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“Should have let me stay there,” Gwindor growls, but he is eating. There was a pot of cornmeal mush boiling, when they came out. Wachiwi was beside it, and she smiles with worry in her bright eyes, before ladling them each a bowl of breakfast.
There is molasses mixed in. Unexpected sweetness.
Gwindor eats, and grumbles. Finrod rests the bowl on his knee and stares into the sun-thinned trees. Wachiwi makes gentle, bird-like chatter.
Estrela eats dutifully, but she is weary to her bones. Her bones have been heavy like this for a long time, but the night has hollowed out her lungs, and each breath opens them up painfully.
The prayer in a far-off, blood-haunted field has been answered: Russandol is saved.
Yet, it was half-answered—because Estrela was not the one to save him.
She had no right to put herself forward, of course. She swallows mush and thinks of Amlach’s mother, feeding her gently when her mouth was open on three sides. She thinks of Russandol’s voice, when he bargained with Gothmog, for her pitiful life.
Whatever they did to him—to his poor face, his slim hand—they did it without bargaining.
Estrela knows Mairon, knows Bauglir, and knows that they would have allowed him no quarter, no mercy.
But they would have been slow.
Mysteriously, that slow torment saved him; saved him for his friend, his kin. There are many questions that float unanswered, in the uneasy hollowness of her mind (and yes, her lungs, which are still aching). She does not know Russandol’s mother, though she now knows his father’s name. She knows his uncle. His cousins. They are all handsome, eager, good.
This hurts her more than she ever could have dreamed.
“Belle.”
Gwindor has ceased his griping. He is looking at her. “What did I miss? You should have woken me.”
“I neither should have woken you nor let you stay there another moment,” she says, snappishly—not with any harshness in her voice, but with the brittleness of dry kindling. “You…you came so far.”
“Not as far as you think,” he mumbles, and his whole face closes.
She used to know him so well, Gwindor. Then Russandol (she still thinks of him by that name, though she has heard his true one, now) came and knew him better.
She begrudges neither of them that.
She cannot begrudge Doctor Fingon the fierce, earnest brother-love that so evidently consumes him. She cannot begrudge any of them their worthy love.
(If she prayed again, she would have to ask Santa Maria to intercede against ugliness, not love.)
Russandol, when and if he wakes—with his beautiful features marred, and his nimble hand, gone—deserves to see faces that can help him.
Estrela’s face is Belle’s face: a reminder of all he has lost.
Should have let me stay there, Gwindor said a moment ago, and he meant, in the tent, by my friend’s side, ready to fight to heal him as I fought to bring him back.
Estrela thinks, with soft despair, should have let me stay there, and she means it to fill in the other half of her prayer—saving the boy by not weighing him down with her.
She means it to make a thing whole.
(Holy Mary, Mother of God…give me the hour of my death.)
“Belle,” Gwindor tries again, when she leans her eyeless brow against her hand, scraping aimlessly at the hardening cornmeal silt.
“Hey there!” Sticks cries, appearing from nowhere, pinch-faced and red-eyed. Frog is not with her. “Don’t you know, Soldier? She has a new name, now.”
Estrela will spend the rest of her days on the blood-haunted earth mourning the loss of his hand.