Chapter Text
It had been years now since the first time her father had brought her here to this place. The tall grey colonnades, the latticed bower overhead, the way the steps went right down to the sand. The fountain in the center with its sweet perpetual song. Apiece they had not changed since her childhood.
Behind, the Ered Luin, hazy in the blue distance, heavy, immovable, land.
Ahead, the silver quays, the ships tethered there swan-necked, the cove, the throat of the inlet, and in the evening, the pooled sun dissolving down into it. Shoot an arrow into Anorien’s unwavering face and it would sketch the Straight Path for you.
Laurelandë said, as her father had taught her until the words had become her own, “You don’t have to be afraid.”
Her companion was standing, swaying in the sea-breeze like the sea-grass, pale-haired and translucent at the boundaries, weariness a shadow in every pore and crease and curve, and she whispered in a voice gone ghostly, her eyes on the horizon, “I was born here. In the Greenwood.”
She had voiced it thrice already in the last hour. Laurelandë sat upon a white bench to the side, her knees crossed easily, her gauzy skirt a whisper on the white flagstones. The sun kissed her cheekbone, the braid at her temple, her bare shoulder. She said, with steadiness, “It was your home. There is no shame in mourning it.”
“My son was born there, too.”
“Is he there still?”
“Killed by orcs. Thirteen thousand seventy-two days ago.”
“I am so sorry.” Laurelandë’s will seeped into the words and rode the sound to the listener’s ear. So sorry. Indeed she was. Once she had not been able to understand. She had sat and watched her father speak with them. Like water their sorrow had drenched him; like water it had not harmed him. Still he felt it fully. Rode the eddy with them. Children dead. Beloveds sailed. The weight of a broken world gone wrong too heavy for them to carry any longer. Not for him. He had borne it for them for a while, so their minds could clear enough to behold the sunshot West, to hear the gulls, to be afraid no longer.
Now she did the same for them, here in this same place. The flame of her spirit did not flicker beneath the deluge of their griefs. She too felt them fully but as if she were a white wave-carven stone they broke over her, and not she over them. The seabirds to her yet a sweet song, not a sundering one. She sang a snatch of it now, the terns overhead a percussive underplay. There were crabs on the beach for them to torment. She laughed at them, let the simple joy of watching billow out and fill the pavilion like soft light.
At last the lady turned and looked at her, a small smile denting the corner of her mouth, “Oh, hello. Have you been there long?”
“Not at all,” said Laurelandë, smiling back.
“I was just thinking about my son.”
“I bet he was brave, like his mama.”
“So brave. He’s waiting for me, you know.”
“He will be so filled with joy to see you.”
“Yes.” The lady looked far out this time, past the point. The sun a buttermelt on the face of the sea. The gulls shrieked and wheeled. “Yes, he will be.”
Laurelandë said again, “You don’t have to be afraid. The ship is waiting, see it? It will carry you to him.”
“Straight across.” One last time she turned back, and laughed, and bent to take Laurelandë’s hands in hers. She kissed them over the knuckles, one side, and then the other. She said, gone quite suddenly too radiant to look right at, “I will watch for you, someday, when your ship comes.”
Laurelandë was weeping, her spirit a tidepool as the joy washed over her and left her full and running over. She laughed through the tears. “I will see you there, my friend.”
She did not know the lady’s name. She stood to watch as her companion picked up her skirt and ran like a child down, over the sand, scattering the quarreling terns. Up they went like a spray of white seafoam. The ship's gangway received her like a mother’s waiting hand.
Laurelandë began the walk down the long beach, home to her family’s seaside cottage. She would come back tomorrow. There was always someone else to sit and listen to as they looked out, into the West.
She came home in the twilight. Only Túen was there this time, who kept it in their absence. Arwen was gone out on the ship with Círdan, and would be until the end of the week. The light was on in the window at the top of the bluff. The sand still warm and shifting wonderfully under her bare feet. Dinner would be waiting.
Someone stood on the embankment, a stooped black silhouette against the purple dusk.
Laurelandë halted. Some uneasy thing scuttled in her belly. Visitors did not come unannounced, as they had once when her mother had made her home here, her services as a healer and midwife well-known in Mithlond and in Limgobel, the fishermen’s village down the shore.
The shadow shifted, looked down at her, straightened a little. She had no weapon. She squared herself and said, firmly, “Hello. Can I help you with something?”
The person stepped down off the bank. The last light washed his face. The sweep of a king’s high cheekbone. Her best friend’s oversturdy nose. Those Halfeven kids were robust in the bone, her mother always said. It made Arwen startlingly lovely. It made him…
His hair was ragged with braids and unwashing, a dozen different lengths and textures, like the Mannish sailors who brought their goods to the dockside markets. A tattered red feather hung alongside his throat. The sight of it finally snapped her out of her gaping. That, and his shirt, which was ripped, and bloodied like a butcher’s.
“Elrohir?”
He said, as if it hadn’t been twenty-two years since he had seen her last, his voice so full of—something—it yanked her mind back to the quayside pavilion and its heartsick, longing-riddled visitors, “Hey, buttercup. Is your dad home?”