Chapter Text
There is always a part of the tale of your life so early on that you cannot remember it. Though it may span only a few years, that time is so incomprehensibly vast that it dwarfs the whole array of stars above your head, invisible for as long as Anor lasts in the soaring sky. It is full of possibilities, those misty years locked behind the walls of memory, just as you were once full of possibilities. You were once something that could have been anything, and thus, your past, at the point where you can no longer remember it, could have been anything as well.
Perhaps that is being…
Hmm…
To say that you could have been anything, that seems too optimistic.
Too optimistic by far.
Even in the best of all possible worlds, there are few things that Elwing could have been. Endless possibilities are for people without obligations written on their bones. Endless possibilities are for people who do not have storied blood running through their veins, or for people who have the strength and the gall to defy both bone-deep obligations and the narrative patterns of storied blood, those who can resist being swept away by both and becoming the parts that they were born to be.
Even in the best possible world, Elwing is the princess of Doriath, the younger sister of the heir (no one can ever tell her if Eluréd or Elurín was older; why is it that none of them can tell her who was older, why is it that this, of all questions, must go without an answer), beloved princess, and very little else. It would have… It would have…
It would mean a great deal to Elwing, to be a princess and not a queen. She tries to imagine, sometimes, what her father must have felt when he learned that his grandfather was dead. Dior Eluchíl was acclaimed the heir of Elu Thingol all his life, but for all that Beleriand was largely a lawless and desolate place by the time he had been born, Doriath was a bastion of peace and safety and tranquil beauty, and Elu Thingol was of the deathless Edhil, blessed never to die unless some grievous wound assailed him. Dior must never have seriously expected to become his grandfather’s successor. It must have been as if the earth was falling away from under his feet.
Or so Elwing thinks. She was not quite three years old when the Kinslayers fell upon Menegroth, when the greater part of her people were slaughtered and her mother, her father, her two older brothers were consigned to graves that should never have been theirs. The bane of the Nelyar, Edhil no better than Orcs, for all that the Exiles might claim superiority over the Sindar on the basis of their having once bathed in the light of two dead trees, came and stole Elwing’s whole life from her. The only things they were unable to take away with their bloodied, grasping hands was the jewel they had done murder for in the first place, and her own heartbeat, but there are times when she wonders…
The proof of her life is proved again when she takes pinching fingers to her arm, when she trips and falls in the marsh and tears her shin open on a rock just out of sight in a small, murky pool. She is not dead. She is no houseless spirit, drifting through the Lisgardh, fooling the Edhil around her into believing her anything but a relic of a shattered world, though she often feels that way.
Elwing is alive, her father’s heir when she should never have been, her father’s successor when she should never have been. She cannot guess what her father thought when he took up a crown and a set of millstone-heavy obligations that, in a better world, would never have been his. Dior never left any writings behind on such a subject, and had he done so, they no doubt would have burned alongside Menegroth. He might have confided in Nimloth his wife, but her murder had torn out Menegroth’s heart, after Melian’s departure had left it nearly dead. Elwing must figure these things out on her own.
-
One realm in which the possibilities are decidedly less than endless is that of food. The mix of Edhil and Edain (more of the former than the latter, and there are plenty among the Iathrim who would much rather the situation involve more Edain and considerably fewer Gondolindrim) clinging to the ragged edges of the land in the Lisgardh is a larger community than the area could ever hope to support. Some Iathrim have left to join the community of mixed survivors from Doriath, Nargothrond, and the Havens of the Falas on the Isle of Balar, as the island has not yet pushed quite to capacity and the fishing is rich. Some of the Gondolindrim have left Beleriand altogether, seeking out the settlement of Edhellond far to the south, and everyone allows the polite fiction that this was done for no reason other than to relieve some of the pressure on the Lisgardh. The Edain will eventually solve their own problem, if you give them enough time.
(Many would regard that as callous to say, though Elwing knows them to be lying to her when they claim to have never thought about it when they think of how food is to be rationed. It is obvious at a glance that the Edain are not the same as the Edhil. Though their bodies might seem outwardly to be composed of all the same materials, to Elwing’s eyes, their spirits could not be more different than if you were to hold a candle up next to a basin of water, and tried to pass them off as being anything like the same sort.
Short-lived Edain, doomed to die no matter what they might do to try and stave it off, and once they die, doomed to fly off beyond the Circles of the World, to go wherever it is that Lúthien went when she chose to follow Beren rather than be held in genteel captivity in the Undying Lands. Elwing need only look at them to see their spirits slowly guttering, and if the speed of their demise is different—Elwing has seen Edain children no older than herself with spirits nearly worn all the way down, spirits already trying to detach from their frail bodies—it is always reliable. The Edain will always die, given enough time.
She knows the other Edhil can see it. She knows what they have thought about it; they cannot hide these thoughts from her. Other Edhil have thought long and hard on the short-lived nature of the Edain, and Elwing knows that many of them have thought upon it with considerably less detachment than her. She knows that there are many among her people who consider Men, even the Edain who have been nothing but faithful and loyal since they first swore themselves to the service of the Edhil, to be something that just draws misfortune to the Edhil, indiscriminately. She knows that there are many among her people who breathe a sigh of relief when an Adan dies. They do not say such to her. They do not breathe such sighs of relief in front of her. But she knows. They cannot hide it from her.
Perhaps that is why they become uncomfortable with her. Or perhaps it is because Elwing can see their spirits as clearly as she can see the Edain’s, perhaps it is because the Edhil can see her spirit as clearly as they can see the Edain’s, perhaps it is because all parties involved can mark the difference between the Edhil and Elwing. The Edhil believe themselves to be eternal. They are not. When they stand before Elwing, when they see her spirit and can compare it to their own, they cannot deny the truth of themselves: they are not eternal.)
But even with all of these factors, there is not enough food. There is never enough food. There never can be enough food, here, in a land that was never meant to support even half the number who currently slink through the tall reeds, praying they never draw the notice of their Enemy or his Orcs, or those Edhil who claim to be so superior, but in reality are nothing but Orcs in Edhil flesh, Orcs whose flesh has not yet begun to deteriorate into shapes more suitable to their nature. There is fishing to be had in the Sea, there are ships that can travel further south and try to negotiate for grain and for vegetables and fruit, there are things that can be found out in the marshes where the land is too unstable for their little mud-brick houses, and there is never enough food.
Elwing can never know all of her father’s struggles. She is young, she knows, and even if her thoughts do not quite follow the patterns of the few children here in the Lisgardh with her, she is too young to know for certain everything that her father must have struggled with, when he was burdened with a grown and a millstone-heavy set of obligations that should never have been his. She is a child. She has known hunger. Any memories of something that is not hunger is locked behind the misty walls in the back of her mind, behind which the years go too far back for her to retain any memory at all.
She has known hunger.
She loves it not.
-
When Elwing is ten, she is deemed old enough to go digging through the marshes looking for mussels and crabs and those strange frogs that can tolerate saltwater and the little fish that might have come too far inland during high tide and now find themselves stranded in the little pools in the depressions in the sand-soil that dwindle and dwindle the higher Anor rises towards the sky and the more the bright, hot sunlight bakes the water right out of those pools and bakes the fish in the graves they never sought. There are whispers, many whispers, about the appropriateness of allowing the blood of Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen to root around the marshes for food like any other poor urchin in Beleriand, especially considering that among the Gondolindrim, the Lady Idril will allow her son, a boy Elwing’s age, to do no such thing.
Elwing insisted upon it, and there, the situation becomes… sticky. Elwing insisted then, and she does insist now, that if she is queen, then she must do these things. There are those who mutter where they think Elwing cannot hear her that this is the whim of a child that must not be indulged, that this is the whim of a child who is using the power of her blood to try and force them to bend to her will. There are those who think that Elwing is the blood of Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen, that she is the blood of Lúthien Tinúviel and Dior the Beloved and Nimloth who was for a short while the heart of Menegroth, and that she must not be allowed to go out into places where she could be found by their enemies, that she must not be allowed to go out into places where she can be swept out into the Sea and lost.
(They do not know the Sea, if they think that Elwing will ever be lost there by any will but her own. They do not know the Sea, and they do not know her. But Elwing does know herself, and she knows the Sea. She has dwelled by it for as long as she can remember, and it has whispered to her in the long watches of the night, when the northern skies burn too brightly for sleep to ever find her. The Sea whispers to her, in a way she does not think it has whispered to others, for no one ever seems to take the same sort of solace, or as much solace as can ever be found in these shadowed days, from the words the Sea whispers to her.
Elwing will never be lost in water by any will but her own. This much, at least, will be left entirely in her own control. No one will drown her but her own self. No one else even knows how.)
No one is ever able to find the words that can unlock the box they think is in her mind, the box within which is locked understanding of the wisdom of their own words and logic. No one is ever able to grasp that there is no such box, that Elwing has not misunderstood them and this is not a matter of educating a silly child on the silliness of her own desires. There is nothing silly about what Elwing wishes to do. There is nothing silly about going out into a marsh to look for food, when there is not enough to go around.
Eventually, they stand aside, and Elwing is allowed to go out into the marsh, much the same as nearly everyone else in this little camp in the Lisgardh, such a small remnant of their people and yet far, far too large for the land to carry them without straining and groaning, and search for food.
Not alone, of course. Elwing is never allowed to be alone with her thoughts, no matter how much she might wish for it.
Not alone. Elwing is not allowed such things. She is queen who should never have even been heir. She is queen and child both, and her people will not countenance her being alone.
Thranduil is her appointed minder, most of the times, and truth be told, that is a state of affairs that suits Elwing just fine. Elwing has learned to listen hard to the words and the thoughts of others when she does not speak, and for all that her voice is hearkened to, she has much occasion to listen. Thranduil separated from his parents to remain here in the Lisgardh; why it was that Duileth (Elmo’s child, so a cousin of some denomination) and Oropher (no relation whatsoever, no one who shares blood with Elwing, no one Elwing is particularly interested in, in any sense of the word) have chosen instead to sail on to the Isle of Balar with the greater part of the survivors from Menegroth, that is a question that is buried too deep down in the minds of those who speak or think on such things in Elwing’s presence for her to divine the answers without someone else beginning to suspect at what she’s about. It’s a question buried too deep down, and in Thranduil’s mind, buried so deep that sometimes Elwing wonders if it is even there to divine at all. It is there, she is certain of that, but he is always very careful not to think of it when he is anywhere around her, and she never has any opportunity to try to draw it from the back of his mind.
Thranduil keeps his secrets well, and part of that seems to be that he rarely speaks of anything in particular with Elwing when she goes off into the marsh and he accompanies her, as a minder rather than a helper (Elwing did not ask for help, Elwing is not always certain whether or not she wants the help, but sometimes she wishes for the companionship and for something else that she does not, has never known well enough to name, and whatever it is she’s wishing for, it’s not something she is ever able to get with the arrangement set out the way that it is), which does at least leave Elwing some leeway to think, even if her thinking is best done in the few precious moments of solitude she is able to steal from those who feel that her time would be better spent elsewhere. Thranduil, Elwing thinks, would rather not be here, out in the marshes as his ten-year-old queen works to pry mussels from the shifting, squelching sand and grapples with slippery frogs and fish and beats crabs into submission with a bit of driftwood fashioned into a rod. Thranduil would rather not be out in the marshes when he could be in the settlement.
Thranduil would rather not be in the settlement if it was at all possible for him to return to Menegroth. Elwing has discerned that much from the angry, aching buzzing of his surface thoughts. Thranduil would rather not be here. Thranduil would rather be back in Menegroth, even if he had to go back to it alone, even if he had to go back alone and live among the ruins alone, but others have extracted promises from him to do no such thing, and thus he remains here, resentful always of the meager shelter from prying eyes of the reeds, resentful of Anor beating down on them, resentful of every evil done to them that has put them in this place.
Thranduil can bury a secret well enough, but he does not do a very good job burying his surface thoughts.
They feel… They feel right. They feel as if they could have come from Elwing’s own mind. Sometimes, Elwing is not certain that they did not come from Elwing’s own mind, and simply drift into Thranduil’s for her to find.
…She would not go to Menegroth alone, to be fair. She would not go to Menegroth alone. Menegroth is no place for her when it has had its heart ripped out. Menegroth is no place for her without her family in it. Elwing does not wish to face the multitude of ghosts that must now dwell within what was once Doriath’s beating heart, does not want to stare into their misty, sightless faces and account for her own continued survival in light of their own untimely, undeserved deaths. Menegroth is… It’s wrong for her to live there, when she would be living there without her father, her mother, her brothers. It’s not a place for her, when none of the people who should have been living there with her are any longer present anywhere on this side of the Sundering Sea. If the desire to become a houseless spirit, to become a ghost, ever grows within her so overwhelming that she can no longer contain it, perhaps then Elwing will go seeking out Menegroth, but before then, here she remains. Her courage is unequal to the task. She is the one who must always stay.
And there is another reason to avoid Menegroth, to be absolutely fair. Elwing has been fed stories of the place where she was born the way other, more fortunate children would be fed bread and meat and fruit and vegetables. Elwing is young, but she has lived in the Lisgardh for as long as she can remember. She has seen the havoc time and grief and erosion and the merciless wind can wreak upon their poor little mud clay houses. Menegroth is something that was meant to be eternal. That much, the stories have more than adequately conveyed. But their enemies came down upon them and made wreckage out of what should have been eternal, and to see the eternal cracked open, possibly still bleeding sluggishly onto the earth, would put a wound too deep into the earth for Elwing to ignore. It would resonate in her bones, banish all thought from her head, so that all Elwing would be able to do would be to resonate the wound in the earth the way the broken stones must. There are times when she likes to sit in the sand among the reeds and resonate the Sea. But she does not care to do this forever, and she thinks the power of the violence done upon Menegroth might be enough to hold her in place that her people would deem her lost, the way they once deemed Thingol lost.
Elwing will stay away from Menegroth. It is not a place for her. It is a place far more powerful than her.
Today, there are no clouds to give any sort of marker of distance in the pale blue sky overhead. The reeds stand too tall and too thick here for Elwing to make out the Sea and make out that other marker, the far horizon where pale blue slowly melds into the grayish-blue of thousands of fathoms of seawater, though the sound is up, so high and roaring in Elwing’s ears that she can barely even make out the cries of the seagulls overhead. Elwing eyes those gulls suspiciously as she goes to inspect a watery hole in the soil, watching to see if any of the greedy beasts have noticed her and her bucket, have guessed at what she’s doing out here. She’s had to fight off the gulls, before; it’s one of the few instances in which Thranduil can be roused to do anything other than stand watch in pensive, discontented silence, but he doesn’t have Elwing’s instincts for fighting gulls over their supper that he does, and he’s been bitten (pecked? Yes, pecked sounds better) by the gulls more than once, usually when bodily grabbing one and tossing it away from the bucket.
These gulls, at least, seem blessedly oblivious as to what’s going on down below them. At least Elwing will not have competition to compound her troubles, not for right now. (Perhaps later. There is always a ‘later,’ and there are always seagulls, even when the cold winds blow down with especial harshness from the evil north. Elwing wonders, sometimes, how many more decades she will spend doing battle with seagulls over crabs, before the evil north finally spews the fire that murders them all. It must happen eventually. Sometimes, she hopes it does not happen before the Rodyn at last answer their prayers. Sometimes, Elwing is filled with the cold, leaden certainty that those prayers will go forever unanswered, that the Exiles have damned them all to eternal disfavor and apathy in the eyes of the Rodyn, and in those cases, she hopes that death will be what finds her first, rather than captivity. Elwing has dreamed of captivity, sometimes. She has dreamed of being taken before the Enemy the way her grandmother was taken before the Enemy. She does not have power equal to that of Lúthien’s. She cannot imagine anything other than being made as if the lowest and more wretched of thralls before this great scourge of Ennor. She does not dance, and she does not sing. Her enchantments, such as they are, dive deep down inside of her, and they are not something that can ever radiate out.) That leaves Elwing to her foraging, and her battles with the crabs.
She peers briefly down into her bucket to observe the contents, biting back a long sigh. Queens are not supposed to sigh, especially not in the manner that Elwing wished to, just now. It does not matter how old the queen is, if she is thousands of years old, or centuries, or decades, or if she is just ten. If a girl of ten is a queen, especially if that girl of ten has a mind and thoughts within that mind that is rather unlike that of the few other children who live also in this camp in the Lisgardh, that girl does not sigh. It is unfitting for one of her position. It’s unfitting for one who must, even in such privation, be an example to her people.
(What exactly is she supposed to be an example of, Elwing wonders? Is she supposed to be an example of the way a child breaks when that child is raised without her family? Is she supposed to be an example of the truth of the supposition by writers and philosophers that a child who is not nurtured by both of her parents when she is growing up is incomplete, both physically and mentally, for all who know Elwing agree that she is a strange girl, nothing like sunny Eärendil who yet has both his parents to give him affection and the benefit of their wisdom, and on top of that, most agree that she seems unlikely to achieve the physical stature enjoyed by her father and her grandmother and her great-grandparents? Is she supposed to be an example of what becomes of those who take on responsibilities beyond their own capacities? Or is she just supposed to be an example of what eventually becomes of all who must live in these dark days? Though the speed at which they fall into such a state tends to vary upon the strength of their hearts, that could certainly be it; Elwing does not think her heart particularly resilient, though it yet supports her body.)
It would be unfitting for Elwing to sigh, but Thranduil apparently feels no such compunctions against sighing. Elwing does not think she has ever known Thranduil to feel any hesitation when it comes to expressing…
He sighs again, sitting himself down in the shade of an especially dense clump of reeds, scrubbing at his forehead as if trying to ward off a headache. Elwing pokes around the hole a little more, retrieving a single something that she hoped would be a mussel, but turns out only to be a rock, before giving up on it. If she wants to find anything else edible today, she will have to go further afield. But just here, she has found something else to hold her interest.
Elwing… It is hard to know Thranduil well, when he resists attempts to get to know him better. Perhaps when she is grown, perhaps when the course of her thoughts shifts to something that more closely resembles the thoughts of those around her (if they ever do, and Elwing is not certain that she wishes them to, if it means that she will lose what connection to the earth she has that seems to be so much stronger than that of those around her, if it means that she loses her insight into the minds of those around her that seems also to be so much stronger than that of nearly everyone around her, considering that no one ever seems to expect her insights—Elwing must already grope about in the ruins of a harsh and desecrated world, and would rather not do it half-blinded), he will be more comfortable with the idea of knowing and being known by Elwing. Perhaps when she is grown, Elwing, who can have no friends among the Iathrim, for those responsible for her care have impressed upon her over and over that a queen has subjects, that among her subjects there may even be those whom she regards as friends, but that a queen can never truly call her subjects friends, for ultimately they owe their allegiance to her, and who among those you can give orders to can you really call your friends, will at least be able to regard Thranduil as someone she can speak to, someone she can seek counsel from and trust the wisdom of that counsel.
(Sometimes, Elwing wonders whether her father or her great-grandfather struggled with the idea of the friendless king. She wonders if their loneliness was assuaged by the presence of their wives, if Melian and Nimloth could be their friends—a king’s people are his subjects, but surely that must not quite apply to his queen, especially in Thingol’s situation, since the Ainur must be held higher than the Edhil, even the highest of the Edhil. Or perhaps no one told them these things. Thingol and Dior were both men grown when they assumed the throne of Doriath, and if someone ever attempted to tell them that their rarefied position in society meant that they could never have any true friends, if their personal inclinations ever took them in another direction, they would most likely have simply disregarded the advice of those who tried to tell them they could never truly have any friends among their own people, they would most likely have just ignored those people, and carried on to their own satisfaction. They ruled the Iathrim out of Menegroth. They were not born into ruin. They had the confidence required to go their own way.)
Perhaps, one day. For now, Thranduil is, though he has accompanied Elwing out into the Lisgardh many time, in many different modes of weather, most of them rather less pleasant than these weather conditions (though the heat is starting to have an effect on Elwing’s hair, the sort of effect that will no doubt make at least one of her minders stare at her upon her return to the camp and wonder to themselves, even if they never say it aloud, when it was that Elwing allowed a family of rats to start nesting in her curly dark hair), little more than a stranger to her. He has kept his own counsel and his own company, for all the time that Elwing has known him, for all the time that she can remember. The only person whose company he seems to enjoy rather than tolerate is that of skittish, reclusive Nellas, who spends more time out in the reeds on her own, sleeping in the wet sand under the stars, than she does in the camp, where Elwing does not think she has ever seen her truly at ease.
It does make Elwing curious, honestly. Thranduil forsook his parents company to remain in the Lisgardh rather than moving on to the Isle of Balar, and he does not even seem to be all that happy to be here. He agreed to follow her out into the reeds whenever obligations require her to go looking for food with which to feed herself and those others in the Lisgardh, and spends all of that time studiously avoiding even speaking to her, except to tell her when they must return to the camp, either because of the late hour, the rising tide, or because (and this happens only rarely, but it still does happen, and there is a reason that Thranduil is always armed when they go out into the reeds, both barefoot and Elwing’s skirt pinned up around her knees) they realize suddenly that they are not alone, and Thranduil would much sooner they return to the camp than linger long enough to get some idea of what the other person or other thing out in the reeds with them is.
(If an animal, they would come to no harm. Elwing has done battle with seagulls over crabs before, and she has occasionally had to whack crabs into submission with her rod to get them into her bucket, but no other animal has ever offered her any harm, and even the seagulls balked at the idea of harming her directly—the crabs respond to her only as prey must respond to a predator with delicate, vulnerable fingers, and Elwing is no longer foolish enough to offer her fingers to them directly.
Celeborn visits on rare occasions, and he was once, in Elwing’s hearing, relayed a story from Elwing’s earlier childhood, when she was around five or so years old. It was winter, and wolves had made their way into the Lisgardh, desperate for food. Elwing got away from her minders and wandered out into the reeds, and when her minders finally found her again, they found a single, scrawny wolf lying on its side, allowing her to sleep with her head pressed up against its flank. The only danger involved lied in trying to draw Elwing away from the beast, for this the wolf met with protest, and until Elwing got up and toddled over to her minders under her own power, this protest involved low growls and the snapping of sharp-toothed jaws.
Celeborn had not really believed that story, not at first. But the minders kept repeating it, and Elwing, whose memory of the event is admittedly hazy (her minders had rarely let her out of their sight since then), repeated it once to him as well, and he was persuaded to believe it. Clearly not happy to believe it, but he did believe it.)
Elwing looks at Thranduil through the curtain of her thick, dark hair, wondering if now would be a good time to ask questions. Which one should she start with? She has so many, and has no idea which ones he would balk at, which ones would drive him into a sullen silence from which he would not emerge until long after they returned to the Lisgardh. Elwing would rather not contend with such a silence, not now. She’s more than capable of such a silence, herself, and does not want to consider the weeks it might take before Thranduil relaxed enough for her to try her questions again, if it came to that. And trying to pry the answers from his mind without his words being involved, Elwing has done that before, to others, and a sullen silence would likely be the least of her problems, in such a case. That is not something she wishes to contend with, either.
But Thranduil does something that, at this moment, Elwing was not expecting.
Elwing looks at Thranduil, and in turn, Thranduil does not look at her, exactly, but fixes the stare of his pale gray eyes upon her bucket, his mouth quirking downwards like he wants to grimace, but is forcing himself not to. “I… I do not… I have not been paying much attention to your progress, ‘tis true. Has it been good hunting?”
When you are ten, and your thoughts run in courses that others do not seem to regard as being typical, it’s easy to interpret things as insults. Even when you are a ten-year-old whom those around you consider a ‘normal’ child, it’s easy to interpret things as insults. But it’s easier when you are a ten-year-old of the same sort as Elwing, and when you have been taught to be wary of and sensitive to insults—an insult to Elwing is an insult to the Iathrim as a whole, or so she has been assured; it is important that she not let a single one pass her by.
So Elwing weighs those words over in her head, over and over again until the weight of them is as familiar as the weight of the rod she does battle with crabs with, out here in the reedy marsh. She weighs the words, and Thranduil does not press on in spite of her silence, which gives her enough time to decide that most likely, the question was not meant as an insult.
So now she has to reply to it.
That doesn’t sound much more pleasant.
She must try, anyways. She’s often been admonished to be more sociable, though no one seems to know how exactly Elwing can become more sociable, not without going against her very nature.
“…No,” she finally settles on, which is totally inadequate, and yet also all that she can force out of her mouth. It will have to do.
He does not reply to her immediately, instead picking up a small rock in his hand long enough to turn it over in his palm, then lob it further out into the reeds, making a dull thump against the wet sand that makes Elwing wince, for reasons unclear, even to herself. Elwing waits for that response, and when it finally comes to her, it comes in the form of a bitter, muttered, “There is a familiar refrain.”
Yes, it is.
There is a strange combination of sheltering and exposing her to things that no other ten-year-old is ever exposed to, in the way that Elwing’s caretakers introduce her to this world and maintain her access to it. (In how they raise you, in how they care for you, but Elwing cannot quite go as far as that, no matter how many would think the wording strange. She does not know why, but she just cannot go that far.) Elwing has never been allowed to go to the parts of the camp where the Exiles dwell unaccompanied, never been allowed to go to that part of the camp without guards who go about armed and glowering at every Exile they make eye-contact with as if they expect that Exile to suddenly turn murderous and spring upon the young queen of the Iathrim—and perhaps they might; there is very little you can truly put past the Exiles, even those who had no part in the Kinslayings, and most among the Iathrim would rather deal with the Mithrim Sindar among the refugees from Gondolin, though the Mithrim Sindar would rather not deal with the Iathrim. Lady Idril’s access to Elwing is sharply curtailed, though truth be told, Elwing does not particularly mind Lady Idril, and when he’s not crying or actively dwelling upon his lost home, she does not mind Eärendil, either.
But she must be involved with the governance of her people, even if she is queen over a refugee camp rather than a kingdom, even if her age precludes her from many of the judgments that an adult ruler would never be expected to shirk, even if much of her involvement at this age still involves simply observing the adults at their work. Elwing must be involved with the governance of her people on some level, even if it is only to listen, and to observe.
In that capacity, Elwing has had many opportunities to learn about the struggles the adults who have really been in charge of the camp in the Lisgardh have had in obtaining enough food for them to merely go hungry most of the times, rather than end up starving most of the times. It’s a struggle that the Iathrim and the Exiles share, and one of the few areas in which they are of one mind and one heart and one purpose, and the Iathrim are not constantly wary of the Exiles’ purposes and potential actions. It’s a struggle that they would all be utter fools not to share with as much concord as they can manage.
All their safety lies in secrecy. They do not have warriors or arms or defenses enough to defend themselves against any attacking force, be they Orcs or Kinslayers or evil Men. All they have standing between them and the utter abyss is the reeds that hide their little mud clay houses and somehow, somehow, manage to disguise the smoke from their fires enough to keep from drawing their enemies right to them. (Somehow. Sometimes, Elwing hears whispers, whispers muttering that perhaps their enemies are just biding their time and lulling them into a false sense of security, as the Enemy lulled the Exiles into a false sense of security before raining fire down upon them. She hopes… She doesn’t know what to hope.)
All their safety lies in secrecy, and thus, securing food from the outside is not so simple as all that. They must find a way to negotiate for food and have it brought in without attracting notice, must find a way to compensate those who bring them their food—the food brought to them from Balar is given them to completely free of charge, but when obtained from other sources, compensation of some sort is required, and trying to secure whatever it is their sellers request has been a trial in and of itself. And even when they send their own ships, as few and as meager as they are, out into the Sea for fish, there is never any guarantee that they will find them, in large enough numbers to preserve and distribute to keep the people from going hungry for a few weeks, never any guarantee that they will find any fish at all. The fishing is rich around Balar, but it’s a fair distance from the shoreline to the island, and the fishing is not so rich right around the shore.
All their safety lies in secrecy, but there can be no prosperity in such utter secrecy. They cannot prosper when they must hide their presence from nearly everyone in the world. They cannot live if they allow the world to know where they are. Two margins, two sources of tension, and Elwing can feel each of them working on her, pulling her in different directions, and she would say that she does not know when they will cease, but she knows exactly when they will cease, they will cease when they have pulled her apart, when they have rent her body in two and her people are left to gather up the pieces before they have any sort of burial.
It hurts. It hurts in the ever-present dull ache in the pit of her stomach. It hurts in the headache often fulminating at the back of her skull. It hurts in the leaden weight tugging at the base of her heart. Elwing does not know what to do with it. Whenever she even tries to look at it, it just spirals out and out until it’s so big that she cannot even comprehend it in its whole, and she must turn away from it to seek the comfort of the earth and the Sea.
Thranduil tuts in the back of his throat, though it does not seem directed at Elwing, not exactly. “I thought not.” He fiddles with a tarnished ring on his hand, spinning it on his finger until the skin beneath is visibly reddening. “I cannot remember a time when the tables in Menegroth were not laden high, even in the lean years. Now see what we have been reduced to.”
Elwing has been told many stories of Menegroth. There are some among her minders who do not seem to know any other kind of story, and thus, Elwing has listened to many tales told of Menegroth, listened to them regale her with tales of its incredible beauty and prosperity and power over and over and over again. She never knows how to feel when they start on a new one. As long as she’s listening to it, it’s wonderful. She can imagine the place of her birth as it was in his glory, can lose herself in the descriptions provided to her by her minders, and think of nothing else for as long as it lasts. But it cannot last forever, and when their tales are done, coming back down to earth feels like nothing quite so much as it feels like being pinned to the ground like a fallen pile of bricks.
She always forgets that last bit whenever she is given the prospect of a new tale. She always forgets, until she must come back down to earth once more.
For now, Elwing feels a little as if she might sprout wings and come to know Aran Einior’s realm better than what her meager knowledge can currently provide. She chases that feeling, sometimes. Sometimes, she feels like she could spend her whole life chasing that feeling.
“Were they?” A thousand questions are clustering in Elwing’s throat, and thus, it’s only the shortest, the vaguest, the most paltry, that can make its way through onto her lips. Perhaps she will be able to pry out one of the better ones, soon. She would like that.
Thranduil’s eyes glaze over in reminiscence, and as Elwing is transported by those tales of Menegroth, Thranduil gives off an impression of being transported as well, and he seems not even to need another’s words to take him to some place that is not their measly shelter within the Lisgardh. “No one has ever told you of the feasts of Menegroth in those years of peace, have they?” He smiles bitterly. “It’s a shame that you could not sit at them yourself. The king sat you on his lap for the feast that celebrated the passing of your first year and fed you himself. In a better world, you should have memories of plenty of them, yourself; it has been two years since you have been old enough to sit at them past early in the evening.”
Something inside of Elwing shrivels a little at the mention of her father, though she tries not to let it daunt her badly enough to reduce her voice to silence, as her voice is so often reduced. “What… What were they like?”
His eyes still glazed over, clearly seeing not the reeds but a phantom of a vanished past, Thranduil sighs heavily. “What were they like? I curse these evil days, that you must even ask. I will tell you…”
And tell her, he does. Once he starts, he seems unable to stop, and Elwing is unable to do anything but sit herself down on the sand and listen, uncaring of the water slowly seeping through the thin cloth of her dress to soak her skin. Actually, it’s not that she’s uncaring, so much as she doesn’t notice. Neither does she notice her hunger, neither does she remember the bucket, or her rod, or the sunlight beating down on her skin, beginning slowly to burn, or the wind whipping her hair back and forth, or the heavy ache tugging on the base of her heart.
Voice dripping with something that does not sound like appetite so much as it sounds like longing, Thranduil begins to weave tales for Elwing of the feasts enjoyed at Menegroth’s high tables. Visions of massive perch and carp gleaming in the candlelight, glistening with vinegar and crusted with rosemary and parsley and thyme, tantalize her mind’s eye, though they are nothing compared to what comes next. Sweet, crisp wines in such quantities that the whole of the city could drink their fill and then contend with the hangover the next day, without the stores ever running dry, were a staple of midsummer feasts, while spiced mead in similar quantities were a staple of midwinter feasts and left the drinker feeling as warm and effervescent as if they were composed of that mead entirely.
Beds of greens would so heavily laden down the tables that those tables would look more like flowerbeds in a garden than they did the feasting tables of Menegroth. Children delighted in towers of candied plums and cherries, while hunters showed off the stags and boars they had taken down with their arrows and their spears after the cooks had finished with them. The last of the spring or summer vegetables would be made into thick, hearty stews full of pork and parsnips and potatoes and beans. In the winter, thick, succulent meat pies were handed out to the people of Menegroth from the royal kitchens, to warm their stomachs and their hearts against the snowstorms that raged outside.
No one ever went hungry in Menegroth, Thranduil emphasized over and over and over again, longing tainted with bitterness as his gaze drifted out towards the east.
Much of what he told her was rather beyond Elwing’s ability to fully comprehend. He spoke oftentimes of things she had never eaten, spices she had never scented or tasted, a feeling of sublime fullness that she had never in her life experienced. It was a little as if Thranduil occasionally slipped into another language while he spoke to her, something she had never heard before and had no ability to parse or understand.
But his mind was more open now than it had ever been when he kept her company, and his impressions were practically diving into her mind, without Elwing needing to skim deeper than the highest layer of surface thoughts. His mind is more open, and Thranduil considerably less fussed about the potential intrusion, and Elwing dives down inside at the invitation of phantom smells, and his tales take on another layer, at that.
Elwing has never eaten the vast majority of what Thranduil describes to her. The closest she has gotten is the fish they catch from the Sea, and none of it sounds like fish of the same sort as what was pulled from the rivers in Doriath. But Thranduil ate of the feasting tables of Menegroth more times than he can remember, and even if memory is now all he has left of those feasting tables, his memories are yet strong, and cling to his mind and his heart like limpets for her to pluck up and use to her own benefit.
When Thranduil talks, when he eagerly allows his mind to be transported to the past, Elwing goes with him, to an extent. She will never know how any of the foods he speaks of taste on the tongue, not exactly. But the smell comes to her, secondhand, but strong. The emotions the sight and the smell and the taste of those foods inspired in Thranduil when he ate them wash over Elwing like a tidal wave, so heady and so powerful that for as long as it lasts, she forgets where she is, forgets what she’s been doing, forgets the constant gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach.
For as long as it lasts, she is a princess in Menegroth, rather than a queen in the Lisgardh. She is sitting at the highest of the tables with her family, and if she can conjure none of their faces, if she can properly hear none of their voices, that matters less to her than it should, for she is rooted to the vision by the sights and smells of the dishes laid out on the table before her, and they, the proof of the generosity and prosperity of Doriath, they hold her attention more than the shades sitting off to her left and right can hope to, though part of the fizzy, buoyant joy bubbling up in her heart comes from knowing that she eats alongside them.
For as long as it lasts.
It can’t last forever, you know. The Edhil may be eternal, but even for them, and especially for Elwing, nothing can last forever.
Thranduil’s voice peters off into silence, and Elwing is sitting in the reeds again, her skin chilled by the water that has seeped through the thin skirt of her dress. Her skin is prickling with the over-tender sensation telltale of sunburn. The bucket rattles a little when the wind blows, and her stomach is aching. Her brothers are dead. Her parents are dead.
Elwing has work to do.
She is not a princess in Doriath.
She has much to do.
She is a queen in the Lisgardh, and she will never know that sublime feeling that must have been as living in absolute bliss for the Edhil when they knew prosperity, will never know what it is like not to be hungry. Perhaps there will come a day when the wars are done and all the evil actors in Beleriand are removed from it, but the path to such a day is hidden from Elwing’s sight, and she knows not how to find it. What she experienced now, before she was brought crashing back down to earth (what a harsh landing, what a harsh let-down), she will never truly know for herself. Hunger will always be her closest companion, dwelling beneath her skin where nothing else can ever hope to rival it. Her meals will always be paltry. They will always have to struggle for any food at all.
She’s had a taste of something else. Elwing surveys the contents of her bucket in dissatisfaction when they finally start to make their way back towards the camp. She’s had a taste of something else. Her body is weak, weaker by far than the spirit that dwells within, spirit limited by that body, body limited by the circumstances it must contend with. But she has had a taste of something else. She’d like to taste it again.