Chapter Text
“Gone?” Estrela is chilled by the realization that she, far better than Gwindor, can hazard a guess as to why Beren has disappeared, if not whereto. She must not show this. Pressing her scarred palms together, she asks, “Are you quite certain? He may be out scouting.”
Beren has always been readily on hand to accept their furtive delivery of meals and news, and communicates with the changing watch-keepers. This absence is not like him.
“Call it a feeling if you like,” Gwindor says, still too agitated to take immediate offense. He rakes a hand through his pale, untidy hair, which has the appearance of a blown dandelion in the lantern-light. “But I’ve been waiting for him, and searching all his usual places, for an hour or more. Something ain’t as it should be with him, and I reckon it’s in answer to this ill wind we’ve all been caught in the teeth of.”
Gwindor’s intuition is rarely wrong. Certainly not at present, when it is possible—probable—that Beren overheard Estrela’s incautious exchange with Silas. Wachiwi did, after all, and Beren is as subtle as she is. He has had to carefully track every sight and sound these days; why should he not seek to learn the most pressing secrets of Mithrim, while he waits for the determination of his own future there?
But was I incautious? Estrela mourns, remembering, and trying to place Beren in that scene by the lake. Or was I merely desperate, unable to contain the storm within myself…
“We need not panic,” she hears her own voice saying aloud, surprisingly calm. Thank heavens her fast-beating heart is not as audible as it sounds in her ears! “Truly, Gwindor. Beren—” she remembers to glance about them, lest any newcomer from Doriath be wandering nearby, and receives the meagre comfort of confirming that she and Gwindor are really alone in the dark garden. Beren, after all, is gone. “Beren owes no debt of loyalty to this place at present, and perhaps he never will again. Perhaps that is the price of our alliance with Doriath. We must let him decide for himself when and whether he goes.”
“Our alliance with Doriath,” Gwindor repeats. “It seems so fixed a thing to you, then? Armed men among us, eating our food, and friends slipping off in the night—we must call that success, eh?”
“We must wait for…”
“Estrela, if you say, for Russandol to return again, I’ll—”
“What will you do?” she demands, suddenly so dreadfully weary of it all that she allows her desperation to curdle to anger, as it has been threatening to do of late. “Punish me for my hope if you must! Don’t talk to me—leave me be—look on me with suspicion. Have I not endured all this for days?”
I deserve it. I deserve it.
Gwindor is quiet for a long moment. Guilt-stricken, or summoning his own wrath to answer hers—it is hard to say.
“Beren was hiding in the first place because these Doriath folk can’t be trusted,” he says at last. “Can’t you see that? We’ve made a fool’s bargain.”
“Or Russandol has,” Estrela says. “For it was he who sent them here.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do.”
Again, Gwindor falls silent, but Estrela does not attempt to fill the void with more words. Her knowledge of what Russandol has endured—or is presently enduring—does not change her belief.
Russandol will forfeit his own life to secure protection for others; that is the danger. These men from Doriath are not the enemy, even if they were bought at an enemy’s price.
Not that that excuses or softens her unvarnished (and thus misleading) statement. Gwindor may be right, to doubt her as he does.
Deception is a lonely act of service.
Yet at that thought, the anger that she has already allowed to flash out refuses to entirely dissipate. If men could only be sensible, they might share women’s burdens better! If Gwindor could be trusted with Silas’s news, and not expected to run off in pursuit of an insurmountable folly, as Beren has likely done—
It is not a matter of sense, and you know it. Beren is of a different temperament entirely, yet he and Gwindor share a justification for rash action to which no one who loves, and loves well, can strongly object. In Doriath dwells the woman Beren loves: in Doriath, too, there is a looming terror. If Beren, hearing of Bauglir, has gone in thankless search of Luthien, Estrela can understand that. So, too, can she understand why Gwindor would fly off in pursuit of Russandol if he only knew the peril, just as he did a year ago and more.
Gwindor went back for the children, just as Russandol did. Gwindor saw Russandol taken by Mairon, just as he watched Gelmir be maimed by Mairon.
“I am sorry,” Estrela says, regretful that she has been more than half-blind tonight. “I should not have snapped at you. Please—please do not leave me alone.”
“No one is going to leave you alone,” Gwindor says feelingly, with a hand on her shoulder as a familiar, steadying weight. “It’s Beren who’s gone off and left us, but as you say—perhaps we should expect nothing else. I didn’t mean to frighten you, lass.”
“We should tell Fingolfin,” she says. “If there is anything to be done, let him decide it.”
She cannot say so, but that course, too, is only a matter of retracing her steps.
Fingolfin agrees that nothing should be done, at present. He also believes that it is possible that Beren will return with the break of day. In the meantime, he advises patience and discretion: two words that Gwindor grumbles about when they are dispensed from Estrela’s lips, but which he accepts with good enough grace from Fingolfin.
“But don’t you think,” Gwindor ventures, urgent but low, “that this could represent a change? Beren might have overheard something—our visitors might talk amongst themselves.”
Estrela holds her breath, but Fingolfin merely steeples his fingers together, looking pensive. Around them, the fort is merry again—the children returned from their baths, eager to spoil their fresh cleanliness, and the supper things all cleared away and washed. To speak privately with Fingolfin, Estrela and Gwindor have waylaid him in a corner where he is wont to preside over the checkerboard. They have made a sort of shield out of the hubbub, such is its peak: Maglor has condescended to play his harp, in purportedly friendly competition with Enrique, who has produced a pan flute. Anyway, the most dangerous listeners—Celegorm, Curufin, and even Amras—are nowhere to be seen. The children are dancing gaily to Enrique’s piping, so Estrela does not fear their overhearing either.
“What do you think Beren learned, then?” Fingolfin asks.
Gwindor stares down at his coffee mug. “I’d give a pretty penny to ask Silas. Scare him a little with our supposing a bit of news. He’s one of the Haladin—surely he knows about Beren now, so we wouldn’t be giving anything away by mentioning him.”
Estrela holds her tongue. She has quarreled enough already about Silas, with Gwindor.
“I am confident that Silas has told us all he can,” Fingolfin answers, deftly avoiding an outright falsehood. It is… enlightening, to see a shade of Russandol’s cleverness in his sober uncle. This is not the first time Estrela has perceived such a similarity, but its effect has not diminished. “Gwindor, I believe that Mithrim must appear united and confident at this time, as best we can. We are making progress in our mutual education with these Doriath men—to appear restless and suspicious over the doings of a man who has his own needs for secrecy… I think it would be unwise.”
“Estrela agrees with you,” Gwindor mumbles, pushing back his bench. “And I know better than to count myself above either of you. Very well.”
Gwindor may not be wholly satisfied, but he does not retreat to his former sullenness. Instead, he trails Estrela as she goes to collect the children from the crowded floor, since their fervor has emboldened them to tumble underfoot, coming dangerously near to kicking Maglor’s precious harp.
“Have a care!” Maglor snaps. “it’s bad enough, having to accompany a foreign instrument, without dusty little foreign feet striking at the strings!”
Frog rears up as if to launch an attack in earnest, but Estrela intercedes, with an apologetic smile at both Maglor and Enrique. Maglor thins his lips in barely civil appreciation of her intervention, but Enrique winks.
Enrique, at least, is enjoying the contest greatly. Estrela finds herself wondering what Russandol thinks of him. Did they even meet? Does it pain Russandol to encounter other young men who have a broad view of the world and their prospects in it?
She turns her attention to the task at hand.
“Amlach! Lucy! It is not any less your bedtime because the grown people are sitting up.”
“Oh, scolding!” Sticks cries, quite out of breath. “Nobody’s sitting! And where we would be sleeping, hmm? Ears can’t sleep with all this!”
“Tabitha says you may have her bunk tonight,” Estrela counters, tugging Frog upright. “Is that not kind?”
“No,” both children say at once.
“Listen to Estrela,” Gwindor chimes in, looming awkwardly over Estrela’s shoulders.
“Soldier’s orders, hoho,” Sticks grumbles. Then, with a sharp-eyed glance—“Why don’t you listen to Estrela yourself? And then find a stick to beat yourself with for giving her lip all week!”
“Fine manners for someone who wants to be a lady,” Gwindor says sharply. “God above, you two little puppies—” He controls himself with some difficulty. “Never mind. Come along, Amlach.”
Predictably, Frog struggles. But then good Tabitha appears like an angel of stern comfort. “Good children,” she says, speaking over the continuing strains of Maglor’s playing—Enrique having put aside his pipes at last—“shall find a sweet under their pillows. But only good children.”
In a twinkling, the erstwhile marauders are transformed into sleepy little creatures, blinking slowly and yawning into their sleeves.
Estrela thanks Tabitha and takes each still-small hand in one of hers.
She expects that Gwindor will gratefully retreat from the field of battle, feeling that his duty is done, but he follows her still, waiting outside the door of the women’s quarters while she leads the nighttime prayers and kisses cheeks and foreheads. When she has closed the door of the room behind her, he is standing slumped and a little crooked, as he always does with his bad shoulder.
“What is it?” she asks.
Gwindor mumbles, “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
The corridor is empty. Even the kitchen is quiet. Estrela leans against the wall opposite him, the stones cool even through her blouse. Her secret weighs very heavily on her heart. If Russandol’s cause goes ill, will it always weigh on her so?
Gwindor sighs, passing a hand over his face.
“Do you remember when we cut him down?” he asks.
Estrela does not answer for a moment. So lifeless Russandol had looked, strung up at the whipping post, but for that awful burning heat—the heat of blood still welling up along each jagged stripe—the heat of the unbroken skin, burned deep.
“When Gothmog ordered us,” Gwindor presses, as if her silence means she does not recall. “When—”
“I know,” Estrela says. “I know. I remember.”
Gwindor shakes his head. His eyes are distant, bleary with exhaustion. Even when they were not speaking, Estrela was aware of his movements; she knows Gwindor has taken many watches in the last few days. The old territorial claim over midnight hours, for it used to be the closest thing to freedom that they knew.
“We never considered whether we ought not to,” Gwindor says. “Under orders, cowardice becomes as easy as breathing. So we didn’t ask ourselves a thing about it.”
“Cowardice?” Estrela is so astonished that she raises her voice a little, then lowers it again, conscious that the children are in the next room. “It was not cowardice to cut him down—he would have died.”
“That is what I mean,” Gwindor says. “I have never… I have never wanted to acknowledge that he might have had a right to—to depart this world at such a time. We are always bringing him back. I’m tempted to do it again, now. To ride to Doriath alone, tom-fool, and see what sort of nonsense that Thingol fellow has been concocting. And no matter how ill it’s made our Russandol, I want to take him by the shoulders and say, no matter, lad, come back with me, we’ll start again—”
Estrela closes her eye.
“I never say, you can go now. I never admit that in death—they can’t hurt him anymore.”
“But we don’t know,” Estrela says, unable to balance truth and untruth as neatly as Fingolfin, “whether he is in danger of dying now. So why recall the terrible past?”
“Because everything I have ever done for that boy, I did for myself first. I see that now. If he had died on the mountain, thrice over, he’d be at rest now. And I, like Fingon and Maglor and Celegorm and—all the rest—I say, no. Keep on.” Bitterly, he adds, in a hissing whisper, “Come back to me. Will you not come back to me?”
Estrela shudders. The blood-ringed mouth. The tortured back, all but flayed from shoulder to hip. The fevered brow. All an insurmountable task for slaves to heal. Then from the Mountain came aid in the form of a grinning demon, a lure like a fishhook buried in flesh—
Maitimo, I often wonder where I shall find you next.
In Doriath, Estrela answers wildly, though Bauglir did not speak to her then as she huddled with Sticks in the dark, and does not speak to her now as she cringes against the hard stone wall. He rarely haunts her dreams the way she knows he does Russandol’s. You find him in Doriath, because, as Gwindor said, we let him go there for our sakes. We let him live.
“No!” she cries fiercely, rejecting the monster’s voice, its insinuations. “Gwindor, do not talk so. It is evil talk—it is despair. We—we are allowed to desire his good and ours commingled, life rather than death. Do not doubt—”
I deserve it. I deserve it.
She cannot say anymore, choked by her own necessary deceit. Her comfort would be torment to honest Gwindor, if he only knew the truth.
It is a torment to herself.
Standing there mutely, scarred deeper within than without, she can only receive Gwindor’s comfort. And he does offer it, completing his apology at last with a warm embrace that seems not to cause his shoulder any pain. How well he conceals his own suffering, as she conceals another’s! But Estrela clings to him, letting her tears flow in their uneven pattern, while words fly through her thoughts from the so-called terrible past.
Pretend you’re his mother. That is what men want to hear when they slip off. It’s over, Belle.
Estrela dreams of Russandol’s mother that night. At least, when she wakes in a grey hour, lying stiff and lonely beside the crumbling ash of the hall’s fireplace without the children’s warm little bodies to nestle against, she believes that is whom she saw. She is not a visionary, but she has known Russandol and his brothers well enough to fit their features into a woman’s mold. This woman had been seated by a hearth like this one, rocking a small child whose flaming hair was rather like her own. Her eyes met Estrela’s. Estrela’s vision was half-dark, which was not always the case in her dreams.
Even after many confidences from Russandol, the nature of his mother—if not her appearance—is shrouded in almost impenetrable mystery. She loved her sons, then left them. What was her will, compared to dead Feanor’s? Does she live too, though with a sorrow-pierced heart?
Estrela paced in the unshaped room crafted by her sleeping mind. Words, almost visibly shaped in the half-light, suggested themselves to her to speak, but she pushed them aside.
Was the woman before her young or old? How tenderly she guarded her charge—was this her first son, or the last? Was this not a son at all, but a shade of a daughter that she might have had, who could offer companionship to her after all the men were gone?
Daughters as well as sons can be lost, thought Estrela, but though it was difficult to separate a private rumination from outright speech in this state, the woman did not seem to have heard her. All the better; why chide a mother who had already lost everything? It seemed cruel. Apparently Estrela felt greater license to be harsh in sleeping than in waking.
Shaken, she considered, while the scene waxed and waned in clarity around her. She might as well be inside the embers of the hearth, such was the strength of the glow at times.
Perhaps she cannot hear you even if you do speak aloud.
It is my own mind. (She knew this.) I can make her hear me. This was not a vision, but it might be a figment: something constructed by memory and interest and even prayer.
So Estrela said—or afterwards, she thought she had said, distinctly and rather selfishly,
“What is mine to do?”
The woman’s face was so like her son’s—fine-boned and alert and beautifully fierce beneath the fiery hair. If she was angry, she was angry at herself.
Estrela could understand that. She waited.
The figment of Nerdanel moved her lips, and the words were shaped before Estrela’s single eye.
Find a way.
Beren does not return in the morning. Estrela did not expect him to. Silas’ news, no matter how carefully guarded, has created a new order of things; a new chain reveals its links slowly yet inexorably.
Even Mithrim cannot wait forever.