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In Gilmith’s memories, her mother’s image is hazy, slicked-over, fractured like sunlight over wavetops. She remembers feeling so small, so lost looking at her face, even if she cannot quite recollect its features. Galador, with his small number of summers over her, had already seemed so mature, so much bigger, in those last days with their mother – how small must Gilmith then have seemed to Mithrellas, whose summers her father had never even bothered to count for her, only chuckling warmly and avoiding the question when he put Gilmith to bed at night.
Even Mithrellas’ voice comes to her like it is bubbling up from under the calm sheet of a pool, a muted murmur, almost drowned out in the sounds of underwater. Watch over your sister, Galador, it wafts up through the ringing of water-filled ears. Mithrellas’ hands envelop theirs, where Galador squeezes her tiny fist in his bigger one.
Galador is always clear like ocean glass in these dreams, as is the white swan over the mantle, as is the grey sky of morning past the window. Gilmith feels real and alive too, as she always has, thrumming in tune with the bustling noises of the port city always filling their home. Her brother makes to bow his head in agreement, she thinks, but then he doesn’t bring it back up, like it is weighed down by an invisible anchor. His hand shakes where it is holding hers and Gilmith wiggles her fingers but neither Galador nor Mithrellas will let her go. Mother, Galador says, and: I am still young.
Be happy, Gilmith, Mithrellas says, instead of acknowledging him.
It’s a nice enough scene, except she probably made it up. Gilmith can’t really remember anything her mother said, to her or Galador. Trying to dredge up any memory of her feels like dragging the sand for little crabs, sluggish and invasive.
She likes inventing things, though. Every night, and sometimes even during the day, she dreams, her mother a constant specter, flitting across the beach like the shadow of a seagull.
Be a good ruler, she says, or: Keep your father company. Stick with each other. Remember me. Be happy.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
Gilmith keeps up the illusion for a little longer: From her 7 th year onwards, her nightly question to her father changes from how old is mother?, to: how many years until mother comes back? Galador, who has taken to standing by her bedside every night till sleep finds her, twists his fists in her sheets every time, hisses at her to leave it, Gilmith. Father however would only chuckle warmly again, and avoid her question. She notices how much duller his eyes seem, but her tiny self is cruel enough to keep her questioning up for a year longer. On her 8 th birthday, her mother is still lost, presumably in the forest in the east, her former ladies-in-waiting say. Galador no longer comes to her bedside. Instead, her new waiting maid ( befitting a young lady such as yourself, according to her father), has taken to tucking her in.
But Gilmith’s dreams don’t stop. Sleep well, Gilmith.
I love you, my children.
That last one always hurts enough to wake her up.
Gilmith grows up with whispers following her everywhere.
The bloodline is cursed, they say. Lady Nimrodel was lost to the forest, Lady Mithrellas, too. The Prince has brought a curse onto his house.
The young lady will be next, a servant girl whispers to a friend, unaware that Gilmith and Galador are hunkered just around a corner, hoping to steal some of the dough they are kneading. She can see the tears start to well up in her brother’s eyes. The first defense her 9-year-old self can come up with is to kick his shin. Galador yelps, the servants jump, and they take off, Gilmith close on her brother’s heels. They run and run and only stop once they’ve reached the cliffside, looking as always like it will drop them right down into the horizon if they were ever to tumble off. They hold hands and stare off into the endless distance, west. Galador is still sniffling, but he has his nose held high into the breeze, and he’s laughing and she joins him because it feels like they’ll be able to grow wings and fly away if she does.
They stand and then sit and then fall asleep next to each other, right there by the sea.
Cursed.
Really.
How could you want to throw yourself into sadness, like this?
Belfalas is beautiful in spring, the air crisp and filled with light. Her dreams stopped a long time ago – she is 10 now, too old to have nightmares anymore, Galador says and she has to agree. Her head is filled with too many other things, anyway, to think of her mother standing statue-still in her long-abandoned chambers in the castle day in and day out.
There is too many things to do in the heart of the Bay of Belfalas for someone like her, she decided last spring, when she finally gave up pestering the guard about letting her join Galador’s sword training. Running across the sun-warmed sand with her feet bare, hair tangling in the salty breeze, she feels she’ll never need to feel sad, or lonely, or excluded again in her life. Just this – this is enough.
“I swam out a little farther north yesterday, and I found a new spot in the cliffside. I presume it was caved out by the water over the ages. There seems to be a small whirl pressing against the stone nearby,” Gilmith says now, her and Galador perched on a small rock formation a short swim from the shore. She has to hide a grin as her brother keeps looking back towards the city, squinting his sky-grey eyes into the light to see if any of his keepers followed him. When he doesn’t find anyone, his shoulders relax. He picks up a small rock and tries to skip it out across the sea, but the waves are too rocky and its path is soon interrupted. Galador grumbles quietly and it makes her laugh out into the wind. Her brother used to be so loud and demanding all the time. He usually keeps himself so tightly wrapped nowadays, the chief advisor he was given now that diplomatic lessons have been added to his training always tutting at him to be more the man his father is, tall and unwavering and still like the trees. Gilmith can’t imagine ever being still, and she doesn’t think it suits Galador. At least out here, they can just be.
“You know you’re not allowed to swim so far out. You’ll drown, and I will be responsible,” Galador says, eyes casting around for the next stone to throw. Gilmith can’t help but laugh again: “If I drown, will you rename your land Dol Gilmith, dear prince?” Galador snorts and flicks a pebble at her shoulder.
“You are not the most significant person to have drowned in these waters, don’t be presumptuous,” he mutters. Gilmith giggles and tosses the stone back at him. The cliffs and the city tower high above them, and the cries of seagulls come down from even higher. Gilmith turns her face up to the sky and smiles. They sit in silence for a while, her rocking and humming, Galador fidgeting like he always does when he wants to say something. She grins, and waits.
“I had to sit in father’s hall for hours this morning, signing letters to people whose name I have never even heard,” bursts out of him what might have been an hour later. Gilmith brings her head out of the clouds and looks at him, rocking fore and back, grinning. Galador looks at her with his eyebrows and lips pinched. “And you got to swim and run all day. It is unfair,” he says. “My back even hurts from sitting for so long! Sword training will be torture tonight!”
“My poor older brother,” Gilmith grins.
Galador squints at her even harder.
“How come you don’t have any lessons today?”
“Grandmother loves me,” Gilmith says imperiously.
“If she did, she would mind your education more! You will have to be a real lady very soon, like her, you know?” Galador says, drawing his back straight and pinching his eyebrows even tighter. He’s trying to look like their father. Gilmith grimaces to fight the urge to laugh – it is a poor, poor impression.
“Yes, yes, dear brother, I will be perfectly still and presentable by your side, one day,” she lies through her teeth. Galador’s face falls.
A ship passes by them in the distance. She can see one of the men on board shield his face against the light to look at them. She gives a small wave – surely he won’t recognize them from this far away. Surely, they will get to have this just a little while longer.
When the waves that drag behind the boat finally reach their perch atop the water, Galador growls out a frustrated sigh and shouts over their buoying and sloshing: “Don’t you sometimes wish the days were longer, or – or your life’s passing was impossibly slow? There is so much to do, always, it never ends.”
Gilmith can hear the question he isn’t daring to ask.
An image wafts to the forefront of her mind, a new dream of hers (not a nightmare – she is 10 after all). It is her, hair tied in complex, fragile braids that don’t move with the wind at all, robes long and lying flat around her still frame. Past her back, she can see trees.
“If you want your days to be longer, you simply have to sleep less,” she says, trying to push the image away by focusing on her feet, toes curling into the sandy rock beneath, twisting this way and that.
“I don’t sleep as it is!” Galador forces out and launches into a long tirade about the strict schedule his advisor is keeping him to. She pretends she doesn’t see the glances he keeps stealing at her, pretends she doesn’t see herself dissolving into the dark of night in his eyes. Pretends she doesn’t see the fear, and the loneliness.
Past her brother, the sun, slowly setting, fractures on the waves, sparkling in all different colors. She stares until her eyes hurt.
“Gilmith, dear, the eggs now,” her grandmother says, and she gets onto her tiptoes, bare feet digging almost painfully into the tiles laid over the kitchen floor. Grandmother Almarian is a kind woman, with deep lines carved into her face that remind Gilmith of the wet sand revealed by the ebbing of the tides, but she is still walking tall for her age and her hair is full and dark.
When Gilmith makes to use the small stool put out for her to reach the upper cupboards, but then decides it will be more fun to climb onto the counter and retrieve the eggs from there, she makes a small tut sound that Gilmith has heard thousands of times in her life. Her grandmother’s warm front appears behind her and swoops her off the counter with only a small creak of her elbows.
“Child, it is your brother’s birthday,” she scolds.
“So? He will get his breakfast, do not worry grandmother,” she says haughtily, turning her nose up with her body still dangling over the ground like a wet kitten. She can’t believe she hasn’t grown taller than Galador yet, though she tosses stones like wishes into the sea for it to be that way every day. At 12, she’s still so small.
“May I remind you this surprise was your idea? The least you can do now is do it with care. Or does your brother not deserve your care?”
Grandmother sets her back down. With care .
Gilmith makes a face, but then she sighs, long-suffering and too heavy for her body, and gets back on her stool. She made her lady-in-waiting cry only yesterday, and the shock is still settled in her bones. She called her a fickle and cruel child, uncivilized, only out to cause her grief.
She holds two eggs out to her grandmother like a peace offering, and asks her to show her how to scramble them. In a mirror to earlier, only with Gilmith’s feet on the ground, her grandmother stands behind her at the counter. Knobby hands close over hers, press a whisk between her fingers, and they get to mixing.
“I think it should be enough that I thought to make him a present,” Gilmith argues. “Now, I don’t know about care, he has been awfully moody lately, but – a lady should be proper and well-versed in household affairs ,” she parrots the words tearfully hurled at her yesterday.
“Don’t sound so smart now, girl,” grandmother chides, but her voice is quiet and carries a smile. A thumb brushes over the bone protruding from her wrist. “Is that girl putting ideas into your head? My little bird, don’t act so stuffy.”
“I can be stuffy if I want to,” Gilmith says, turning her nose up. “It is not that I can’t be proper, grandmother, I just simply do not have the time.”
“What occupies you so, then?”
“Yesterday, I found a small natural pool tucked into a crevice just past the southern pier. Someone has to explore it, you understand, there might be new seashells there no one has seen before.”
When grandmother just hums, Gilmith tucks her head a little. “But, grandmother – tell you the truth, Galador is always so grumpy nowadays. Do you think he is angry with me? He always scolds me for not attending lessons.”
“Your brother is just worrying about you.”
“He thinks I’ll run away,” she nods sadly. “Are you scared, too? That I’ll disappear like mother.”
The light shines bright through the slanted windows of the kitchen, illuminating their hands as they work. They have to hurry, if they want to catch Galador before his advisor wakes him. She sets her mind to the eggs again, now runny and sun-yellow. She’s almost forgotten that she asked a question, when her grandmother finally speaks up again: “If your mother hadn’t kept herself so tightly, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to run, either,” Almarian says as she steps away from Gilmith to find a pan.
Gilmith conjures up the maybe-made-up-memory of her mother standing still and sad under her father’s banner. “Was father worried about her running off, too? Did he try to keep her? He doesn’t even notice when I go missing,” she says, immediately embarrassed by how petulant she sounds. She starts tapping the whisk against the counter to keep her hands busy, to fill the silence as her grandmother once again takes her time to answer. She’s just like that – very careful, but slow. It settles something in Gilmith, even as it makes her skin crawl with impatience.
“Grandmother?” she asks, after she’s beat out an entire shanty against the counter and her grandmother hasn’t answered yet. She’s stood still before the cabinet Gilmith knows holds the pans. When she calls, her grandmother’s head falls and her arms relax at her sides. Then, she straightens back up, finally retrieves the pan and returns to Gilmith.
“Honestly, elves,” she mutters, “too much time for things to keep streaming into that head, piling up until they block the view of anything outside.” Gilmith isn’t sure the words are directed at her, but then her grandmother bends down and takes her face into her hands. Her eyes are flickering, her hair falling loose and free around her shoulders, skin weathered but bright. “Listen, child, you keep running, no matter who tries to keep you, be it your brother or your father or your own heart. Do not dwell; do not forget that time moves on.” Her gaze drifts off to the side somewhat. “And take your brother with you. You will have to make a decision some day, and it won’t do for either of you to turn out so lonely.”
Gilmith feels tears in her throat but she doesn’t know why, except that her grandmother looks sad.
They bring Galador his breakfast and he laughs bright as always in the golden morning sun and he only digs his heels in a little bit when Gilmith convinces him to climb out of the window and flee to the sea with her for the day.
She has heard it whispered in the streets many times – her father is a sullen man, the Prince of Belfalas, Imrazôr the Númenórean, oh if only he hadn’t lost his heart .
She always pulls her hood up higher and hurries along, hands clenching in the fabric, as she does today. She doesn’t think her father lost his heart. Just the day prior, he had sat her down and hadn’t even scolded her for bribing one of the fishermen to take her along again. He’d only shaken his head, eyes warm and far away as ever, taken a brush and dragged it through until most of the salt and sand had come out. He had lost something, but definitely not his heart, she thinks as she feels her own grow heavy.
She stops to stand on the city’s highest wall for a while, gaze on the rain clouds gathering on the horizon. If there is to be a rainstorm, she will simply have to sneak out tonight. Surely, her grandmother and tutors won’t begrudge her a walk in the rain. It’s been so long.
Only tonight , though. Hopefully, the clouds will keep until then. Now, she is needed on the castle grounds. So she returns home, trades her plain clothes and cloak for the robes her father gifted her on her 16 th birthday and climbs the steps to the stand overlooking the castle’s main courtyard. Imrazôr is already there, one hand on the railing before him, surveying the corps of royal guard going through an exercise below. They are led by Galador – as Gilmith steps to her father’s side, she can see her brother just under the railing, tall as a tree and his back just as straight as Imrazôr’s, his eyes alive with the same tension that is filling the air today, in anticipation of a storm. His loud voice, shouting in rhythm, echoes through the castle, boisterous, confident, full of life. Her father turns towards her in greeting, warm and pleasant, but he has nothing to say to her.
She sighs and looks back down to her brother and his training corps, all in their armor for demonstration purposes, perfectly in sync. The thicker the clouds overhead get, the easier it gets to look at them, with the last slivers of sun no longer reflecting blindingly off their plate.
She swallows the tenseness building in her throat, unsure whether she will say something insensitive or just snarl in frustration like one of the castle’s dogs. She hates presentation days, envies Galador, who can stroll across the courtyard freely, wide strides, deft sword strokes, raised voice. Meanwhile, Gilmith has to stand beautiful and silent by her father’s side, who doesn’t need or want her for anything, except as an ornament, a monument to whatever it is he lost .
She reminds him of Mithrellas, does she not? That has to be why he always keeps her close, looks at her so gently, but is still so removed, so careful to never let her close.
She doesn’t know what Imrazôr lost when her mother left them, but one thing is for certain: If she has to stand still for an hour longer, she will lose her mind.
For the first time since she arrived, she catches her brother’s eyes, filled with laughter. He quirks an eyebrow at her, cocking his head, and she knows he can read her mind.
How she wishes she could fly down to him, swift like a bird swooping down to claw a fish out of the water – join him, and run, like they are years younger and Galador will not be ruler soon and for her, a future filled with long days like this will still be far-off. When she could still escape for days on end, to play and explore, and her grandmother would only sigh and promise not to tell her father.
If Imrazôr could hear her thoughts in this moment, would they also remind him of her mother?
Gilmith has no ill feelings towards Mithrellas.
Maybe she has some ill feelings about not having ill feelings, but she tried to tell this to the waves before and she felt even the fish were mocking her, so now she keeps it to herself.
She knows this: She doesn’t really know her mother. When she was a girl, she would come up with her own memories of the woman, imagined that she loved her and Galador; that she never loved them; that she didn’t care or that she cared too much. She is 18 now, and only hours ago Galador halted her departure to shout at her for abandoning the castle too often, a wild edge to his eyes, grey swallowed by the foreboding darkness of the eastern forest she was headed towards.
She doesn’t have any ill feelings towards him, either. She breathes deep – how could one hold resentment in their heart, with the vestiges of ocean air drafting through the trees, catching between rustling leaves and mingling with heavier, staler air. All around her, birds sing, though she can only make a small number of them out among the foliage – a sparrow, two swallows. Farther towards the east, a woodpecker is battering a hole into a tree.
She wonders if her mother hears the same sounds she hears, at this very moment, or if she perceives them differently – or maybe she cannot hear them at all, in her sorrow. What a sad existence it must be, to be so stricken with grief you cannot see the world in front of you.
She falls down on a tree stump, huffing in frustration – she’s doing it again. Who knows what her mother feels – felt . Maybe she wasn’t sorrowful at all. Maybe she wanted to wander and run, like Gilmith. Maybe she didn’t even get lost in the forest but wanted to look for her Lady Nimrodel, or traveled across the sea in her stead.
Maybe she even felt homesick and made her journey back to Lothlórien.
Or maybe she was always nothing more than the ghost in Gilmith’s memory, and she felt nothing, nothing at all.
Gilmith starts picking grass and flowers off the floor by the tree stump, arranges them in shapes on the ground before her, tries to make a crown for herself like she is still a little girl. Her fingers are long and immaculate and elegant around the delicate stems of daisies and she tears them just because she can. Oh, how elegant, the women teaching Gilmith to mend clothes with deft stitched would swoon at her, how lucky those blessed by the Eldar are. Just last week, a young archer from her brother’s hunting company had taken her hand on one of the castle’s balustrades, and he looked at her with surprise and wonder and protectiveness in his eyes, like one might at a small bird fallen from its nest. She snatched her hand back, hissed words at him that were not befitting of a lady of the castle and probably hurt his poor young heart, but all that went through her head at the moment was: I’d rather have his hands. Those of a hunter. Or a fisherman. Or hands like the seamstresses and kitchen maids. Hands whose motions left impressions on their owner over years and years of life.
The trees show signs of age and wear, but not of decline – the forest is healthy and thriving, her father makes it so.
She likens Imrazôr to a great oak perching at the edge of her clearing, old and long-suffering, with its spine straight and its roots and dreams dug in deep.
Her mother was probably most like the short-lived flowers in her hands, even though her life was the least fleeting of all.
She hopes Galador will never become either of these things, neither dug into the ground or too easily plucked, hopes he will be able to bend better than her father but not keel over completely. To her left, birches swing from left to right, and she remembers how precarious climbing into their tops felt when they were younger. She can almost hear their laughter on the wind.
For a moment, she tries to imagine Galador and herself perched within the branches of the mallorn-trees she has heard about but never seen, their bark and leaves silver, not grey; framed by gold. They would make a beautiful sight, she is sure, but it hurts, to picture their faces not as silhouettes against the wide-open sky, but against a thick roof of leaves.
Would Galador want to see the mellyrn? Would he find them beautiful? Would he get lost among them? He always stays so far from the forest; tries to keep her, as well. But maybe he would like to, one day? She tries to find an answer but comes up empty. What a terrible sister.
You are 18 now, you will have to choose soon, Gilmith, Galador had screamed at her earlier. They were stood in an archway letting out into the gardens reserved for the closest family of the Prince of Belfalas, her in her inconspicuous walking clothes, him in the colors of their father, with the Swan boldly on his breast. It was a very long rant, and at the end, the thing that’s stood between them for all their lives: You won’t be able to run away from – this – for very much longer.
This. Their family. Their curse. Their birthrights, both those passed down by her father and the terrible, terrible one passed down from their mother.
All Gilmith thought about when she heard him stutter was their childhood, laughter swallowed by the roiling waves.
Brother, calm, you’ll get wrinkles at this rate, she mumbled out. Galador spluttered, and her heart was so fond, she couldn’t leave him hanging. I’ve never done anything but run, brother. And I have not been led astray yet.
I always returned to you , she didn’t say.
With a sigh, she lets the sorry excuse for a crown she built herself drop between her knees. Maybe she will be led astray tonight, for no fault but her own: The light is quickly fading all around her, and there are no stars to guide her way to be seen past the dense brush above her. Oh, how she misses the stars. How she misses Eärendil’s cruel stare down at her, mocking her with his beautifully simple existence: to sail forever, no destination to arrive at and no port to return to. She wishes so for herself, and also she doesn’t. Mainly, she wishes to leave this forest.
Before she steps out of the trees, she whispers a quiet little question to her mother.
Are you wandering, or running, or lost?
She is 18, so she doesn’t ask if she’ll ever come back.
Imrazôr dies when Gilmith is 21. They sit on either side of his bed, Galador with one of their father’s hands in his. She looks into his face, sees the face of the laughing boy who fell asleep on the cliffside with her, and knows he is too young, and knows that his youth won’t come back.
The castle servants usher them out, into the arms of their grandmother, moments later. The last glimpse she gets at her father, he looks still and sad, as he had in life, grey before a grey room and grey sky, blurring before the crisp threads of the ship and swan over his bed.
Grandmother takes on all the responsibility of burying her son, so for days on end, Gilmith has nothing to do but sit. Galador is afforded a grace period – after the funeral, he will have to take over for Imrazôr, but times are peaceful and no one sees any point in rushing the young heir onto the throne.
So, with nothing else to do, they sit by the sea. They don’t fall asleep and they don’t laugh.
At night, when she returns to her chambers, she hears people passing by: It was only a matter of time, they say. Like Amroth, he followed his wife into death.
I told you, just you wait, says a man by the stables, who’s been working on the grounds as long as Gilmith can remember. Just you wait until the children are old enough, then he will follow that wife of his. Nevermind that Gilmith has been some nebulous old enough for years now.
It cannot be long now, until the curse takes the young lady, a noblewoman who happened to be visiting when father fell ill whispers to her husband. Galador and Gilmith are passing through the gardens in the morning, and Galador makes it out of the open space and into the dark of the walkway only barely before he slams his fist to the stone of the castle and snaps at her to leave him already, and be done with it.
“I don’t know how I deserve your trust and care, brother,” she sneers at him, and leaves for the sea alone.
She only sees him again at the funeral. It is a very drab affair, their father’s body covered in cloth and mounted on a splendid bier, trudged through the city to be sealed away in his ancestor’s tomb in silence. There is singing, and wailing, and more flowers than Gilmith can count. She stops seeing any of it when Galador next to her brings one hand up to curl ever so softly into the fabric at her side, a secret gesture, hidden by the gratuitous sleeves of their best robes. They stand until they are alone but for grandmother with her hand on the opulently wrought iron gates sealing her son away, still forever, never to move again.
They choose the fate of Men here, a decision whispered silently between themselves, like secrets muttered into the dark of night, into the rushing of the sea, the murmuring of activity just past the door of their childhood bedroom. Galador seems surprised, and she can’t fault him. She will have to crush the glimmer of hope in his eyes soon enough, after all; she will not stay. For now, though, they look at their father’s resting place.
Knowing for certain that she is not staring down an eternity of obligations and memories to weigh on her mind; that she will rest by the sea when she dies and not cross over it; she feels comfortable in stillness for the first time in her life.
The day after, Galador is crowned. Gilmith gifts him a small, beautiful box she had made from birch wood, filled with seashells. For safe-keeping, she says.
She knows he shouldn’t, but he sees her off anyway, stood high up on the cliff as the merchant company she joined for their journey steers their boat north. As the wind blows her hair into her face, she swears she can hear his laughter carried down by the wind, mixing with her own, with the cries of seagulls overhead and the laughter of the men settling in for a long trip.
She closes her eyes, and smiles, waiting to fill her time full to bursting.