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Two days after Haleth departed Doriath on yet another intelligence mission, Luthien woke early, as was her wont. Dawn was only just looking in through her bower window, lily-pale and sweet with springtime dew, drawing frail shadows like plum-blue silk down her bedroom walls. Luthien lay abed just long enough to stretch her aching shoulders, smiling at the sound of the wakening birdsong outside her window, and then sat up in her clouds of silken bedclothes and cushions, setting her bare feet down upon the floral carpet covering her bedroom floor.
As long as she could remember, Luthien had loved best the liminal times of day: the melting, early morning, and the gentle, dreamlike evening. Twilight Daughter, her mother had called her since her babyhood, for Luthien never fancied early bedtime. She had loved accompanying her parents on evening strolls in the house patio, beneath the dappled fruit trees, one tiny hand in each of theirs. Sometimes Mama would set out her guqin, and sit upon the lip of one of the lovely fountains, and play a song for Luthien to dance to, barefooted upon the grass. Other times, Luthien would sit beside her father, her head upon his shoulder, and with him be an audience delighted by her mother’s singing. Mama sang, with or without musical accompaniment, in Chinese; Papa, when he sang in his fine baritone, sang in Spanish. Luthien learned to sing in both languages, and in French and English besides, thanks to Daeron.
Beren had whispered a single word, one night as she sang at his bedside, idly plying her embroidery needles until such time as she should change the bandages upon his wounded hand. She had not thought him awake to hear her; she had looked up in startlement, and had met his dark eyes in the candlelight, and had wondered at the immensity of feeling she saw there—very like loneliness, very like grief, and yet neither of these.
The word he had whispered, she later learned, meant Songbird, in his tongue. It was a name only Beren and Haleth knew, and of all the names Luthien bore, in all her many languages, it was her very favorite one.
On went Luthien’s silken slippers, embroidered by her own hand last winter; over her shoulders she drew her delicate muslin wrap, tied at slender waist by a silver ribbon. Crossing to her vanity, she collected her ivory comb and pearl-backed hand mirror, and nestled herself at her window to watch the sun rise as she combed out her braided hair. The breeze was cool, but no longer winter-cold, and Luthien had already packed away her furs and quilts into their scented wooden chests. She was eager for spring: for the flowers and the rains and the nesting birds. Every year around this time a pair of doves built a nest and raised their babies in the pear tree outside Luthien’s window—a different set of doves each year, to be sure, but the birds had returned, generation by generation, since Luthien was eight years old. She looked forward to the arrival of each new family, and enjoyed watching the tender industry of the parents as they built the nest, the evolution of the offspring, and the tentative fledgling flights of the baby birds when they were near-grown. She had entire sketchbooks filled with watercolors of wildlife she observed around her father’s house, and many pages of these were devoted to drawings of the doves and their nests over the years.
Haleth had always liked looking at Luthien’s drawings, even if she never said so. The captured images of animals amused and intrigued her in turns, and interested her far more than the rarer intervals of landscape studies, done in washes of cobalt and cadmium and viridian. Privately, Luthien agreed with her friend; landscape painting had been enjoyable when she was younger, but she had wearied of painting the same hills and pastures she always saw, without any opportunity for geographical variety.
One winter, the second after they first met, Luthien had presented Haleth with a painting of a red Fox in miniature, as a surprise Christmas gift. Haleth had not been impressed by the concept of Christmas, once she had heard out Luthien’s explanation, but she had still taken the miniature with her on her next drive north. The next autumn, she had brought back a pair of mittens for Luthien, slightly too large, and cunningly made from red fox fur.
Luthien had thanked her delightedly, touched by the unexpected token of friendship. Haleth had only frowned, examining her fingers critically.
“Your hands are very small,” she had said, disapprovingly, and the next day she had been gone again, out on a riding errand for Papa.
Still, after that, they had been friends.
Luthien took breakfast with Mama this morning, for Papa had already gone out early to the spring pastures, riding to review the new fence repairs. He would be out all day, likely returning only after dark, in high spirits. Work always put Papa in good humor, and he enjoyed the spring time almost as much as Luthien did. If he were at the breakfast table there would be coffee and milk, and toasted bread with fruit jam. Since this was Mama’s table this morning, however, breakfast was hot, gingery congee with fresh youtiao, although the cook had remembered to still put the jam jar upon the table for Luthien, alongside the tea service.
“You are quiet this morning,” Mama observed, with a little smile. “Did you sleep well?”
“Oh, yes,” Luthien reassured her, jolted out of a daydream she had not known she had fallen into. She took another spoonful of congee, then elaborated: “I was only thinking about Haleth. Did she say how long she would be away this time?”
“Not to your father,” Mama replied, pausing to consider. “He complained to me yesterday, of how she had not reported to him on where she was going before she left. But sometimes, Haleth’s business is her own; you know that. She will return soon, for she is dutiful. Do you miss her already, Luthien?”
Luthien discovered, uncomfortably, that she was not sure how to answer that question. After a short silence her mother smiled, taking mercy on her silence.
“I know it is difficult for you, to go so often without any companions your own age. I wish we could have given you sisters, to fill your days with talk; or brothers to guard your steps, that you might wander further afield.”
“Haleth could guard me,” Luthien dared, before she could think better of saying it. “She is a fighter. Even Papa trusts her.”
Mama was quiet a moment, watching her. Then she sighed, and set aside her spoon.
“Thingol trusts Haleth with his life, Tinuviel,” she said, softly. “Not yours. Not while that man still lives, in that devil mountain.”
Luthien raised another spoonful to her lips; Luthien tasted nothing, nothing at all.
“I know, Mama,” she said, with the lightness with which she always said such things, and said nothing more about Haleth.
Luthien saw the man Bauglir only once, and long ago. He had repulsed her then, with his bone-pale face pulled long with greed and his eyes like round black toad-eyes, glistening. She had not liked how the touch of his gaze felt, when it fell upon her. Still: he had not frightened her.
Nothing frightened Luthien, until Beren went away.
The clouds which had been so thick over Doriath lately had largely cleared overnight, rolling up farther north and leaving a brittle, uncertain sunshine behind. Despite the turn in the weather, Luthien did not put on her riding gear after breakfast, for her only chaperones left with Haleth gone were Isabella, who did not leave the hacienda, and Daeron. She had in previous years been grateful to Daeron for suggesting that they might practice French and Latin while out riding together, for that was how she had best managed to slip her father’s strict watch and explore the lands about, even if she still remained well within Doriath’s perimeter fences. This was yet another part of how things were changing, in this life that had been hers for so long: she did not wish anymore to go out riding with Daeron alone.
Instead, she gathered her embroidery hoop from Mama’s sewing room and a book of poetry from the little family library, and she carried both into her bedroom, closing and securing the door behind her. There were swinging shutters at her window, but Luthien was loath to shut out such a lovely day entirely, so instead of closing them she pulled her silken dressing screen before the window to block out any curious eyes. The woven pictures in the screen glowed with the sunlight flowing through the cloth, the butterfly wings Mama had painted on the silk shining in bright jewel-tones. Luthien took out her sewing table and set the embroidery upon it, and laid the book of poems upon her bed.
She carefully tied up her long hair, securing it with long, inlaid pins she kept in her vanity, and slipped out of her blue wrapper so she stood only in her undergarments, freed from her burdensome skirts.
Then, very quietly, she began going through the fighting stances Haleth had taught her.
Haleth, in teaching, called these forms. To Luthien, they were dancing steps, each as precise and intricate as the yayue dances she learned from her mother. In China, Mama said, dance could mean many things, depending upon the ritual; Luthien spun, and struck, and lunged her way through this dance of violence, and knew what this ritual’s power meant: safety.
The formula, as Daeron would say, was simple. Safety meant freedom.
Freedom meant Beren.
Beren meant—everything.
Sometimes, Luthien longed to tell Mama everything; to lay her head upon her mother’s lap and cry out I love Beren, Mama, just as you loved Papa, and you left your people behind, when you were young, all to be with him. Tell me what I must do.
Sometimes, Luthien imagined telling her father the secret she kept in her heart, and the fury that would rise in him then, the same anger that filled him when he spoke of Bauglir, or Feanor, or any other traitorous, faithless, unlovable creature, but this time it would fall upon her.
Sometimes, Luthien imagined that her father’s rage could not hurt her; that she could disarm him and turn all his wrath to bluster by merely laughing and telling him Put aside your anger, Papa! I love Beren, and you shall love him too, once he is the father of your grandchildren.
Oh, but those were very bold imaginings!
Luthien stumbled to a halt, breathing hard. She raised her hands to her hot-burning cheeks, and stood silent a moment on trembling feet, calming her breath and her heart.
How long had she been going through Haleth’s sparring forms? A quarter-hour? Thirty minutes? It would have to be long enough. Isabella could knock at the door at any moment.
Luthien stretched her arms, her legs, her back. She waited for her racing heartbeat to slow, just as it did when she finished a Spanish jota. As she selected a new house dress and laid it out upon her bed, her eye glanced upon the book she had left upon the bed first, so small and innocuous amidst the blankets.
Daeron had given her that book, this past Christmas. It was a book of French love poetry, bound in powder blue.
For your studies, he had told her, in his soft, familiar voice.
Luthien went to her vanity and poured a fresh basin of water with which to bathe her sweaty face and arms; she unpinned her hair and brushed it loose, before binding it again in her customary braids. This done, she dressed as quickly as she could, and walked to the window to push aside the silken screen. The whirl of painted butterflies flashed in the sunlight and then dulled in the shade of the wall, the magic gone. The sun fell upon Luthien’s face instead; upon her hair and her hands and her throat. Outside, all was quiet. There was no nest yet, in the empty pear tree. Soon, Luthien told herself, lingering a moment with her hand upon the windowsill: soon.
She was thinking not of the promise of new baby birds, this time; she was thinking of the empty nest that would be left behind, when the birds had flown.
Luthien returned to her bed and took up Daeron’s poetry book. She let it fall open upon her lap to whichever page it pleased, and she tilted her head forward, gazing unseeing at the pages. If anyone were to happen past her open window—if anyone were to chance a glance within—they would see only Luthien, dutiful and accomplished daughter, sitting quiet and demure, reading poetry.
Don’t tell him I am learning, she had whispered to Haleth, the last time they sat together out upon the rippling grass beneath a laden sky. Her arms ached with the exhilarating exertion of secret sparring for an hour with her friend; sweat ran through both her hair and Haleth’s, wind-chilled on hot skin. She recovered her breath faster than Haleth did; her constitution was better than Haleth’s, from her years of dancing and running carefree across her father’s lands. Her arms ached, her ribs ached, but her heart was strong underneath.
She whispered: Don’t tell him I am learning to fight. I want it to be a surprise.