ever met, and Melian was taller still, and her power was as palpable as a coming storm, the air fairly bristling with it.

Arwen had always thought, from the stories, that Melian was an almost silent figure, calm and radiant. She had never known that, even silent, Melian filled every space wherever she was, and no one drew breath without being wholly aware of her. Her presence was like smoke, or else perfume, jasmine crushed in the hand and spreading its sweetness through a room and never abating. She didn’t need to speak.

Dark-hair – Mablung – was still holding her in his arms. At Melian’s glance, he laid her down upon a long low chair, heaped with cushions. Arwen began to rise– she was the daughter of Elrond, and equal to any occasion; lady of Imladris since her mother had gone over the sea – but Melian’s bright eyes turned to her, and stayed her.

“Did you offer her food?” said Thingol.

“I did,” said Beleg Cúthalion. “And she ate and took no ill from the way-bread.”

“That is not what I am asking,” Thingol said. He was standing before a table, and now he braced his hands upon it, and leaned forward a little. “Report, marchwardens. From the beginning.”

“I found her,” Mablung said, “in the Taur-na-Neldor, at the Nan Dungortheb bound. She was alone, and armed with this only –” he drew her small knife from his belt, and set it on the table before Thingol. It looked a pathetic thing, even before the King picked it up and turned it in his white hands.

“These, too, she carried,” Mablung added, with a flashing look at Arwen, and set the seals down as well. “She claimed Sindar blood, and she speaks our tongue with little of the golodh harshness, but you will know the marks she bears as well as I. She seemed alone, lost, and in need of aid, but I knew her not, and she could not have been better formed for a snare. I thought it best to bring her hence.”

“You did well,” said Thingol, and put down her little knife. He took up the seal which bore Elrond’s sigil, and he studied it for a long time, shining eyes narrowed. The larger star, the petals, the smaller stars – there was a story there that Arwen could read, but what he made of it she could not tell. At last he passed it to Melian, who brushed the incised petals with a fingertip, her lovely face very sad, and took up Arwen’s own.

“You see!” Mablung said, as he had said to Beleg. “The sun-star is a sign that has been allowed passage through the Girdle in the past. But they are dead now, all your great-nephews, and if they left daughters behind in the ash of the Taur-nu-fuin or Minas Tirith, that is more than I know.”

He paused.

“Say on,” said Thingol.

“I know that Orodreth has a daughter,” Mablung said. “And I know Meril her mother – but that flower is not hers. Her rose I might look to see, overlain by the sun-star of Angrod's son – but not the niphredil, and not that thing.”

He was speaking of Gil-Estel, which never before had borne such loathing in Arwen’s hearing. The star of hope was a promise in the sky, a lodestone in the night, loved by all the Eldar with a special passion. She had loved it hundreds of years before she came to give Aragorn-Estel her heart, and then it had taken on new meaning for her, an assurance that although all seemed dark, day would come again, as it had come with Earendil at the end of the First Age.

It would not be shining in the sky tonight. In fact, its very brightness was in this room, hanging from Thingol’s neck.

The sky above would be empty of hope, of promise. There was no straight path, not yet.

The world was not even bent, and the Valar were not listening.

Somehow Thingol was still turning her seal in his fingers. He was wearing the Silmaril, but it was set simply, on a silver chain that was not the Nauglamír. It could not be the Nauglamír, for if it was, he and Mablung would be already dead. That opened a narrow window in the long scroll of years in which Menegroth had stood, from its delving before the Sun and Moon and throughout the long Siege, and into the dark years where so much had happened and so swiftly.

They were already dead, the great-uncles she had never met. Galadriel’s three golden brothers – Angrod and Aegnor, in the Sudden Flame, and Finrod in the Silmaril Quest.

That meant that Beren and Luthien had already met; they had already gone hand in hand into Angband and brought out the star-that-would-be. If Thingol was wearing it, then it had already been cut from the belly of Dragluin the Great Wolf, and Mablung of the Heavy Hand had already dropped it; and Beren had already died, and Luthien had already faded.

Had they come back yet? There was supposed to be such a short span of years between their first deaths and their last, and then a shorter one still between those first deaths and Thingol’s own. That was Arwen’s window. It was not long, but so many things had happened in that space in the world beyond the Girdle. She couldn’t put them in order, because rarely had the stories been told that way. Did Nargothrond still stand? Had Tuor yet come to Gondolin?

What year was it?

She said, “It is not the star of Fëanor.”

“Yet these others are theirs,” said Thingol, of the smaller stars on her father’s sigil.

Beleg Cúthalion said, carefully, “There was a golodh princess we turned away from our borders once before.”

Mablung snapped, “Ar-Feiniel was lost!”

“I have heard a rumour that she was found.”

“I have not.”

“She looked not unlike this lady –”

“If this lady looks like anyone, it is not Ar-Feiniel!”

Ar-Feiniel. They were arguing about Aredhel of Gondolin, who had been her great-aunt. More greats than that; she had been Eärendil’s great aunt, Galadriel’s high-hearted cousin. Arwen had never heard that she looked like her before, but Aredhel’s story was not often told in the House of Elrond. The fall of Gondolin had caused too much pain to many who dwelled there, and Aredhel’s loss had been the first link in that long chain of doom.

Outside these jewelled halls, it had to still be standing, if Doriath was. Somewhere the white city she had heard so much about was still safe and secret, and – oh, Glorfindel must still be alive, in his first life! Glorfindel, the faithful lord who had cradled her as a baby.

Arwen had been pulled out of her time, like a thread drawn out of Vairë’s weaving, but many of her family and her household were here with her, if she could only find them. The thought sustained her, steadied her. Glorfindel! Erestor, somewhere, who had taught her her letters. Her grandparents in their storied youth, long before they had become her grandparents. Melian had been Galadriel’s teacher, and Celeborn had kept the memory of his great-uncle Elu Thingol bright down all the years and Ages, half a world away from where Doriath had once been.

“She is welcome here,” said Melian the Queen without raising her voice, and Mablung and Beleg hushed. “She is not the child of Meril and Orodreth, but that is only the most well-known cross between Sindar and Noldor. Far fewer know of Ar-Feiniel and her Sindar husband, for that is not an affair that brings Doriath any honor.”

“Ar-Feiniel was found?” Beleg asked, as though the answer to that question had worried him in the years since he had turned her party back at the Girdle. “This is her daughter?”

“Lost, found, lost again,” said Melian. “Ar-Feiniel met Eöl our kinsman in the shadows of Nan Elmoth, and bore him a child in the twilight there. Marchwardens, you may leave us now.”

Every word Melian had said was true. She had not lied. But she had made a web of inferences; had drawn out from Beleg and Mablung all they knew already, or merely suspected, had allowed them to reason from what they knew, and then given them an answer that tied up all of what they suspected or half-suspected. A child of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel might bear a Noldorin name like Undómiel – indeed, Maeglin Lómion had. A child of Eöl might flee through the woods and pass safely through the Girdle, carrying what tokens she might, if she meant to find her mother’s kin, who had given her up as lost; she might bear a seal marked for one branch of Aredhel’s cousins in one hand, and one marked for the other in another.

Mablung and Beleg were seemingly satisfied when they left, but they were only part of the problem, and when they had gone Thingol said quietly, “You wear my daughter’s face, stranger, and no child of Eöl and the lost golodh princess would do so. I will need a better answer to this riddle.”

He fixed her with his piercing eyes, and Arwen became aware of him as more than the king of this hall, her kin from afar, the king from her grandfather’s tales.

This was one of the three Elvenkings of old who had won leaderships of their people by bold deeds in the dark night of Beleriand under the stars; one of the three who had been first to come to Aman, and who walked with the Valar there. This was the father of Lúthien who had nevertheless sent the man his daughter loved to what had seemed a certain death. He had caged his daughter in a beechwood gaol rather than let her go after him.

Arwen was wearing the tattered remains of her gossamer gown under the thick fall of Beleg’s white cloak, and her hair was a wild dark tangle, but she was Arwen Undómiel, daughter of Elrond, and she would not wear a falsehood. “I am Arwen Elrondiel,” she said, “and I have not lied. I am not the daughter of Aredhel Fingolfiniel, but neither have I claimed to be.”

“Elrondiel?” said Melian, and a smile touched her lovely mouth. “There, you see? They will remember you, Elu. And you thought it might not be so! Do you truly not know her face, or her eyes? Do you not know the line of her cheek, and is not that proud chin like your own? Oh, child,” she said, and held her white hands out to Arwen. “I did not think to meet you in this world or any other. It is a wrong thing for you be here, but I am glad for the chance nonetheless, little lost one.”

She leaned down to kiss Arwen’s forehead as though she was her mother, and her night-jasmine power washed over Arwen like a wave. Instead of sweeping her unsteadily away, it seemed to feed secret parts of her that had never come into bloom before, or which had long been starving in the dark.

“Lúthien’s child?” said Thingol. “Lúthien’s grandchild?”

“Her grandchild’s grandchild, my love.” Melian's hands were still clasping Arwen’s. They felt cool and firm, but Arwen knew they were not, or would not stay so. They would dissolve in a shining cloud, and what was truly Melian the Maia would rise like a butterfly from the chrysalis and leave this form behind. Even now, she shone with a radiance that was more than immortal. “Not yet,” she said, and pressed Arwen’s hands once more before she let them go.

“You know?”

“I have always known,” said Melian the Maia. “I have seen the end of the Music. I knew the end of this song before it was begun. I will not claim that I see all ends clearly; there are twists in the melody, where things hang on the edge of a knife, again and again, and past those places it is hard to see. I knew that you might come to be, little Arwen, but not that you would be.”

“Lúthien’s grandchild’s grandchild,” Thingol said wonderingly, as though the thought was still coming home to him. “When she sent word of her son’s birth, she said he was mortal. Did she tell us that to keep him from us?”

“No,” Melian said, “Dior is mortal.” There was sorrow in her voice again, and only now did Arwen understand the full nature of it.

Luthien’s child had to be a babe in arms at this moment, somewhere in Ossiriand, but to Melian he was also already the grown Dior Aranel, sitting on her husband’s throne, wearing the Silmaril, and giving the Fëanorians his fatal answer. He was already dying in these very halls, perhaps even at their feet. All Melian’s joy was touched with sorrow, and all her sorrow with joy, and it had been that way from the moment she drew on flesh like a gown and took Elu Thingol’s hand under the wheeling stars. For her Thingol had always been falling in marvelling love with her, all their long years together in the Thousand Caves, and he had always been at the same time being torn apart by dwarvish swords on his own treasury floor. She had always known.

“I am very lost,” said Thingol, but he smiled. He looked like Celeborn when he did so. “Not as lost as you are, perhaps, little daughter! But I do not understand how this can be, and even less how came you here.”

“Nor I,” said Arwen. “But we do remember you, Elu Thingol: Lúthien’s line. They are all named for you but me. Elurin and Eluréd, Elwing, Elrond and Elros, Elrohir and Elladan…”

Her voice trailed off. Thingol was looking at her as though she herself was hope beyond hope to him, brighter than the Silmaril, but Melian was looking into the distance as if she was seeing what end would come to each and every person Arwen had named, even the fates that Arwen herself did not know.

Arwen was standing before her, but Melian was also seeing, perhaps, the mortal woman she would choose to be. Aragorn’s wife, and one day his widow, old as no child of Melian should ever become, dying as no child of Melian ever should. But they would, so many of them. Lúthien, and Dior, and Elros, and all of Elros’s descendants down to Aragorn, and then, perhaps, if Arwen was very fortunate, her own mortal children would be born to die.

Thingol’s Maia-queen said, “I am glad to have met you, but you must not stay here, little daughter.”

“Can she not?” said Thingol, who caught daughters and caged them. He was still looking at Arwen like she was the brightest thing in that star-strewn room.

“She is a tear in the Weaving,” Melian said. “She changes things. The Song changes, but it weaves brightness out of darkness; it takes what is wrong and makes beauty more unexpected still out of it. That is the pattern that was ordained when the first Song was sung. Nothing is certain. Some things must be, but that is not the same as saying that they will be.”

“Still I too am glad to have met you,” Arwen said. She would never have met them otherwise, because she would never come to Valinor; she would go beyond the world where the Elves could not go, and Melian would not, because she had tied her fate to Thingol’s in a dark wood. This was a strange and terrible dream, buf it was glorious too. “But I know I must go; and I long to go! Will you send me back to my own place, my own time?”

Thingol said, “You need not go.”

Melian was still looking at her with ageless grief. “Oh, child,” she said. “I wish I could.”

Chapter Text

“I don’t think she can even shoot,” Mablung said in some disgust.

“She will certainly need a better blade than that she carried here,” said Beleg, with a glance at the chatelaine he had given back to Arwen. “We’ll arm you, Undómiel.”

They had left before dawn. Thingol had given his Marchwardens leave to go: Arwen he had not, but in her borrowed cloak and leathers she could pass as one of them, a borrowed sword slung in a baldric across her back.

She had left behind the rags of the gown she had arrived in. She had left behind a wardrobe of beautiful gowns, some thin as a whisper, others heavily embroidered in fabulous golds and gem. All of them Thingol had heaped on her, and all of them had once been Lúthien’s. She had left behind the jewels he had given her, and she had laid down the weaving Melian had set her to.

-

“Then how will I get home?” she cried, because that she wouldn’t was not an answer she could accept.

“I cannot see it,” said Melian, her great grey eyes all blind pupil as though she was straining through time for a glimpse of light.

Thingol gleamed with triumph. “All you must do is stay alive, little daughter,” he said. “Stay here, stay safe. You need not seek your home – you should not, because that is the surest way to ensure it will never come to be. Stay here, and we will care for you, and the Song will go on, and when your time circles back to you and your place is empty again: why, you will fill it.”

That made sense, if you were the King of the Sindar and had ruled all Beleriand under the stars for thousands of years before the Noldor came to trouble you. You could put your hand over your descendent and keep her safe within the Girdle, and wait for the future, secure in your long power, your secure boundaries, your new knowledge that your family would put forth new shoots and that your descendants would one day come home again.

Arwen could not tell him that he would be dead before Dior ever came to Doriath. She could not tell him that his kingdom would fall, and his people would be slain and die. Melian had told her that some things must be, and the two falls of Doriath were surely a fixed point in the Song, a melody that had to play.

She was in Beleriand, and Melian couldn’t send her home. She didn’t belong there, and she couldn’t stay – but she couldn’t go home, to her father and brothers, to Rivendell.

To Aragorn.

The knowledge sent her to her knees, and the tall King and Queen bent over her, their too-beautiful faces and too-brilliant eyes exactly something out of the cradle-stories she had been told as a child.

-

They had her brought somewhere quiet and dark, and Melian sat with her a long time, her hand cool on Arwen’s brow. “Sleep,” she had said sadly, and when Arwen woke up she was still in the great soft bed, hung with gossamer curtains as thin as spider-silk in white and lavender. Someone had laid a rug over her of mossy green velvet, soft as the grass on which she had woken in Beleriand. Otherwise, she was quite alone.

The ceiling above her looked like it was made of real boughs woven together to form an arched roof, but this was no birch-bower, and the gaps between the branches weren’t filled with stars but shining light-lamps. There were carved nightingales peeping out everywhere between the statue-trees that held up the ceiling, their curious eyes made of jet and each one a miniature masterpiece of likeness and personality.

In one corner of the room there was a great harp of black wood. There was a loom in another, with a weaving-work in grey and white still half-finished, the flying shuttle hanging by its thread. When Arwen got to her feet, she saw that all over the floor there were small stylised niphredil made of white quartz inset into the stone.

It was Lúthien’s chamber, it had to be – a room that had been lost for nearly seven thousand years beneath the sea. It belonged to a woman who had been dead longer than that, gone beyond the World and beyond the reach of her people forever. Arwen was standing where Lúthien had once stood, in the rooms she had left only – how many years had passed since she had left Doriath forever?

Not many; not long enough for dust to settle on any of the surfaces, to cloud the silver mirror hanging from one wall or tarnish the silver combs that lay before it, scattered as though they had only recently been flung down. There were still long dark hairs caught in their teeth. There was clear water in the silver ewer.

Had time been thickened deliberately in this room, or had Thingol and Melian simply left it as Lúthien herself had left it?

It was a large room, with room enough for pacing back and forth. It was a beautiful room, for an adored child, a precious daughter.

Arwen could see, already, how it easily it had become a woman’s cage.

-

Her brothers would have loved – would love – to ride to war with the two ancient and most renowned Heroes of Doriath. They might have happily traded their uncertain futures for this brilliant past and gambled everything for it, safe in the knowledge that in the worst instance – if they died – they would go to the Halls, and finally to Valinor, and that their remaining family would still come, in time, to them, and all could be made well.

But that was not Arwen's choice, and she refused to have it forced upon her.

Her brothers would love to be heading towards the last great battle before the War of Wrath in Beleriand beside Mablung Heavy-Hand and Beleg Cúthalion, heroes out of song. Arwen, however, thought Beleg kind, but remote, and Mablung in need of a good kicking.

They went first to Brethil, moving swiftly through the trees, and all the while she felt unseen eyes on her, nightingale eyes. Arwen could not have left if Malian had not permitted it, but she feared that Thingol’s hand would reach out to catch her before she had won free from his lands.

“Will they truly wish to join us?” she asked, rather than dwelling on her fear.

“I know not,” Beleg said. “Some already do, for their lord sent word, and they are brave, the Haladin! I do not underestimate them. That does not mean that they must ride to war, to death, with us. If they prefer to stay and guard their own, they must be allowed that choice.”

“As we were,” said Mablung. No one else from Doriath had chosen to leave with them.

-

Arwen had lived all her life in a Middle-Earth where the lands of the Elves had dwindled, shrinking down and down, in a darkening Middle-Earth where their borders became ever stronger and firmer, where even fewer of other races were allowed to enter their homes. Even her father’s home in the Valley with its doors always open to the Dúnedain had seen fewer and fewer guests as the Third Age wound on, while in the Greenwood, Thranduil kept court under the earth, and was wary even of allowing other Elves in his lands. In Lórien, her grandparents had sealed their caught-in-amber kingdom up tight. Aragorn had been the first Man to enter those woods in an Age on his first visit. That had been the time when she had first known she loved him. They had sealed their troth with a kiss on the heights of Cerin Amroth, and it had been so gentle, as though Aragorn feared he frighten her away, like she was a moth that had only briefly alighted on him, a dream instead of a wife.

She had worn his ring ever since around her neck, weighting her to the earth. She had sworn to give it back to him on the day they were married, when Gondor had acclaimed him king and Sauron had been overthrown forever, and she was going to do it.

Yet she had chosen danger over safety when she had asked Beleg to take her with him when he left to join the Union of Maedhros, action over waiting, flight over stasis; but what safety could lie behind in Doriath, waiting for the massacres to come? There was no safe place in Beleriand. There was only captivity, and freedom.

-

Beleg had looked at her seriously when she asked to come, brow troubled. “It is too dangerous, khíril. Beyond the Girdle, Morgoth’s forces are abroad in the land; and not only his Orcs. There are worse creatures; cold-drakes and fell Fire-spirits, vampires and were-wolves. Even Elves, those who have been long in his power, who look like us but whose minds are no longer wholly their own! I can only protect you to the best of my ability – I cannot promise you safety, beyond the Girdle, even if I were not riding directly to battle. Thingol can keep you safe.”

“Thingol is not my king,” said Arwen. “He is not my lord or my father to keep me here.”

“He means well by you—"

“I want my family,” she said, and that wasn’t a lie: the truth thrummed in her voice like the strings of a plucked harp. “I want to know them. I want to go to them. You know now I mean no harm; let me go with you when you leave."

(”Absolutely not, ” Mablung had said, when she asked him. “Can you fight? Can you shoot, can you hunt, can you make or break camp? Little butterfly, you would have died in the woods if I hadn’t found you. Guilt won’t work on me! I did my duty to my king’s will in bringing you hence, and I shall do my duty to his will in leaving you, and in both instances you should be thanking me for it.”)

Beleg looked troubled. “I go to war, khíril,” he said. “Even though I go to fight with your kin – they will be at war, too, and will not thank me for bringing you into such peril.”

“They would have the right to order me away, but Thingol does not. Please,” she said, and this was going to be a painful half-truth, a taking of something sacred in vain that hurt. If Melian could lie with the truth, why not she? “My mother is gone. Don’t keep me from her family.”

It almost surprised her how swiftly it worked, the invocation of Aredhel, who Beleg had turned away once from the borders of Doriath and sent riding into darkness and towards her fate. He searched her face again with his serious eyes and then nodded tightly. “Dress for long journeying. We leave tomorrow at first light, before the second watch is relieved. No one will know of your absence until the third begins.”

Mablung put up a much more spirited resistance when he saw her the next day in her Marchwarden’s garb, but he closed his mouth when Beleg looked at him, and then they slipped out of Menegroth and through the woods of Neldoreth towards the Girdle’s end.

-

Arwen had not seen Men since she had woken alone in the dark wood, and she was taken by surprise by how glad she was to see them. They weren’t the Men of her own time, the tall Dúnedain she knew best, who with their dark hair and pale eyes still sometimes betrayed with the shape of a nose, the angle of a jaw, the set of an eye that they had Elvish blood, Numenorean blood. These Men were all shorter than the Men she had known, and slightly fairer in colouring, if less well-favoured.

And there were many more women among them.

The Haladin didn’t greatly care for Elves. That was clear from their lowered brows, their distance, although their ancient lord clearly knew Beleg well. He came to greet him himself, holding out his withered hands, and Beleg took them in the warrior’s-clasp without a trace of the flinching that some Elves betrayed when confronted with mortality.

“Halmir,” he said, “old friend.”

“That is a new title,” said Halmir, “but be welcome again, old ally. Young ally, I should perhaps say!”

“Nay,” said Beleg, and there was a look on his face that Arwen knew as well as the flinching as he took in the chief’s stooped shoulders, his thin grey hair flyaway on the wind. He was seeing Halmir as he had last seen him, tall and strong and riding out against Orcs with him, and the disjunction hurt. “Nay, Halmir; I am older than you could reckon, and if I do not look it to you, I feel it.”

“You look younger than my sons,” said Halmir, and gestured. “You’ll remember them: Haldir will be the one leading our men this time, but Hundar will be at his side. Perhaps the two of them together will make up for my lack.”

“Perhaps,” Beleg said, with a smile that probably read to the Men as disdainful rather than pained.

Haldir and Hundir were not so very young, either. To Arwen’s eye, they were already in middle age, and she was not surprised when Halmir pointed out his grandchildren to Beleg, too: Handir, Haldir’s son, old enough to be married himself, and Hundad son of Hundar and Hunleth his sister.

They heard Beleg out, and then Halmir offered much the same compromise that Thingol had to his own warriors: those who felt called to the fight meant to ride out, and those who didn’t were to stay, and all of them were to follow their own wills in staying or going, and not Thingol’s, lest Beleg get any ideas about that.

The discussion descended into a great deal of logistics-talk, and one of the women came over to Arwen where she stood with Mablung in the shadows.

“Come have a wash, Elf-lady,” she said. “They’ll talk all night, and not say anything useful until tomorrow.”

Mablung narrowed his eyes, but said nothing, so Arwen let them take her away, deep into parts of the Brethil settlement where Thingol’s male marchwardens had never been invited. That was what one of the women told her, anyway, laughing; they seemed delighted to have met a female Elf at last.

“For now we will know how much of their rudeness is all Elf, and how much only man, ” explained another of the Brethil-women, and Arwen laughed, too. Clean water was offered, and then introductions were made. The laughing one was Meleth, a good-looking woman of about thirty who was one of Halmir’s granddaughters too, by one of his daughters.

“I don’t mind at all not being pointed out,” she said. “You must admit, it would ruin the pattern of all those Hs to list me, and I have no brother.”

“I should be so lucky,” Hunleth said, but she didn’t seem to mean it. She was dressed like one of her male relations, for battle, and that seemed to be no small part of why she had merited the introduction to Beleg. She would be leaving with them the next day, and her eyes ran covetously over the sword lashed to Arwen’s back, the knife at her belt, the boots and leathers Beleg had given her for the journey.

There were children, too: a richness of women and children, a wealth of them. Meleth had two small sons, one of them just toddling. Hunleth had none, but her sister-in-law had a newborn, Hardang son of Hundar, who she passed to Arwen to hold, and whose small face was still red and angry at the indignity of existence. He was surprisingly heavy in her arms.

“Oh!” Arwen said, and touched his cheek with the very tip of her finger. “How beautiful he is!”

One of the women laughed. “That’s a matter of opinion!”

Hardang’s mother didn’t seem troubled. “In a few months he’ll look well enough,” she said. “You won’t hurt him, lady, if you joggle him about a bit. Do you have childer?”

“No,” Arwen said, still looking down at the infant. His faint eyebrows were barely there, his nose scrunched and soft. Would her own mortal children look this small, this raw? “Not yet.”

“Warrior-women don’t,” said Hunleth.

Arwen smiled. “I am no warrior.”

“There, ” said a woman who turned out to be Hunleth’s mother, and then there was an argument between a number of them, who turned out mostly to be Hunleth’s aunts, Gloredhel and Hiril and Hollith. Meleth rolled her eyes, and the baby slept on.

“Are you betrothed?” said one of the women who had been quiet until now. She was much paler than the tawny-brown others, and her dark hair was wound back from her head in a spiral, rather than in braids. “To one of the ones in the courtyard?”

“To Beleg?” said Hiril, breaking off the argument. She was perhaps fifty, but her eyes had lit up. “We used all admire him terribly when I was young, and he went riding out with my father. How handsome I thought him then!”

“The dark Elf is surely more handsome,” said one of the women. “I like men who know when to keep their mouths shut.”

“That one looks very closely at you,” said Meleth to Arwen, winking.

“No!” Arwen said, and there was more laughter at her open horror. “No, I am pledged to neither of them!”

She had given little away of herself in the past few months in Thingol’s halls, where she had been mostly kept to Lúthien’s rooms, and kept from the general life of the court, lest she bring about too much change, like a mortal carrying some insidious disease might be kept away from their kind. She had not wholly understood that precept. Her grandparents who weren’t yet her grandparents yet were away on some great journey to the East, it seemed (they also were not yet married, or so Melian said, which could not possibly be true – surely there was no one more stately or dignified than Galadriel and Celeborn, more observant of ceremonies), and there was no one else in Doriath who she had known in her own time, no one else’s fate who she knew in detail but those who she had already met. Still, Melian had cautioned her, and in the always-twilight of Thingol’s halls Arwen had been lonely, and she had sat in Lúthien’s rooms or with Melian, weaving, listening, and had watched every word she said.

Surely she might speak of Aragorn to these women, if she was very careful?

It did not seem like so great a risk, so, very sparingly, she gave the Haladin women to understand that she was promised to a great warrior, a noble man, whose duty had long kept her from his side, and that they were waiting for the long Darkness to be over before they might wed.

“How you must hope for the war to go well,” said one of the younger women. “We all do, of course, but none of us are waiting to marry. It seems to speed our betrothals rather than anything else.”

“I do hope,” Arwen said: but for not this war, this war which was not hers.

Baby Hardang stirred and began to mew, and his mother took him hastily and put him to her breast. There was a little stir as refreshments were passed around, and the dark woman came to sit by Arwen when Hardang’s mother rose.

“I am Beldis of the House of Bëor,” she said, “wife of Handir.” The House of Bëor; that made her kin to Beren, which she confirmed when Arwen pressed. “We are cousins. But I would not speak of him to you if it offends, lady.”

“How could it?” Arwen asked. “He is a hero in Doriath now, and his name will be spoken of in song as long as Elves live on these shores.”

“Ah,” said Beldis, and some strong feeling passed across her face.

“You should not call me lady, ” Arwen added, “or else I should call you the same, for you are wife to the eldest son of the eldest son of the lord of the Haladin, are you not? And we are, perhaps, kin to some degree, through the marriage of Beren and Lúthien.”

“That doesn’t mean quite what it would in Dor-lómin or Dorthonion-that-was,” said Beldis. “The Haladin don’t hold lords in such high esteem – but that is not what I wished to ask of you, lady.”

“You may ask anything,” said Arwen, “only if it is for news of your kinsman, I know no more than you: that he lives somewhere in Ossiriand, and that he has a son.”

“That last is news,” said Beldis, with a brief smile. “But but is about my own son that I would speak.”

“Which is he?”

There were so many children playing, but when Beldis pointed out a small dark boy sitting quietly in the corner, the resemblance was so strong that Arwen might have known him herself.

“Brandir,” said Beldis, lifting her voice.

He looked up when his mother called, and rose to come over to them, and Arwen saw that he was lame. One foot dragged after the other, and there was a wicker frame he used to rise and then to help him move across the floor, pushing it before him with an ease that seemed too practiced for so small a child.

His face had lit up for his mother, and when he finally reached her, she cupped his pale face in her hands, making a heart of it with her long fingers. “My darling boy,” Beldis said, and then she turned to look at Arwen. “He is my only child,” she said, “and my husband rides tomorrow for war. There may never be another.”

The son of the son of the son of the chieftain: this child would lead the Haladin one day.

Brandir. Did Arwen know that name?

“I have heard that the Elves have skill with healing that we have not,” said Beldis of the House of Bëor, of Dorthonion-that-was, and she did not plead: she was Beren’s cousin. “If there is something you can do for him, I will thank you all my life.”

“Come to me, dear heart,” Arwen said to the child. He stared at her with his big dark eyes, but allowed his mother to gently push him towards her.

Brandir was perhaps six or seven summers, and his bones were already solid, his joints formed. His knee seemed very small when she placed her palm over it, too thin to be dimpled, the weak leg markedly thinner than the sounder. The small left foot curled inwards, toes twisting up.

She closed her eyes and listened. There was no trauma that she could sense, no shadows of past breaks or pain. This was a healing that even her father might not have done easily, should he had been present at the child’s birth, or when he began to take his first steps. This was damage that was coded into his flesh. It would not be a matter of putting right, but of tearing apart, of forcing one’s will where it wasn’t meant to go. It would be difficult work, and she had little skill in healing compared to her father, or to Elrohir.

The child didn’t seem to feel any pain as she ran gentle, diagnostic fingertips up and down the length of his leg, palpated his ankle, carefully felt all the furled bones in his foot.

Some Songs must be Sung, said Melian in her mind as clearly as if she was there, but in this room there were no nightingales.

Small Brandir giggled when her fingers traced the strangely-shaped arch of his foot. “Tickles.”

How could she not try?

Some Songs must be Sung.

“I am sorry,” Arwen said, and held her cool hand over his foot a moment longer. She closed her eyes and whispered a blessing, a song against future pain from it. Perhaps the Valar were not listening to the Eldar of Beleriand, but she would call on them nevertheless. “There is nothing I may do.”

Beldis said nothing, but she took her son back and sat a moment with him in her lap, her face very set and her arms tight about him.

“I am sorry,” Arwen said again. “I will not offer you either false hope or false comfort, but one day it may be his people’s gain that he is not meant for war.”

“Well might you say that,” said Beldis of burned Dorthonion tightly, “whose lord stays in halls like an earthworm, and won’t fight for this land!”

Arwen could not begrudge her that, when so many of the Men of Brethil were preparing to leave for battle. Not to Beldis, whose husband was leaving in the morning. She said only “l am going myself.”

- They had all chosen to stay behind after the invitation to the Union came, all Doriath's warriors in their silver mail who refused to leave the Thousand Caves even to fight the Dark Enemy. Their would-be allies had done them and their kin great wrong, both in the lands of the West and more recently in Beleriand itself, but against the spectre of Morgoth, his creatures, their great evils: how could they not go to fight?

Arwen was the daughter of someone who had fought the Shadow all his long, long life. Her brothers had spent all the days of their own lives either in battle or training for it. The man she loved spent his shorter, dearer days waging that fight. How could she not judge Thingol and his warriors for not stirring?

She was prejudiced, and she knew it. Not through upbringing alone: the wrongs done had occurred so many Ages before her own time that they weren’t truly real for her, and she had the unfair advantage of knowing that these warriors weren’t saving themselves for a final assault in Doriath’s defence, a final line against the Shadow. They would fall instead fighting dwarves that should have been allies, or else fighting Elves that had been allies, in either Menegroth or in Sirion. Those that lived beyond that would dwindle on Balar and then either go into the West or over the Blue Mountains to live among the Silvan Elves, the last of the Sindar, and they would never take the war to Morgoth again the way they had in the Age before the First Age, before the Noldor came to Beleriand. Perhaps they might have made a difference in this battle that was only weeks away now, this battle that would come so near success and fail so terribly: this great conflagration into which the Haladin were sending so many of their sons and husbands and fathers, in which so many Men and Elves were doomed to die.

But if the Song had to be sung, perhaps they were wise to hold something back, Doriathrim and the Haladin alike.

-

She slept with Mablung and Beleg that night, in a guest-chamber off Halmir’s great hall. The women had invited her to stay with them, and Arwen might have agreed if not for the encounter with Beldis, however it irritated Mablung. She had found pleasure in the women's company, and it was a brief chance to know even slightly this people which had disappeared so long before her time. Only a remnant of them had survived the First Age, and that remnant had been transplanted to Numénor: and then only a remnant of a remnant of Númenor’s people had survived its loss, and only a thin strain even of that survived into her own time.

The Dúnedain were proud and self-sufficient as the Haladin were, as stubborn, but they did not have the Brethil-women's laughter, and unlike the Haladin with their little love for lords, they would follow the line of their kings down to its last embers.

So many of the Haladin were leaving with them today. So many tawny-blond men and not a few women, riding out on their stubby horses towards the black clouds in the North and leaving behind this fastness of Brethil among the beeches, quiet Brethil with its river and its dappled sun-light, its strong walls and stout, unpretentious halls. Leaving behind the children, the women, the laughter.

“I wish I was riding out with you,” said Halmir, but he looked even frailer in the morning light than he had the night before, and there was grey in his face, and other marks of closeness to death that Elrond had taught his children to read. “Give that bastard hell for me, will you? Cut down as many Orcs as you can.”

The leave-takings were brief, and not sentimental. They were a curious people, the Haladin.

“Farewell, old friend,” said Beleg, his face very hard and closed.

“You’ll meet my other grandsons at the muster,” Halmir added. “My daughter Hareth wed into Dor-lómin, and her sons will be of age for battle: Húrin and Huor. Look out for them, won’t you?

“I will,” Beleg said, then frowned over his shoulder at Arwen.

The Brethil-men had given them two horses for the journey to the mountains, and Beleg had accepted the gift, and the logic, although it was clear to Arwen at least from the glances he exchanged with Mablung that they cared little for horses, or being mounted. Arwen was riding double behind Beleg, his body veiled from her by the hardness of his jerkin. Still he felt her jerk at Halmir's words, her grip tighten convulsively.

“What is it, khíril?”

“Nothing,” Arwen said; but if she could have seen her own eyes, she would have recognised Melian in them in their wide straining towards knowledge, their grey depths eaten up by pupil. They were names that rang in her ears, Húrin and Huor: names with fates, and terrible ones.

Huor was her own – great-great-grandfather? That made this terribly old man from the dawn of the world her own kin, and all these tow-headed frowning Men too, the laughing women. They were all great-great-great uncles and aunts, distant cousins, but she had never sat down to learn their names, or their stories. She did not even know if somewhere in her own time they had been preserved. She did not know how many of them would die in the great battle ahead; but Húrin and Huor, she knew.

Chapter Text

Haldir of the Haladin led their host over the crossings of the Teiglin and down into the Talath Dirnen, all the Brethil-men streaming behind him. Mablung and Beleg Cúthalion were somewhere on foot, invisible among the trees, running faster and fleeter than the Men could manage mounted. Arwen rode alone on Beleg’s horse; someone else had charge of Mablung’s. They were not fond of horses, the Marchwardens.

Her horse was stockier and shorter than she was used to, but sweet, and it needed only the slightest of attention from her, the faintest pressure of her knees. The rest of her attention Arwen was free to give to long-lost Beleriand, which she was seeing clear of tree-cover for the first time since she had awoken in the dark woods where Lúthien had once danced.

It didn’t seem as though it could be real. It felt like something seen in a dream, a vision of the past, a song that recalled and crystallised what had been lost in painted images inside one’s head. The sky was bluer than blue, the great hunch of the Ered Wethrin behind them in the distance a deep blue-green, their great crowns of stone white with snow. They reminded her of the Hithaeglir, which she had crossed so many times between one home and another, between Imladris and Lothlórien. She could almost persuade herself that home lay across those hills, a refuge from the strangeness she was lost in: but she knew better.

Over the Ered Wethrin lay the lost kingdoms of Hithlum and Dór-lomin in their last days, their brief hours. The great Union was being formed, and it would dash itself against the might of the Dark Enemy in vain, and the foul masses of Morgoth would spill out of their bounds and overrun these long-ago kingdoms of Elves and Men. It was a vain desire to wish that she might see them before they were gone. They were not crossing the Ered Wethrin. They were meeting the great muster of the Men and Elves of those kingdoms at the Andram Wall, and very few of that army would ever see the lands they had left again.

The Teiglin grew suddenly wild when the cliffs dropped away and became ravines, forcing them from the last embrace of Brethil Forest onto the plains. Beleg and Mablung seemed displeased by the great grassy meres of the Talath Dirnen, which rolled on and on in waves of green almost as far as the eye could see.

Mablung, particularly, sunk deep into his hooded cloak as they crossed the plains, as though he thought he could hide from the Sun and the Enemy if he only hid his face.

“I do miss the trees,” Beleg said, when Arwen asked him. “I would be glad of their cover. We are being watched very closely.”

“By the Enemy?”

“By the Nargothrondrim.” He cut his long eyes at her. “Did your mother tell you nothing of them?”

Arwen’s mother had never met her uncle Finrod, but Galadriel had told her many stories about the sunlit king of the underground kingdom, his kindness, his joy, his searing wisdom. Her stories had brought her long-dead brother to life for her grandchildren, and Nargothrond too, where Galadriel had once walked and laughed and pestered her brother to wed.

But that was not who Beleg meant.

“No,” Arwen said, trying to imagine the many-times great aunt she had never met, whose story had always been too sad to be told. She would not lie. “The White Lady could speak only of Gondolin.”

“How golodh,” Mablung muttered under his breath.

“Hush,” said Beleg. “They were good friends to us once, the Nargothrondrim: but no one hears from them, no one sees them, not since their king fell. His brother rules now, and Nargothrond is friend to no one, as curled in on itself as a dog licking a wound. On our right tomorrow you’ll see one of their watch-posts, the Amon Ethir. But I do not doubt they are closer to us than that, somewhere in the grasses.”

-

She slept rolled up in her cloak, back to back with Beleg while Mablung took the watch. Beleg reminded her of her grandfather in many ways, with his long pale hair, his ancient eyes, and the way he sometimes looked at her as though she woke great pain in him. It was easy to find her rest with him near, despite the watching bright eyes out somewhere in the long grass.

She woke with her face pressed into Mablung’s dark hair, as though she had turned towards him in the night and sought out his warmth sometime after Beleg had relieved him at his post.

His eyes glinted at her from the ground when she disentangled herself and rose, and whether he was asleep or not she couldn’t tell.

-

“Is that Amon Ethir?”

Beleg glanced at the hill ahead, which was gleaming red in the early dawn light.

“Nay. That is no work of Elves.”

That became clear the closer they drew, and its craggy face was revealed. Even as the dawn died away, the hill stayed red-crowned as a girl with harvest leaves in her hair. It was beautiful, and somehow sinister, and something made her turn her eyes from it before they had passed it.

-

Three days since leaving Brethil, they came to the Fens of Sirion. It brought them close again to the Girdle. Arwen could feel it, a humming in her bones and a song in her head. It pulled at her. It wanted her to wander back within its grasp, to walk into its hand and give up her freedom, to become again a bird in a cage that would be safe, for a time.

It would not force her, but it would call her, and the longing of it was powerful.

The Sirion itself was a name out of song, a river that had been overwhelmed into the Western Sea long before her birth. It was by the Sirion’s mouth her paternal grandparents had fallen in love and lived and ruled, and where her father had been born. It was by the Sirion where their lives had forked. Her father had loved it, she knew.

Rivers still spoke to him, and he to them. The great Bruinen that flowed through the valley of Imladris was liquid silk in his hands. He had taken all his children to Bruinen to bathe when they were very young, to meet the river, to be touched by it. Bruinen was the river that defined her life, but Sirion was the river that had defined his.

The Fens were like fens anywhere, the ground imperceptibly becoming water, the reeds standing brown and green and shivering in the wind. Here the Sirion was a slower, sluggish trickle, not yet the great-mouthed torrent that joined the sea.

Do you know me? Arwen asked it.

The river wasn’t sure.

My father sends his love.

The river was grateful, although it didn’t know why. It did not remember him yet. That worried it.

There were rafts hidden on the banks, so well concealed that they could not be seen at all among the reeds, even to Arwen’s elf-sight, until Mablung pointed them out. “It’s too deep for the horses to cross,” he said. “Help me launch them, if you would not rather stay on your fine horse.”

Arwen slipped from her poor maligned horse’s back without a word, into the fen-water which came to her knees, and then deeper. Daughter, said the river, satisfied. Child.

She closed her eyes.

Daughter, said the river.

It touched her mind with cool fingers, and then it shared with her an image as clear as crystal. It was the dearest thing this part of the river knew, the memory it cherished in its breast like a jewel.

Two Elves are bathing in its waters among the reeds, and one has woven a crown for the other out of the long grass on the Sirion's banks, and then swiftly makes another for himself. He is very pleased with his work, and with his fair, wavering reflection in the water, and the dark one laughs at him before pulling himself out of the water and onto the grassy meres. When the fair one joins him, the dark one slings an arm around his shoulders and pulls him to him, and they lie there in the grass until their thin clothes dry, talking long and seriously of things the river cannot understand, and above them the sky slowly fades into twilight, and then the stars come out.

The fair one is close enough to the water to dabble his long, clever fingers in it, and then flick clear droplets of water at the dark one's face. He is nearly rolled into the water himself, but finally the dark one relents, and the fair one settles himself back against his side, and then their minds begin to go smooth and strange, like underground streams. The river knows that this means that they are sleeping. It is content to watch them, and then something changes, and the river is not the river any longer. It is the Lord of the Waters, come very far inland, and he rises from the fens and draws himself up to a great height, staring down at the silent sleepers.

The river feels the many things that roil inside the Lord. He wants to put his hand over the sleepers and keep them safe in dreams forever, to feed them to the sea where they will be safe. He is saddened by them. There is old anger, too, in the sadness, but it fades as he studies their faces. He is not seeing them curled together on the bank any longer. He is seeing fire and golden, glowing eyes, and teeth in the dark, and falling towers.

Then he is in their sleeping minds, and what he shows to the dark one are those towers tall and white and unbroken: and to the fair one he takes away the glowing eyes and shows him a kingdom under the earth, secret and safe. The river finds this image pleasing. It does not know why the Lord is so sad.

Then the Lord is gone. The Elves are waking. They look at each other like strangers. One puts his hand to his head and finds the grass-crown still in his bright hair, and turns it in his hands as though he no longer remembers making it, and the other starts -

“Undómiel,” said Mablung harshly. “Wake up.”

-

The plains beyond the Andram were swarming with Men, Elves, and Dwarves, great clusters of tents here and the. Some could only be Elven, but other encampments belonged less clearly to one kindred or another.

One bright blue pavilion flew a banner she had seen only in painted illustrations of old manuscripts in the library of Imladris. An eight-armed wheel of gold, set within a ring of gold, on an azure field spangled with silver stars. It caught the wind, and the eye, and Arwen could not look away from the gaily hopeful banner she had seen in paintings drenched in blood and tumbled in the mire, an image which had seemed to serve for the Noldor to represent all the loss on the field of the Nirnaeth.

“That’s your golodh uncle’s, is it not?” Mablung asked, like the words dirtied his mouth.

“The High King Fingon,” Beleg said, a warning note in his voice.

“There is only one king in Beleriand left now Denethor rests among the leaves!”

“Would you give lordship over the bright-eyes to Elu Thingol? He would not thank you for it.”

Mablung made a sound low in his throat.

“Well, khíril,” said Beleg, and turned to her. “You asked me to take you to your kin, and I have kept my vow. Haldir, Hundar,” he added. “I will take you also to the Noldor King.”

Haldir said, “I would bring with us my son Handir, lord Elf. It is a time of war, and he is next in line.”

“Of course,” said Beleg, although he paused – Arwen saw the flinch, the moment when an immortal considered the practical way the Secondborn prepared for their own deaths.

Hunleth looked after them, although her uncle and father left the care of their host to her and her brother. Her envious eyes on Arwen’s back were palpable.

-

There was so much noise everywhere. Clashing metal, and gossip, and song, and argument. Men and Elves, Dwarves, mingling in a way Arwen never had seen them mingle, although she had been born into the last Homely Home, where the doors were always open to those who fought the Shadow. She had met Dwarves, and spoken to them. She had given her heart into the hands of a Man, and her fate, and her choice. There were very few among the Eldar who could say even the first, in her time.

People stopped to look at them as they passed. The foreignness of Mablung and Beleg was very marked here, among all the Elves that shone with armour and bright clashing jewels and had terribly bright eyes. Their grey and green garb marked them out as it was not meant to, stamping them as Doriathrim, from the Hidden Kingdom where so few came, where so few were permitted. Arwen in her grey cloak must also read to those eyes as one of Thingol’s people.

Was that dislike in the massed Noldor faces?

Was it hope, that Thingol might yet send a greater force?

The Brethil-men did not seem to notice. Well, they were Haladin. They didn’t care for the thoughts of lords or Elves. They were her kin from afar, and Arwen should learn that lesson from them, if nothing else.

The High King’s tent was a brilliant blue beacon, shining under the golden sun, drawing them forward, visible even from afar, and at last they drew near.

The voices inside the tent were speaking in Quenya.

Mablung said something to the guards at the entrance, his Sindarin particularly mellifluous and well-enunciated.

Inside the tent, the voices stopped.

“You are known to us, Mablung Heavy-Hand,” someone said in flawless Sindarin, and the silk curtains parted and the guards stepped away. “It has been a long time, my friend.”

Arwen half-expected an explosion, but Mablung only lifted his chin very slightly. “You were not then a king.”

“It was a happier time,” agreed High King Fingon. “I am very glad to see you! Every soldier is welcome here, and a hero of your stature – for you, too, have gained in fame since last we met! – must be especially so.”

“As for fame,” Mablung said, “this is my captain, Beleg Cúthalion, the chiefest of the Marchwardens, and my skill is small compared to his.”

“We are honoured!”

Beleg bent his head a fraction.

“And this is Undómiel,” Mablung said, and his eyes left High King Fingon and met Arwen’s, and it became very clear that he had not taken Melian’s explanation on faith, not quite, not fully. “I believe she is some kin to you?”

“Really,” said the High King of the Noldor, and Arwen broke away from Mablung’s half-accusing gaze to look lost High King Fingon full in the face for the first time.

The features were more Elven, more chiselled; but the long dark hair, the grey eyes, were familiar to her from almost every day of her life. They were her brothers’, her father’s, her own.

But there was gold shining brightly in his braids, woven in all the way from his temples to his waist in a strange antique fashion. His ears were thick with it, gold drops hanging from each lobe and climbing in studs and rings towards his ear-points, and on his head was a golden circlet set with blue star-sapphires.

His eyes were full of light and studying her with equal care.

“So I see,” said High King Fingon. Then, tearing his eyes away; “Not that I’m not glad to see you, Mablung, or to meet you, Cúthalion, but I must know: are these all the men we may expect from Doriath?”

Beleg inclined his head again.

“Ah,” said Fingon, and for a moment the light in his eyes dimmed. Then he summoned up a smile. “Well – given what has passed between Doriath and some among my allies, I am grateful you came at all.”

He gave his hand to Mablung, and Mablung, to Arwen’s amazement, returned his clasp.

“And these are?”

“Lord Haldir of the Haladin,” said Beleg, “and his son and brother.”

The smile came back, and Fingon spoke to the Brethil-men with as much interest as he had to the Doriathrim, asking about numbers and their journey and their arms and their supplies and nodding his head at each piece of information, his earrings chiming faintly. He was clearly doing sums in his head, and when their audience had ended, spoke swiftly to one of his men about finding them a camping-place and more provisions.

“I believe you will find some kin of your own here,” he added, “among the Hadorians. I wish you joy in that meeting.”

It was as friendly a dismissal as Arwen had ever seen, and he didn’t need to speak to Mablung and Beleg. A shared glance was enough, and they followed the Haladin out, shadowed by the retainer put in charge of their needs.

When Arwen turned to follow, the King said,

“No, you I would speak more with.”

Mablung paused, glancing back at her over his shoulder, but walked on.

-

“Come,” said King Fingon, and drew her away through another set of silken curtains: and “Go,” he said, to the other people in his pavilion. “I would speak to this lady alone.”

“Would you,” said one of the Noldor there, lifting his dark eyebrows.

“Oh, go away,” Fingon said. “Don’t be more of an ass than you can help. Leave the wine!”

When the inner room was clear, he turned to her. “Well.” Switching to Quenya, he said, “Who, kinswoman, are you to me? I have cousins enough – I had cousins enough – that I might have missed a secret sprig of from one of their branches. I don’t think you lie, not with that face, for you could hardly lie in the shape and colour of your eyes! But I do not know you, and I cannot place you, and I cannot imagine how you came to keep company with the Sindar!”

“It is a very long story, and I do not know if you would believe it,” Arwen said, also in Quenya. It had clearly been a test, and one she passed, because the King reared back, laughing.

“A Fëanorian lisp! The barest hint of one!”

Arwen put her hand to her mouth. “No!”

“I’m afraid so,” the King told her gravely, and then laughed again. “Is that whence you sprung, then, little leaf?”

She held her hand out to him.

It was an offer. He looked at it with sudden wariness, but he extended to her a hand graced with several rings, including one great golden one with that bore the same device that flew from his tent. There was a thin silver band on his forefinger.

His grip felt warm and real, and not at all like being touched by a ghost.

Arwen closed her eyes. “I fear I am not as skilled at this as my grandmother.”

Your grandmother? Fingon asked, and she felt him touch her mind curiously with his own, taking it in his grasp like he was peering into her face.

He was looking closely – it was hard to keep him away from what he couldn’t, shouldn’t know – and she pushed a memory towards him to stop him delving too deeply.

Galadriel, standing in the clearing in Lothlórien among the gold and silver mallorn trees, a star on her finger and a look of long strain and yet exultation on her face. Her eyes held the knowledge of long millennia, and the look of one long-wed, one who had borne a child, one who had suffered loss, and known rule, too. No one could look at her surrounded by the singing-gold trees, in the heart of her power, in the land that was sustained by her and sustained her in turn, and not see a queen, uncrowned or not.

Fingon was shocked. Artanis? Your grandmother? No! That makes her sound so old! She’s almost the youngest of us, and none of us are old enough to be grandparents yet!

Arwen offered him her father, and then her grandfather, her great-grandmother. She had no memories of the last two, but the knowledge was there in her, bone-deep, for him to find.

Idril? She’s certainly too young! That would make you Turgon’s – no, that’s far too many greats! Far too many!

Arwen drew a line to Fingon from herself and felt him recoil.

Your great-great-great uncle? I utterly refuse! Then, No, leafling, I didn’t mean it like that –

I know, Arwen told him, and began to pull away.

But Fingon resisted, clinging on, searching, looking for memories that would make sense of it all to him like a drowning man grasping at handfuls of water, or snatching at bright golden fish that darted out of his reach.

No, Arwen said, and pulled harder.

Turgon, he said. He was skilled at this, better than her. Idril. Her son. What happens to them? Why don’t you know them?

She gave up on severing the connection and let the gates open instead. Great water-horses burst forth from the banked resources of her mind; flooding tides of meaningless information, overwhelming, overriding, sweeping all before them.

King Fingon gasped for breath and let go, pulling his hand from hers like he’d been burned instead of drowned.

“I’m sorry,” Arwen said. “But I can’t – the Song cannot change –”

He grimaced, but then he found for her one of his bright smiles. “Don’t fret, little – cousin? Niece? I’m not going to include all the great-greats, and you can’t make me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“If I can’t survive a ducking, I’m not up to much. Artanis used to be much rougher.” His face shadowed. “Finrod was smooth as silk. He tipped you out and made you feel you should thank him for his trouble. You’re certainly an Arafinwion - they were always the best of us at osanwé. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” she told him, and without meaning it, poured all her weariness, confusion, loss, longing into the cry. The tears came, as though in loosing the gates of her mind she had loosened something in her, too. What would this stranger think of her?

Fingon gathered her into his arms at once and begun to awkwardly pat her back, as though she was a very young child. He wasn't her father or her brothers, but he was family, and solid and real and not at all eldritch, and he knew who she was, and so Arwen leaned her head against his breast and let a few silent tears fall.

The gold-thread of the embroidery on his tunic was very scratchy against her cheek.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” he said, and made a soothing sounds low in his throat, like he was coaxing his horse. To her horror she made a wet noise into the unyielding design on his shirtfront. “I can't imagine how difficult this must be - but it must be for a purpose, little one! Have faith. The Valar do not move without one, and they won't let you wander lost forever. When you need them, they will speak to you: that they haven't already means you must already be doing as you ought.”

“Oh,” Arwen said, and lifted her face, stricken by a piercing thought: but some of Fingon’s many earrings had caught in the travel-snarled tangle of her hair, and they both wince until the connection was unravelled.

“We must get you a bath,” the King said, looking in dismay at her hair, and clearly becoming at last aware of the reek of fen-water, and the smell of horse, and the damages wrought by long nights of sleeping under the stars. “And a comb, and fresh clothing - did you bring more with you? No? Oh, you poor thing! I think you need a good sleep, too.”

Arwen did not heed him, although later she would smile to remember how such a legendary figure was capable of sounding like her nurse. “How can you believe in the plan of the Valar? They are not here! They are not listening!”

King Fingon stopped fussing and said, suddenly serious, “I of all people could not doubt that they listen.”

“But they Doomed you,” Arwen said. She was seeing that trampled banner so clearly that she wondered he didn't pick it from her mind.

“We Doomed ourselves,” he said, shaking his head and making the earrings ring again. “And the Valar bound themselves not to aid us as surely as my poor cousins tied themselves into the net of their Oath: but they still move in Beleriand, as lightly as they can. I've felt their hand, and I've seen their grace. I believe - I must believe - that this is all for some greater purpose, part of a larger pattern. Could any other power bring you here? They work sideways, and at secondhand, and they have set you to some task they dare not be seen to perform themselves.” He gave her a rueful smile. “We're as stubborn as each other, the Valar and the Noldor. They will not take back their word, and we would not turn back, and now we must both regret at leisure, and look to mend what we can between us without bending first.”

He kissed the top of her head, fen-water and all, and then gently put her from him.

“Bath, comb, bed, in that order. I'll have a pallet made for you in one of the rooms in this tent, and find someone to look after you. We’ll speak again when you've rested. Do you have anything with the Doriathrim you need? No, never mind - we’ll get you what you need for now, and send for anything of yours while you sleep.”

He nodded, and then strode forth, calling for someone, and it was such a comfort to place herself for a time in his sure, strong hands that Arwen, briefly, let him. She was turning in her head his words, they work sideways, and at secondhand, and remembering what the river Sirion had shown her.

Chapter Text

King Fingon wasabi there in the morning, and the main space of his tent was empty of councillors, although Arwen had heard them talking through the veiling partitions of silk late into the night, until sleep came up and claimed her.

The empty room was dominated by a great table, on which there was an unfurled map, and many small pieces. A game, she thought. And then, when she drew nearer, realised it was no game at all.

Carefully arranged, there were blue-and-silver pieces, and red-and-silver, green-and-silver, black-and-silver. Squat pieces in blue and black and black and red that looked distinctly Dwarven. At the edge of the map was a hopeful cluster of white-and-silver pieces: but someone had pushed a serried army in grey-and-silver off the map and onto the table-edge, and removed all the green-and-gold pieces but one.

The Mannish ones were easy to identify, once she had puzzled out the coding. Solid yellow pieces marched with the blue-and-gold, solid blue pieces too. Solid red pieces kept company with the black-and-silver, the red-and-silver. Where were the Haladin? They had to be the company in solid green, with a single grey-and-silver piece among them.

Her brothers had fought and refought this battle with little painted pieces on tables of their own when they were younger, moving armies there, there, trying out never-happeneds and might-have-beens. They would have opinions and advice on troop-movements, weakness in the lines, points of fracture where things might have gone another way if only, if only –

When it came to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears - the battle that was to come, the battle that could only be weeks, days away - Arwen knew the broad shape, the way it would all come undone. Not the details. Elladan and Elrohir were the ones who should be here in her place, if the task that was hers involved stopping or reshaping the battle in any way.

What she knew was the moments that became song, painting, tapestry. Fingon’s banner in shreds in the mire. Húrin Thalion standing alone on the field, still hewing about him, surrounded by mounds of the dead. Gelmir the thrall, being taken slowly apart piecemeal in front of his brother’s eyes -

“Ah, you’re awake,” said the sad-faced woman Fingon had sent to her last night, who had organised warm water and soap, and then helped Arwen comb out her hair and braid it for sleep. She was wearing armour today: a steely mail tunic, blue leggings and tall black boots, and heavy leather aillettes. Her hair was braided around her head in a dark crown and kept in its place with pinned silver stars. “Your clothes are still being washed, but don’t worry: Fingon thinks we might be of a size, so I’ve brought you more of mine.”

“Oh, no – that is far too kind,” Arwen said, dismayed.

It was still a new experience, this facet of her time in Beleriand: being a burden, being beholden, again and again. She had long been the lady of Imladris in her mother’s stead, the bread-giver, the hostess, the one who moved to make things right and comfortable for others. Being one who needed aid with the barest sufficiencies had been bitter in Menegroth, and it was bitter now.

“I have no need for them now,” said the woman, shrugging, and shook out for her a gown of deep Fingolfinian blue, scalloped with gold thread. The neckline was very square, and its split-sleeves trailed almost to the floor. It was something that a queen might wear.

How could Arwen refuse such kindness? The gown something she might have worn in her father’s house - if perhaps the colour had been a little quieter, a little less bright - but she couldn’t look at it and not see those very colours trodden in the mire.

She had no desire to make of herself a banner. “Thank you,” she said. When she had dressed, she asked, “Where is the King?”

“Conferring with the commanders of the East, I believe,” the woman said. “Somewhere in their camp, before we split our forces. Your things are here now. Fingon had someone bring them over while you slept.”

And indeed they were. The sword, one of the few possessions she had brought out of Menegroth, Lúthien’s comb, and her silver chatelaine, which had not been something she could wear with her Marchwarden leathers. Arwen reclasped it about her waist, and the woman’s eyes lingered on it, and its dangling seals, but she said nothing.

“Do you know where the Haladin have been billeted?”

A shrug. “Fingon will be back soon enough.” The woman pushed some of the hanging silk aside, and then she was gone.

The gown was its own form of dungeon. It was so long it trailed on the floor, and Arwen had to loop some of it over her arm to walk without tripping. Even then, the long sleeves got underfoot. To wear it beyond the pavilion, to walk wearing it through the camp and all the busy soldiers, through the mud, was unthinkable; it was not her gown to soil, and she could not walk through the camp wearing without drawing every eye.

She waited within the pavilion. She waited and studied the battle-plan on the table, trying to see what her brothers would have seen, and her father, who had been Gil-galad’s herald and second in command. Aragorn, who had been born and bred for long and ancient war.

She waited and studied the silk ceiling.

She waited, and then she went to look through the scrolls in Fingon’s desk.

It is accomplished, said one letter. My lord, we trust to return to your side before the battle, but the child is safe in Brithombar now should aught befall…

Another began, Fingon - that you should ask such a thing of me is impossible. If I had the desire to aid any venture wrought by a Fëanorian, still I could not do so! I have left it to my people’s consciences, and so Gwindor and his small company will go, but I will not and could not order any of the people that were once Finrod’s to fight and die alongside Curufin and Celegorm…

Another: I do not know if we will gain all, but certainly we must venture all: I am learning, you see. I take you for my guiding star. I cannot trust my own judgment, so I surrender in this to you as in all else, and know myself safe in your hands, body and soul. We gamble greatly, but I have known you before to bring light out of dark, joy from sorrow, to find grace when things seemed beyond hope. If we fail to act, we shall fall to a long and losing game of attrition in any case; perhaps if it is my part to follow you this once –

It was not for her eyes, and Arwen let it curl closed.

This experience was doing things to her she did not like. She had become a dependent, a truthful liar, an ungrateful runaway, and now a spy. She would rather have burnt her fingertips than open another’s letter in Imladris. Yet the great battle drew near, and she did not know enough to know how much time she had, or what it was that the Valar wanted her to do. What acts were merited in their service?

If they had brought her hence, in the year of the Nirnaeth, there was surely work to be done. But what was it? How could she do anything at all, and yet obey Melian’s warning?

-

High King Fingon did not return until it was nearly mid-afternoon. “Ah, little leaf,” he said, and smiled to see her. “Look at you! Now you look like a proper princess of the house of Finwë.”

The woman who had given Arwen the gown raised her dark brows. “Aredhel would beat you with her sword for saying that.”

“Would have beaten,” King Fingon said, smile fading.

“We don’t know that she’s dead.”

“Given what I do know, how can I assume otherwise?” He looked at Arwen. “Do you know?”

Some Songs must be Sung. But that one had ended already, hadn’t it? The stories Arwen had learned had never been told in the order of years. They were whole tales, complete of themselves: Turgon, Idril and Aredhel disappeared to found Gondolin, and then Aredhel was lost, was found again, her son at her side, only in order to be lost once more. Lost again, Melian the Maia queen had said sadly, who would know. Yes. That song had to be over.

“Yes,” Arwen said. “I am so very sorry.”

King Fingon had already thought that his sister was dead. The woman had insisted she wasn’t. Yet the confirmation hit them similarly. Fingon closed his eyes for one long moment, and so did she. There was something closed and hard in their faces which made them seem very alien to her before Arwen realised what it was: the stoic bearing of one more blow after many. After so very many. She had seen it on her father’s face on the day her mother had sailed West.

“Well,” said the woman at last, whose name Arwen didn’t know. She should know it, because the woman was surely family. It was written in her arrogantly arched dark brows and her high cheekbones, the shape and setting of her grey eyes: things that were also Arwen’s, which had made Fingon look at her before he knew where she came from and claim her without question as a niece.

“How?” said King Fingon, and then, “No, don’t tell me.”

The woman glanced at him.

“Better not.”

“You believe that this is really Artanis’s grandchild?” she asked. “With those Fëanorian dental fricatives? Artanis?”

“It is very funny,” the king agreed, managing a smile. “Turgon’s descendent, too! Imagine what he'd say.”

“I never speak Quenya with my grandmother,” Arwen said.

“That sounds just like her, even after seven thousand years. Stubborn!”

“So stubborn,” said the woman, also briefly smiling. “I am Lalwen, little girl: your great-aunt, if that means anything to you, and if your story is true.”

Arwen had never – no, she had heard of Lalwen, daughter of Finwë: only a name, a line on one of the many family trees that led nowhere. They were generation too ancient and mythical for her to comprehend, the children of Finwë: the three High Kings, and the two daughters of whom nothing was still known. She had not even known that one of Finwë’s daughters had left Aman.

“My lady,” Arwen said. “–Your highness?”

“Lalwen will do. Fingon says you’re not to tell us anything we shouldn’t know, but I want to know, what is the point of that? Surely you’re here to do something.”

“Melian said-–”

“Melian,” said Lalwen, daughter of Finwë, in exasperation. “I grew up with Maiar, child, and I’ll tell you, while some of them are perfectly nice, they can also be perfectly useless. What has Melian the Maia done in the war against Morgoth, all these centuries before we came? Precious nothing! What is she doing now? Nothing still! Oh yes, her Girdle: but what will that mean, if all the rest of Beleriand falls, and only her little bubble remains? What life will they have? What chance will they have, when they’re all that’s left, and Morgoth’s gaze turns to them at last? They won’t even come out to fight while they can! Her daughter has done ten times what she ever did, and she’s only half the Maia Melian is.”

It was blasphemy. It was also unfair, when Arwen remembered the many possible futures in Melian’s eyes, and the way she moved so carefully through the world, lest through the wrong gesture she sever the one shining golden thread among many possible threads that would lead to success. And yet –

“Oh, do laugh,” King Fingon said. “I know you want to! I can see it in your eyes.”

"Melian is my kin: I don’t think I should.”

“Good blood,” Lalwen said, “if it’s from the daughter. I like people who do things. But what I want to know is, how does it come to you? I understand Artanis having a Sindar child: from what I understand, she’s gone very Sindar indeed, and sits at Melian’s feet and talks to trees and all of that. If only we had a Maia of Manwë or Tulkas here, and not one of those pettifogging Yavanndili: when I think of the waste–! But where does Turgon come into it? Clearly there’s a future, if Artanis is to have a child, and that child to have one in turn; for Doriath, if not us. For Turgon and Idril, if not us! Either we’ll win, or we’ll die. If the former – why are you here? And if the latter – how can it matter what you tell us, if we’re dead anyway?”

They both looked at her, even Fingon, and their expectation was a palpable thing.

Arwen opened her mouth. Then she closed it. The table crowded with little figures seemed to loom very large in the center of the room. Elladan had always simply removed lost troops from the map: Elrohir had tipped them over instead, letting the little carven armies clog the field like the thousands of dead they represented. Elrohir had gone through a phase of braiding his hair with gold when Arwen was very young. They were very severe now, her brothers, dressed always for war, for sorties, for silent movement through the trees. It wasn’t often that Elrond could persuade them to dress as princes of the Noldor, princes of the Sindar, and have them appear in the Hall of Fire in glory. Even on the high holidays of the Gates of Summer, the Winter Farewell, on the days where the triumphs of the Eldar in their long defeat were remembered. And the losses.

She could feel Melian’s cool, inhuman hands on her shoulders. She could see Fingon’s bright banner trampled in the mud and blood, and she knew that the reason she kept thinking of the banner was because it was more bearable than thinking about the man himself. The king standing before her, alive and vibrant and handsome and kind, too gaudily jewelled, who would be trampled, too.

She knew nothing of Lalwen’s fate, but that itself suggested no future.

Whatever her face said, the brief passion on Lalwen’s died and fled, leaving her sad-eyed once more. King Fingon said, “It’s all right, Undómiel. You don’t have to say anything. It’s been a long time since we had a family dinner with more than just the two of us, hasn’t it, Lalwen? I’ll tell my knights that I’ve had enough battle-talk for today. I’m sure we have some stories about your grandmother you’ve never heard, leafling: not if you won’t stand hearing ill of Melian! Let me tell you, however grand Artanis is in your time, she was my little cousin first –”

“We’ll drink to Aredhel,” said Lalwen, “and speak of her, too.”

-

The next day saw Lalwen and Fingon called away again. Lalwen seemed to be as much his general as his aunt, a commander in the field rather than the keeper of his household. More herald than chatelaine, although it seemed that she had held that role in Hithlum, first for Fingolfin her brother and then for Fingon her nephew.

Where was his queen, if he had one? That was a name that was missing in the histories. By Arwen’s time, there were no Mithrim Noldor left in Middle-Earth. They had died in Beleriand, most of them in the battle shortly to come; they had died in the last battle against Morgoth, following Gil-galad and Finarfin’s banners; or they had sailed, when forgiveness came at last, and the way to the land of their birth had opened again. They had not written down much, or else much that they had written had been lost when Mithrim fell to Morgoth when Beleriand was drowned. They had kept the details of Hithlum’s court, which had not then been secrets, preserved in their perfect Elven memories, and they had taken them with them to the land no one could come back from.

Gil-galad had been High King after Fingon: most histories suggested he was Fingon’s son. He hadn’t come out of the air.

-

The gown kept her in the tent.

She missed the work of her hands. Sitting idle was difficult. At Imladris, there was always work; and when there wasn’t, she had her own, her sewing, her embroidery. To do nothing was foreign to her. To do nothing was to deny where she was, and why.

-

King Fingon didn’t come back at night. Arwen understood the calls on his time. He sent his apologies, and bade her treat his pavilion as her own. The last line of his note suggested that she stay there, and not venture out. They would discuss things further when he had time. This was underlined.

Arwen understood that, too. But she had spent months in Menegroth, that future tomb, sitting at Lúthien’s abandoned loom and wearing Lúthien’s abandoned gowns, and in her dark hair fastening the star-shaped jewels that had once been Lúthien’s, because it pleased Thingol to see her so.

When Fingon’s people brought her Marchwarden clothes at last, washed and mended, she changed into them.

-

The long-gone, currently-alive Mithrim and Hithlum Noldor didn’t seem to find her at all remarkable anymore in her Sindarin greys and greens. They directed her to the Mannish part of the Western camp without question, but had little idea of where the Haladin were camped. There were so many people here: so many Elves, more Noldor than she’d ever seen in one place, even when she was young and many living at Imladris had yet to sail. And so many Men. There were tents and tents of them, clean and neat enough, but far less colourful than the pavilions of the Noldor.

They were mostly all Hadorians, the solid yellow pieces on Fingon’s battlemap. They were taller, blonder, and cheerfuller than the Haladin. Here and there, you could see Bëorians, darker than the others, who had managed to flee lost and burned Ladros after the fall of Dorthonion and fled to the safety of Hithlum. There were many fewer of these, Fingon’s blue pieces.

The Haladin host, which had seemed great to her when it was first mustered, was smaller still, and it was still separate from the others, self-sufficient. The first of them to notice her as she approached looked wary, but relaxed when she shook her hood back from her face.

“Lady Elf!” he said. Hallir, that was his name. He was very young. “I thought you were with your own people now?”

“And that I would forget my friends?”

He blushed pink.

“Lady?” said Hunleth, getting to her feet. “Would you believe that these Hadorians and Bëorings have almost no women fighting at all? When the alliance needs every sword! I’d say they’ve been softened by long closeness with their precious Elves, but that’s no excuse when all the Elf-women I see around here are dressed for battle.”

“Hunleth,” said Hallir, in agony.

“Hunleth,” said Arwen, and laughed. Her sword was slung at her back again, and if it wasn’t her needle, she nevertheless felt useful. “I missed your company.”

Hunleth, too, went pink. “Well!” she said. “Perhaps you’ll fight a bout with me later. I’ve beaten all my cousins already, and the Hadorians won’t fight me, even the ones I’m related to.”

“Related to?” Arwen said, and then –

“Undómiel,” Mablung said, moving from the shadows where he had been concealed. “Why came you here?”

sShe was pleased to see even his familiar dourness. “I came to visit, of course.”

“Your uncle the High King permitted this?”

“The High King does not hold any power over me but that of affection. I would do much that he asked of me: but it is not for him to say where I may go and where I may not.”

“Then he’s careless of your safety, and also your honour,” said Mablung Heavy-Hand, hero of song. “I wonder he lets you linger here at all. He should have sent you at once to Hithlum, if he had any sense - golodh that he is.”

“Noldo that he is, he calls you friend,” Arwen said, to watch him flinch.

“Go back to your golodh kin,” he said, for perhaps the same reason. “We have work enough to do here, without seeing to you: that is the Noldo King’s care now, however poorly he does it.”

“How rude Elves are!” said Hunleth. “Not you, lady – this rough fellow here.” She eyed him like she would like to fight a bout with him too, perhaps in real earnest.

Hallir looked like he wanted to do the same. Did they not know who Mablung was? Her brothers would have fought each other for the right to touch his famous hand, and died at his frown. At least, they would have when they were still young and merry, before their mother sailed West.

“Lady Elf,” said one of the Haladin, getting to his feet. It was Haldir, Halmir's son, and he bowed deeply to her. Arwen put her hand out to stay him, but he kept his head lowered. “Forgive me: I had not realised you were the High King’s kin on your journey here. I beg pardon for any disrespect any of my people may have offered.”

Mablung raised his brows at her. See?

“None was given,” Arwen said, and then, “Do not bow to me!”

“Your uncle sends us no further word?”

“He sent nothing by me. I only wished to see you all again.”

“You do us much honour,” he said, but it was all ruined; all the camaraderie of the journey from Brethil, walking under the skies again after the months deep in Menegroth, listening to the trees and the grasses and the river, the way the Haladin talked to each other, her unknown and unknowing human kin from the dawn of the world. They had looked on her as an Elf, but the Haladin had never considered Elves their superiors: now they saw her as the High King’s niece, and if they didn’t respect royalty, either, they could see what Fingon meant, here, in this enormous camp of people who had come to his call, and they were wary of her.

“This is the High King’s niece?” said another Man, who had been sitting at Haldir’s side before he rose. He was not tall, but rather broad, like the stocky Man-pieces on Fingon’s battle-table, and his fair hair was pulled back simply from his face. “How do you do, lady – Undómiel, is it?”

He was looking at her very closely, like he knew her already, or was searching for something. Then he grinned, wide and white through his short beard, a little crooked, utterly Mannish. “I’ve met some of your family, and you have a look of them. If you know what I mean?”

It was like he was expecting her to understand something from that. “I have been told so,” Arwen said cautiously, and looked to Lord Haldir for an explanation, or at least an introduction.

“My sister-son,” he said, bowing awkwardly again. “I’m sorry, my lady -- Highness. This is Húrin son of Galdor, of the House of Hador: son of my sister Hareth.”

“Did I not say so?” said Húrin son of Galdor, laughing. Húrin the Steadfast, who would suffer as no Man perhaps had ever suffered, who would watch his family walk into the net of a dark and cruel fate and be unable to help them, who was young and friendly and broad-shouldered now, and would sit for decades chained to a mock throne as his body withered and he slowly aged, and be released again only when all the hope and sweetness of his life was gone. “Are you well, lady?”

There was an arm around her waist suddenly, and the green smell of the forest in her nose. “Undómiel,” Mablung said.

“Sit down,” said Húrin Thalion, and had Mablung direct her to the seat near the fire he’d just vacated. “What is it, lady?” He paused, and then said in Quenya, as shocking from a Man if he’d starting speaking Valarin,“Can I help you? I shall, if I can, for your other uncle’s sake.”

Mablung jerked, and then his arm was gone, and his scent, too. “How dare you speak that tongue here,” he said in thick, furious Mannish. “Under this sky, in Aran Thingol’s own lands that were?”

“It was not something I could say in any other tongue,” Húrin said. “There are things that cannot be whispered too far afield.”

“Yes, and I don’t know that you ought to have said them at all, in that language or another,” said another Man Arwen didn’t know, who was sitting by her side as he had been sitting by Húrin’s when her seat was his. He looked Hadorian, too, fair and friendly, his eyes a surprisingly soft and pretty blue. He had no beard. “Húrin, you know better!”

“It’s Turgon’s own niece,” argued Húrin Thalion, again in Quenya, and the blue-eyed Man said, “I see him in her face too, but that doesn’t mean we may break our Oaths of Silence!”

Mablung hissed like the fire itself.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said the blue-eyed Man to Arwen, laughing. He was little more than a boy, really. So was Húrin. They couldn’t be thirty. That was so little, in the lives of Men; especially for these Men, before the Gift of Elenna. They were so young. Was it kinder, that this one would die all the sooner? “Shall we get you something to drink? Or eat? Don’t you Elves have some kind of drink to help with funny turns?”

“Huor,” Arwen said.

“Yes,” said her great-great grandfather cheerfully. “You’ve heard of me, then?”

“And not me?” said Húrin Thalion, his famous brother, pretending dismay. “When we’ve lived all our lives side-by-side? What oversight is this?”

“I’ve heard of you both,” said Arwen. She swallowed. She let herself feel the weight of the earth beneath her, the solidity of it, the distant cool sky in its arch above, where Huor’s grandson would one day sail in lonely splendor, a Silmaril on his brow. “Your grandfather Halmir mentioned you in Brethil before we departed.”

“Well, there’s nothing to shock you in that,” said Húrin. Mablung had disappeared, silently, to fetch miruvor. With a stagy look around the fire that made sure no other bristling Sindar were in earshot, Húrin said, in Quenya again, “Or is it from your other uncle that you’ve heard of us? We’ve been very careful in speaking with the High King, but has he heard from Turgon that we...?”

“Húrin,” said Huor despairingly.

“Yes,” Arwen said, because what else could she say? “Yes, I know that you – yes.”

Grinning, Húrin put his hand over his heart and then touched his lips in a gesture that was very ancient and very familiar.

Arwen had seen Glorfindel make it: tall, glowing Glorfindel, who had watched over her from her birth, who was as familiar to her as her own father, and almost as beloved, as much and more her uncle than anyone she was bound to by blood could ever be. Glorfindel, who went somewhere dark and silent in his head every year when the Gates of Summer were celebrated. While everyone else celebrated the change of season, he would stand in the dark looking towards to the distant West, and place his hand over his heart and then bring that hand to his mouth, in silent memory of the king he had once served in a distant, secret White City in a fallen world, the same city where Húrin and Huor had once been brought by Eagles as boys, and been loved.

“You are a disaster,” said Huor to his brother. “No discretion at all!”

“Princess Idril’s own cousin!”

“And Prince Maeglin’s!” Huor said, but laughingly.

“Who?” said Mablung. He was back, with a flask in his hand and a worried Beleg Cúthalion at his side: and for a moment Arwen seemed to step out of her body and just look at the circle of people she had, somehow, against all logic and probability, been permitted to meet in the glory of their lives before their deaths. Beleg Cúthalion, the Unbegotten, who would one day die with the black sword of Húrin’s son in his heart, and that son’s kiss on his lips. Mablung Heavy-Hand, who had fought and would fight by the side of the hero Beren Camlost, who would die trying to save his king not terribly long from now.

Húrin himself, that laughing hero with the axe, who would fight and fight and fight for Fingon’s sake, and be taken into darkness, and one day stand broken and beaten at the gates of the White City he had loved so much, and curse all inside all to death but for the fragment Idril would save.

Huor who would die only days from now, young and unknown, but whose son would be touched with destiny by the Lord of the Waters himself, whose grandson would be the first to reach the Undying Lands: whose great-grandson would be Arwen’s own beloved father, the kindest person she had ever known, and also the saddest.

“Khíril,” said Beleg, aghast, as though he was seeing all this on her face. He had served Melian the Maia all his life, and he knew the look of someone listening to the Music.

“Who is Prince Maeglin?” said Mablung again, and dropped to Arwen’s side. His face was still its glowering self, but his hands were gentle as they wrapped her white fingers around the flask. “That is a Sindar name: and I know no princes who wear it.”

Huor and Húrin traded looks. If they breathed a word of Aredhel, the story Melian had woven for her would be torn apart.

“That is not your business,” Arwen said, as calmly as she might. “The Princes of the Noldor are not your concern; and nor do you care for them, I believe.”

Mablung got to his feet swiftly, and very slowly brushed the dirt from his leggings where he had knelt on the ground before her. “Indeed,” he said, “princess,” and stalked off into the darkness.

Chapter Text

She sat at the Haladin’s temporary hearth for a long time after that, the small vial of mirúvor clasped in her cold fingers. Sat, and managed to eat a small portion of the evening meal they shared with her. Sat, silent, wondering, and watched the fire gleam on Húrin Thalion’s bronze beard, on Huor her great-grandfather’s fair head.

They were talking about the war as though it was a less fraught topic for them than Prince Maeglin of Gondolin. Their Haladin uncles, Haldir and Hundar, nodded, by turns adding to the conversation, but in large part listening to their account of the great muster of people, Elves and Men, from Hithlum; of the long journey from Mithrim, the weeks it had taken for the army to come together here at the Wall as different parties came to join them – or else as it became clear they would never come.

“My heart was glad to hear that my mother’s people would not fail to stand against the Dark Enemy,” said Húrin, with a brief glance at Beleg Cúthalion, who was still staring at Arwen across the fire.

The ancient hero was here. But the Sindar were not. Nor were the Nargothrondrim, save a handful.

“Fingon is their High King,” said Huor, still sounding amazed. “Their king is just a petty-king: Fingon rules the Noldor. But they won’t come! They stay in their halls!”

“Underground halls seem to have a strange effect on Elves,” said young Hundad, shaking his head. “They grow timid, and tame, and hiss at the sight of the sun!”

“Are you well now, Undómiel?” inquired Beleg, somewhat stiffly. “I will see you back to your uncle’s side.”

“Oh, no,” said Hunleth. “We were going to fight!”

“I need no escort.”

“Yet you will allow me to serve you so, I hope.”

“Thank you, but there is no need.”

Beleg bowed his head at her refusal, his face impassive. She suspected that Mablung would not have listened to her refusal; neither would Elrohir and Elladan. Aragorn would have listened, but Arwen would not have told him no. He would know whether or not an escort was truly necessary, and not suggested it save at need; and she heeded his thoughtful counsel whenever he gave it, as he heeded hers.

That was why she loved him: one of the many thousand reasons that were as great as his shining soul, and as silly as the way his eyes crinkled at her when he smiled, the way his rough hands were so gentle when they touched her face, her throat, caught in the silk of her hair.

She honoured the calluses so hardily earned through long years of travail. Arwen remembered the youth who had walked with her through her father’s garden, face still soft, the full stark beauty of his strong bones not yet revealed, and who had called her by a name out of story; but she loved the man’s hard hands.

“I’ll go,” said Hunleth, jumping to her feet. “Not that the Lady Elf needs my sword when she has her own! If you allow me?”

“I would welcome a friend,” Arwen said. She rose, and looked once more around the fire.

“My lady,” said Húrin Thalion, and touched his lips and heart again in the ancient gesture she still thought of as Glorfindel’s own. His brother, less stately but more animated, did the same.

They were smiling, their faces warm and ruddy in the fire-light. They were young. Húrin had a wife and children at home, and the height and breadth of a man grown, the bearing of a chieftain: but the lines she had seen touch Aragorn’s eyes were not there yet, and there was no silver in his hair. Huor was younger yet. The child who would become her father’s father was already a spark in his wife’s belly, the next stitch of the story that would weave on into the centuries already set.

“Give your uncle our greetings, when you see him next,” said Huor. He didn’t mean Fingon. There was something in his smile that suggested that he knew he might never see Turgon again himself, however long he lived, and yet it wasn’t sad. Men were so strange in ways the Eldar could scarcely grasp, accepting the impossible and yet living on.

Hunleth tugged on her arm.

“Be well,” Arwen said to Huor and Húrin. She touched her lips and then her heart to them, and took her leave before they could question the gesture.

-

It was nearly night, and the small fires here and there stood out now in the deepening dark. The Men whose faces Arwen had looked at with interest when she came through the camps were by turns bathed in firelight and then cast into deep shadow. The bustle was less, and the smell of meat cooking very strong, and in places the smoke was thick.

Hunleth was good company, with strong words about the rudeness of men in general – in Elves and Men both – occasionally stopping by one fire or another to trade words with Hadorians she had met – not all the words were friendly – as she guided Arwen back towards the silk tents of the Noldor. There was a clear demarcation between Men and Elves. No walls, no drawn lines in the dirt; yet the organization of the small encampments changed perceptibly, the smoke was gone, the chatter died.

Somewhere a harp was being played, very beautiful and very sad, and there was the soft sound of many voices singing.

“Well!” said Hunleth awkwardly. “I expect you don’t need any more direction from here.”

Would Arwen see her again before the battle came? The muster was still finishing, and the parties had yet to split to East and West. But it would be soon. She knew the girl before her was long dead, but it was hard to believe it, looking at her, very young and very freckled, determined to be a shield-maiden worthy of the people of Haleth the Chief.

Had she ever seen an Orc? Surely she had: the Haladin held the river pass at Brethil. Had she ever seen an army, one armed with dragons and fell beasts and driven forth by a great malevolent will? Arwen had, many nights, when she sat at her embroidery screen and felt her mind’s eye clear and the petals of the future unfurl before her.

“We part in strange times,” she said, “but my blessing goes with you.”

Hunleth laughed, her awkwardness passing. “Do you think I need it? I know how to use my sword!”

“Nevertheless,” Arwen said. She watched the short, valiant little figure until it disappeared again among the smoking fires of the Men which stretched out along the Wall like fireflies in the dark, from furthest West to farthest East.

-

She was almost back to Fingon’s great tent with its bright banners when someone caught her arm and turned her around.

“Lúthien,” they breathed, “Lúthien,” and then there were hands on her shoulders. Rough hands. The stranger shook her, strongly enough that her hair began to come down from its borrowed pins. “I can’t believe you’d have the gall to come – damn you – damn you –”

And then he was kissing her, one hand digging into her arm like a vice, the other forcing her chin up. She struggled, but it was hard to find purchase against someone in full plate-armour, against the thick breastplate between his body and hers; the hard gauntleted hands, the steel gorget protecting his throat.

Use your knee, if you haven’t a knife, her brothers had taught her. When she tried to do that, he was all metal there, too. Greaves protected his calves from her feet, and her sword was still strapped to her back: and all the while she fought him he was muttering “Lúthien, Lúthien, you bitch, you whore, Lúthien,” and peppering frantic kisses on her forehead, her nose, her cheekbone, her jaw.

“I heard you died; they told me you died —”

“Celegorm,” someone said very coldly.

The stranger tore himself away, or was torn. Arwen finally had air to breathe and mind to feel outrage. No one had ever kissed her against her will before; no one had ever kissed her but Aragorn.

The same cold voice said, “I believe that the lady requires an apology.”

“She’ll be waiting a long time,” said the stranger, panting with anger or desire or a noxious mixture of the two. “She stole my fucking horse, she stole my fucking dog, she stole the fucking Silmaril and fucked off to Ossiriand with a pathetic fucking human–”

Now that his face was no longer twisted up with passion so close to hers it was all detail instead of whole, Arwen could see that he was one of the most beautiful Elves she had ever met. The planes of his face were as smoothly and flawlessly modelled as a golden mask, and his long hair was the colour of pure mithril: but the loveliness of the mask was marred by yearning fury.

“Lúthien of Doriath, I presume,” said her rescuer. Arwen turned to him instead. He was an Elf, too, as lean as a greyhound with a stark-boned, thin, face. The spare lines of his long body were taut with tension.

“I am not!”

“Not –!” Her attacker began, scoffing; and then stopped. “Not Lúthien,” he said, and it was no longer a question as his eyes skimmed her face, taking in whatever differences there must be. The anger left his voice, and the perfectly-arched silver brows met in confusion. “Who the fuck are you, then?”

“I am Undómiel.”

“Get our tongue out of your mouth, Sindar bitch,” snarled silver-gold.

“Gladly,” Arwen said. “Pray keep your tongue out of mine!”

“Celegorm,” said her cold rescuer. “The lady still requires an apology. If she is a stranger to you, still the more do you owe her one!”

“I’ll give her an apology if she gives me a proper fucking name,” said silver-gold – said Celegorm Fëanorion.

Celegorm the Fair, a creature out of nightmares to terrify Sindar children all the way down the ages to Arwen’s own childhood. The Elf who had captured Lúthien Tinúviel, whose sword had slain Dior the Beautiful. The Elf whose liegemen had taken two small boys out into the forest on a cold winter’s night with the snow falling, and had left them there until they ceased to move, until the snow came down to cover them like a blanket. They had done that in this man’s name, for his memory.

He was the monster from her childhood stories. He was as cruelly beautiful as a hawk. His spit was still wet on her lips. He was looking at her like he wanted to shake her, only for the face she wore; and like he wanted to kiss her again, and kiss her, and kiss her.

Everyone knew that Celegorm the Fair had tried to cage Lúthien in her flight. He had clipped her wings, taken away her cloak of hair, tried to bind her underground in the dark. She had wandered unwisely into his grasp, and he had seized her and the advantage she offered: leverage over Thingol Greycloak, a pathway to power in the Kingdom of the Sindar, a gaming-piece to trade in the unimaginable event that Beren and Finrod and their ten loyal knights did claim the Silmaril.

No one in the histories had ever seriously suggested that he wanted Lúthien for Lúthien’s own sake, although she was the most beautiful child of Elvendom ever born. Daeron had pined after her over forest and hill, and she alone had moved Morgoth the Dark Enemy into confusion, and she alone had made the Lord of the Dead himself bend to her will. No one who had ever seen her had ever forgotten her shining face: but it was Beren Camlost loved her, they said, and was alone worthy of her love.

Celegorm the Fair had come with vengeful sword to her once-home after she died her final death and moved beyond his grasp, beyond anyone’s; and he had put that sword through the heart of her only child, the boy-king who wore Lúthien’s face.

He would do that. Dior Eluchíl was still an infant somewhere in Ossiriand, safe in his mother’s arms. Doriath still stood, whole, and the little princes who would be lost and never found were not even born.

“If you’re not Lúthien,” said Celegorm the Fair, pursuing his point doggedly, “who the fuck are you?”

“Celegorm,” said the cold one yet again. He had red-brown hair clubbed roughly back from his head, and a very nicely-shaped mouth that was currently being pressed together tightly. “That’s still not an apology.”

Celegorm the Fair spat in a calculated arc that ended just before Arwen’s feet to show what he thought of that, and her rescuer sighed, apparently giving up on the line of argument.

“Go.”

“You’re not my king,” said Celegorm. “You don’t get to give me orders!”

He spat again, this time at the cold one; but then he left, not before stealing one last hungry, burning glance back at Arwen.

When he was safely gone, Arwen returned her focus to her rescuer.

His eyes were palest grey, as cold as his voice. “I apologise for my brother,” he said. “He never has been house-trained. But he does raise a pertinent question: who are you, if not Lúthien?”

“I told you my name,” Arwen said. The surge of relief that had come when Celegorm left was gone: her blood was thick in her ears again. His brother. His brother. “But you have not, I think, told me yours?”

“I am the lord of Himring,” said Maedhros Fëanorion, another ogre out of ancient song, but also the sad shadow that sometimes touched her father’s face. “I don’t mean to doubt your word, but I will observe that Undómiel is how my people might choose to say Tinúviel: and that Lúthien of Doriath’s aid would be very welcome in the fight ahead.”

“If you know that,” Arwen said, her voice very thin, “you also know that none of the Doriathrim would utter a word in Quenya, nor ever shall.”

“I do know it,” said the lord of Himring. “So there my surmise ends. My brother does not, after all, recognise you as Lúthien, and he would know: yet who knows what changes the body and spirit might undergo, passing through death and taking up a mortal fate and form?”

He studied her for a long moment. Then he reached for her throat.

He didn’t touch her. Rather, with his very fingertips he lifted the golden chain around her neck from her flesh and tugged on it until the Ring of Barahir was drawn ineluctably from its hiding place and fell into his scarred white palm.

The snakes, the flower-crown, the great green stone: they gleamed even in the low light, the ancient gold worn from the handling of a thousand fingers. The ring had been passed father to son since the time of Elros Tar-Minyatur, all the way down through the ages. Elros had had it from his own mother, who this man would orphan: yet this man was the one who would raise Elros to manhood. It was the ring Aragorn had worn until he gave it to Arwen in troth, and she did not like to see it in the hand of any other, and less still in these long murderer’s fingers.

Maedhros Fëanorion looked at it for a long moment. Then he said, “I last saw this on my cousin Finrod’s finger, some time before he died.”

“I came by it fairly,” Arwen said.

“Oh, I am certain that you did,” he said, and then he let the ring go, and bowed to her, very deeply. “I hope to speak to you again, my lady Undómiel.”

-

“Oh, no!” said High King Fingon, when Arwen related this to him. He had not taxed her with her decision to leave his rooms, against his express command; only lifted his eyes briefly to the blue silk ceiling and muttered something under his breath that sounded like Irissë! “I didn’t realise you looked so much like Lúthien of Doriath. I’ve never met the woman.”

“I have heard it before,” Arwen said, with not a little bitterness.

When she was younger, she would have given anything only to look like herself: to move through the world and not raise ghosts in the ancient, haunted eyes of those who loved her. It was worse still to be in the First Age, when the ghosts were still alive or only newly dead. To be looked at by those who had loved them, and who knew Arwen not at all. If love was the word for what Celegorm Fëanorion had felt for Lúthien Tinúviel.

She rubbed her hand over her mouth as though she could wipe away the foul memory, and King Fingon said, divining her thought, “I’ll send for water and soap. Here, have – oh, will this do for now?” and offered her, a little helplessly, the trailing end of one long embroidered sleeve.

The gold thread was scratchy against her lips, but she welcomed its scouring. “Oh,” she said, half-laugh, half-sob, remembering how it had felt to stand there with the traces of Celegorm’s mouth still lingering on hers, “of all the times not to have a handkerchief!”

“A what?”

Ah. There had been no Hobbits in Beleriand, or if there were, no one had ever caught sight of them. Therefore, no homely little practical Hobbit inventions. As a people, they might not even exist yet, far over the crest of the Blue Mountains where Arwen’s grandparents were apparently exploring together, unwed: they wouldn’t be known to the Elves for thousands of years.

Even then, they would not be known well until the day Bilbo Baggins turned up at Imladris in the train of Durin’s folk. Not until he appeared again a few decades later, with a travelling pack over one shoulder, a year’s supply of pipe-weed, and an intention to stay for a single winter that would, in the end, span the rest of his life. He had become a dear friend of Arwen’s in his genial retirement. How many times had she walked through her father’s halls with him trotting at her side; how many evenings had she looked down the table in the Hall of Fire to see him sitting there? How many times had he offered her his handkerchief? On how many birthdays of her own had she given him little linen squares with the humble flowers he liked best, embroidered by her own hand?

“Never mind,” she said, pushing aside the painful spasm of home-sickness, and let Fingon’s sleeve fall. He was wearing mail under the fine surcoat, and the gold-washed iron links glittered like fish-scale in shadow under the veiling velvets. “Only tell me: what have I done in wandering and letting myself be seen?”

“Nothing irredeemable,” King Fingon said, although there was a line between his dark brows that might have been scoured with a knife. “Only it’s a pity the Fëanorions caught wind of you. They’re not exactly sane when it comes to anything do with – Well, let us say only that if they believe that there is any chance that Thingol would give up the Silmaril for you, any of them, things might become very difficult indeed.”

Given what Arwen knew of their future deeds, that was something of an understatement.

“I might have to send them to the East sooner than I had planned,” said the High King of the Noldor, still frowning. The lamplight sparkled on the gold of his earrings, his braided hair, his beringed hands. “Only, I’d hoped – Well! We’ll see. I can’t send you home to Hithlum: that’s where Morgoth’s wrath will first fall, if we should fail. I had thought of sending you to Nargothrond, but I worry now that Nargothrond is no place for you, if you look so like Lúthien Tinúviel. Her face is not unknown in those halls. Would Doriath be so very bad? You said that they were kind to you there.”

Would it be so very bad to spend the next thirty years under the earth inside the Girdle, under Thingol’s eye, mewed in Luthien’s empty rooms, waiting for the moment the Girdle fell? Would it be worse to spend a shorter span in Nargothrond, waiting for the dragon?

“It would be,” said Arwen firmly, and the King smiled kindly, but his eyes were distant: the eyes of a king of Elves making plans and thinking through logistics, moving people around on his board like game-pieces.

When the soap and water came, he sent her to her bed.

-

She woke to hard voices through the fine silk partition dividing her from the main tent.

“Could you really not keep Celegorm a little more tightly on his leash?” the High King was saying. “I can’t have him assaulting stray Noldor maidens because he thinks they look a little like the Sindar princess! Do you know how many dark-haired women there are in my camp right now?”

“No,” said Maedhros Fëanorion, coolly unmistakable, and Arwen went still. “No, that line might have worked, Fingon – If only your stray Noldor maiden wasn’t wearing Finrod’s ring.”

“He was so very open-handed with his baubles!” said High King Fingon sadly.

“That ring, I happen to know,” said Maedhros Fëanorion, unswayed, “was given to Camlost’s father, and from him to Camlost, who brought it into Finrod’s kingdom and held it hostage for Finrod’s aid, and, in the end, for his death. Celegorm and Curufin were there to see it. Celegorm and Curufin told me of it. A strange and bloody token, it seems to me, to pass from one-handed Beren to his beloved: yet I cannot imagine he would give such a thing to any other.”

He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had changed. “Why lie to me? What do you imagine I would do to her? What do you think I am?”

“I know what you are,” said King Fingon. “I know, and I would trust you with my life, with my very soul–”

“You shouldn’t,” said the lord of Himring bleakly.

“Rather too late to tell me that, I think.”

“I am sorry for it.”

King Fingon made an angry noise, and then said, in his king’s voice more, “I will be asking you and Maglor to begin moving East tomorrow. I recommend sending Curufin and Celegorm’s people first, few as they are. Send them with Caranthir and his Men.”

“We hadn’t planned to begin moving into position for three more days. I thought Maglor and I were to lead the movement East?”

“My plans have changed,” said the High King.

“I thought – I had hoped –”

“So did I.”

“Fingon,” said the ancient monster, as though he was in terrible pain, and the King said,

“I would trust you with everything that is mine to give: but I will not trust your brothers with this. Ask me no more. I don’t want to fight with you. Not when we’re parting in the morning.”

An indrawn breath like tearing silk. “How you punish me.”

“You punish yourself!”

“I didn’t mean that I regret you. How could I ever?”

“How could you sigh and say you would rather have spared me the contamination of your hideous self?” demanded King Fingon.

“You deserve the brightest,” said Maedhros Fëanorian dourly. “You deserve only joy. To bind yourself to one who can give you neither – who is sworn elsewhere and always will be –”

“I almost hate you as much as you wish I would when you speak like this,” said the King.

The silk was so fine and the lamplight in the main section of the tent bright enough that Arwen could see, faintly, as though through a veil, his jewelled hands rising to Maedhros Fëanorion’s hair, pulling it from its clumsy knot until it spilled down his shoulders, blue-stained through the silk but surely as red as blood in the full light; and Maedhros Fëanorian cupping Fingon’s jaw in his only hand.

They were embracing. Arwen’s many-times great uncle and the great scourge of Beleriand. The three-times Kinslayer and the King; the tortured Elf who had hung from Thangorodrim and the bright hero who braved everything to rescue him.

Arwen felt turned to stone by the revelation, but she was not stone. Should she try to be, and close her eyes and her ears, and hope they did not hear her breathing?

Or ought she hope they did hear: should she say something to interrupt? This great wrongness, this thing that should not be! She could shatter it like glass, if she chose. This leave-taking that was for all time, if the two embracing did not know it.

She knew. Unless the battle went differently – unless she changed it – they would not meet again this side of the Sea. Even, perhaps, in the West, in the long years of return promised them as their birthright; for the Doom had never lifted, that she heard, from the man who had both orphaned and raised her father.