Work Text:
*
« Was she bound? »
« Only the arms, my Lord, not tightly. »
« Untie her. »
A crash of metal over metal, gauntlet to breastplate. « My Lord. »
The warehouse door opens with a faint creak; the hinges are well-oiled, it is the wood that is dry. Light floods in, hurting her eyes through her lowered lids, unforgiving, the Sun is always unforgiving, shining on every dark corner of the landscape. And sometimes she is the landscape.
Three sets of boots step in, one set pauses by the door, two other sets approach her, a pair to her left, another behind her. A hand, gloved – faint scent of new leather –, presses between her shoulder blades, firmly though not roughly, bending her further towards the floor. The floor under her knees – hard, but not foul-smelling, it is clean, it is kept clean; there are grains kept in this warehouse, cloaked in the odour of hay.
A soft metallic whine at her back, a weapon drawn. The tip of it rests cold just below her nape; no puncture, but it weighs. Then a pull to her forearms, the rope cut and slipped away, and the pair of boots to her side retreats. The other pair… slowly. The weight of the sword is lifted, but it lingers above her back… like a feeling, like a whisper.
It doesn’t hit.
She knew it would not, though she expected it to.
« Leave us. »
« Is it… wise, my Lord? »
« Leave us. And close the door. »
Another crash of metal, gauntlet to breastplate, then two sets of steps exit and the door creaks closed, the dark red flare of light filtered by her lids retreating and leaving her to blessed penumbra. In the dark… kneeling in the dark, her arms still crossed behind her back though they were unbound, her back still bent – kneeling in the dark… safer. She knows the dark. The dark knows her.
She counts her breaths, slow and deep; one, two…
She counts his breaths, also. Attuned, a soft and deep murmur of air.
Her position is uncomfortable, yet she maintains it for as long as her body allows her – soon, it does not: her arm muscles ache, her backbone strains for release, and though it is weakness, she relents, uncrossing her wrists and bringing her hands limply to her thighs, straightening slowly until she is sitting on her heels.
« I know », he says, his voice lowered in its steadiness.
At last, she lifts her head and opens her eyes.
His face’s sharp lines, high cheekbones, noble nose, proud brow, are softened by the delicate chiaroscuro of dim illumination; his hair might almost look dark brown, if not for a blade of light from the high windows that lands on his head and sets the locks aflame. His pupils shine with the glimmer of another world.
He repeats, « I know. »
***
She digs her way through the earth, a tunnel carefully hidden and carefully built little by little. She reimagines herself anew, an underground river that flows and flows, carving its path from rock, smoothing its way south to the sea; a droplet, even, a droplet of water falling onto the same stone until there are holes in it.
A river of piss and shit, perhaps, coursing through the bellows of the earth to find its way out.
The first time she had tried, the jailer had laughed at her face when she had been brought back. The jailer had also spat at her face. The jailer had said, you can’t leave here, you never can. Had said, they hate you and fear you out there now, you can’t ever return. Melkor’s will shall make you great. Had laughed. Had said, how funny, you’re ugly like me.
That time, she had snuck into the tunnels that the soldiers of Angband also use.
She makes her own tunnel, this time. Deeper and concealed into the guts of the mines.
She has a companion to whom she is often chained, and together they work faster. Eventually (and it is a remote eventually, when she has long stopped trying to count the days), they break into a cavern where stalagmites and stalactites glitter with water as if still pure.
Blue lamp in hand, they stumble into the grottos. They stumble until their mouths are dry and their lips chapped. Until her companion stumbles one last time, falling injured, and she fears the smell of his blood and broken bone will call the wargs or the vampires upon them, and so she grabs her pickaxe and watches herself hit.
You can’t leave here. You never can.
When she pushes herself through a tight hole in the ground, she wonders if perhaps she has not dug herself upside down and rather than emerging to the surface of the land, she hasn’t instead found the blackest corners of Thangorodrim.
The air is dark and thick with smokes heaved from the depths of the Iron Hells and the rocks under her feet are sharp and rough. Knowing not where south is, she heads toward the direction that feels downwards, downhill, descending.
She runs, walks, and lurches in turns.
They hate you there.
But the terror of returning to her chains is greater than the terror of freedom.
*
The years of thraldom have tested her mettle beyond what she’d thought a spirit could endure. And yet, when she falls in the tall grass and her eyes roll upwards to the heavens, lit up by Anor to painful brightness, she knows she shall not ever take another step forward.
The soil under her is cold, but soft. Pebbles dig into her skin, but the grass that frames her vision sways gentle in the biting breeze, and she can smell – smell things other than smoke, sulphur, tangy coppery blood, or sweat. Smell the earth.
Better to die here, she thinks feverishly; here, blinded and lung-hurting from cold breaths, but in the light.
And if it is death, it is a slow one. High above, carrion birds fly in circles, dark spots against the blue.
Then a rumble comes, a vibration against her back and her head, which makes her fingers dig into the soil, holding onto something when the ground will inevitably split open and swallow her back into its filthy dark bosom.
They won’t kill her, as long as she can work – surely she can still work.
The rumble, an earthquake around her, crashes and diminishes. The grass is not disturbed. A musky smell of animals crawls in her nose.
« It is a thrall », one says, a singing voice unmarred by the struggles of bondage.
« Alive? »
A high-pitched sound that, mid-way through its course, she recognises as neighing rings in her ears. These are those who were once her own people, for no orc speaks Edhellen in this flowing manner among the soldiers of Belegûr, and her fellow miners, well, they do not ride horses.
« Barely. »
« …What shall we do, captain? »
She waits; this tune, she knows well and intimately. Verdict has never been death before, they had use for her; here, how can she tell? Her held breath is like a rope wound too tightly around her ribcage.
They hate you there.
*
The woman healer does not look at her eyes. The healer only glances, furtively, towards her face, while inspecting her body. She counts how many times the glancing happens, and it isn’t many.
Her arms and legs are lifted by the wrists and ankles, her limbs squeezed with care, her lids moved to look at her pupils, her mouth opened to check her teeth and tongue. A slow process; she speaks no word to protest it. The fingers on her, the fingers on her are delicate – fingers so delicate should not treat flesh like mud to mould.
But her spirit is not touched; her spirit is left alone, behind her closed eyes, wrapped in her locked mind, twisted inside the paths of water in the deep earth.
The ceiling beams are sturdy and intricately carven, and in their swirls she loses her thoughts.
« Her conditions? », a male voice asks, muffled, just outside the door.
« Malnourished », the healer answers. « A few bones were broken and then set wrong, and the soles of her feet shall turn silver from scars when they are done recovering. And there is the face, of course, but it is what it is. With rest, she will be better. » A pause. « …Did you have to bring her here? »
(Listening to others discuss her doom, their voices almost out of the reach of her ears – dreadfully familiar, helpfully expected.)
« We have orders », says the first voice – the captain, she belatedly realises. « Any thralls found in Lothlann are to be brought to Lord Maglor’s brother in Himring. Tend to her, then send her underway. »
There comes her fate decided.
That night, and all the nights thereafter, she sleeps with her eyes closed.
She had not expected to be rebirthed by the earth’s womb, to come out of it alive, though the manner of this second life is still grim and formless, and perhaps unwanted. A spirit lingers by the bed they put her into, from time to time, when the hours are dark, the man who was chained to her, from whose bloody shell she sought freedom – but surely it was not her hands who wielded the pickaxe?
When she has strength enough to lift them and look at their knobby knuckles and dirty nails, those hands are not her own.
*
The citadel of Himring is a stout stronghold circled by great walls, lying ever-watchful atop the bald hill, tall among her rolling sisters, like a crown of stone rested upon a proud head.
She walks through the eastern gates with her shoulders hunched, her neck bent, and her face hidden under the hood, and each free step she takes is by the grace of the Lord of Himring. She is told that he will meet her, and that is the first time she sees the eyes of Maedhros son of Faenor.
Even were he not so tall, even without the long copper hair, tightly-braided and refulgent, even without that hand of bronze that she sights under the fur-lined cloak, and without the star, eight-pointed and sharp, needled into his clothes with many small precise stabs, even without all that, she feels that she would have known him by his eyes alone.
He asks her if she has a name that she wants him to use and, at her head shake, he does not inquire further.
He asks her if there is anyone that she is seeking to find too and, at her head shake, again he does not inquire further.
He asks what she might want to do in the fortress; there are others who came from Angband, others who may help in a way that understands how help for the likes of her might be shaped – he does not say that part, but she hears it.
Her tongue moves, she flicks it between her lips to learn her mouth’s shape again, against her teeth, the chipped and the whole, and finally she speaks with her voice – « I know how to mine. »
He explains, calmly but without condescension, that they do not need to mine here, the best ore comes from Thargelion, sent by the dwarves of the mountains, which she already knew. His next questions lead to simple answers – are you any good with horses, will you have a solitary bedroom, have you had lunch.
Simple answers.
She does not hold his gaze for long.
*
Here, they call him the Morgoth Bauglir.
Never Melkor, as most of the orcs do, never Belegûr as some of the other miners did, never the Mighty Arising.
A woman by the stone wells delivers her a quick glance, unable to bear to look at her any longer than what little courtesy might be offered; but the woman by the wells smiles even when she doesn’t look, a fine and gentle curl of her lips that is there for the taking even though it isn’t explicitly given. They make artless small talk until the woman lifts her buckets with a huff, not effortlessly, and gifts her with parting words – « I am glad that you are free. »
Alone, ignored by the other passers-by, she looks into the wells of stone, their dark mouths and the depths where their clear waters are birthed by the earth, flowing away into the Little Gelion. Her hands hold onto the edge, finely built, as her sight is lost in the pit.
She steps away before the vertigo overtakes her.
She was set to help in the Lord’s stables, overseen by one of her own. A gaunt man of slight build, with wispy dark hair, a one-eyed man who wears a patch over the empty eye socket and moves about the animals with unwavering composure. His name was Calendol once, and he still uses it.
Not all the animals like him, huffing nervously when he moves around them, yet he handles them expertly, and they tolerate him.
None of the animals like her. For what it’s worth, she is unsure that she likes them, either; they are great beasts of the lands beyond the ocean, taller at the withers and larger in girth than any breed of Beleriand. War horses, the likes of which transported her from the sea of grass into the encampment, where she did not die.
Their large, glossy eyes follow her.
Even in the shadow of her small dwelling, they follow her.
In the periphery of her conscience, she is always watched, and always does she sleep with her back to the wall, with the restless spirit of the man her hands killed lingering about in her field of view.
How was she let go, she asks to the wakeful darkness? And what would she do, were she forced to go back?
Calendol is not a loquacious man and the horses do not like her, nor she they, but she always returns to the stables every morning, for fear of solitude, for the comfort of company.
Solitude breeds her nightmares.
In her nightmares, she is always chained, and she always wields a pickaxe through which she unchains herself and flees; these are her dreams when she sleeps with her eyes closed. But in her open-eyed nightmares, she is always brought back, back into the earth, and the jailer spits at her and laughs at her, and says, Melkor’s will shall make you great – and says, how funny, you’re ugly like me.
Weariness settles in her bones as she works around the horses.
One evening, when Anor has already faded beyond the peaks of the Ered Gorgoroth, painting the sky with the fiery glow of lava, Calendol walks slowly in her field of view and, just as slowly, reaches out with a bony hand.
She watches that hand, and he watches her. It touches her shoulder – she remembers the healer, how the woman had handled her limbs, and it is not the same thing, if nothing else because Calendol does not handle her.
Under his breath, as if the cool breeze could steal his words and carry them too far to foreign ears, he says, « Do you sleep? »
The kindness of the question feels like pulling away a scab, letting the wound bleed the truth out with its inherent failure. Perhaps he knows as much.
« The laundresses », he says with gentle steadiness, « often sing by the river’s springs. The water and their songs are lulling. Go there, and they shall help. »
His hand leaves her slowly, but first it squeezes her shoulder, and it stuns her for long seconds of silence as the heavens burn.
*
Calendol is right – the water and their songs are a chant of crystalline beauty that repeats itself, wordless, soothing like the curves of the Little Gelion in its southwards course. The gentler roll of baritone voices is the bed of the river, its stones, smoothed out by time. The higher notes are the call of buzzards high in the sky.
She sits against a rock, on the cold yellow grass, hugging her own knees, and the songs and water take her hand down the path of sleep.
She dreams in the dark, but a darkness in which she is alone.
So she returns.
And again she returns.
They have grown accustomed to her, their glances no longer cut her way like chasing arrows, and the silent acceptance of her presence draws her forward, little step by little step, as once she would draw closer to scraps of food.
« I can help », she says, her eyes on the reddened fingers of the laundress.
The way she smiles reads gentle, reads like pity – but the man with her says, « You mustn’t worry, we have enough people. »
She asks herself, in that hour, the same question as ever: what would she do if she had to go back? Walking upstream with the treacherously sweet lullaby in her ears, her eyes cling to the great walls of the stronghold; in stopping, she plunges her hands in the cold water and washes them, washes them to redness.
She walks around the fortress – she is seen, watched, there are sentinels on every defensive tower, watchmen in between the crenelation, soldiers by every gate, every entrance deep set inside the walls, their maw a death trap for any who might attempt to walk in without the welcome of the Lord of the March.
And perhaps even for those with it.
*
She has reimagined herself a river, but no rivers spring from Angband.
The avalanche of soot rolls down from the triple peaks of Thangorodrim, heaved despair, regurgitated blood, smoke that seems to have carried with it the spirit of the companion she killed with the pickaxe. There were no rivers. She dug her way out and stumbled forward still engulfed by filth.
*
Finding a mirror is an effort of half design and half chance.
In the penumbra of the stables, the smell of horses in her nose, she kneels in a corner over the frozen and trodden hay, flattened to the ground by hooves and boots. The mirror she holds is round like a creek pond, set into a golden frame that was etched in the shape of clouds, fine work for an even finer wonder – the world doubled on a sheet of silver – her father – he had told her – he had been a craftsman.
The mirror reflects the beams of the stables’ ceiling, until she tilts it just so.
Her hair has begun to regrow properly; it reaches her collarbones, and the warm brown has regained something like lustre. The shape of her face is something like what she remembers, the steady access to warm food and drink in Himring have put some fat on her bones again.
Nonetheless, she is unrecognisable.
Her eyebrows nigh naked of hair, burnt away, surmount her sunken eyes. The scar that she has often felt with her hands begins from above her upper lip and cuts through her nose, the tip of it lost, and part of her nostrils also, leaving holes behind. It climbs up to her cheekbone and temple and disappears between her thin locks.
The jailer had found it funny.
It had been fresh, then. The first time she had tried to flee.
You can’t leave here, he had said.
She abandons the mirror in the stables, her feet lead her out. The crawling of fear like insects on her guts is the memory of something that came before, before her flight, before the mines, before the capture. She had known Mithrim, then. She had known those like her, but only in tales.
In the tales, they serve the Morgoth. They betray friends, they backstab kin, and Belegûr has his black claws sunk into their very spirit. Ever do they return to him.
She moves through Himring with hunched shoulders and quickened breath, crossing the main square towards the main body of the citadel – here too is guarded – more heavily than elsewhere – they look at her.
« Passage is forbidden unless summoned », the guard says, armoured, gleaming in metal and leather and red insignia.
She steps to the side, wary-eyed, and walks forward – she is stopped by the firm outstretched arm of the guard – she steps to the side, attempts the other guard – walks forward, the archway and the cool deep shadow underneath the only respite she might ever find.
They grab her by the arms. The gauntlets – grimy iron.
She is not the back-bent chary creature the people of this place carefully walk around. No, it is not with whining sounds and faint steps that she had fled, not with tears and cowering that she had been retaken, not with mercy that she had killed.
She whirls on herself showing teeth, she screams, it echoes in the archway.
Her arms are bent behind her back with painful twists.
Daylight glares down on her.
Dust on the ground.
Her wrists clenched in the gauntlets.
Blotched with wild colours of a world in-between, she fades out of consciousness, fades into the dark.
***
I know.
The sword of the sun falls on the hair of the Lord of Himring and sets it aflame. Maedhros son of Faenor stands before her, his cloak hanging from his right shoulder, the clean dust of the warehouse dances in the air, fills her nose with scents of straw.
I know, he says. I know.
She swallows down her dried throat, returning to herself.
« Are you not afraid », she says from the dark, the pain in her knees putting a spark in her voice, « that I will lunge for you? »
His mouth curls so very slowly. « I would like to see you try. »
The tone is not unkind; bemused, graced by a low hum. As it fades, his expression falling back to mildness, poised and – and understanding, Lord Maedhros exhales.
« Do you know », he says, « what you were doing? »
Her knees hurt, anchoring to her the long seconds of her silence.
« There are », he speaks again, « no right answers. Only answers, of sorts. »
Yes, no matter where she steps, no matter the path, the way is treacherous, dotted with pits and pitfalls, like the mines and their masters. « I was entering the citadel », she says, the flashes of her actions seen from a distance, in a dream, other than herself.
Lord Maedhros nods, the sun catches the copper of his circlet. « But—you do not know why. Is that correct? »
Belegûr – the Morgoth – her fear, her dreams, her redundant presence among the free people, the discomfort of her wounds, the tiredness of her abused bones, broken and set wrong—
« I killed. » She looks up, the tar and coal of the truth comes out of her, for surely out of all Edhil the kinslayers will understand. Her voice is light as the wheezing wind and like the wind suddenly runs. « In my fleeing I killed a man who was chained to my ankle. He fell in the caves, fell and cut himself and could not stand, there was the smell of blood in my », a hand lifts, touches the holes of her nostrils, the bridge of her gnarled, « nose. I had no strength to carry him, and the smell was foul, and I feared it would betray us, so I grabbed the pickaxe and killed him, axed off his foot and fled. » Both her hands palm up on her aching knees. « I killed for this. At night I see him, he lingers, he does not go beyond the sea. And I wonder perhaps I am still chained, perhaps the body is free but not the soul. I drift, my Lord, I drift from task to task, and Calendol is kind, but I do not think he has done what I have done – but you have, my Lord, and my Lord surely is free, so I beg you that you say if I am, I beg you tell me what is that I do here where I am not needed. I drift, I have nothing but a ghost. »
The Lord of Himring is silent, the noble traits statuesque in their immobility.
At last, he speaks.
« You have », he says, « years of uncertainty ahead of you. Years in which your wakeful hours will breed your monsters, in which you will not know yourself, and you shall take the pieces of you and hold onto them and on their razor’s edge ‘till you are left to bleed. Do you understand? »
She breathes in, her ribcage expanding.
« And after those years », the Lord continues, « when you have learnt yourself anew, still you will wonder if the weight that at times seizes your heart, when the hours are darker, is that of your chains. Do you understand? »
The warehouse comes into focus little by little, its grey penumbra revealing the casks of forage and wheat, the bales of hay; the sun is always unforgiving, and it is slicing her through.
« Then », she says, « there is no freedom. »
« Do you ever look north? »
She stares, his voice has grown strong, its power gripping her; she shakes her head.
« Do so », Lord Maedhros says. « Angband will always be there until the day it will be no more. None are free from it – some less so than others. Walk through the northern gate and look; you will not find freedom, but you will find defiance. Here in the hills, we weave the threads of another world, and though the road is long and hard, what today you cannot fathom shall in the future take shape. »
It is the most bewildering thing to hear of the future and think of it as something that shall come, rather than as the fog on the horizon, ever present, never reached.
The darkness knows her, holds her back.
« What happens, my Lord—what happens if I am a thrall still, if willing or unwilling I serve the Morgoth? »
Lord Maedhros eyes close for the briefest moment, his head tilting in the beginning of a nod. « You cannot do harm, here. »
« You will watch me. »
« We will. Not as a prisoner, but we will. »
Perhaps that is a relief. She counts her breaths, and his, the quiet harmony of air displaced by their continued living.
« Do you », she whispers, hesitantly, « hate the Morgoth, my Lord? »
There is a huff leaving his nose, a huff that she realises is the beginning of a laughter that finds no resolution. « Do I ever », he says. « But make no mistake, it is not for hate that I fight him. »
« For what, then? »
His left hand rises, his gesture slow, princely, encompassing. « This. My people. What we shall have afterwards. »
The future again, encroaching; she searches for it in the scent of grains, in the falling dust, in the glimmer of the sun, in the dark corners that the Lord of Himring says shall ever remain in her company. Her eyes lower. « I do not know if I hate him », is her confession. « But my jailers and the sentinels », her lips curl over her teeth, her chipped teeth, and anger, long-buried, resurfaces like gas from the earth, « I curse them. May they know what I suffered. »
His boots, polished leather, are only dirtied ever so slightly about the tips and the soles.
Do you understand?
A breath.
« Hate is not proof of freedom », she adds, defeated, her eyes rising.
Lord Maedhros smiles; a faint curl of his lips, no more than a twitch, so much that in the granite of his face one might hardly notice it. It is, she thinks – it is kind.
« What if », she asks, « I do not find defiance? What if I find only fear? »
« These hills shall stand », is his answer. « So shall these walls, for as long as I will it. You mustn’t fear, so long as you live in Himring. »
« What if I find only spite? »
« Let us call that », he says with a burr of humour in his voice, « a step in the right direction. »
She does not smile, nor snort, nor certainly laugh. But she finds that she can conceive it.
He takes a step back, his chin lifted and his back straight, all too straight, as if in tension from something invisible, in ways with which perhaps she is acquainted. He turns his head to the door, the slices of daylight between the planks of the door blackened here and there by the still silhouettes of the guards.
Then again he turns to her. « Calendol will be with you when you need it. He carries more wisdom than his silence and apparent frailty might suggest. » A pause. « You may stand. In your own time. »
The Lord of Himring nods to her, the door opens, she squeezes her eyes against the sun. She is left alone.
Her palms press on the floor – she stands, in her own time, with hurting knees and swaying thoughts.
*
In the moment closest to death, lying on the tall grass of wide Lothlann, one thing she had thought with clarity.
Better to die here.
Here, blinded and lung-hurting from cold breaths.
But in the light.
*
The years do pass and the future comes, uninvited yet inexorable.
The years do pass, and she has learnt how to tend to the horses – not all like her, but some do, and most tolerate her well enough to let her work; Calendol says not to worry, it has been decades for him and some of the great beasts still stomp their hooves at his passage. She has learnt to find sleep by the waters of the river, learnt to live with the spirit of her companion, the apparition of some of her nightmares, watching it wander and fade a little more every night.
The years do pass, and eventually the Lord of Himring prepares to journey to Hithlum, in visit to the High King and his son.
A thought comes to her, a thought that will not leave her.
She begs Calendol to let her be the one to accompany the lordly convoy and take care of their mounts.
Graciously, and perhaps with knowing eyes, he allows her.
*
The Prince of Barad Eithel descends the grand staircase of the fortress’s white courtyard with his arms open and a smile like sunlight.
It is the first time she sees him, or the stronghold. From her horse, hidden behind the many others who came from Himring, she watches the Prince enfold Lord Maedhros into a tight embrace, warm in its generous welcome no matter the propriety with which it is reciprocated.
The court swirls around her. The court watches her, too – she has never covered what remains of her nose. But none dare call her orc-blood in the presence of her lord.
She takes the great horses of Lord Maedhros and his vassals away to the large stables of Barad Eithel and thinks of the misty lake where she was born.
*
She asks for an audience.
Lord Maedhros sits against the backdrop of high mullioned windows, the bronze hand wrapped in a velvet glove and resting on a desk, the flesh one writing neatly. The nib scratches and scratches, and then rests, and he gestures in quiet invitation to speak.
« My Lord », she says, « I ask for your leave to visit Lake Mithrim. »
« It is no small journey from Barad Eithel. Wherefore? »
She has gone prepared – to talk, to reveal – and still the words come out with the difficulty of a secret that begs to remain such. « To find the house of my mother. »
For long moments, the Lord is silent; then his steel-bright eyes turn to the side, considering. « There will be », he says slowly, « a hunting party with Prince Fingon and his friends in a few days. We shall… endeavour to ride by the lake’s shores. »
She bows her head, releasing breath, her heart clutched. « Thank you, my Lord. »
He dips the pen in the bottle of dark ink. « But of course. »
*
She retraces the paths of time, riding backwards into the country of her memory.
In the darkness, she had remembered the needle-thin leaves, hanging on the trees evergreen or coating the ground like a prickly carpet; she had remembered the scent of the resins, rich and aromatic, of the pinecones as they fell crashing from the high branches. She had remembered the mist wreathing the land, lying on the water pools dotting the land where the swans lived, lying on the great lake like a mantle of cold beauty, agleam under the sun, placid under the stars, against the backdrop of the embracing mountains.
Recollections in which to live when all else failed.
She returns into her past as a child to whom the world is first opened.
She returns with bones and joints that ache from the damp air, and with a growing pain above her brows from the icy air she breathes into the cold of her nose; but no protests come from her for the duration of the journey, nor while she tends to the horses as the nobles of Barad Eithel creep into the undergrowth in search of harts.
The old settlements, from before the encampments came, swallowed those very same encampments and grew between the trees.
She breathes slowly. She bows to Lord Maedhros. And walks away.
The path is a grassless lane that many feet made; the waist-high rock wall is blanketed by moss and lichens, white, green, yellow; the first wooden house appears on the left, on the slope of the shore, the small boat lying in wait to be pushed into the slate-grey water; the silver pipes still chime in the biting breeze. The second house she passes, the third she ignores, but their angles their roofs their doors, it is like dreaming the palms of her hands – she knows them, and yet are not quite her own.
So she comes in view of the house at the end of the path, and there climbs the vine on the wall with its white berries, there the carven bench beside the door and the stone oven next to the kitchen window, and there the meadow where dew in the morning turns to the crystal of ice.
The door opens.
Not because she has called, but because perhaps she was heard even though she was silent.
The woman who steps out is her mother. Though she was aged in ways that the immortals should not, it is her mother.
Her mother blinks once – and knows her.
Her mother’s hand rises covering her own mouth; eyes into eyes they know each other, and yet she feels as if the woman who gave her birth would have recognised her despite her ruined face.
With steps first stumbling and then transformed into a run, her mother runs to her, grabs her shoulders and falls to her knees. Sliding down she wails, and birds nearby take flight.
« Hethwes! », her mother calls, fingers digging, gripping.
Her name from another life dislodges something in her. The critical stone that holds together the dam.
Hethwes reaches down, cold and numb in her gloves, and cradles the head of her mother, crying tears that freeze on the scars of her cheeks.
*
Her mother asks questions in the warmth of their kitchen; they are not questions with simple answers, even when Hethwes endeavours to strip them of all rhetoric, of all thorns. She makes them simple, for her mother’s ears, for her mother’s faint wrinkles of pain, so that they may not be deepened.
Your father?
Died in the mines.
Your scar?
A punishment.
Your escape?
Through the earth.
Your return?
With the Lord of Himring, who hunts in the woods with Prince Fingon and their people.
Her mother struggles to take the pieces of her and use them to patch together her old wounds, to snap the chains, and the pain that seizes Hethwes is that of taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it with the cognizance that the way she knows the darkness and the way her mother knows it will not be the same for all the years they have left to live.
Before twilight descends, before the crepuscular grey seizes the land in the washing out of all colours, she steps outside the door and looks at the shape of the sky that is cut by the tree boughs, the other houses as they peek between the trunks, the soft murmur of the lake as it washes the pebbles on the shore. Familiar, so much that it might as well have been stitched into her spirit, and yet other than herself. But before it is too dark, she begins her journey back to the hunting party and her mother walks by her side.
*
« My mother, Lord Maedhros, Inweth from Lake Mithrim. »
They both bow before the lord standing by his horse. They are watched, in the clearing where the ferns grow sumptuously green, the paleness of their sprouts glowing gently in the darkness – and her mother is tense with nervous apprehension, around so many of the nobles of the Lechind.
« Rise », he says.
His eyes are on them, appraising, as if he were picking apart the threads of a story he is not privy to and yet for which he grasps: how her mother holds her hand between hers; how her mother stands half a step behind her; how her mother clings as if fearing that she isn’t gripping with enough strength, that at the first gust of cold wind they will be both swept away back into solitude.
« Your daughter, Inweth », he says, « has been serving in my stables for a number of years, and she served me well. »
« Thank you, my Lord », her mother says, nodding her head.
« Could she », Hethwes says, « could she, my Lord, come with us to Himring? »
Could a piece of life be plucked like an overripe fruit and its seeds replanted, hoping against all hope that it could yield a new tree? A piece, refitted into the crevasses of these new days, so that they may be at least partially filled?
Things her mother might not know but, she thinks, Lord Maedhros must.
And he weighs them, appraises them, his left hand resting on the mane of his horse, the other, still gloved, half hidden by the cloak. If there is a strange longing in the sharpness of his face, she cannot name its source exactly. If there is a feeling, she cannot give it a name.
« It is no trouble to me or my escort », he says eventually. « If your mother wishes to come with us, she may. »
Her hand, she feels her mother squeeze it tight.
*
She had lifted the pickaxe high above her head, her breath strangled in her throat, her eyes wild from fear, the smell, the smell of blood spreading in her thoughts. She had not looked into the eyes of her companion, she had lifted the pickaxe high above and hit him in his throat, the blow crushing his windpipe, more blood spurting, then she had hit again, and again, until she had, finally, looked into his eyes, finding them glassy, bulging, unequivocally dead.
She had then hit his shin, over and over, splitting the flesh, cutting the muscle, the tendons, splintering the bone, until the whole limb had come off, and there she had knelt and had taken him by the foot, and crying and gasping she had slid the piece of leg out of the iron ring that had been biting into the skin of his ankle.
The chain rattling, she had fled.
Of all her nightmares, it is ever the most vivid.
Of all her memories, the one she never revisits.
Under the trees of Mithrim, the spirit sits on the carpet of pine needles, between the ferns, a milky shape by her soft pallet. The horses huff in the dark, and many lie awake, chatting softly, a rustle of voices as they watch the stars.
She looks at his white eyes and he looks at her, as he ever did.
Opening her mouth to the dark, she whispers.
« Go. Go westwards into the Halls of Badhor. Let not my guilt keep you. » She points her finger towards where the sea lies, beyond the mountains. « Go. »
Long seconds of silent contemplation, then she watches him stand like a beam of moonlight.
*
The return is slow and unhurried. The Prince holds Lord Maedhros in a renewed long embrace, fervent in his goodbye. Accompanied by the vassals and a new convoy of supplies, they ride through Dorthonion and come in sight of the hill of Himring within three weeks of travel. Her mother sits behind her on the horse, light and often quiet.
Up the hill they ride and, before passing through the fortress’ great gates, Hethwes pauses her obedient mare under the cloudy skies of the march.
Turning her head, she looks north.