Chapter Text
Early summer was never easy. Glorfindel did his best to avoid the gardens, particularly just at dusk. Silmelotie had walked in the gardens of Gondolin at that hour. She'd taught him to enjoy that moment when the night-blooming jasmine and the stars came out together. He had gotten her a velvet cloak embroidered with jasmine blossoms earlier in that final Spring, thinking that they might choose each other as lovers before the fall.
She had not refused his gift, but nothing had come of their time together and their walks in the dusk. The Balrogs came, and the sweetness of his youth had faded as rapidly as a picked jasmine flower. Glorfindel could no longer remember the exact hue of her eyes or what dress she'd worn beneath the cloak, but he avoided the gardens at dusk.
Yet he found himself trotting towards them now. The fault lay with Elrond's sons, as it so often did. Elladan and Elrohir had found a small band of Avarin Elves cornered by trolls on their last hunting trip, and had brought their strays home for their father to heal. Just as the twins' noble intentions and quick impulses had so many times before, this one had created chaos for all around them.
Several of the Avari had been wounded, but one had apparently run delirious from the fever of the wound and run out into the gardens by the guest quarters. Glorfindel had been rounded up by Elrohir among a group of swift-footed folk in the Hall of Fire in order to rescue this Elf a second time.
Lord Elrond's gardens ran all around the Last Homely House, so they were broad enough to need all the searchers. Glorfindel spiraled a quarter of the way around the main dwelling before he heard someone yelling in pain. He sped up to a trot and turned toward the sound.
In the midst of an herb garden, he found them. Elladan had half cornered the elf against the herb bed. She, weeping, held a stick before her as if to defend herself against Lord Elrond's son.
"Yrch! Stay back!" she cried, lost in delirium. Elladan spread his hands, speaking in a soothing voice. The Avarin elf waved her stick at him, shouting, "No!"
Glorfindel approached as cautiously as he could, but she saw his movement somehow out of the corner of her eye and leaped backwards away from Elladan. In the confusion of her fever, however, she had not noted the stone border on the herb bed, and her heel caught on it so that she fell full length into the plants. Under her weight, the varied scents of mint and sage and other herbs Glorfindel could not readily identify rose from the crushed plants.
"Ada will have something to say about this," Elladan said with a wince for the battered herbs. Apparently unbruised, the fevered elf began to crawl away from them, trampling more of the garden in the process. Her robe tangled around her legs until she barely moved at all.
While Elladan stood surveying the damage to the garden, Glorfindel darted around the herb bed until he reached the closest point to the sick elf. She scrambled faster as he came near, but he closed the final gap with a flying tackle that brought them both down into something prickly. Once the damage was done, Elladan hurried around to help them up.
The strange elf still wept and gasped out stray, panicked words, but perhaps her fever dream had changed. Now she clung to Glorfindel. With Elladan to lead the way, he half carried her back to her quarters. She mumbled at him urgently the while. The only words he caught clearly, which she stretched to say in his ear, were, "Gi melin, Culdir."
He left Elladan resettling the sick elf. As he headed back towards the Hall of Fire, Lord Elrond passed him, trotting to the guest rooms. Rivendell's master nodded at him in passing in place of his usual courteous greeting. His frown boded trouble for his sons. Glorfindel lengthened his stride and thanked Varda that he had left the guest rooms before the onset of what promised to be a classic scold in Elrond's dry style.
In the Hall of Fire, he accepted a glass of wine and let the twins' fiasco slip from his mind. In the future, he promised himself, he'd let them solve their own problems. His oath was tested, however, on the following afternoon. Elrond and Elrohir found him in the library. Elrohir looked sheepish, his father ironic.
"One of my sons' guests is asking for you," the Lord of Rivendell announced. Bland irony suffused his voice; Glorfindel wanted and feared to ask where the humor lay.
"Elladan said you were able to calm her last night," Elrohir confirmed. "She seems troubled in her mind, and anything that helps her heal faster . . ."
"Will reduce the number of disasters awaiting my gardens," his father finished.
The Avarin elf rested on a carved daybed that was too long for her, shaped for lords of Amanyar descent. Another of her kindred sat beside her. Glorfindel had not remembered what the elf in the garden had looked like, except that she had tangled hair. He felt a little reassured to see that she had not combed it yet; if she had, he would not have known which of the two in the room she was. In the slanting afternoon light, her hair gleamed a solid brown, wood-brown, he thought, while her companion's neatly braided hair shone blonde.
Both turned to face him, but while the blonde merely noted his arrival, the brunette sent him a glowing smile. "Culdir, you came."
That nettled him. He had assumed that she spoke to some figment of her delirium the night before, but apparently some deeper, wild-elven idea moved her. She had not bothered to introduce herself before deciding to rename him.
"I am Glorfindel, Mistress. Please note that I do not have even a hint of red in my hair."
She and her friend measured him with matching grey stares. "You may not see it," she told him solemnly, "but the fire shines in your hair. Sometimes, I see it all around you."
"We have met but twice, and last night your eyes were scarcely reliable. You had a strong fever."
It was no more than the truth, but her smile vanished, and she seemed to retreat among her tangled locks. Her companion frowned at him.
"A fever might affect Ereglas' eyes, but not her sight," the blonde said sternly.
"In what other organ would she have sight, if not in her eyes?" Even as he appealed to sense, Glorfindel knew the argument would not move either of them. These were not Grey Elves, but true Umanyar, Wild Elves indeed and barely able to express themselves in Sindarin. Neither answered his question, though both studied him closely. Under their fey grey gaze, he wished them well, then made his bow and a hasty retreat.
Before he reached the door, he heard her voice behind him. "Eveditham, Culdir." We'll meet again.
A/N: No Sindarin expert, I used http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/movie_fotr.htm#dartho for her parting line, and Lady Garavmithiel's challenge for almost all the rest.