Work Text:
THESE SHORES WE LEAVE
Frodo found him in a garden no one seemed to use.
It lay behind the eastern guest houses, reached by a narrow passage between two walls. The stone there had not been repaired. A crack ran from the archway to the ground, broad enough for small weeds to have taken root, and the branches of an old fig tree pressed against the upper wall as though they had grown too far and discovered, too late, that the city would not make room for them.
The garden itself was little more than a square of grass, a dry fountain, and a wooden bench beneath an arbour. From there the roofs of Minas Tirith descended in pale tiers towards the lower circles. Beyond them lay Pelennor, green again in places and brown in others, cut by roads, camps, and the dark marks where fires had burned. Men were already at work upon it. From so high above, their carts moved slowly and without sound, like beetles crossing a field after rain.
Legolas sat at the far end of the bench.
He was not looking at the city. His face was turned towards the south-west, beyond the walls and the long country that followed the river. He had been looking that way often of late.
Frodo stopped beneath the arch. Legolas did not turn at once. One hand rested open upon his knee, the other lay against the bench beside him, his fingers curved lightly over its edge. He wore no bow, though the empty place at his shoulder made its absence almost as noticeable as the weapon itself would have been.
After a moment he looked back.
“Master Baggins.”
“Prince Legolas.”
The elf shifted, making room that had already been there. Frodo crossed the garden and lowered himself onto the other end of the bench. It had been built for men, and his feet did not reach the ground. He arranged his coat beneath him with some care and placed both hands upon his knees, the left over the right. The evening was warm, but warmth had become an uncertain thing in him. It touched his face and hands without really reaching him.
For a while neither of them spoke.
Somewhere below, a hammer struck stone in a slow, irregular rhythm. Voices rose from a courtyard and faded again. A cart complained over the paving in one of the lower streets. Nearer at hand, the fig leaves moved against one another with a dry, private sound.
“It is quiet here,” Frodo said at last.
“There are quiet places in every city,” Legolas replied. “They are merely difficult to find when one is being shown the important ones.”
Frodo looked at the fountain. Dead leaves had gathered in its basin around a length of red ribbon, greyed by dust.
“This one does not seem very important.”
“No. That is much of its charm.” Legolas glanced at him, and a faint smile eased the stillness of his face. “Though, if I have learnt anything these last months, it is that appearances are seldom as obliging as one would wish.”
Frodo smiled back.
The smile remained between them for a little while after the words had passed. Then Legolas turned again towards the south-west.
The hammering stopped. In its place came the distant call of a guard changing watch. Frodo adjusted his left hand where it lay over the right.
“They are looking for you,” he said.
Legolas did not seem surprised. “Aragorn?”
“And Gimli. I believe they have divided the city between them, though neither trusted the other with the more likely half. Gandalf was in the hall when I left. He had the look of someone who knew exactly where you were and had decided that the search would be improving for everyone involved.”
“That sounds like him.” Legolas lowered his eyes for a moment. “I did not mean to cause alarm. Have I been gone so long?”
Frodo frowned. “I know elves do not reckon time quite as we do, but I had not understood that this meant you simply misplaced it.”
Legolas laughed, an earthy and musical sound that rang across the high spires of the castle.
“I do not misplace time, Master Baggins. At least, not ordinarily.” He leaned back against the bench, and the old wood gave a small complaint beneath his shoulder. “But it has behaved strangely since the fighting ended. It passes quickly when there is some need before me and very slowly when there is not.”
He looked again towards the south.
“Or perhaps time is innocent, and I am the one who has become strange. That ragged man everyone insists on calling king has suggested as much more than once.”
Frodo did not answer. At first, he had been startled by the peculiar terms of Legolas and Aragorn’s friendship. It had not taken him long to understand that the insults, veiled or otherwise, were not a failure of tenderness but one of its highest forms. They spoke with the freedom of those who had already proved, in darker places, what they would do for one another.
He watched Pelennor instead, where men were turning the blackened earth over the places that had burned. The work looked simple from a distance. The dead had been carried away, the broken weapons gathered, the carcasses of the great beasts burned beyond the walls. Yet the plain kept the shape of what had happened upon it. Roads bent around pits that had not been there before. Grass ended abruptly at long scars of mud. Even where the ground had been cleared, its colour changed.
For a moment Frodo thought he felt something of himself in the soil: the blackness was not gone, only hidden.
He became aware that Legolas was watching him.
“They are right to be worried,” Frodo said.
The trace of amusement left the elf’s face, but he did not look away. “About me?”
“There is something different. I noticed it yesterday at the feast. Gimli was telling the story of the three orcs and the broken axe, and you laughed in all the proper places, but you were listening to something else.”
“I had heard the story before.”
“That was not the reason.”
Legolas looked down at the hand upon his knee. His thumb moved once across the side of his forefinger, then stilled.
“No,” he said. “It was not.”
He did not speak again immediately, and Frodo did not prompt him. The city went on below them. A woman called to someone in an upper window. A door shut. The hammer began again, slower now, each blow followed by the scrape of loosened mortar.
At length Legolas said, “Tell me, in all the tales your uncle told you of elves, did he ever speak of the sea-longing?”
Frodo followed his gaze. Beyond the city and the darkening plain, the sky was clear except for a bank of cloud along the horizon. Its upper edge still held the sun.
“Once or twice. Bilbo said that the Sea would call to the elves in time, and that those who heard it would never again be wholly content in Middle-earth. I thought it was one of those matters he understood chiefly because he had read three songs about it and therefore considered himself an authority.”
“That may be as much as anyone understands.” Legolas considered this, then added, “Our songs are very eloquent concerning the call. They are less useful concerning what one is meant to do after hearing it.”
“Then you have heard it,” Frodo said.
Legolas inclined his head. When he answered, there was a weariness in his voice that had not been there before.
“Yes, Frodo Baggins. I have heard it.”
Legolas rested his forearms upon his thighs and looked past the roofs. “It happened on the river, after we came out of the Paths of the Dead. There had been fighting all day. The quays were broken, the air smelled of smoke and salt, and the river was carrying things I had no wish to look at closely. I remember thinking that the evening was too fair for the place. The clouds had opened in the west, and the light upon the water was almost white.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, not against the sun but against the memory.
“There was a gull above us. Only one. I heard its cry and knew it at once, though I had never heard such a bird before. There were no words in it, no command that I might obey. Yet something in me answered before I knew that it had been waiting. For a little while the river and the battle seemed very far away, and there was only that sound and the knowledge that somewhere beyond all the lands I knew, the Sea was moving.”
The hammer below struck twice. On the third blow it glanced aside with a dull scrape, and the workman swore. Legolas’ mouth turned slightly at the sound, but he did not laugh.
“I had always thought that longing required memory,” he continued. “That one missed a voice because one had heard it, or a place because one had lived there. This was different. It was as though I had been made with a door in me and had gone all my life without seeing it. The gull opened it. I have not found the means to close it again.”
Frodo looked towards the bright rim of cloud. “Is it the Sea itself that you want?”
“I do not know. The Sea, perhaps. The road beyond it. Those who have crossed before us.” Legolas turned one hand over and studied the faint marks across his palm. “Desire is easier to bear when it can name what it desires. This cannot. It offers no instructions. It merely enters everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yesterday, while Gimli told his story, I could hear the fountain in the courtyard. I have heard running water all my life, but for one moment it was no longer a fountain. At supper someone opened a window, and the wind came from the south. It smelled only of stone and evening fires, yet I found myself listening for salt.”
He lifted his eyes to the horizon again.
“The strange part is that the world has not become less dear to me. The trees are no dimmer. My friends have not become burdens. The call does not only promise what may await me beyond the Sea. It reminds me, with equal force, of all that I must leave upon this shore in order to reach it.”
He paused, and when he continued his voice had grown quieter.
“Ah, the great difficulty of loving greatly and being greatly loved! Either shore contains a loss.”
Frodo thought of the Ring then, not because the sea-longing resembled it in cruelty, but because he understood what it was to carry beneath one’s own will another intention that never entirely slept. He did not say so. The comparison seemed unjust to Legolas and, in another way, to the Sea.
“Does it make you wish to go now?” he asked.
“Sometimes. More often it makes me wish there were no choice to be made.” Legolas’ expression did not change, though his fingers closed slowly over the open palm. “If it were an order, I might obey it. If it were pain alone, I might endure it. But it is neither. I remain free, and so every day that I stay is mine, just as every day lost by leaving too soon would also be mine.”
He spoke without bitterness. That made the words heavier.
Frodo watched him for a while. “And what keeps you here?”
Legolas’ eyes moved from the horizon to the city below. Lamps had begun to appear along the higher streets, one by one, small and steady against the pale stone.
“For one thing, the thought of a man and a dwarf somewhere down there looking for me,” he said. Then he turned to Frodo with sudden concern. “You will not repeat that to either of them. They are already far too convinced that my present condition is somehow their fault. Aragorn especially. He has acquired enough guilt to govern a second kingdom.”
Frodo smiled.
“The poor man has spent the better part of a week wishing he had forbidden me to accompany him upon that road. He has even begun to speak as though such a prohibition might have succeeded.” Legolas shook his head, with the fond exasperation of one recalling an old and incurable defect. “We had been warned what the cry of the gull might awaken in me, that much is true. But Aragorn must have taken leave of what little sense kingship has spared him if he believes I would have allowed him to enter a kingdom of the dead without me.”
The humour remained in his voice, but only faintly now. He looked down at the lamps, his expression settling into something quieter.
The smile remained briefly upon Frodo’s face. Legolas’ faded sooner.
“He has been trying to command the past,” he continued, looking down at the lamps. “It obeys him even less readily than I do.”
The humour had not vanished entirely, but something quieter now lay beneath it.
“I would have followed him knowing all that I know now,” he said. “There are roads upon which one does not permit a friend to walk without you.”
The last light lay along the distant cloudbank. Frodo could not see the river from the garden, yet he knew where it ran by the darkening line of country to the south.
“Then the Sea draws you towards one shore,” he said, “and love holds you to the other.”
Legolas looked at him. “Yes. Though ‘holds’ is not quite the word. I am not a prisoner here.”
“No,” Frodo said. “Prisoners seldom devote so much effort to convincing their gaolers that they should be allowed to remain.”
That earned him a fuller smile. It changed Legolas’ face more than Frodo expected, and for a moment he looked as he had during the feast, before the sound of the fountain had carried him elsewhere.
“For one?” Frodo asked.
Legolas looked at him without comprehension.
“You said that, for one thing, the thought of a man and a dwarf searching the city was enough to keep you upon this shore. I wondered what the other things might be.” Frodo allowed a moment to pass before adding, “There are other people, I suppose. Your father, for instance.”
Legolas stared at him, then laughed.
“You have known me for a remarkably short time, Frodo Baggins. How have you found me out so quickly?”
“I had certain advantages.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Bilbo was once a prisoner in your father’s halls.”
Legolas winced. “Ah, yes, that. I am sorry. Those were difficult days, and everyone concerned was behaving with less sense than usual.”
“So Bilbo always said, though it never prevented him from telling the story at great length.”
The last of Legolas’ laughter remained in his face. He settled back against the bench, looking resigned to whatever evidence Bilbo had left against him.
“He said that, while he was hiding in the halls, he began to hear certain expressions repeated among the guards. He was never sure whether they were old sayings or merely jokes.”
Legolas narrowed his eyes slightly. “What expressions?”
“One was: ‘The eagle soars, the rivers run, the King counts leaves around his son’.’”
Legolas closed his eyes.
“There was another,” Frodo continued, encouraged. “‘For every scratch upon the boy, a dozen guards lose every joy.’”
“That cannot possibly have been a common saying.”
“Bilbo heard it from three different guards. He also saw the two of you together after the Battle of Five Armies. He was telling you off for not wearing gloves in the middle of winter.”
Legolas opened his eyes again. The amusement in them quieted, though it did not disappear.
“We had just fought a dragon. One does not generally feel the cold when standing near a dragon.”
“Bilbo said your father showed very little interest in that defence. He inspected both your hands and then took them between his own to warm them.”
Frodo smiled.
“Bilbo recognised the gesture at once. He used to do the same with me when I was small, whenever I came indoors with cold fingers.” His smile softened at the memory. “There was something reassuring, he said, in discovering that Elvenkings and hobbits worried about cold hands in much the same way. That was what encouraged Bilbo to approach him. He thought that anyone capable of forgetting he was a king for several minutes might possibly be reasoned with.”
Legolas looked down at his hands, smiling. “Me and my cold hands are happy to be of service.”
“So… I was right,” Frodo said.
Legolas raised his eyes towards the lamps below. “Yes. My father is among the reasons.”
The answer was simple, and because it was simple Frodo heard the weight of everything Legolas had not attempted to put into words.
The evening wind entered the garden. Dead leaves shifted in the fountain, uncovering the faded ribbon before settling over it again.
“Do they know about your condition?” Frodo asked. “In Eryn Galen, I mean.” He frowned and corrected himself. “Eryn Lasgalen, I believe it is now. The Wood of Greenleaves.”
Legolas became very still.
Frodo looked at him pointedly. “Rather like a certain Greenleaf of my acquaintance. A fortunate coincidence.”
He glanced at Legolas, and the colour that rose into the Elf’s face answered before he could.
“It was not my doing,” Legolas said, confirming Frodo’s suspicion.
The hobbit’s smile was slight, but quite sufficient.
“The name was proposed in Lórien, accepted by my father’s council with suspicious enthusiasm, and approved by my father without a single objection. Aragorn then summoned me before half his court to announce it.” Legolas looked towards the city, as though the memory still made escape seem desirable. “Gimli was standing beside the door. I believe they had anticipated flight.”
Frodo laughed softly.
“They knew you would hate it.”
“Oh, yes.” Legolas’ mouth curved despite himself. “I suspect that was part of the pleasure.”
Frodo smiled. He could readily imagine Aragorn’s careful expression, the solemnity maintained just well enough to make protest impossible, and Legolas obliged to receive such an honour before an audience when he would much rather have faced another army.
“Do they know about the Sea?” he asked again.
The humour left Legolas gradually. His hand lowered from his face and came to rest upon the bench between them.
“No. I have not told them yet.”
“Not even your father?”
“Not even him. But I suspect he suspects something. His last letter asked whether I was sleeping, whether I had recovered my appetite, whether the southern air troubled me, and whether Aragorn’s healers were competent. He placed the questions between observations about trade and the condition of the northern roads, presumably in the hope that I would not notice.”
Below them, the hammer struck again. This time the blows came evenly, measured against the gathering dark.
“They suspect that something has changed,” Legolas said. “Those who know me well would have to be determined not to. But I have said nothing of the gull or of what followed. I would rather tell my father in person than send words across half of Middle-earth and leave him alone with whatever he imagines between one line and the next. He has a mighty imagination, that one.”
“And Aragorn has not written to him?”
“I do not believe so. They have grown fond of one another over their love for me, but Aragorn knows that this is mine to tell.”
Legolas looked once more towards the south-west.
“In that respect, at least, he has learnt not to command the past before it has happened.”
Frodo let the words settle between them. “How will you tell your father?”
“I do not know.” Legolas sighed. “Every way I imagine the conversation, it ends in a quarrel. He will be angry that I waited to tell him, I will insist that I needed time to understand it myself, and before long we shall both be defending ourselves against things the other has not accused us of.”
A faint weariness entered his smile.
“By then, the Sea will be the only subject we are no longer discussing.”
The attempt at humour did not quite reach Frodo. He had drawn his hands closer together upon his knees, and his face, turned towards the plain, had become so still that Legolas could no longer mistake silence for ease.
“I have spoken a great deal about what has changed in me,” he said. “It would be discourteous to pretend that I have not seen the same in you.”
Frodo lowered his head. He seemed to study the place where his left hand lay over the right, though the fading light could not have shown him much. When he answered, his voice was controlled with an effort that made it sound smaller than usual.
“Everyone has been very kind. Men I have never met bow to me in the passages. They tell me that their wives will see another spring, or that their sons have come home, and then they thank me as though I had done those things myself.” His mouth moved in something that did not become a smile. “I never know what they expect me to say.”
“They expect nothing,” Legolas replied. “They are trying to place their gratitude somewhere, and you are the person to whom they owe it.”
“But they are wrong.”
Legolas waited. Frodo’s eyes had filled, though he still would not look at him.
“At the end, I failed,” Frodo said. “I stood where I had gone all that way to stand, and when the moment came, I did not destroy the ring. I put it on. I claimed it for myself.” His breath caught, and he pressed his hands together until the knuckles showed pale. “Had Gollum not been there, I would have left the chamber wearing it, if I could have left at all. Sauron would have found me. Everything would have been lost, and it would have been lost because of me.”
The hammering below had stopped. In the quiet, Frodo’s breathing seemed too loud for the little garden.
Legolas looked at his hands, clenched so tightly that the fingers trembled.
“I was not in the chamber,” he said. “I will not pretend that I know what it was to stand there, or tell you that the last moment happened otherwise than you remember it. You claimed the Ring. That is true.”
Frodo flinched, but Legolas did not withdraw the words.
“It is not, however, the whole truth. You carried the Ring farther than any of us could have done. You did not do so because there was less in you, Frodo, but because the life you loved had never depended upon power.”
Frodo raised his head a little.
“You wanted your home, your books, your garden. You wanted meals shared with friends, fresh air. A simple life, the greatest life. You did not wish to possess the world. You wished to live in it, and to leave room in it for others.”
Legolas turned briefly towards the plain, where the last light was fading from the distant fields.
“Sauron would have mistaken that for smallness. He understood the desire to rule, to conquer, to punish, even the desire to do good by forcing the world into a better, but unnatural, shape. He understood any love that might be twisted into possession. But your life was already full without power, and so the Ring found less in you that answered to its promises.”
“But it found enough,” Frodo said. “In the end.”
“Yes,” Legolas replied. “In the end, when you were starving, wounded and exhausted, and had carried it into the place where it was strongest. It had worn away your strength step by step, and then you judge yourself because, when nothing remained, you could not give more.”
Frodo wiped at his face with the heel of one hand. “I still claimed it. In the end, my choices almost killed us all.”
Legolas looked at him for a long moment, frowning. Then he moved closer along the bench and reached for Frodo’s hands.
“But Frodo,” he said, and his voice had changed. The grave patience remained, but beneath it was an affection so open that Frodo finally looked at him. “My dear, dear Frodo, do you not see? Your choices saved us all!”
Frodo stared at him.
“You saved us long before you entered the Mountain. You did it when Faramir would have killed Gollum and you asked him to show mercy. You knew that he had lied to you, and that he might betray you, but while his life was in your hands, you chose to spare it.”
“He did betray us.”
“Yes. Mercy does not promise that the one who receives it will become worthy. If it did, it would be no more than a bargain.”
Legolas’ hands closed a little more firmly around his. “You spared him while you were still free to choose. That choice remained after your strength was gone. When you could no longer surrender the Ring, the choices you had made returned to you. Choices that saved you, and us all.”
Tears slipped down Frodo’s face. He made no attempt to hide them now.
“But it was chance that he followed us. Chance that he came into the chamber. Chance that he fell.”
“Chance?” Legolas said. “I will not presume to speak with Gandalf’s certainty, Valar spare me. But we often call a thing chance because we see only the moment in which it happens, and not the long road that brought it there.”
Legolas lowered his eyes to their joined hands.
“The Ring taught Gollum to desire it beyond his own life. Sauron made that hunger. But he did not make the mercy that allowed Gollum to stand in the Fire. That came from Bilbo, and then from you.” A faint smile touched Legolas’ face. “So one might say that, in the end, Sauron destroyed himself. Malice consumed malice. Goodness,” he added, his hand closing gently over Frodo’s, “preserved goodness. As it so often does.”
Frodo wiped his face again, this time without haste.
“I do not know whether I believe you.”
“I am not asking you to replace one simple account with another. You failed in the final task, if failure is the word you must use. But you also made that final task possible. You carried the Ring farther than anyone had believed possible, and you chose mercy before you knew that mercy would be needed to finish what strength could not.”
Legolas’ smile deepened, though his eyes remained grave.
“If that is failure, dear hobbit, then may we all fail so well.”
Frodo’s mouth trembled, though no smile came. For a while he said nothing.
He looked beyond the wall. The Pelennor Fields had disappeared into the darkness, but he knew where the blackened earth lay, turned over and hidden from sight without being made untouched.
“Even so,” he said at last, “something in me has changed because of those choices. For ever, I think.”
Legolas’ hand remained over his.
“I want to go back,” Frodo continued. “I want Bag End, and the lane, and the sound of Sam arguing with the Gaffer in the garden. I want all of it so badly that sometimes I can scarcely breathe. Yet when I imagine myself standing in my own doorway, I feel as though the house will know me, and I shall not know the person it has welcomed.”
Legolas listened without moving.
Frodo lowered his eyes to his hands. The missing finger was hidden beneath the left, though neither of them could forget where the absence lay.
“There are things in me that were not there before, and things that were there which I can no longer find. I do not sleep without returning to the dark. Food tastes as it should, yet gives me no pleasure. Sometimes someone enters a room too quietly, and my body knows terror before I know who it is.”
His fingers shifted beneath Legolas’ hand.
“The healers say that time will help. Perhaps it will. But I have begun to fear that they are speaking of someone who is mending, while I am only learning how to appear mended.”
Legolas did not answer at once. The distinction was too exact to be denied, and too painful to be met with praise for its honesty.
After a while Frodo said, “I spoke to Gandalf.”
Something in his tone made Legolas turn towards him more fully.
“He told me there may be another road, if the Shire is not enough. He did not promise that it would cure me. Gandalf has become cautious with promises. But he said that, in the West, there might be rest which Middle-earth can no longer give me. Arwen has offered me her place upon a ship, should I need it.”
The words settled between them. Legolas stared at Frodo for a moment, and then, to Frodo’s surprise, a laugh escaped him. It was not loud, nor was there any mockery in it.
“Forgive me,” he said, pressing his hand briefly to his mouth. Then he looked up at the darkening sky. “The Valar have always had a remarkable taste for irony.”
He turned towards the south-west before looking back at Frodo.
“Let me see whether I understand our predicament. I want to sail, but I need to remain. You want to remain, but you need to sail.” His smile returned, gentler now. “Between us, it seems, we have been given two perfectly reasonable fates and each assigned the wrong one.”
Frodo laughed then, though the sound broke once before it steadied.
“The world has managed the matter very badly,” he said.
“Well, it has had a difficult year.”
They sat with the small remnant of amusement between them until it faded of its own accord.
“How will you tell them?” Legolas asked.
Frodo looked towards the passage leading back to the guest houses. “I do not know. Sam will hear only that I intend to leave him. Merry and Pippin will begin searching for some practical obstacle they can remove. I have not yet found a way to tell them that does not make the farewell begin at once.”
“Perhaps it need not begin before you have decided.”
“Perhaps.” Frodo’s eyes remained upon the arch. “But secrets alter the shape of ordinary days. One begins refusing questions that have not yet been asked.”
Legolas considered this and nodded. “Then I hope you find better words than I have.”
“So do I. Though it is comforting to know that, if the conversation goes badly, I shall not be the only person in Minas Tirith facing the displeasure of those who love him.”
Legolas chuckled.
The hammer began again below them, but the rhythm had changed. The mason struck three times, paused, and struck once more. Frodo listened until the sound had travelled away among the walls.
“I have been thinking of writing a book when I return home,” he said.
“Have you?”
“Bilbo began one after his journey to the Mountain,” Frodo continued. “A large volume bound in red leather. He wrote of the Dwarves, Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies, though he has revised several parts so often that I no longer know which version he considers true. I thought I might continue it. As an account of what happened, while there are still people who can correct me.”
Legolas made a quiet sound that did not suggest enthusiasm.
Frodo glanced at him. “That did not sound like approval.”
“I approve of history in principle. I become less certain when I am expected to appear in it.” Legolas turned his gaze towards the roofs below. “Leave me out where you can, will you? And where you cannot, include only what is necessary.”
“Why should I do that?” Frodo asked. “You were necessary rather often.”
“Then exercise judgment.” Legolas’ tone was mild, but Frodo could see that he meant the request. “I have spent much of my life being seen before I am known, first as my father’s son, then as whatever the needs of the realm required me to represent. I would rather not spend the rest of it being introduced to strangers as a figure from a famous book.”
“I do not expect the book to become famous. It will remain at Bag End, or perhaps in Rivendell. I want there to be a record, that is all.”
“Stories are poor at remaining where they are put.” Legolas looked towards the city below, where messages and rumours had crossed the streets more quickly than any rider. “Once a story is written, it ceases to belong entirely to the person who wrote it. A copy is made for a friend, a passage is repeated at a feast, someone sets part of it to music, and soon people who were not present are deciding what the events meant. They remove what is difficult to remember and polish what they admire. In time the people within it become simpler than they ever had the luxury of being.”
Frodo thought of the songs already being composed in the lower circles, and of the clean courage they would make from fear, confusion and blood.
“You think it will become known? What happened to us?.”
“How could it not, Frodo Baggins? Good hearts have always treasured stories in which hope outlives the dark.” And I think no writer can know where a story will end. Mortals are spared one part of the difficulty: eventually they leave the world and are no longer required to hear what strangers have made of them. But I may remain here long enough to hear every error repeated until it becomes tradition. I am proud of what the Fellowship did. I would not take my part out of it, even if that were possible. But I do not wish that part to become all that is visible of me. I should like, from time to time, to be merely… Legolas of the Woodland Realm."
Frodo looked at him for a while. Legolas’ expression had lost its humour.
“Very well, Legolas of the Woodland Realm. I shall be restrained. But I reserve the right to preserve the episode on Caradhras, when you declared your intention of finding the Sun and promptly vanished up the mountain.”
Legolas stared at him, then laughed, the sound rising warm and unguarded into the arbour. “This is precisely how slanders begin. A sensible reconnaissance becomes an Elf abandoning his companions in a blizzard to find the Sun.”
Frodo decided that the line would also remain.
The laughter passed slowly. Night had settled over Minas Tirith, softening the broken places without concealing the work still being done. Below the garden, the lamps burned steadily. Farther out, small fires marked the camps upon the plain, each one containing people who would wake, labour and tell the story differently.
When the laughter passed, Frodo found himself thinking not of what Legolas might read in years to come, but of the years themselves.
“When you do sail,” he asked, “after we are gone, will you miss us?”
For a moment Legolas did not move. Then his eyes closed, and when he opened them again there was a brightness in them which caught what little light remained. He did not turn away from Frodo, though the effort not to do so was visible.
“I have known mortals all my life,” he said. “I am not a stranger to their deaths. But knowledge is a poor rehearsal for loss.”
His hands had become still upon his knees.
“Even if every battles are won, time will still take from me what war had spared.” Legolas drew a breath, and for a moment his voice came near to failing. “Yes. I will miss you. More than I can say.”
The confession was quiet enough that Frodo felt no answer would improve it. They listened to the wind move through the fig tree.
After a while, Legolas lowered his eyes and gave a faint smile.
“Still, let it not be said that Legolas Thranduilion surrendered too readily to despair. Catastrophically optimistic, that’s what my father calls me.” Legolas looked at Frodo. “For you see, Mr Baggins, there are older reasons for hope than my disposition. There are many things said among the Eldar concerning what lies beyond the life of the world,” Legolas continued. “One of the oldest teachings says that Arda began in music. The Ainur sang before Ilúvatar, and from their themes the world was formed. Morgoth, the first Enemy, set his own discord against them.”
Legolas’ eyes remained upon the dark beyond the walls, but Frodo thought he was no longer looking for the Sea.
“It is said that after the end of days, when the marring of the world has been healed, there will be another Music, greater than the first, a Second Song. The Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar will take part in it together. Every voice will understand its own part and the parts of all the others, and no discord will have power to deform what the Music was meant to become.”
Frodo was quiet for a long time. “Elves and mortals together?”
“Together.” Legolas’ mouth moved with the beginning of a smile. “The dwarves keep their own beliefs on the matter, but I cannot imagine that any final music worth hearing would succeed in excluding Gimli.”
Frodo laughed softly. Legolas did too, though his eyes remained bright.
“Do you believe it?” Frodo asked.
Legolas considered the question with the seriousness he had given the Sea.
“I believe that no one who heard the first Music has told me what the second will be. I know only what has been handed down, and hope is not made into knowledge by age.” He looked at Frodo then. “But I have seen mercy reach farther than the person who offered it could have intended. I have seen evil prepare its own defeat while believing itself beyond consequence. I no longer think it foolish to trust that the end of a thing may contain more than those within it can see.”
His voice lowered.
“So yes. I hope that when the greater Music is made, the division between the deathless and the mortal will no longer place your voice beyond my hearing. I hope we shall recognise one another, not because nothing has changed, but because at last we shall understand what every change was part of.”
The tears did not fall, but Legolas’ next breath trembled.
“I think I shall have waited long enough by then,” he said. “And I cannot tell you how much I long to hear that Music.”
Below them, the mason set his chisel once more. The hammer struck stone, and after a pause another answered from farther down the city. A cart passed over the paving, a guard called from the wall, the wind moved softly through the fig leaves.
For one brief moment, Frodo thought he heard a strange harmony among them, a few notes, too faint to follow and gone before he could be certain they had been there at all.
Beside him, Legolas smiled.
He did not turn towards the Sea.
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