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He says he is burning. He takes her hand in his, shaking, sweating, curls it against the cloth of his tunic now stiffened with dried blood. His eyes seem almost glazed now and his lips dry, his pulse a brief, frantic patter like a terrified bird under her fingers. He is going to die.
She kneels beside him in the leaf litter, a little copse of trees giving shelter while they let the horses rest. She has not even taken off her armour and she thinks maybe she never will; that once she buries him, if she buries him, she wants to return to battle as fast as her horse will take her, hunt down every orc in that wasteland and make them pay and pay and pay.
“Water?” she asks, and he nods, and maybe that is a good sign, that he still feels thirst, that he still understands her. She keeps holding to scraps of hope like this, fewer and fewer though they are and more and more evident though it is becoming that she is probably deluding herself. She unwraps her hand carefully from his and brings him the water-skin, and tries not to remember the water he gave her on the raft.
He does not try to drink. He asks her instead to pour water into his cupped hands and then splashes it onto his face, groaning in relief at the chill of it, cold snowmelt from the stream nearby.
If they had been closer to Eregion, she might have saved him. If there had been places along the way to change their horses they could have ridden faster without need to break like this. If she had been at his side when the volcano exploded in a nightmare of ash and fire he might never have ended up lying in the road with a poisoned orc-blade wound in his side. If she had not brought him to Middle-earth. If she had not named him a king.
It is only when his fingers on her cheek smudge her tears that she realises she is crying again. “That’s not encouraging,” he says. His voice seems a little stronger now, steadier perhaps, the coals of fever cooled a little.
She gathers herself. She has soothed enough dying soldiers, and death is different for elves but perhaps this is not. Besides, it is not for her to say that he is dying, not with Eregion only two days away and the future unwritten. Such things are never wholly predictable. He might yet live. “I had hoped we would be celebrating our victory now,” she says.
“Ah…” He lets his hand fall from her face and both of their eyes follow it down to his side again, as he presses gingerly at the edge of his wound. The healers have done their best to bandage it but the blood and poison have soaked through again and she dreads to think what it will look like if she tries to unwrap it now. “Would have been nice. I was going to ask you to dance with me.”
“Halbrand.” She is crying again a little but laughing too at the sight of that grin playing at the edge of his lips.
“Had it all planned out,” he says, his eyes closing.
He lapses back into sleep again. She stays beside him, barely daring to count each breath.
When he wakes again it is full dark, and his hands are burning again with fever. “Galadriel,” he says as though he can’t see her before him, and she feels her heart fall once again. “You would have danced with me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, of course.” And lets herself imagine it for a moment, the cheering and laughter, the music, the feel of his arms at her sides. “I will when you have recovered,” she says, pulling him fever and future and all into a more comforting tense.
“Right.” He laughs a little but it turns into a cough, and he winces and hunches over his injured side once again.
“We will be in Eregion in two days. Less. Please, Halbrand.” She is not sure what she is asking of him: don’t die? don’t give up hope of living, not just yet? She wants to hold his hand again but he seems to have lost all strength in it, and she ends up cradling his whole forearm, limp and oddly cold to the touch.
“Don’t worry,” he mutters. “I’m tougher than I look.” But he is not; he is shivering again, and there is nothing she can do.
She brings him more water and tells him to drink this time, mixing it with a bluish-grey herb Bronwyn had given for easing the worst of any fevers. She is not aware of this medicine and perhaps it would have done nothing for elves but for him it thankfully seems to have some effect. He mouths his thanks, unaware it seems that he is not speaking out loud, and his breathing starts to settle, and in a while he begins to smile slightly as the herb takes effect. “We’ll make land soon,” he says, absent and light.
“Land.” The herb must have numbed his mind somehow. He thought them still on the ship, or perhaps the raft. “Yes. We will.”
He nods, vague and distracted. She cleans the sweat from his face with cool water and he does not even seem to notice. “I don’t think I’d like to die,” he says, a whisper through dry lips.
“You will not die if I can help it.” But she can’t help it, he is slipping further and further from her, sinking in endless ocean.
“Would have liked to be a king,” he says. “You’d be such a beautiful queen.”
“Halbrand…” But he looks so fragile and tender, all of him now like a wound. Who is she to deny a dying man the comfort of an impossible dream.
“Pearls,” he says. “I would have dressed you in pearls and silver and silk.” He smiles at the thought of it. “And a crown. What do you think, silver?”
“I don’t -”
“Humour me.” His fingers clasp weakly around hers.
“Silver, then,” she says.
He sighs in evident pleasure. He has never seemed one to hide his desires, base or noble, and he has never troubled to hide the way he looks at her, but now she feels oddly as though she is intruding on something he does not intend her to see. “Think we’d rule fairly?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Some great palace in the mountains.” He shifts position, hissing in pain. “I’m cold, Galadriel,” and she folds the blanket around him again, promises him a fire, she will have to gather more wood but she will return as soon as - “No,” he says. “Stay with me.”
He must live, she thinks, he must live, she cannot bear to have found him alive after the fires only to lose him again here for want of a bare few days, a handful of miles. Not another lost, not one more after so many. He is mortal and so death is never far for him but not like this, not so soon as this. She pulls close to his side to shelter him a little and he leans into her as though she were a missing part of him.
“Where were we,” he says, once his shivering has eased again.
“Ruling the Southlands.”
He laughs. “Why stop there. Let’s rule all of Middle-earth.” He coughs again and lacks the strength to hold himself up, and she steadies him against her, wishing and wishing. “Galadriel,” gulping her name down. “Tell me what our children would have looked like.”
He seems in pain again and the sheen of cooling sweat on his skin makes her want to close her eyes and wish herself so very far away. “It would not,” she begins, and is unsure what words come next. It would not happen that way, it could not happen that way, I should not even give voice to such thoughts, you are mortal, you are dying, none of this could ever, ever be.
“Please,” he says. “Everything’s gone so wrong. I’d just like one precious thought to keep.”
And so she tells him of children with red and golden hair in fine filigree crowns, children who totter on fat baby feet over the lush grasses of the Southlands, children who dance with wooden practice swords, children who carve tiny wooden swan-boats to float on the great river, children raised in strength and love and beauty.
“Yes,” he says, barely louder than a breath, and then he’s asleep again in a deeper rest than he’s managed for days.
The next morning, she is so pleased to see he is well enough to ride that she almost forgets it all.
Her Mirror shows the man she used to know. He keeps this face for her, a memory of what she thought he was before the wars, before the deaths, before the terror and ruin: only Halbrand, her friend.
“Bring your forces any closer to my lands and I will see them destroyed,” she says. “If you are too much of a coward to come yourself I will send their heads back to Barad-Dûr for you.”
“Missed you too,” he says. The reflection of the golden leaves of Lothlórien frames his face like a wreath.
It is never easy, but at this time of year it is hardest. She remembers Eregion, Ost-in-Edhil that had once stood so proud, and the banks of the Glanduin in flower beside her as she asked him his name.
“You sought my attention and you have it,” she says now. “I don’t have your ring. What is it you want from me?”
“The same as always. Be my Queen. Give me my future. You have seen what I am without you. We could end it all together.”
“So simply,” she says. “As if none of them ever died.”
“You would make it better. Please.” He tips his head sideways, Halbrand in every tiny movement, a guise so well-practiced by now. “If not for Middle-earth then for me. I need water. I’m burning, Galadriel.”
Nenya, cool on her finger, speaks to her of the peace of quiet lakes, the innocence of mountain streams, the impermeability of glaciers. She knows better than to listen to him. She breaks the connection and he is gone, again.
Her future is the long defeat: a life in exile while her enemy still stands, a Lothlórien fated for either destruction if he wins or fading if he does not. One silver-haired child, growing up so cosseted and protected she thinks the world ends at the outer trees. More deaths, more losses, an endless, inevitable line of farewells.
Her mirror shows her many visions of different futures, all yet to be decided, a shifting gallery of possibility. Some are terrible, and some are fearful, and not all will come to pass. She knows this; she knows what she sees and what she must learn.
But there is one future she will always linger with alone long into the evening, until the silver bells of Caras Galadhon call her home.