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1. Eregion/Somewhere in the ocean
He has tried. He has tried. It’s not ideal, that she’s found out now - he would have preferred another year (five, ten, three hundred) fighting at her side, leaning into her as she would into him. Then he would have told her, and then he would have crowned her his queen. It would have worked. It would, he is sure. And that was the plan, but then there was the volcano, and the mithril, and the glimmer of an end in sight and the giddying rush to meet it and - and -
And, she rejects him.
And, she shouts that he will die at her hand.
And, he roars, and she falls backwards from the raft into the sea.
He has tried. It didn’t work. It will the next time - it will the next time - but for now, he has to retreat. Step out of this memory-vision of the raft he’s created, leave Galadriel floating in the shallows of the Glanduin for Elrond to find, and run.
He pulls his mind back, blinks, and he’s -
Still on the raft.
This isn’t right. The raft isn’t real. They’re in Eregion, leagues away from the sea. He has made this and he should be able to unmake it just as easily. He tries again, and again, and again.
He is still on the raft. He can’t leave.
One piece of him, a particularly furious piece of him, thinks: why trap him here? If he truly must be stuck in some daydream of his own devising, why couldn’t it be one of the better ones? Why not the one where she’s beside him on the throne. Why not on the raft but with her, tasting salt water through her soaked shift as he bites gently at her skin. Why couldn’t he have that.
The rest of him thinks: but how? Who has the power to trap him here? He is a Maia, he is power and force, he can’t be constrained by the whims of elves, so how -
The ocean breaks.
It truly breaks, he has no better word for it. It acts in no way he has ever seen water act. It shatters into ice and then water vapour, a maelstrom of noise and chaos. It spins a circle of ice, and then Galadriel is lying on its surface, curled on her side as if asleep. Then the rest of the water rises in clouds and the smoke gathers around it, and he sees a vast towering figure in armour the green of deep seas and a helm like the crest of a wave, and a voice made up of whalesong and crashing waves and spray says: Mairon.
The force of it, the shame of it, knocks him down to his knees. The wood of the raft feels disconcertingly real. Above him, Ulmo, Lord of Waters, blocks out the sun.
Mairon, the voice says again.
“I was trying to mend it,” he says, feeling the clawing desperation in his own voice.
Ulmo weaves a beam of sunlight that cradles the sleeping form of Galadriel. These are my children, Mairon. Your work has harmed them. Your mending has harmed them.
Ulmo, ever the doting lord of men and elves. How many seas and rivers and streams and lakes and wells had he been watching from, this whole time? “I went too fast,” he said. “I meant to give her more time. I didn’t know the volcano -"
Your work.
“I was trying to mend it!”
Your work. Ulmo shows him Galadriel again, suddenly so close that he can see her breathing, see a faint strand of golden hair light over her face. She is beautiful, she is the most beautiful thing he has seen for whole ages of Arda, and she is lost to him. Lost because he couldn’t wait. Lost because he couldn’t hold his patience. Lost because he listened to a whispering silken voice, one that he always thought was his master’s and was now beginning to wonder if it had been his own all along, had told him: see how she looks at you, see how she yearns for you, she’ll follow you, they’ll all follow you.
“I was trying to mend it,” he says, once again. “I was trying to mend all of it.”
Again that dizzying, sickening rush of being too close to a Vala’s thoughts. He’s buffeted sideways by it, an endless stream of spiralling multi-dimensional spectrum scream of images: whole worlds rise and die, languages are unwound back to silence. Ulmo could restrain this just as the others mostly did, but the others were accustomed to physical forms, the art of them, the craft of them, the beauty of them. Ulmo prefers to be water.
You were told to return to Valinor for your judgement, Ulmo’s voice crashes in his mind. He hears the hiss of waves retreating from a sandy shore.
“I’ll go when I have something to show them.”
You wish to bargain for your forgiveness?
A wave hits him with a smack of scornful laughter and now he’s in the water too, grasping for something solid to hold. Chunks of ice and broken wood slide from his fingers. Where Galadriel lies, the air is still perfectly calm, but he a mere few yards away is in a tempest. You feel you can mend yourself alone, Ulmo’s voice says. Arrogance.
“No.” Well. Not entirely. “No, I - Ulmo -" Another wave throws him beneath the water, and it’s a whirling cloud of ice and bubbles and debris, he can’t make out anything at all. “I am trying to mend what I did!” he shouts into the noise, his voice drowned in saltwater. “Let me show them! Let me show you. Let me -"
And then suddenly it’s gone, all of it, the sea, the raft, the ice, the storm. He’s on the banks of the river, coughing water, half a dozen elves with swords around him and Galadriel with a knee in his stomach and a knife at his throat.
then face their judgement first, the river whispers.
2. Prison
Númenoreans make good dungeons. Like everything else here they’re a lie - no, no Elvish influence here, all our art and statues and craft and buildings are our own, so pathetically petty - but it’s a pleasing lie. Even this cell is built with so much care and craft that he’s seen whole castles built with less. Some of his, in fact.
He lies back on the wooden sleeping platform and admires it: the arches of the doorways, the waves of the bars, the perfectly carved stone floors. Such beauty. In all those years how he’d craved it, coveted and sought it, captured it only to find that his touch could only mimic and mock and corrupt. Now, in a mortal body (for all that the others see, anyway), as a man alone washed up from the sea, no armies at his side, no sword in his hand, no master, no master, he is alone and lost and imprisoned and oh he could lie here for days, simply letting his eyes feast on it.
This becomes more challenging when they bring Galadriel and throw her in a cell across from him.
She paces. It’s distracting. She will not be still - perhaps doesn’t even know how to be still - and she does not see anything here except the bars. The fact that the enemy she seeks lies just beyond those bars would have seemed to him once like an absolutely delicious irony; now, it only makes him feel somewhat tired.
He only has himself to blame for the conclusions she’s leapt to about his identity, he knows. That was of course the plan, of a sort, and for a few hours he even entertained the idea of sending her off with a Numenorean army to fight Adar on his behalf, so that his enemies could tear each other apart while he sat somewhere in the sunshine back in Armenolos enjoying all the beauty of creation.
That was naive of him, though. She won’t rest. She won’t rest. She won’t be satisfied until she’s dragged him along too, back into the war, back into all of it. Until she realises who he really is - and then she won’t be satisfied until she’s killed him.
Years, she’s sought him. Centuries. For the sake of hunting him down she’s turned away from her people, she’s rejected Valinor, she’s alienated her king. For the sake of finding him she’s made enemies of half of Armenolos and she refuses to stop pacing long enough to even see the beauty that surrounds her. For the sake of him she’s turned herself from a soldier to an animal seeking vengeance. He doesn’t think anyone in his long existence has ever been so loyal to him.
He even considers letting her kill him. After all, it’s not as if it would be permanent. It took a long time to form this body together, and it took much from him, and it would be hard to do again, and yet… he might consider it anyway if only to see what satisfaction would look like on her face. What puts him off, most of all, is the thought of going through another ten, hundred, thousand years of trying to knit himself back into physical form, only to find Galadriel facing him again. Galadriel and a Númenorean army, Galadriel and a handful of battle-weary elves, did it even matter? Galadriel alone and unarmed in a cell was enough.
(Is he watching her, too? He is. Well, so what if he is, he can appreciate beauty in all its forms. He’d just prefer it - for practical reasons if nothing else - if this particular form didn’t want to destroy him.)
If she could only let him be. If she could only find peace, as he advised her once before. If she could only stop pacing.
“What would you do if your enemy was here right now?” he said.
She whirls around at him, distracted, annoyed. “Kill him myself.”
“You aren’t armed.”
“I would still try.”
How, Galadriel, he thinks. How exactly do you plan to kill me with only sheer fury and your bare hands. But then - she does have rather a lot of sheer fury, and her bare hands must be well practised at killing. Perhaps she could do some damage. Certainly she would try. “What if he sent a herald? To reach a truce with you. What would you say?”
“There can be no truce with evil.”
This is why Gil-Galad’s herald was Elrond, not you, he thinks. “That’s not how it works, Galadriel. You’d have to hear terms.”
“There are no terms that would persuade me to lay down arms.”
“What if your enemy offered to lay down his?”
“I would know it as trickery and lies.”
“But what would your terms be?” And for the first time, she doesn’t have an immediate answer, so he pushes further. “You’re all that’s left of your army, so it would be up to you. What would you accept? What is it you want? Beyond death and revenge, we’ve covered that. What would it take for you to lay down your arms and give up your fight and go off and do happy peaceful Elf things forever?”
“I do not want -" She stops herself.
“You must want something,” he says. “It can’t all be blood and vengeance. What would you trade for peace?”
She glares at him and he thinks the fire of her might set him alight where he stands. “What would you know of peace.”
“At least I’m trying,” he says. She scoffs and turns her back on him.
Well, so much for that. Perhaps a more direct approach. “Galadriel, turn and look at me,” he says in her own Quenya. “Galadriel. Galadriel of the Noldor. Galadriel, commander of the Northern armies. Galadriel daughter of Finarfin. Galadriel who crossed the ice at Helcaraxë, Galadriel who fought Fëanor’s sons at Alqualondë, Galadriel who has hunted me for years upon years, Galadriel turn and look at your enemy.”
And she does, spinning round and stepping back, her breath drawn in. “What are you?” she demands - but oh, she knows.
”Better,” he says. “Now can we discuss terms?”
She stares at him, stares and stares and stares. Only the slightest shake of her head in answer.
“You might as well. You without an army, me without an army, both of us locked in prison cells. What else is there to do?”
“How are you here,” she breathes.
“It’s a long story. How about this: I agree to stay away from Middle-Earth, you agree to stay away from Númenor. Both lay down arms. If I ever set foot on your shores you can slit my throat yourself.”
“Or I could slit your throat now,” she says, and for a moment he actually thinks she might tear her cell bars apart herself.
“Except, you can’t,” he says. “You’re stuck in a prison.”
“As are you.”
“True, but I can talk my way out of here a lot faster than you can. So.” He leans back against the cell wall, knowing she’ll have to step closer to see him. “I don’t want Middle-Earth. You can have it. You can have every single mountain and river and blade of grass. All for you. Deal?”
She laughs at him. She laughs at him. “I don’t want to rule Middle-Earth. There is nothing you can offer me.”
“Nothing. You don’t want a single thing.” It’s maddening she’s not closer, because if he could touch even a fingertip to her skin he could weave all kinds of dreams for her. As it is, anything he can do from here is only going to get the attention of the snoozing, grumbling guards in just the way he doesn’t want it to. “I can give you great things, Galadriel. I can give you kingdoms. Armies.” What exactly do vengeance-addled elves want? “Jewels. Ships. Name your terms.”
“My brother,” she says. “My brother Finrod, dead at your hands.”
At least she’s specified the brother. He can imagine it wouldn’t help to have to ask which, specifically, of the several brothers of hers that he and his armies have killed. Still, as attainable terms go it’s not the best start. “I remember Finrod,” he says, and she all but snarls at him. “Good fighter. Shame what happened. But it didn’t seem to me like he was the sort of person who would have devoted centuries of his life to bloody vengeance. Do you think he would have wanted you to do that with yours?”
“No,” she says. “I am less gentle than my brother.” The way she says it does not imply a great deal of regret about that.
He feels temper start to burn inside him, fights it back down - not here, not here, not yet. “Why can’t you just leave me be?” he says. “You don’t even want Númenor. What do you care if I stay here?
“To inflict upon these people what you inflicted upon us? To burn their cities as you burned ours? To slaughter them as you slaughtered us?”
“I wouldn’t,” he says. And he wouldn’t, probably. Would he? He wouldn’t. He wants to be small for a change. Have them sneer ‘low man’ at him and not mind it, because what are they to him, where were they when he helped sing the world into being. “I want to make things with my hands again. I want to see beauty again. Please, Galadriel.”
There is not even the slightest catch of mercy in her eyes. Nothing. Blue, pitiless nothing.
“You’ll have to come to some agreement,” he snaps at her, and really this is why he would also have made a poor herald. “Or what will you do? You’re one elf, alone. Your king doesn’t want you. Valinor wouldn’t accept you now. Nobody here will help you.”
“When I tell them what you are -”
“They won’t believe you. They will say the elf is maddened by grief and rage. They’ll throw you back into the sea and call it pity. None of them here even understand the language we’re speaking now, Galadriel, and I can make friends quicker than you can. They won’t believe you.”
Then the flat edge of a sword blade slams against his fingers on the bars, and he pulls back his hands with a very mortal yelp.
“Some of us will believe her,” Elendil says.
3. Forge
The hard thing about being back in a forge isn’t the work. The work is good. He makes weapons, showing enough of his skill to impress but not so much people start wondering. He makes a bit of armour. He makes all the things a sea-going people need, anchors and rivets, harnesses and studs for clogs. They even have him making spoons for a day. He gets quite good at it.
He knows they’re testing him, pushing him, giving him all the boring work that’s beneath him, but he doesn’t care. It’s still work, he’s still happy, and it’s better than the alternatives, which at this point were either a jail cell or trailing round Armenolos after Galadriel.
No: the hard thing is being mortal and small and weak now. Both the being it, and the not forgetting to be it when he’s focused on his work. It’s hot in the workshops; sparks fly off the blanks he’s hammering; the noise is a clamour; the clouds of steam from metal quenched in water fill up the air. He has to let all of these limit him, and then pretend he doesn’t mind.
This is manageable most of the time. It becomes less manageable when Galadriel arrives, once again, to wheedle and push him into leaving Númenor with her.
“Stop asking,” he says, hammering the glowing bar into a wedge. It’s going to be part of an ox harness, although it’s unlikely to ever get used; it’s just a show-piece. “Stop distracting me, elf, I’ve got work to do.”
“Your people do not need a smith. They need a king.” She drifts at the edge of his space, keeping away from the cloud of sparks.
One spark lands on his forearm. The time it takes to think through the sensation, process it as pain, make the right sort of grimace and brush it away, is only a fraction of a second but it might be a fraction too long. Go away, Galadriel. “I’m not your king. I’m not your hero. I can make you a spearhead for your battles and that’s all you’ll get here.” He could make this metal into a spearhead, in fact. He might. That’s the good thing about this part: sometimes the metal doesn’t want to be what you intend it to be, but if you listen to what it’s craving you can make it into something better.
It’s the forge, really. He can’t stay away from it, and he should do, he should’ve been more patient, he’s already ended up thrown in a cell once in large part (in small part, in some part) because he wasn’t. He needs it, is the truth, and not just because some of his current assortment of mutually contradictory plans require it. He’s at his strongest here and his weakest here. He can’t quite hold together.
He lets himself feel the heaviness of his body again, palms the sweat off his forehead, and breathes the hot smoky air. Not this time, none of it this time, no sorry about your brother or you don’t know what I did or anything else this time, or she’ll puzzle him out before the metal’s even cooled.
She tips her head slightly like she pities him, like she pities him. “You seek to punish yourself.”
He almost laughs out loud at that, but settles for turning away from her on the pretence of burying the spearhead back in the coals of the forge. “I swore an oath,” he says. Which he did, albeit not the way he’s implying, and surely that should work. Elves know what oaths are (so do Men, so should he); her own relatives tore Middle-Earth apart for an oath, sent themselves into exile and despair for an oath. She knows he can’t just break one. She knows a king wouldn’t just break one.
“An oath made without your full will is no oath at all,” she says. She’s standing beside him now, watching with him as the metal glows in the coals. She puts a hand on his forearm, and his senses report fire, pain, and then no, and then pull away, and then no. “What you did in the past is done and gone. It does not bind you to your fate, any more than I would cast you out for it.”
Ha. Swear an oath to that, he thinks -
- and realises too late that he’s spoken out loud.
A scrabbling desperate part of him hopes for some reason - why? why does he care? this forge, again - that she’ll sneer in scorn and wheel away from him. Or at least, at the very very least, pretend out of civility that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She told him she couldn’t stop fighting, but surely she’s not so far gone that she’d be willing to swear an oath on something she doesn’t know to someone she can’t trust just to get herself an army.
“What if I did?” she says.
Apparently she is.
Of course he could also stop her here, or at least try to stop her, but of course he doesn’t. He folds his arms and says “Go on.”
“If you agree to come with me now, if you will speak to the Queen Regent with me, if you will return to your people and fight for them, then I will swear an oath never to cast you aside whatever I learn of your past. I will swear that no matter who else turns from you for it, I will stand by you.”
He shouldn’t. This is too, too tempting, but he should laugh in her face and refuse. For practicality, if nothing else - if she’s willing to do this to take an army to where she thinks he is, she might be just as willing to break her own oath for the sake of getting to cut his throat here and now. He’s got plans for his time in Númenor, and none of them are quite formed yet and none of them are the same plan but there isn’t a single one of them whose success chances would be improved by that. Besides, he’s weak here, he’s limited here, and he doesn’t want to feel her pain so vivid and raw and, well, present again, the way he did when she spoke about her brother.
On the other hand: he’s weak here. He’s limited here. And so he can’t fail to notice how absolutely perfect this is. She hates him so much that she’s trapped herself to get to him. She’ll finally find Sauron after she’s already sworn herself to be loyal to him. The same fates that brought her half-drowned to his raft have delivered her up once again, and what’s he going to do in the face of that?
What he does is smirks at her, and leans back against the wall where half-formed weapons hang, and says: “You wouldn’t dare.”
She does. Every word. He couldn’t have planned it better himself, he couldn’t have hoped for more. She takes his hand and presses it against the anvil and asks Aulë the smith to witness her words, like she’s hammering out a creation of her own, and he thinks: yes. Yes, this.
“In the name of Galadriel, daughter of Finarfin and Eärwen,” she says.
He snakes his fingers between her own and holds them fast. “And the name of Mairon, student of Aulë.”
There is a brief shattered fragment of a moment between him speaking and her understanding. He will wish, in times to come, that he could have lived in it forever.
4. Somewhere in the mountains
Fever laps at him like an incoming tide. He’s been balancing a narrow line for days now: injured enough to need her to take him to Eregion (to suggest it, to worry, to fear for his life), not so injured he won’t survive the journey. He thinks he’s done quite well all told. But it’s taken its toll, letting the damage and infection spread through this body. At first he was pretending the seriousness of his injury (although not lying to her, he’s never lied, and this has become a ridiculous point of pride for him that he’s determined to hold); by now, he no longer needs to.
Galadriel has led the way most of the time, breaking only to ride alongside him and take his own horse’s reins when he was too weak to do much himself. To begin with she tried to distract him, telling him stories, naming the mountains for him, asking him about his home, but she’s been quiet for a while now. In truth he’s lost the ability to concentrate anyway when he’s trying so hard to stay upright.
Still: he doesn’t care. He’s long gone by this point. He wonders if she’d sing for him if he asked her to. He wonders if she’d let him ride behind her, arms around her waist with the last strength this mortal form has got. Bind yourself to me.
He weaves his hands into the horse’s wiry mane as the waves of nausea come and go, the shaking, the heat. At some level he finds this fascinating; he’s seen it all before of course but he’s never experienced it himself. He’s able to battle with the injury to a degree, otherwise he’d have been dead before they even set off for Eregion, but only to a degree. Much more and he’ll have to break this body apart to free himself of it.
They’ve been going slower for a time now, the path narrowed and rocky. His horse’s neck bobs as it picks its way over stone. The grass gets sparser, the trees shorter and scrubbier, and by the time they come to a halt it’s on ground barely more than slate and scree and ice.
She springs lightly off her own horse. He tries to do the same but his knees buckle and he slumps to the ground in a heap, and he looks for her and she’s just - watching.
“I do not think you will reach Eregion alive,” she says. He realises these are the first words she’s spoken to him for quite some time.
He drags himself up to something like a kneel. Pain roars through him. “Galadriel,” he gulps out through the taste of iron in his mouth.
She crouches down near him, but not too near him. No more fleeting touch of his arm, no more laughter. “Never fear. I will tell the people of the Southlands that their king died a good death, and that his thoughts to the last were of them.”
Curse it. He’d been so close.
He feels rage fill him, battling with the fever to burn through his veins. She tips her head to one side a little and he knows she sees it now: his anger, his real anger, the face he wears under this face. Why shouldn’t she see it? She’s tricked him, she’s deceived him, she’s let him knit himself into this dying mortal body and dragged him through this empty land for days and days until it’s too late.
He always knew he had to watch her, but he’d assumed the second she found out he’d know about it from the knife at his throat. He hadn’t realised she was capable of this. He’s furious. He’s in awe.
He forces himself back into his Halbrand self, weaker now even from that brief flash of Maia fury. “Well done, Galadriel,” he says, but in Quenya now, letting his tongue speak all the sounds of her name as it’s longed to. He’s going to miss saying her name with these lips. “But you know if this body dies I can make a new one.” (Can he? Probably.) “So go on. Kill me.” He can’t even seem to breathe that easily now, he’s dizzy. He rolls onto his back to lie sprawled out before her, inviting the blow.
She does, as he expected she would, take out her brother’s dagger, but she lies it on the stones. “I had thought to kill you with Finrod’s blade. It would have been fitting. But the death you deserve is slow and cold and alone in a place with no comfort, as you gave him.”
He shakes his head, as best he can. “It wasn’t like that.”
He can see something in her waver. She loves her brother so much that she’s almost tempted to take comfort from the lips of his dying murderer. “You’re a liar.”
“I’ve never lied to you.” And he hasn’t, he truly hasn’t. Even this isn’t a lie: Finrod died in horror but Finrod died fast, and Finrod died in the arms of a friend.
She looks down at him, unforgiving and implacable. She is glorious. Even here alone on a mountainside where she’s brought him to die, she is glorious. She should have been his queen, his Lady of Light.
Maybe she still can be.
“You know what he told me?” he says, quietly over dry lips. And she can’t help herself, it strikes straight at her heart, past any armour she’s learned to wear since, and she leans in towards him.
Not much. Not close enough for a dying mortal man to reach her. But just close enough that he can.
She pulls back too late, he’s already got her wrist in a grip like a manacle. She twists and goes for the dagger and -
They’re in Tol Sirion, or what Tol Sirion became. It’s dark with soot and dust now, all the elven tapestries torn down and burned, the dark throne an ugly snarl of wood and iron at the top of the hall. It’s his memory, but he can make it so vivid it will feel like hers too.
The orcs have brought in their prisoners, a line of elves and men with their own disguises looking much less convincing now with the hoods all torn away. They crowd defiantly together. They’re all watching the cloaked figure sitting on the throne, but this time he’s not in that figure. He’s there beside her as Halbrand.
Not that Galadriel is looking at either version of him. She’s looking at her brother, all golden hair and glory, as Finrod stands apart from Beren and the others and faces the throne.
“What is this?” she says, and then whirling to face him with her wrist still held firm, “What are you doing? ”
“Call it a gift. Something to remember me by.”
She looks confused, and then something in her breaks and she folds like she’s winded and sobs “no, don’t make me watch -"
“I’m not giving you his death ,” he says, hiding the uncomfortable clutter of things he might feel about that beneath a cover of eye-rolling exasperation. “Shhh, listen.”
This is easy enough to do for what he is, but it’s too much to hold for the form he’s wearing. His heart is slowing, stuttering, and he hauls it back into life. Not yet. Not yet.
In the throne-room Galadriel stills beside him as Finrod starts to sing. His voice is beautiful, the visions he weaves dance around them in light. Finrod sings of building and creation, the comfort of Nargothrond; Finrod sings of unity and friendship; Finrod sings of honour, and justice, and truth; and Finrod sings of love for a little dancing sister with the light of the Trees in her hair.
A fading mortal body can’t contain this for long. On the mountain he feels his grip slip away, and his flesh flush and then start to grow cold, and his eyes glaze, and his last breaths weaken.
It wasn’t long enough for all he wanted to do, but it was enough. He knows he’ll see her again, now, and he knows she’ll hold this with her the entire time they’re apart. He’ll see her again, in friendship and forgiveness, at the head of a righteous army, who cares. He’ll see her again because she’ll seek him out; and when she finds him, he’ll remind her that the last thing this body saw was the joy in her eyes.
5. Armenelos
It’ll be sunrise soon. The harbours of Armenelos are already waking up as he crosses the quay in the pale dawn light, with thin streams of workers filing down from the city. He weaves through them unseen and anonymous, nobody remarkable, just a smith’s aid on an errand.
He had considered waiting until full daylight. He almost talked himself into it, in fact: did he really want to disturb Galadriel’s rest, so close to the fleet leaving for Middle-Earth? Wouldn’t it be better to wait a while, perhaps bring her some food later, perhaps wait until everything was done for the day, perhaps…
Perhaps not speak with her at all, is the conclusion he’d inevitably have arrived at. And this he couldn’t allow. He is set on doing this. Perhaps because she will drag him back to Middle-Earth, later if not immediately, and it’s the only thing he can think of left to say to her that’ll stop her. Perhaps for other reasons, all tangled in his mind with the end of the war, kneeling before Eönwë to sob his regret and beg his own forgiveness and being told not even that was enough. Perhaps merely because she believes him and she shouldn’t.
The rooms they’ve given over to her are small but well-placed, looking down over the sea. He finds his way inside without too much difficulty. Her bed is empty - of course, she wouldn’t be sleeping, not so soon before the battle she’s longed for - but he can see her sitting on the balcony, looking out to the morning. Quietly, quietly, so quietly, he lifts her brother’s dagger from the writing desk. And then, quietly, quietly, so quietly, he goes to her.
She is shocked to see him, and that gives him a couple of moments to move before she can react. She says “Halbrand? What -" as he drops to his knees before her, takes her hands, and wraps them around the dagger.
“You’ll want this,” he says.
“What are you doing?” She’s never trusted him entirely - to her he’s another weapon to use, the same as everything and everyone else she sees. But she has liked him, he thinks, just a little, and he’s really going to miss that.
He could stop right here. He will not.
“Everything I’ve told you is true,” he says. “I was driven out of my land by orcs. I fought alongside them. I meant it when I said I was sorry for all of it. But there’s things I didn’t tell you.”
She knows something’s wrong, now. He can feel her try to pull her hands away, and see the flicker of confusion as she can’t, as he’s stronger than she realised. All the same, she nods to him to continue.
“The orcs are where I told you, they’ll be moving in the same direction. Their commander calls himself Adar. He was an elf once. I don’t think he is now. You’ll need to be careful. He’s clever and he’s brutal. And he doesn’t serve Sauron, he serves himself. Sauron won’t be with them. He’s not in the Southlands.” He releases her hands, leaving them holding the dagger.
She looks at it. At him. “Then where -”
“Here,” he says. “I’m here.”