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Chapter Text

The waves swept and rolled her farther out into the bay than she had gone before. Forgetting herself, she gasped for breath – and the waves took her under. Uinen! Her mouth was full of seawater, and the metallic taste of her blood.  

Lothiriel did not expect the stars to follow her into the bay. They dripped into the water to join twin moons glimmering from the bottom of the bay, a mirror of Ulmo’s impenetrable stare. Despite her familiarity with the currents and the Bay of Belfalas, panic quickly spread throughout her body. Instinctively, Lothiriel straightened and unfurled her limbs, repeating the prayer to Uinen that Orfalas taught her many sun-cycles ago.

Uinen, Lothiriel thought the name and forced the panic out of her mind. Come – Lothiriel stopped swimming gradually, opened her mind, spread her vision as far wide as she could. Orfalas came unbidden into her mind: the elf on the shore with netting strung across the tall beeches like a canopy. Orfalas’s strong, calm voice intoned the prayer like a chant: Come, maiden of the sea, guide of every mariner, helpmeet and calm heart of Ossë. I come to seek your protection like every creature in every stream, bay, and ocean. Shelter me, maiden. Come, Uinen, maiden! Lothiriel sank further – and she chanted harder as a line of urgent fire ignited in her throat. She could still see the stars reflected below her, so she was not as deep as she feared. Uinen! Lothiriel felt the tug of a new current, some fresh, cold undertow. Lothiriel made herself as buoyant as possible, letting the current pull her up to the surface. When she finally drew breath, she spread her arms, relaxed her chest and stomach, and blinked up at the starry sky to float. To her left, the promontory on which her home was perched high in the deepest evening indigo. The current that had taken her might bring her all the way back to Cobas Haven, and onward to ancient Edhellond, but the surge broke on the flat, smooth rocks just abutting the white and gray shelf beneath Dol Amroth. She must have caught it just in time.

“Thank you, Lady Uinen,” said Lothiriel aloud, to the sea, as her mind veered, and her heart continued to pound. Her skull felt like it was full of seawater, and she felt light and faint. “Again, and again.”

On her back, she considered the wheeling stars above. The cluster of stars to the east were obscured by the growing dark cloud spreading westward toward the coast. This was the smoke spewed by Orodruin, Mountain of Doom. Lothiriel liked to think on her lessons on language as a girl, how ‘doom’ meant to succumb to fate, and to perish. The dark cloud crept from the periphery of her vision, nearly alive with the threat of obliteration. It was the war finally arrived. The cloud, however far away it looked, sat heavy on her chest. Her father had ridden towards its Doom. Her brothers, their friends. She had encountered, and fed, and clothed, and sheltered more Men in the last month than she had ever encountered in the whole of her life in Dol Amroth. How sheltered she had been! Did she wish for the same shelter again?  

When finally Lothiriel began to shiver hard enough that her teeth chattered, she commanded herself not to move. This time, a minute. A full minute!  She had been training for weeks now to endure the cold. The practice stilled her emotions, as though she could rip them from herself—leaf, bough, trunk, and root. She could have been left entirely to herself, then. Burnished as gleaming steel. She began to count, feeling her toes, her fingers, the breath enter into her belly.

Ten, eleven…nineteen… She should swim back to shore at the risk of being taken closer to the rocks, or, worse, farther out again. Twenty-three...

But what lurked darkly on the shore except yet more waiting for the final stroke of doom? She could wait just fine here. Only in the deep water did Lothiriel feel less consumed by the war in the East. In the water, here in the Sea, she was also water. The dark whisperings in her, and in the hearts of the men in her service, about the wellbeing of the families left in the villages, freeholds, and scattered households under her protection – all of these she sent into the waves that crashed on the sand, on the rocks. War was coming! Lothiriel thought, holding the cold within herself. Let it come! She thought back, fierce with fear and the stir of panic. Let it come! She could have wept; she might have wept: war did not have to come, it was already here, packed into the chests of every fleeing child. It had arrived with the cart-horses bearing the sick or ill or dying. It continued to arrive in the fragmented missives she received too seldom from Erchirion and her father.

Lothiriel was desperately cold: she had clothed herself just with a light cotton suit tied around her waist, under her chest, and just under her arms. Forty, forty-one, forty-two…

The damp fabric was a sheet of ice on her chest, her stomach, and the wind that had been gentle began to blow more fiercely. All around her, the water stirred, gaining momentum. Dawn wouldn’t come for an hour or so more, and then she would be missed. Fifty-five, fifty-six!

Orfalas would be at the shore now, Lothiriel thought. Orfalas would have prepared a meal of fruit, and rice cooked in coconut milk, the fruit from the strong, bent trees that grew on the edge of the sea. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine…! Taking air deep into her lungs, Lothiriel righted herself in the water, and turned east towards the shore. In the water, it was not so cold, and her body was light and easy. She swam just under the surface like Orfalas taught her when she was a girl learning about all the ways her body would change, and how she could swim longer and farther. It had never seemed strange to her how an Elf could understand a human body like hers, but when she expressed this to the elder, Orfalas merely laughed.

“I have known Men and their bodies, child, almost as long as there have been Men on this earth. You belong fully to the world, and nothing of this world is alien to us,” Orfalas said as she braided fibers of the coconut tree into soft, pliant rope. She used this for their nets, and she wove thicker and rougher strands into larger ropes to turn into baskets. The world was clay for the elder, and under her hands, the world was malleable and creative. This was how Lothiriel liked to remember the elf: sitting in the shade with warm hands, weaving.  

When she reached the shore, Lothiriel located her discarded garments, and her pair of soft slippers. Ellonel, her kinswoman, was nowhere. She looked for her among the scattered, black rocks that drew a sharp, straight line along the shore, pointing south. Ellonel usually came to fetch her back to Dol Amroth, but she had recently begun breaking her fast with Lothiriel and Orfalas, instead. Ellonel, who had been a child at the beginning of this year – and was now bereft of much of her innocence. But she was not there. A good sign that the household was still deeply asleep. Lothiriel then walked north, following the beach towards the nearby hills where Orfalas had built her dwelling, and settled the land with provisions and cleared some of the interior forest for herbs and food.

The grassy shore stretched a few meters inland until warm soil replaced it, and the edge of the forest crept to the shore with sturdy, grasping roots. She walked quickly, following the path that led to Orfalas and the Sitting House. The Sitting House sat itself aloft, raised on thin, wooden legs. It was built entirely with the strong rope Orfalas wove, and long planks. It kept the house cool, and Orfalas grew different herbs or sheltered small animals or hung many of the ropes and fabrics she wove and decorated under the floor.

Lothiriel heard Orfalas calling her from within the dwelling, telling her to come into the home. A thin strip of fragrant smoke flowed up from the kitchen at the back. The Sitting House was small and tidy: there was only a separate area where the Elf maid recuperated or retreated, and otherwise the house held an unobstructed and barely furnished space, with a table for cooking and meals just beyond it. Lothiriel sat there. Orfalas had expected her: there was already a strong cup of coffee, and the smell of bananas and sweet rice. Orfalas herself was bent over a hot plate, deftly cooking down some thinly sliced meat.

“Tomorrow, you must not swim out,” Orfalas said. She turned and brought three plates – rice, tomato, meat cooked in some dark, flavorful marinate. “The water will be large,” she said, pushing one of the plates to Lothiriel and setting the third aside for Ellonel.  

“No Elf nor Man knows the sea,” Lothiriel replied with a laugh. “Or do you tell me through some Elf-magick I cannot learn?” She laughed again at their old jokes. Throughout Lothiriel’s life, there had been many such secret jokes between them, acting like a language they spoke by themselves.  

“Not magick. Merely sight and feeling,” Orfalas said. She took a strand of rope that she had been weaving, and she took Lothiriel’s hand. For the girl, a spark of energy jumped at the contact. The strands of the rope had been from a tree growing close to the shore. It drank saltwater, produced sweet juice, and it had dried in the heat of the sun overhead. It described what the tree knew: how it knew that the current of the water will swell or dip based on how much it drank, and how. There was no language to her discernment – she touched the rope, and there was a flood of sensation, and knowing. Sometimes, there was more. Sometimes, less so. Lothiriel could not know from the quality of the object or how much of the object she had, what kind of discernment she could glean. But through Orfalas’s tutelage, she began to understand, and she could work to describe and decode what she gleaned. The rope itself was alive – it was alive with knowing itself, so the discernment came quickly, and easily. It helped that Orfalas had worked with it before she did.

“The world changes, but the stories we creatures within it tell, are very similar. What can you discern?” Orfalas asked. Lothiriel described the tree where the strand had come, its roots, the water, the salt. Orfalas nodded, and for the first time that early day, during their meal, the Elf smiled. Her brown, smooth face grew tender, and warm as she looked at Lothiriel, clearly pleased.

“You have enough of the Elf-feeling in you. You are awake to the world, more than you know,” Orfalas said, repeating an old refrain from Lothiriel’s girlhood, the reason she her father and uncle had taken her to Elves like Orfalas in the first place. Orfalas described for Lothiriel the patterns in what she had discerned – how the trees drank more or less during seasons of greater water, thus preserving the acres of time in their story, and how the tree had suffered damage during the turn of the tides. Lothiriel seemed to understand, and holding the rope, she could train herself to discern with more clarity. But with a greater sensitivity, Lothiriel could grow more vulnerable to denser things too. The Elf’s clear gaze was tender, but her voice hardened as she continued: “you must be careful to secure yourself within the world, child.”

Lothiriel blistered. It was a time of war. There were no children in war. “I am no child, Elder,” she said firmly. The Elf did not respond in any way that Lothiriel could know.

“Be that as it may, Lothiriel, when you discern, you must take your language with you. There is much that the world speaks of,” Orfalas said. “Your progress has been good – slow, but steady. I am well pleased.” She grasped Lothiriel’s hand, and squeezed her for comfort.

Lothiriel smiled, relishing the touch. Only in the Sitting House, and only with Orfalas now, was she a student. At nine and twenty, and at Dol Amroth during her father’s absence, she could afford to make no mistakes. Once Ellonel arrived and finished their meal, that was the life she needed to face. A breeze swept through the Sitting House. Ellonel’s plate of food would not keep for very long once it cooled. Where was the girl?

Orfalas finished her plate, and looked up and out of the window beside the table. The dawn had come clear, but not bright. There was a chill in the morning air.

“Lothiriel!” Ellonel called from outside. “Make haste!” The girl stood just within the clearing. “There was a rider! There is news!” Orfalas pushed touched Lothiriel’s arm, jutting her chin out in a gesture of urgency, telling her to leave. To run.

*

Ellonel was tall, and fast. She followed the path, running so hard she could barely breathe, let alone talk. Lothiriel caught up with her despite her size; she was not nearly as quick on her feet as she was in the sea. In gasping breaths—the only ones she could spare—Ellonel told her about the unknown rider, his strange gold and green garb, and the news of corsairs that he brought.

Dol Amroth was not a castle – although it perched confidently upon the edge of a cliff. Someone in the tower saw their approach, and the main gate opened for them. The main courtyard – their only courtyard – was full of tents, beds, sacks of rice and coconut shells, other supplies. Displaced tradesmen had set up at ever possible corner, and there was already work noises, and conversation rising in the area. Ellonel led her, weaving to and fro, to Lothiriel’s small office in one of the towers just off the court. Astoreth, one of her ladies and closest companion, was standing with a sealed letter in her hand.

Astoreth’s eyes were dark with worry. Her husband, Dírhael, had set out with the company of Swan Knights eight weeks ago, but he had not been as faithfully communicative. She had only received two missives from him, both hastily written, and sparse. He was alive, at least, but the state of his mind, the wellbeing of his body, Astoreth could only guess. She had even turned to reading runes – sky writing in the clouds, tea leaves, the greasy splattering of animal fat on a cold slate – to ease her worry. Astoreth had closed her mouth against the fear, afraid it would make its way out and she could be consumed. She said nothing, as she wrung her hands and waited for Lothiriel to catch her breath. Windswept and blurry from running, Lothiriel gulped at the air like a fish. Her vision swam, and her body was uncomfortably warm. The first missive in weeks – but it had not come from any of the Swan Knights, nor delivered by one of the merchants that still used the safer trade routes.

“My Lady,” said Astoreth, handing her a cup of water. “You ran home in your shift and sea clothes?” Despite herself, Astoreth managed a wide smile. Joy was still easy, despite her worry. Lothiriel looked down at herself – she was dry in the Sitting House, but she was drenched with sweat from running and the soft cotton cloths clung to her breasts and her belly and thighs.

“No one is looking! Spinsters need not worry overmuch about safekeeping our dignity,” Lothiriel said. She shook her head, laughing a little to dispel her embarrassment. “Now, peace, Astoreth, and let me see.” Lothiriel held out her hand for the missive, and flinched when she touched it. The thing was heavy. The discernment would be quick. She would need caution.    

“This is not from our men,” Lothiriel said. This, she knew immediately. The texture of its energy, and its history, were different. Strange, but not unkind. She felt more than saw Astoreth deflate before her.

“No news is not an omen,” she told Astoreth, willing herself to believe it to be so. She looked up at the older woman. Astoreth stood strong, and steady, without flinching. She was all straight lines – her hands were quick. Like the other women of Dol Amroth, she was not tall, but her wide, round face was clear. Like all of Lothiriel’s remaining household, she wore her fear well. It did not destroy her. Not yet.

She steeled herself and opened the missive. Immediately, the strangeness of the letters bruised her, and she could not concentrate. She scanned the letter for her father’s name, or any of her brothers’. It was only then that she noticed the letter had been addressed to Imrahil, himself. The missive was from someone called Éomer, whose language was strange. The name was stranger still.  It was a personal letter, not a formal address, so Eomer’s language was personal. Without reading his words, Lothiriel ran a finger across Éomer’s name at the bottom of the parchment. The letters here were deformed by a small tearstain.

Before her knees buckled beneath her, Lothiriel knew Éomer wrote the letter in an unknown place, on land unclaimed, with time he did not have. He was alive on a slaughter field where he had come to be slaughtered. And he was afraid: he had found himself falling into a terror he had not foreseen, despite the death that he had claimed for his own. Death was preferrable to this place. He was there, and so she was there. And that was when Lothiriel began to scream.

Chapter Text

This was not a dream. How could it be, when his hands were bloody pulps? His knuckles had grown swollen and raw, his calloused palms bled where the skin had broken from the force of his vice grip on Gúthwinë, and he could not flex his fingers without feeling his muscles tear. His hands had frozen into claws. And with these claws, he stabbed Gúthwinë far down into the neck of an attacking orc. It must have screamed – even these animals felt pain, fear, the arrival of doom – even as Éomer took hold of its head and jerked hard, swiftly breaking its neck. How could this be a dream? There came another, and another after. Gúthwinë jumped back into his grip as he cut through the morass, his mind tripping across orc faces, and the pale, burnt faces of the Southron army. They all seemed to wear the same expression of hunger mingling with pain. Haradrim in their intricate armor: bone, some soft metal, and wood. There were some Easterlings – small and deadly quick – fighting with long spears and concealed daggers. His body was a boulder, a slave to its forward momentum.

How could this be a dream? No mind of man, no living memory, could possibly contain a scream such as Éomer now heard: a pulsing ululation that goaded him into riot, towards death upon death. He began to run, his fear speeding him in circles, cutting and hewing almost blindly. Somewhere far away, Éomer hoped his blade met only foes. It felt like his body ran hot for hours, driven by terror. He could have lost his senses, his mind, and his will to the abject fear, and to the blows that his body suffered, which he could not feel. How could this be a dream? Many moments later, the madness cleared as suddenly as the Witch-King’s scream. From where he was, Éomer saw the carcass of the Nazgûl laying only two meters in front of him. The reek and stench of it reached him where he stood, the smoke wafting into his face. Acid, bone, and rot. Approaching slowly, Éomer flinched as he passed the Witch-King’s ancient, wicked mace. Its head was half-buried in the ground, its long arm and grip floating eerily in the air. An Elvish dagger was buried in the Witch’s knee. Where the hilt protruded, where blade met bone and flesh, no blood seeped. Yet, the Witch-King’s armor, its robes, were dusty and soaked with blood. Men’s blood, blood of those who had been slain. Éomer dared only glance at its head, and the empty blackness of its iron mask, and then only long enough to determine that a Rohir blade had delivered the fatal blow. But, there! A jolt of recognition struck him dumb. Across the fallen Witch’s helm, was a small, crumpled form with a halo of gold hair.

How could this be a dream?  

How could it not be a dream?

What must he do, that it might remain only a dream?

*

The first time Éomer spoke at length with Imrahil, the older man had hunted him all over the city, and followed the whispers of him out into his éored’s encampment.

Something about the city brought him no rest. The wind tunneled down the alleys, swirling into small tornados along its streets. Many of the lower street levels at the base of the promontory were still heavily crowded, especially as the city braced to rebuild after the siege. The crush of people and the walls concealing the horizon made Éomer feel both uneasy and confined. Kilometers above him, Éomer thought, his sister fought to recuperate. She was still, she had always been, a warrior more skilled than he had become. The thought gave him a modicum of comfort, but it was fleeting. He had not seen Éowyn in days. He could not. Despite Eowyn being billeted in the Houses of Healing, he took a tent northeast of the great gate. Once her body was out of danger, and the healers had determined that Eowyn alone could heal herself to regain the strength she had lost, Éomer made his way out of the city towards the Rohir encampment: white, green, and gold-yellow tents pitched near the first thorny, tall trees of the Druadan forest, and with a view of Cair Andros. Here, the ground was still soft and fragrant with untrampled grass, and the sight of Pelennor was partly obscured by the shoulder bend of Minas Tirith’s wide bulk.

He needed to escape the view of the Pelennor, and block it from his sight and memory. Maybe then he could carve some peace for himself in the black grief that had not since left him. Eowyn cold and unresponsive in the middle of the field, her sword arm bent at an unnatural angle. Her shield broken upon her breast. Blood from a wound on her temple mingling with her hair. Grief, grey and immovable, veiled his vision until despair seeped into his body. How he longed in that moment to disappear into his grieving, how he had wanted to fall to his knees but for the surrounding orcs and the sound of his men around him, themselves dying. But he was still, irrevocably, Éomer. Still himself – there was no escaping himself, and no way he could give vent to the loss. In that moment, and since that moment, he lost the ability to sleep. Since returning from the Pelennor, he had not slept but for the few minutes stolen by his exhaustion.

Edoras, he thought, would be here – he pointed to an obscure corner of his tent. And farther, the Westfold. And here, Éomer chose a vague point due east of Edoras – here, the Black Gate. What had he ridden towards? He had trusted his uncle with the future, and he had ridden with his eyes open, seeing nothing. He had anticipated – prepared for! – his own death, but he had never considered a future where he outlived his uncle. The tent, encampment, and the entire city outside – these all felt like the work of a dream. And in this dream-life, his vision was cramped with only the Pelennor, the Black Gate, and the great walled city.

“Éomundson, are you awake?” Héoleth called from outside his tent. The younger man’s shadow stood arrayed with another figure just behind him. Always, Éomer thought wearily. He lay on his pallet in the clean tent, wondering blearily if he could opt not to respond.  

“Peace, Héoleth, I shall come,” he said. The tent was sparse, but familiar enough from his experience. Every tent was the same: a leather hide and heavy cloths on the ground, his pack and some supplies in a corner. His small cloths were in a neat stack at the foot of his pallet, and his armor was on a rack, the helm resting on the single, short stool. He readied himself as best as he could, tying his hair neatly into a bun, and stepped out to greet a Gondorian noble.

“Éomer King. You have been difficult to find,” the older man said. Short and stocky, the man had black streaks in his silver hair. The brown skin and deep, brown eyes in a wide, stern face were all belied by the softness of his expression. “Thorongil and Gandalf assemble the captains and chiefs in the Citadel. There is much work to be done, and many things to speak of,” he said. Éomer noticed the swan insignia the man wore on his tunic, noting that he must have travelled far from home, like Éomer.

“I am honored that you have taken this time to find me, Lord. Please, let us walk back together,” Éomer said. To the Rider, he directed quickly, “Héoleth, find your captain. Tell him where I have gone, but let him stay to take rest.” He led the Gondorian out of their encampment, and on the rough path back towards the Great Gates.

“It is a pleasure to finally find you, Éomer King. I confess, I come to speak the wishes of another, whose name you may not know,” the Gondorian said.

Éomer looked at the man beside him. The high walls of Gondor dwarfed them to their right, and he felt uneasy. It would be a long walk, and he did not appreciate surprises.

“My nephew Faramir has been confined in the Houses of Healing with your kinswoman these last seven days. He was the late Steward’s younger son, and he alone of the House of Hurin survives,” the man continued.

“I know of Faramir,” Éomer cried suddenly, the name strange but unmistakably familiar to him from stories his cousin Theodred brought home from scouting. “My cousin had brief but striking encounters with Ithilien rangers along our southern border, on the pursuit of orcs or in aid of villages. His name is not foreign to me!”

“I speak on behalf of Faramir, then, and hope that the string of our fate might bind us closer. He meets and speaks regularly with your close kin, your sister, and he urges that you make your way to visit her – soon!” the Gondorian said. He looked up at Éomer with gentleness and he laid a hand on Éomer’s arm as they walked. Together, they began to climb the long, straight stair to the innermost and highest level. The King’s Step, it was called, and it was the spine of the city, with the heaviest traffic, and the tallest silver-barked trees flanking the stair on either side. Followed all the way to its terminus, it led to the foot of the empty throne, and to the Steward’s chair. During the siege, many of the trees on the lower levels had been felled, and the stone steps were chipped and damaged in many places. Their conversation ceased as both men climbed.

The climb took its toll on Éomer, who wore his weariness like a pair of ankle-weights. He found himself having to concentrate on each step to keep himself from stumbling. On several occasions, the gentle hand on his arm helped him stay upright when his foot caught on a broken step. He could not even feel shame, embarrassment. Finally, Éomer said, “No mean force keeps me from my sister, Lord. I am not well.”

He glanced at the Gondorian beside him as they climbed. The trees shaded them from the setting sun; it was nearing supper time that the council would convene. They had a couple more levels to climb together.

“I am unwell – I have no comfort to carry to her, only grief. Grief for my uncle, the King. I am entombed in this grief, and in this fear.” He paused, unsure if he might continue. The Gondorian led him further, without interrupting. Éomer was weary, but he noticed now, as they climbed slowly, how the gleaming stone of the city flashed with color as the light of the sun shone on them. “Éowyn defended the King before he was slain on the field. Béma help me, but I know my sister. She wants only one thing,” he swallowed, the fear coming forward, pulling him more strongly than the gravity of the earth. “She will want wrath. She will want a part in his greater avengement, and I can neither accede to this request, nor prevent it. I cannot bring myself to that grief! I cannot lose them both to this war. I would rather have lost myself, my own self.” The pronouncement came out of him as blood from a wound on the steps of a foreign city, in the clean, grey shadow of ancient trees. The Gondorian still had hold of his arm, and he found that the shorter man had led him onto a stone bench in a small enclosed garden where, in the center, an untouched fountain still flowed. The sound of water upon stone brought him some comfort, somewhere else to place his tattered, frayed attention.

“That you are here, and whole, in the blackness and dread during the onslaught of war. This does not speak to your strength or fortitude: many other men might thrive here for a time. But you, lord, you are here as a testament to your own hope. You are yourself, despite madness that might drive lesser men to ruin. You are here, despite grief and pain. You remain,” the Gondorian said. They sat together in stillness, without many words, for a short time. Éomer could not look at the man beside him, although his words found purchase within him. It was not a comfort to hear and listen to the older man, but the words reached him, and stayed.   

“My nephew has spoken to me about Éowyn, her courage. Alone among all the captains of men – including you, my lord – she slew the Witch King, the terrible captain of our foe, the scourge of these lands,” the man continued.

Éomer nodded. The Healers told him about the wound on her shield-arm, the burned palms and the broken fingers of her sword-hand. They bandaged her chest with many herbs, mended the shallow wound on her forehead, and cleaned her body but it was Thorongil who had finally helped to break the lingering fever. It was Thorongil who set the broken bones in her arms to prevent lameness, and it was under the King’s touch that Éowyn’s body mended clean, and whole.

“In all of Faramir’s communication, she has spoken only rarely of battle, and rarely still of returning her sword to its scabbard. Your sister is shield-maiden still, and shall always be. But in the Houses, she has asked to learn and practice the healing art that helped make her whole again.”  

At this, Éomer looked upon the man fully, unable to believe. “You speak truly,” he said, against hope. The man nodded. Éomer wanted to weep upon the flagstones, to feed the nearby fountain with his tears. Months later, he would weep in the same garden, and remember the conversation with gratitude and wonder. Now, the older Gondorian tugged him back onto his feet so that they might climb the rest of the way to meet with Gandalf and Thorongil.

“You will not heal here, Éomudson, but you will not stay here either. This war is not your future,” the older man said gently as they reached the black doors of the citadel. Within, there would be a table sparsely laid, with some fruit and bread, maps, and an accounting of their men. It would be a long night, but Éomer would climb back down to the Rohir encampment wearied to the bone.

“Who are you, Lord, and what authority do you have for such pronouncements?” Éomer asked with trepidation. He could not yet see past the next sunrise, but he hoped for his vision to clear. He could not yet see beyond the battle, the scarred and pockmarked field of the Pelennor, and the looming darkness and fire of the eastern mountains in front of Minas Tirith. Threat made flesh, death certain as the rocks and soil on which he stood. But he wanted to trust to hope.

Finally, the Gondorian removed his hand from Éomer’s arm, stepped slightly away, and looked up at him. His eyes were serious and dark, and warm.

“Only an older man with sons and a daughter, Éomer King. It is a father’s duty to muster hope.” The man smiled briefly before pushing the doors open. Éomund, his father, would he have said such a thing? Would Théoden King, uncle, father? He had been taught strength and courage and resilience to persevere. But among the bright steel blade, and the hard leather and armor, he briefly scoured his memory for his fathers speaking about hope. Steel, blade, leather, horse – all these he had come with and prepared, but hope could not be plated into his armor, or burned like a brand into his leather, or fed to horse and man. Hope, he realized, he must find on his own. For now, this was enough.  

Warm, golden firelight spilled out from the hall. It was just after sunset. In the Great Hall, Thorongil in his well-worn travelling cloak came forward and greeted them, calling the Gondorian lord by his name and title. The ranger that Éomer had known answered to every other name, except the one given him at birth, which came with a birthright to rule. Éomer followed the Prince Imrahil into the war council, his spirit not yet healed, but feeling held in place by more than duty and more than pain. Looking upon Thorongil -- gray eyes quick and sharp, deferring quickly to the wizard Gandalf leading the war council -- it was then that Éomer realized this was not the first instance the ranger had entered the city and its towers. How many lives, Éomer thought, how many lives of men could he command and yet! Thorongil conspicuously avoided the throne, and the Steward’s Chair, he kept to the back and the margins of the room, giving his advice quietly and firmly. Here was a man like himself, Éomer recognized, who came to authority perhaps against his will. How strange to be here with him, Éomer thought. And how mightily fortunate! On the Pelennor, Aragorn helped him shift Snowmane’s carcass to uncover Theoden King’s lifeless body: grass, piss, and shit on his uncle’s breastplate, several ribs broken that he could feel, and his sword several meters away. He must not have seen the Witch King descend. His last moments were simply the sky becoming obscured by the bulk of his beloved horse, and maybe a glimpse of Éowyn as she saved him. Snowmane was untouched, except for a rank blackness on his chest where the fatal dart had struck him. So now that Thorongil, Aragorn of Many Names, proposed a combined force marching to the Black Gate, the ranger need not even call.

“Thorongil, as you are known here,” Éomer said into the severe silence. Captains from different Gondorian villages and coastal cities, and even the Prince Imrahil, were quiet after the ranger and the wizard laid out the simplest, meanest plan to use themselves as bait. “The sons -- and daughters -- of Éorl did not ride to Gondor, did not cross the leagues in haste, to leave the threat unchallenged. This is our doom, and our hope, now.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the shorter, silver-haired lord from Dol Amroth smile. It felt like there were not enough leagues in Middle Earth to keep him from reaching the Morannon.

That night, after he reached the tent and his pallet and settled himself for another long night of waiting, he traced a path back to Edoras in the quiet darkness: here, the Black Gate, the Morannon – there, the Pelennor. Farther still, leagues distant, but more concrete and more certain and a weight against the enfolding crush of uncertainty, was home. He slept.

*

When the rider finally took one of the beds in their hall, he slept almost an entire day. Astoreth reported how he had not even eaten, only slept deeply, his body hungry for stillness. Lothiriel let him recover; his first and next errand would be another long ride back to the Gondorian capital, and from then, who knew? Had she no other need of him, she would have let him stay, and treated him as yet one more refuge-seeker from the war. Astoreth reported that he had named himself: he was Héoleth of Aldburg, and he was young – younger by half a decade, certainly, than most of the Swan Knights that had ridden with her father and brothers. His captain and King sent him with an urgent message to this princedom, and he had ridden with haste and luck speeding him, for he had only the instruction of his lord, and the various contradictory advice gleaned from trading merchants to reach Dol Amroth. He had never been to Gondor during the long peace, let alone to one of its southern princedoms. But there had been no one else to send.

“There was to be a final muster, Lady” the young man sat ramrod straight on one of the stools in her office, where he had earlier been led to meet her after delivering the missive. He looked windswept, and weary: his skin was blotchy, and on part of his face, he wore a red sunburn. His long, blonde hair was still tangled, and bleached platinum. He had peeled off his riding gloves as a sign of respect. Lothiriel noticed how both his hands shook.

“To the Black Gate, not three nights ago. They plan to march as this week fails, in a day’s time. Before I could march with the Riders, my Captain, Grimbold, commanded me deliver this message to the Prince Imrahil at his estate,” Héoleth said. His gaze was softly unfocused in remembering.

“The Prince Imrahil and our kin, did they not march east?” Lothiriel pressed, her brows knotted together. Why had the letter been sent if the Prince had been among the force headed farther east? It was impossible that her father had allowed himself to be left behind by the force, whatever his age or stature. Prince or no, Imrahil was a proud, good man, for whom duty was an honorable endeavor. But if he did not join the fatal final assault on the Enemy, then he would certainly be alive, Lothiriel thought, already struggling to determine which way her hope turned. He must certainly be alive. From the far corner, Astoreth drew closer.

“He did, my Lady,” Héoleth said quickly. “Éomer King, he desired that this message be conveyed–” the soldier paused quickly, gaze shifting downward, “with certainty, regardless of the state of my lord’s return.” A gaping silence flattened those in the room. Because he did not expect that he would come back, Lothiriel realized. The deep grief she had discerned began to speak, to make sense. The foreign King’s fear was for himself as much as for her father. Writing the letter had been among the final acts he performed for himself, days before he turned completely toward doom. Leading a contingent of his men – brothers in arms, kin, friends – towards a bleak and terrible death with no sight of home. Lothiriel steeled herself against a sudden cold that came, not from her well-lit tower room, but from within her own bones. This was not discernment, this was empathy: she could not know the dread of such a mustering, but so much of her own will and hope reached against her flesh towards the defending forces. Towards her father, her brothers, and towards even this strange, new-made King.

Astoreth was beside her, asking a question. “How is it you were chosen for this errand, soldier? And to what other errands were you commanded?”

“None of our number could be deterred from the ride. I was commanded as the newest soldier,” Héoleth said quietly. He was ashamed of surviving, of being made to turn back from the fate of his comrades. “After, Éomudson bid me return to Aldburg. This is my King’s final command.” He looked at the women with something curious, and frail in his gaze. Some shade of longing neither Lothiriel nor Astoreth could place. “He allowed us to call him by his soldier-name as the riders had used for him as their captain. Preferred it, he said.” The rider pressed his lips together and took a breath. His eyes were red-rimmed when he turned them upon Lothiriel, and cried: “Turn me away, Lady! Bid me unwelcome, and send me back that I might ride with the Sons of Éorl!”

Lothiriel shook her head, and smiled. Her voice, when she spoke, was warm but firm. “I welcome you, Héoleth of Aldburg of the Folde of Rohan. I welcome you to Dol Amroth as a rider of Rohan. I bid you rest and regain your strength. And when you are healed of body and whole again, you will ride back to your captain and your King.” She nodded at Astoreth. “Astoreth will take you to a hall where you can rest and eat and find solace in company.” Thus, Héoleth came to Dol Amroth, and to the sea. The next day, he would walk with Ellonel and some refuge-seekers along the shoreline, and marvel at the sea. Ellonel would report how he wept at the sight of the unobscured, glittering horizon. She would tell him of Ancient Edhellond, the elves that still kept to the forests between the mountain and the bay. During his frequent visits to the region in years to come, the household of the Prince would welcome him with especial care.

*

Lothiriel’s desk was sparsely stocked: a capped inkwell and bottles of ink lining one of the shelves, several quills upright in a jar and neatly bound by a strip of stiff leather for protection, a stack of papers, sealing wax, and ribbons. She kept candles and sconces ablaze in her tiny office. All of these were neatly arrayed – until Lothiriel decided she needed to wipe down her ink bottles, inspect her quills and ribbons, and re-mold the sealing wax. The Rohir’s missive for her father lay open in front of her. Éomer King had sent the letter without knowing if her father would ever read it, and without the certainty that he would be alive upon its reception. He wrote with no expectations of a reply. He had saved his youngest soldier’s life with its delivery. And still, Lothiriel did not know how to begin the reply. The gift of his missive, for her, was confirmation of her father’s life. Astoreth and so many others had no such recent knowledge. News of the final march to the Black Gate spread easily through Dol Amroth, catching on the collective hunger to discover more of what happened east; by the evening of Héoleth’s arrival, there was much whispering: what was the size of the host that was to march? Who was leading them? What hope had they against the hosts of Mordor? Chatter fueled fear as refuge seekers coming up from the south or down from the north and across the Anduin from the glades of Ithilien idly bartered their worries. Lothiriel blamed no one, and though she longed for peace from the fear-mongering, she showed forbearance. Even Astoreth and the other women of her household were silent, nursing their own portions of the pervasive, and inescapable fear.

Everyone had a part in the war, and the road this stranger trod had been perilous without reprieve. Even then, he found a moment to write a letter to her father. His penmanship was precise, and well-practiced. And he had chosen a beautiful dark green ink that shifted slightly gold in the lamplight. Lothiriel could tell that he wrote often, and with care. She looked for – and found – in her discernment the simple, but distinct pleasure of writing. Where his letters became cramped and lightly deformed, she felt their heavy indentations on the reverse of the page – and she did not need to discern to know he wrote here with greater feeling: The news you relayed of my sister as she dwelt in the Houses of Healing brought me quickly to her. She is as you described. She even spoke of planting a garden.  He had discovered his sister was safe – certainly, safer than he – and while this brought him relief, it also sharpened his fear, bringing him to the edge of a tenuous, clanging panic. He feared – he feared she would heal, perhaps find a world relieved and refreshed. Would he be able to join her outside fear, outside weariness? Lothiriel asked similar questions from the other side – her brothers, her father, cousins, and kin. She did not doubt they faced the same evil, the same challenge: to put one foot in front of the other towards the Black Gate, the seat of evil on Middle Earth. And in the face of this threat, the foreign King wrote to her father. Wrote with feeling about his weariness, how he suffered from nightmares, and how he clung to the hope that Imrahil was right. The King wrote, I hold to your foresight now as my vision remains obscured by the Mountains of Shadow. This war is not my future. Lothiriel thought that Éomer King and she occupied the same place: both writing to her father, in the hope that he would be alive. Like a child, she desired that her letter guaranteed his safety, tied him closer to the world, and secured his survival. Lothiriel handled Éomer’s letter again, her thumb anchoring her discernment to the moment the words were penned, the ink brought her through time and space into the Rohir encampment -- to a makeshift table and its unpolished wood -- to Éomer wearing a mask of calm. His arms were braced and wrapped already in a tough leather skin, and his hands were large and warm against the loose parchment. She knew as she watched –imagined and conjured were words Orfalas favored instead – that this man’s desire was for her father’s protection as much his own. For a world in which they could meet again as equals. From whom does a King plead for protection?

The thing was heavy, and potent, but at last Lothiriel found she had a thing to say – not to a King – but to a man who, like the refuge-seekers flocking to the hills of Belfalas, found himself stranded in an uncertain country, captive to pain, and unable suddenly to imagine a future less painful. This too shall pass, Lothiriel wrote so forcefully that the quill-tip split. She cursed herself quietly, alone in her tower room. Her own handwriting was erratic and uneven. Your letter arrived at Dol Amroth a day before the combined armies marched East. Here by the sea, the smoke of Orodruin is dispelled by a brisk, morning wind. Here, Lord, there is no shadow. There is nowhere in the sea for the Shadow to hide.  She would write to him, and trust that her letter will find itself into his hands, and find him whole.

Chapter Text

Many came by boat, their sails pockmarked or patched over with colorful garments to obscure or remove the corsair sigil. For many, it was unclear where they were headed. When questioned by Dol Amroth natives, they simply waved their hands, following the wind west or north. Westward was the vast, untamed ocean too wide and too wild for their crafts to challenge, and up north waited the crooked peninsula of the Anfalas. The harbors there were controlled by Elf-run ports still busy and teeming with the remaining Eldar, and their Silvan kin. But these Men did not know that, or if they did, their relationship with the Elves was more fraught and tangled with violence than Lothiriel could know, or wish to understand. More women, children, and young boys came up from the south and east every day, arriving to settle in informal communities among the hills of Lebennin and Belfalas. They arrived on foot, ragged after their journey. The sight of Dol Amroth on the promontory must have brought relief and fear in equal measure. And every day that Lothiriel faced them, she was duty-bound to deliver the same death-sentence: the north was not safe. It was not safe from the young Southron families carrying babies and children and the herbs they had wrapped carefully in cloth and kept in shirt pockets. These are for our protection, some of the younger ones mimed, patting the herbs through their garments. But not even these magick herbs will keep them safe in Gondor. It was not safe from the Easterling women who travelled west through the ash-bound and burnt country south of the Mountains of Shadow, across the estuary of the Anduin at some unknown crossing.

“Where could they go where they will not be pursued?” Astoreth whispered in terror. Astoreth and Lothiriel sat huddled in one corner of Lothiriel’s tower office where she was writing her father a missive. She needed to hurry if Héoleth was to take it with him back to Minas Tirith. Héoleth was anxious to leave; the Rohir had seen the corsair ships in the distance, and he had been alarmed. They told him the ships contained harmless civilians – families fleeing their own lands. How could anyone in Dol Amroth – in Gondor, even – know what they caused them to flee? But Héoleth believed he needed to warn the captains of war, and he was hungry to report back. So Astoreth went to Lothiriel, the fear in her eyes more pronounced, her hands cold and wrung dry.

“There are women with child, and young children, too,” Astoreth continued. She was talking about Yusraa, who had walked from Near Harad, travelling many months west, towards the sea. The woman had joined another small family when they reached Lebennin, and they had made their way slowly through the hills towards Dol Amroth. Yusraa would give birth in four months, and she was terrified, and young. Too young. Astoreth had found her, and had taken particular care of her, bringing her meaty soup, and teaching her the Common Tongue. Astoreth believe Yusraa had been violated on the road, and this foreboded many more instances of violence and abuse that would trickle towards them from every direction. It made Astoreth furious.  

“All this from Ellonel’s report?” Lothiriel asked. Her letter to Imrahil was not brief, but now she could see it needed to be longer still, and more detailed about how the Gondorian princedom might handle the influx of peoples, and their communities. When her father comes back – her mind glitched as she forced herself to ignore other possibilities – he would not return to Dol Amroth without knowledge of the families and communities that had sprung up between and among the hills of Belfalas and almost into the untamed fields, and the black-sand beaches farther west to the Anfalas. This was how she would keep her father alive, Lothiriel thought. He must return, he must!

Astoreth paced around the tight, circular room. No word had come from Dírhael, but it seemed that Héoleth had seen him in Minas Tirith, and in the city of tents that had been put up just outside its outer walls. Or maybe the Rider had told her a kind lie. How ever it might have been, she would take it. A lie, in this case, was fodder for hope. 

“If he delivers this news to the wrong captains, Dol Amroth will become an outpost of war,” Lothiriel said, stopping Astoreth mid-stride. The idea made her blood run cold with fury. Lothiriel wanted to speak with him, allay his fears, have him see them as the people they were, as much as anyone else living in their time. But in her conversations with the Rohir, he had been mute against her, and while he never outrightly contradicted or argued against her, in recognition of her authority, Lothiriel knew enough about soldiers and men to desire more active understanding between them.

“Let him tarry here several days more,” Lothiriel told Astoreth. “And have Ellonel bring him to the shore. Have him help gather the driftwood for cook-fires. Have him making some of the bedframes for the refuge-seekers, and distributing the meat, fruits, and rice cakes we bake for them,” she instructed Astoreth. “While he is here, Héoleth will not be idle. Have him help you collect names, and build your word-lists, Astoreth.” Lothiriel smiled. “I do enjoy hearing about this project.”

Astoreth grinned. She was building a way towards a common language because suddenly their Common Tongue was not so common anymore. The refuge-seekers faced the challenge of learning language, and culture, but this was a burden Astoreth had also made clear should be borne equally by the natives of Dol Amroth. It was easier for the older woman to imagine her people kind, and so it was likewise easier for her to act like everyone would receive the kindness in the same manner. It was a difficult education for her to see her people act and think so cruelly, for them to refuse to share their food, shelter – their words. The word-lists were a kind of bridge between her people, and the people who were new-come to the land, and making names for the experiences as they come.

“Héoleth will not enjoy these menial tasks, Lady,” Astoreth said, a small, curious smile tugging at her lips. “I do not question the wisdom of your instructions, however.” 

Yusraa and her found-family of refuge-seekers were setting up temporary dwellings in the courtyard outside. They were eight in all, putting up their tents along the western wall. A few other families had pitched their tents more permanently in the fields surrounding Dol Amroth. Some had been courageous enough to settle in the surrounding villages, building their own houses of smoothened plank, wood, and dried leaves and grass. When they did, Lothiriel remembered how they had walked north from their homeland east of the city of corsairs. When they stayed, she called them refuge-seekers, and they were her people. Now, this new family was seeking to learn the craft of house-building – they would be taken with others up towards the Anfalas, where friendlier Elf households might be inclined to teach them, just like Orfalas and their people taught Lothiriel’s kin long ago. Look far enough back, was not everyone new-come to this land?    

“He does not have to enjoy them – but it will bring him back from war, I hope, as only living a life might. At least for a little while,” Lothiriel said. “The world swells with people. He cannot deny that, wherever they have come from, what can they want?”

“Shelter, safety, food for their young,” Astoreth said. She had been helping the families stay together, making lists of names, tallies of the younger children and the older adults who had come. “But many of our own feel and act otherwise,” Astoreth said, scowling. When the first few families had crossed into the Princedom, they had encountered retaliation and some petty violence from the established and well-armed villages. They had been denied food and shelter and they had been distrusted outright, for wearing the garments that they owned.

“No one wants war, how strange that we all seem to forget that of the strangers. In this, no Man is strange,” Lothiriel said. She was suddenly and fiercely ashamed – ashamed of the war in the North that had displaced innocents, chased them out of their own land. She was ashamed of how she had seen her own people demonstrate their fear of the refuge-seekers, the newcomers. They had been fearfully ignored, and where fear met fear – as waves of the ocean meet the cliffs – there was strife, danger, and the threat of a prolonged encounter. This was another kind of hope she would hold for her people: the hope that kindness and their shared mortality, and humanity, might be the clearer and better choice for everyone. But first, she would need to write to Golasgil in Anfalas, to expect refuge-seekers along the coast, and to take care of them as best as he could, and not to harass or do violence upon them. The men of Golasgil’s house were honorable, they would keep their word, but this letter needed to be delivered hastily. How could she know how many other fleeing refuge-seekers might find more violence at the end of a long road?

“We shall need to make more plans, Astoreth, about our growing people,” Lothiriel told her kinswoman. “Have you the strength to hope?”

Astoreth laughed outright. There was a saying in Dol Amroth about winter – how it came to the continent of Middle Earth, but without touching the southern Gondorian states. There were no winters in Dol Amroth, and so the sea-faring people enjoyed the warmest summer and the sun year-round. There was no winter, and no rest, in the south of Gondor. Astoreth quoted this to Lothiriel in answer, before she left the small office to find Héoleth.

Lothiriel sat still for a long while, gathering her thoughts, and fears in one hand, so that she might write her father a missive that was not only the phrase father, please come home safe written and rewritten frantically over two pages. Instead, before her inkwell dried, Lothiriel wrote to her father about the sea, how it had brought them a new people. How she had been trying to find them homes along the shore approaching the rolling, green hills of Pinnath Gelin. And when she wrote to tell him about the Rohir she sent out with Ellonel and Astoreth, she remembered the letter he delivered. The letter from Éomer King was obscured by sheafs of paper on her desk, but as she read his words again, she glimpsed – discerned – a field of dead trees, and a fear so keen it could pierce flesh. The green-gold ink was a river that she rode towards his history. The more that Lothiriel was able to discern from his writing, the more it uncovered. With practice and attunement, she discovered that more information could be teased from his penmanship, the paper itself, and the hour or so he had taken to write on the paper. That hour was precious – and as Lothiriel reread some of the King’s passages, some of her previous murky discernments formed more clearly into scenes.    

On the evenings that I do not dream, I find instead of restful sleep, I wake up with a kind of longing to be gone, to be elsewhere, and yet here I remain. This will have to suffice as courage. I will not describe the scenes, I do not want to recount them, commit them to paper, transmit them to you, but my memory trips back towards the countless raids that have brought me to the Pelennor, and the Pelennor onward to the Morannon, and from thence perhaps farther East. No path in Middle Earth diverted from this; no other path is open.

The Rohir King was a formidable man in battle, because where he fought, he found a desperate and unpeaceful calm, where decisions were easier to parse: kill, or be killed. In the thick of slaughter – Orc bodies falling around, the sound of steel against steel, the blood in his mouth not his own – he was given over to survival. But this state never lasted long. Lothiriel found the man in a glade of branchless trees, trunks thick as the columns that held up the domed roof of Dol Amroth, but burnt at their base, and wearing so many arrows, they looked like fur. He was remembering the outskirts of Fângorn, the old forest, and this time the anguish was different. The Rohir surveyed the glade, and past that, the hilly short-distance looking south, towards the West Emnet. His men began piling bodies of the routed orcs into a small pyre, to burn them. They were gathering helmets, gear, and their long blades that were always wickedly sharp and light. Lothiriel discerned, imagined, conjured – whichever was most appropriate – Éomer’s terrible aching fear: if war was not his future, when will all war end?

How do I cling to hope for survival – when after the war, there is not yet a guarantee of peace. My hope is for the war to end, for all war to end. To survive it all. Lord, you told me the war is not my future. Your words have brought me more hope than I can recall.

Lothiriel blinked, and took a breath – unable to move, suddenly afraid of orcs hiding in the glades, ready to pillage villages, or cause havoc, or kill with malice for the sake of killing. The fear was not hers. She thought about sending the Rohir’s letter on to her father, back to Minas Tirith. Looking up, without thinking it through, she slipped Éomer’s letter into one of her desk drawers. If – when – her father returned, the letter would be safe with her. It was important – and precious to her, although she could not understand how or why. She felt a certain ownership, and kinship, with Éomer. At least, with Éomer’s words. And she wanted the chance to read the letter again. For her father, she described the letter, her response, what she had discerned. She wrote to Imrahil instead, I cannot unveil the future as you do, with your farsight, but when the Rohir King finds you, Father, please help him find peace. So many men have died already. We who live must endure. There is so much fear in the world already, Lothiriel thought. Dol Amroth had not been spared its cup this war.

When Éomer crossed the threshold of the great gates of the walled city, the feeling had just left his right arm. His writing hand. The bandage tied around his forearm was soaked through, and the Houses of Healing were an hour or so above him, at the end of the long flight of stairs. He would die, he was certain, before reaching the top of those steps. But he had been certain of death so often the last twenty-four hours, he was no longer certain he had not yet died. There was pain – his body was pulped by fatigue, all the ills from cuts and bruises wailing to be cured, yet all he wanted was to enter his tent, and weep.

Beneath him, Firefoot whimpered, trotting behind Grimbold, whose arm was strapped into place with wood and bandages. Behind him, two soldiers had strapped a covered cart of their fallen to their mounts. Beyond them, another pair. He did not know how many there were, a procession of their dead. Éomer thought about the task of transporting the bodies back to Aldburg, where they might be buried in the style of their kin. But the wiser way would be to bury them here, in Gondor, so they might be put to rest quickly. He had washed their faces before covering them with cloth, and said their names with a blessing. As King, it had been his duty to ensure that all his soldiers returned, one way or another. Ceorl, Ealdor, Folcred, Herefara. Men in his Éored who would never ride again – and these were only some of the names that he could remember immediately. Exhaustion washed over him. His body felt cold despite the chainmail, his leathers. These were simply names, now. The bodies were lifeless in the carts behind him. Herefara would not stir at the offer of ale, and Ealdor will never look again upon his son and daughter back in Aldburg. There would be no new song from Folcred during the brief but harsh chill of winter, and Ceorl – who was among the youngest of Éomer’s men – will never be old enough to remember the Siege of Gondor, as he had anticipated. How does anyone push past the death to focus on the task of living, once again? Éomer wondered, letting the strangeness linger, passively curious if there was even an answer that would make sense, that could snap the grief into perspective against a whole.  

On the fifth level of the city, Éomer turned Firefoot to follow one of the remaining Citadel Guards towards a series of stone houses. White cloths with a grove of trees marked the entrance of the row; these had been converted into ward homes to accommodate the soldiers returning from the Morannon. There would not be a lot of them, Éomer thought wearily. We shall need many carts. From afar, and visible by her golden hair, Éomer recognized his sister standing on the street. A line of healers in white and blue stood in small groups in front of the wards. Unlike the others who wore a dark blue apron emblazoned with the white tree, Eowyn was clad in a plain dress with long gloves that went up to her elbows as she ushered the Rohirrim into one of the buildings. She scanned each of the soldiers’ faces carefully, and spoke to them in turn. She helped some of the riders dismount carefully, placing a short footstool for them.   

“Éomer!” Éowyn cried, when she finally recognized him. Her face turned into a mask of pity and pain as she took him in: the smattering of gashes on his face and neck; a busted lip where he had bitten himself; the dented chest plate where an orc soldier had grazed him with its mace. There were bruises beneath the mail that forced him to limp, and carry himself stiffly. But he was alive – and whole, for the most part. He had been fortunate. His sister was not one for propriety, but she stilled herself, holding her hands clasped before her until he had dismounted Firefoot, and presented himself in front of the ward home, in front of her. The last time they had met, she had been on the threshold of grief after the death of their uncle, and the prospect of losing him. It occurred to Éomer that they had been in the same place, fearing the same loss. By some trick of the gods, they had traveled through that land, and met again. Éomer wanted to succumb to the urge to weep as he gathered his sister to him, pressing his stinging eyes to her forehead. He drew a shaky breath.  

“Sister, you are well,” Éomer said. There was a lightness about her that was brand new. “You are well, and a healer!”

“Not at all yet,” Éowyn said, holding him now at arm’s length. “But in time, I shall earn that title. Welcome, Éomer King.” Her own eyes were damp.

He almost choked at the title, and the strangeness of it coming from her. They looked at each other after their greeting, each understanding how much had changed with the other, and each eager to know more. His sister clasped his forearms gently, which made him wince with a sudden, sharp pain. With a frown, Éowyn undid his vambraces, and peeled the leather and cloth from his arms underneath. Éomer wondered at Éowyn’s deftness: her fingers were quick and precise, with no sign of strain where they had been broken. Her palms were soft, despite the scars that marred them front and back. Even the wound on her forehead had left nary a scar. She was whole. She was whole! Éomer was not so lucky. There were bruises on both of his arms, but his right arm had a long gash that ran from inside his elbow to just before his wrist. A plainly-clad young healer stepped forward with a clean cloth and poultice in a bowl. When Éomer glanced at the other healer, he cried out in surprise.

Héoleth stood before him wearing a somber expression. The young soldier’s complexion was brown and baked, his hair lighter than Éomer remembered. After returning from Dol Amroth, Héoleth found the camp empty of soldiers. Neither recipient of the missives he carried had returned, and there was no telling if either of them would come back from daring to stand in the shadow of the Black Gate. That week, Gondor was quiet as a grave, everyone holding their breath and watching the dense, dark clouds swirling out of Orodruin. He went to Éowyn, who was possibly the only other Rohir in the Citadel, and began sharing her tasks to learn about medicinal herbs and their preparation, bandaging less serious wounds and cuts. They had both begun to learn about setting bone, and healing the deep muscle that bound the bones together when preparations for the return of the company began.   

Éomer recognized Héoleth and, without thinking, he found himself embracing the young man. The young man he had sent on an errand to the southern Gondorian state, to save his life, to spare him from certain death. The young man he had robbed of the opportunity to defend his brothers-in-arms in battle. How narrow had his vision been? How faithlessly had he decided?

“Forgive me, Héoleth!” Éomer said, remembering again the names of their friends. The many pairs of eyes shuttered forever. “For the fool’s errand that you had to endure for my sake.”  

“Éomer King, there is nothing to forgive, sire,” Héoleth replied. From his pocket, he produced a leather wrap, worn and sturdy. “I bring a missive from the Steward of Dol Amroth in answer.”

Éomer thanked the solider, took the wrap in his left hand, and stared at it curiously. The Prince of Dol Amroth and his sons had been among the company that marched upon the Black Gate, and he had not expected any reply. Someone, a member of Imrahil’s court, had given him the courtesy of a response. In that moment, there was no room in Éomer for embarrassment – he was full only of relief, and exhaustion. If anything, he mused, he would have been glad to retrieve the letter he wrote – and whatever passionate foolishness he had written.

“Come, find your bed, and rest. These must come even before any business of the State,” Éowyn said. She wrapped his right forearm with a simple cloth, binding it tightly to staunch any bleeding. The cut, she said, was long but shallow. His bruises would heal with time, herbs, and a warm towel. The rest of his healing, he would receive with the rest of the men. There were no Kings in the ward home, Éowyn reminded him with a small smile. She knew he preferred it so. There would be time for titles later, after. There was time now to think of a time after.    

“There is much that we must discuss, Éomer King. And when you are well and have recovered your strength, brother, I shall come to take you to our uncle,” Éowyn said. Gently holding his arm, she led him towards the doorway. Her voice was steady and low. “The Gondorians have laid him in state upon the Citadel, among their own lords, in a place of special significance.” She could not tell him yet how she had helped prepare his body, how it had been the last and final service she would do for their uncle. How she had steeled herself against the task of doing the same for him. Later, after she had welcomed the Rohirrim into the ward house and taken stock of their most urgent ills – broken bones, infections, fevers that might be hiding more serious disease – Éowyn would weep. She would find an enclosed garden with a small fountain whose water was clear and cool. And there, Faramir would find her, her own arms wrapped about herself, her face tilted to the bright, gold sunlight. The garden looked out North, the sunlight slanting onto the rough patch of grass and flowers growing determinedly between the stone floor. Soft, sweet-smelling moss and vines covered the walls of the surrounding houses. Relief at the end of the war, joy at her brother’s return, and the wellspring of peace filled her, and the sound of running water calmed and soothed her, anchored her to the present. Thus, Faramir would come upon her, touch her shoulder, and for the first time, she would walk into his arms. He would call her name softly as she let her tears come, as she shuddered gently against him, and she would tell him finally that her brother had arrived, alive.

“Just as you said,” Éowyn said, turning her face up to look at Faramir. His dark, brown eyes were warm and his expression open.

“As I saw, Lady,” he said simply. In the Houses of Healing, he had already explained the curious foresight that had come down to him from his father’s line, strengthened by the bloodline of his mother, Finduilas. He described the short rush of intuition, of knowing. It did not come often – these visions were like flowers that bloomed on their own, outside his capacity or authority to dictate. But for the White Lady of Rohan, his farsight had been clear, clearer and more solid and certain than his other visions. He knew without doubt that Éomer, her brother, would survive, and he had told her, to ease her fear. She had not dared to believe him. Éowyn would understand, in time, he hoped. And she would grow to trust his visions. For now, she nodded, and laid one hand on his chest, above his heart. His pulse quickened.

“Then may you always be clear-sighted, Lord Steward,” she said, her voice edged with joy. She took his hands, kissed his knuckles in reverence, and, leaning against him, she closed her eyes. They stayed this way as long as they could.

The Gondorian healers gave him a small room on the fourth floor of the ward house. Éomer thought he would feel less comfortable in a strange home, but alone in the room, he allowed himself to be overtaken by exhaustion. He slept for two days, waking only to eat and empty his bowels. On the third day, Éomer found himself awake before daybreak, ashen and afraid, emerging from another nightmare. He was safe, he was safe, but his body shook from bone to breath; somehow, Gondor was still too near the poison of war. In the middle of the fray, Éomer looked up from the crush of bodies. The ground was slimy with blood, and soldiers were likely to fall over the body of a cold fallen comrade, as be felled. A long screech—blood-curdling and high-pitched—rose up from the near distance, from within the plains of the Gorgoroth. It was a Nazgul, or the sound of trampling, mûmaks, wargs, or other beasts. He could not trust his senses any longer, and he was disoriented, his vision narrowed into slits. Almost blind, Éomer dropped his sword and spear. He covered his ears from the noise, the scream and threat of pain and loss, and he looked up to the ball of fire, the Eye filling up the heavens, its lidless stare seeing all. Seeing him. Seeming to stare at him directly. Éomer fell to his knees, shut his eyes, and shielded his face with his arms in terror of being consumed.   

The candles he lit were long and slim, and they burned more brightly in the dark than he expected. He wanted a nourishing cup of something warm – but he did not know where the kitchens were located, and he did not want to fumble through the house to look. Someone had given him a set of linen clothes to wear, and his armor was arranged in a set of neat piles upon a low table. There was nothing for him to do, and no way to engage his mind. He felt it whirring within himself, a tireless grinding wheel. He needed something to occupy him: something to draw his attention, something to examine. At home, in Aldburg or at Edoras, he had a stocked shelf of books that kept his mind busy. He had built the shelf with his father as a young boy: it was narrow and tall, unevenly sanded and varnished. It would stand out as rough and unfinished in the ward house, but its memory brought a new ache. He missed his father. Would the war have been easier if his father had been alive? The room was too warm, so in the half-light, he moved to open the windows. On the desk pushed up against the window sill was an unfamiliar leather wrap, with an intricate seal. The letter from Dol Amroth and its Steward felt hefty, and serious. Before he opened it, he examined the leather, its seal: a swan with its wings upturned, flourishes to depict its flight, the rich, deep blue dye that treated the leather. He had learned early on to train his mind, and he grasped at the thing in his hands as an anchor for his mind: how the leather felt in his hands, how he undid the knot, how the paper felt under his thumb, the rich and deep green ink that greeted him. Letters in an unfamiliar hand, slanting slightly to the right, the long downstrokes. On the reverse of each page, the shadows of the letters were imprinted from the pressure of the hand that wrote them.

The name at the bottom of the final page sounded feminine – Lothiriel – but he was unsure. He reread the unfamiliar word, sounding it out. He took his time trying not to read or scan the pages. Éomer had forgotten the contents of the letter he wrote, but he remembered how he felt: the sickness of grief, terror, and anger spoiling him from the inside out. The letter was a poor excuse to save even one of his men – but the exercise had given him some reprieve. If he had died, Éomer realized, that letter would have been his last act before the war, and the only missive he would have sent as King. The only missive he had signed as King. He shook his head, and began to read. He gleaned more than remembered what he wrote from Lothiriel’s response, and though she had written diplomatically, the letter was also clearly personal. For Éomer himself, instead of the King.

You aid in the command of forces that will bring Hope home to us here where the Shadow has not breached the sky. Here, where the sea makes land on the beaches of Belfalas. There is room in this new world that awaits your return – there is room for even the fear that cannot be named yet. Lord, you have spoken of gardens and fear and war. To you, I say, on behalf of all the lives of Men and Women touched by this war: this too shall pass. This is our shared Hope. And that in its passing, we do not only build again: we live, again. Your letter arrived at Dol Amroth a day before the combined armies marched East. Here by the sea, the smoke of Orodruin is dispelled by a brisk, morning wind. Here, Lord, there is no shadow. There is nowhere in the sea for the Shadow to hide. There are parts of this world unmolested by fear, or pain, still. And it will be renewed.

His face burned, and his throat was dry. Somewhere, Prince Imrahil’s daughter sat unflinching with his unravelling. Somewhere, that missive still lay, in some quiet room. Éomer sat at the desk suddenly unwilling to move, afraid to break the river of longing that rose up where before there had only been room for fear, and anxiety. He had never seen the sea – he could only imagine the vastness it contained that stretched the capacity even of Sauron. But from thence, the missive came. Éomer found a few sheets of paper, ink, and a serviceable quill, but he paused before beginning to write. The wound on his right arm made holding the pen difficult, but not painful. It had begun to heal, but the flesh would break open again if he moved too much. He would have to wait.

The loud, inarticulate whirring in his mind had calmed enough that he could hear his own thoughts again. He brought the candle closer to the desk, closed the window to prevent a draft, and looked again upon the letter. Lothiriel had signed her name without a designation at the bottom of the final page. The curious, and conspicuous omission made Éomer smile.  

The letter was sealed with wax, and bound in cloth and leather. When he unwrapped it, a small, tidy bundle of dried herbs, and a tightly packed pouch of rice grains lay in the middle, pristine and whole. Lothiriel had packed him a small snack to entice him back home. Prince Imrahil smiled and, for the first time since he had joined this war, he allowed himself to remember home, the townships surrounding Dol Amroth, and the daughter that he left behind. On the night that he set his back to the sea, his eyes were filled with the deck of heavy, grey clouds sitting on the horizon where the bay seemed to reach forward to pluck the sun from the sky. But there had been no rain or storm: the sky had been clear as sea glass during all the long weeks that Imrahil had been away from home. It could only be an omen.

Against the odds, he and all his sons had returned from the Morannon, whole, but not unscathed. Erchirion had sustained several wounds on his face and chest and arms, Elphir had come down with a fever that broke only that morning, and Amrothos, the youngest son, was healing a broken leg. It would be weeks before they hazarded a return to Dol Amroth – and even longer before they returned to Gondor afterward. Imrahil, himself, had not been in the thickest part of the fighting, and at any given point, one or more of his sons were beside him, or in front of him, or bulldozing orcs and men to clear a path for him. After – after the lidless Eye of the Enemy had gone out like a star falling into itself, and the orc forces began to turn from battle and run into the dark wild – he gathered his sons to himself, and found them unharmed. After – after the long trek back to Minas Tirith, as the trooping army turned their face towards the city and the smoking plains in front of them, and as they all realized the scope of the long work ahead of them – he had taken his sons back to their childhood rooms. His sons had not only grown into captains of men in this war; he himself had grown older. He could feel, in his flesh and bones, the approach of another age, one of reckoning. The fourth age was dawning, and he wanted a place for his children in that new world. His part, and his contribution, were clear, and had been set in stone. It was not enough that he survived the battle that would close the Third Age. Part of his legacy would be to usher in the age of Men, for his children, and their children, and so on. After – he found that his knees were sore, and his legs were everywhere marked with dark bruises and wounds – Imrahil read through his daughter’s letter, and something that he had gleaned during his conversation with the Rohir King took on a startling clarity. The Prince’s home in the city was a suite of apartments in the Citadel, close to the rooms that Faramir had taken as a Ranger. A bay of windows looked out north-east, and though it was not visible, he imagined the spine than divided Eriador from Rhovanion, the Hithaeglir, and the wide country of Rohan. And he imagined, as Lothiriel described, how men and women crossed the wide, undulating seas, and the green plains with its tall grasses waving in the breeze. How people’s migration, their wandering north and west as the forces of war finally disbanded, could shift the balance of the world. The meaning of peace would change as quickly or as slowly as the world changed. We who live must endure, Lothiriel had written. And so they must. His children, he knew with no recourse to either Lothiriel’s discernment or his own farsight, will help shape the future of Dol Amroth – and perhaps other lands. They must endure, and they will. He would see to it.

Imrahil chose an older set of robes much grander than he was comfortable in, but he needed all the markers of his station for the conversations he would have next.

“Father?” Erchirion opened the door slightly, poking his head into the room. He stepped into Imrahil’s chamber, but stayed near to the door.  “I have come to fetch you, as you instructed, to take you to Theoden King. His kin have arrived,” he smiled, and paused. “I also want to accompany you on this errand.”

Erchirion had always been the son who challenged him most. Their values aligned closely, and yet they approached their shared beliefs and priorities from different places. It was instructive for Imrahil: his son’s curiosity and intensity checked the Prince’s logic, his reasons, and made him articulate and clarify his farsight – that he saw what he saw, instead of imagining phantasms, or looking into mirrors of his own desire.   

“Curious, Chiri?” Imrahil said, leading the way. “And shouldn’t you be resting more instead of walking around shell-shocked like the rest of us. I see most of your cuts have begun to heal nicely.” Imrahil glanced at Erchirion, who was grinning. Of his sons, Chiri had sustained the fewest wounds – and the bruises on his body, and any pain in his muscles, were healing quickly.

“You’ve presented me with a small puzzle, and it’s kept the shock at bay,” his son replied, keeping pace. “I don’t quite understand why you’ve taken an outsize interest in the late Rohir King, and his niece and nephew. Especially because, father, you are not one to politick.”

“We need fewer Men in politics, Chiri, this has always been my position. No – we come to support the mourning of our comrades-in-arms, and to strengthen this net of peace we have begun to weave,” Imrahil said. Imrahil led his son up towards the tower and the courtyard of the White Tree.

“Lothiriel should be here,” Erchirion said. “Lothiriel’s update about the Easterlings and the Peoples of Harad – these are already in play. And yet, so much grief, father. How large the world must be to hold this grief.” Erchirion’s eyes scoped the white walls of the fortified city, and the bright sky above. There was a hush that had become part of the city’s early days following the war. It would not last, the breathlessness of disbelief. Erchirion had read Lothiriel’s letter, and among his brothers, he was the most anxious to be home. They had talked at length about the ongoing migrations, crops, sustenance. What Dol Amroth might send Gondor in aid of refuge-seekers. What the Anfalas might need that they could not themselves grow in the rocky, thin soil of their hills. There were provisions to think of: lumber, leather, steel. And the challenge to rethink the borders that had been dissolved or replaced during the conflict.

Within, the hall was transformed: white and gold cloth, flowers in tall vases. Windows along the upper galleries were open to the sun, and the light. Tapestries hung from the walls, while incense and candles burned in vigil of the recently dead. Guards, knights, Lords shared the hall, their families mingling easily and informally. The recently dead lay upon and were partly covered in the cloths, and their bodies protected by glass as their kin remembered them, looked upon their faces, and carefully stroked the edges of their garments. Benches and tables surrounded the room, and deep, cool bowls of water, strong tea, and sweetened fruit pulp were arranged in long tables to sustain the families.

Théoden King occupied a place of honor near the dais. In the style of his people, he gripped the pommel of his sword even in death. Golden flowers were arranged all around him, and he seemed to float upon them. He wore no circlet upon his brow, but his hair had been brushed back. The King wore a beautiful, calm expression. An intricate carving of his steed, Snowmane, accompanied him, placed near upon his right shoulder. Imrahil saw Éowyn at his feet, her hands clasped in front of her. Beside her, Imrahil recognized Éomer, the young King who had taken up the mantle of leadership and authority, who would need all the help he could get. His expression was harder to gauge, more difficult to read. Éomer seemed immobile as stone, unreadable as the sea.

Faramir marked him first. His nephew hailed him from across the hall, carrying two small goblets of cool tea. They approached the siblings together.

“My Lord Imrahil,” Éowyn began when they reached the pair. Faramir handed them the refreshments he had brought over. “Éomer King, my brother, has told me about your meeting. Please, accept my gratitude,” she said, glancing over at her brother. “Your words echo,” she said.

Imrahil looked upon Éowyn, who was tall and golden, her expression fierce and glad. “Lady Éowyn, Éomer King, I feel a kinship with you both that extends beyond the horrors of this war.” Beside him, Erchirion smiled. “My son Erchirion and I come to remember with you the deeds of your uncle and the Rohirrim who have come to aid Gondor. There is much to remember, and much to be done.” He noticed immediately how his nephew had positioned himself near the lady, how he turned often to look upon her.

“There is much to be built and rebuilt, Lord,” Éomer said in a low, quiet voice. “Rohan answered the call for aid – you may rely upon these bonds as we enter a new Age.” His eyes were on his uncle’s body. For Éomer, Théoden King was not in the room; Théoden King had not been in the world since his demise. It was his uncle who had taught him the difference between a man and the corpses they became: how the body withered, how it became weak, and frail, without consent, and how finally when the men within the body depart, only the corpse remained. He struggled to feel the potent grief that he carried during the war, through the fighting, as he looked upon his uncle’s remains. But there was nothing: no grief came, no desire to weep. Even remembering was more difficult; Éomer could not reconcile the virility of his uncle as he remembered him, with the stillness of the cold flesh he had left behind. Éomer had never felt as lonely as in that moment. He would never feel this lonely again.     

“You conceive of the coming Age as marked by war and fighting, still, Éomer King?” This was Erchirion. Imrahil’s son took after his father in stature: taller than Imrahil, but sturdy and stocky. His hair was a rich, deep black unmarred by the pale grey that had begun to lighten Imrahil’s, and his face was wide and striking.  

“I prepare for it, Prince, as I always have,” Éomer said. “Is not battle the largest threat that we might face, alone or together?” Théoden King, his uncle, had lived in fear of battle and mostly in fear that the patched-up peace of his time would fail. It had. Éomer had not known peace for long – not as a boy, who lost his father, and who came to Aldburg to train in war. Not as a soldier, then Marshall. Not now.

“I fear, Éomer King, that more than battle, this new-come Age will bring different challenges, will birth new fears. The world has changed. People are on the move – borders are porous, and shifting. Things cannot stay the same. Nowhere is the same,” Erchirion said.

Éowyn looked from one man to another and asked, “Do you mean orcs that must be routed? Our villages protected? Rebuilding and strengthening the roads that connect us?” Instinctively, she shifted closer to Faramir.

“Perhaps, as a start. But the world is suddenly full of people who will find that their lives are suddenly theirs. We have already received a report from my daughter in Dol Amroth, about groups of men seeking shelter and refuge,” Imrahil said. He watched Éomer’s expression, and their eyes met. The Warrior-King’s expression was still stern, but behind that, Imrahil sensed curiosity. He did not speak.

“So much change. What would Théoden King have done, brother?”

Éomer did not speak immediately. He glanced first at Éowyn, then at Faramir who stood now close enough to her to touch, but Imrahil sensed no threat in the King’s examination. Éomer was difficult to read, but Imrahil had begun to understand – through the man’s gestures, his silences, how he took his time – that the work of articulation was new-come to him, through the mantle of Kingship.

“I do not know, Éowyn. Bema, but I wish I did,” Éomer said. He frowned, and then looked at them all standing in the hall of their beloved dead. Something lifted in Éomer, and he laughed. “We are on our own. Our fathers will judge us when we join them in the halls of our dead. May they be merciful!”   

Erchirion came forward then and clasped Éomer’s shoulders. “Be blessed, Éomer King. The work is long in the making, the toil will be hard. With what do we build our new world?”

“Hope,” Imrahil said, smiling. “The work Hope requires of us will be difficult, Éomer King. You will need all the help you can get.”

“Do you hope to provide a help-meet, Uncle?” Faramir asked light-heartedly. There was a curious, and clever twinkle in his eye as he said it.

“Perhaps, Lord Steward.” Imrahil said. He met Éomer’s eyes, and the younger man’s expression opened. He laughed again.

Chapter Text

The gardens Lothiriel enjoyed planting always took a long time to flourish, sometimes taking several years before becoming productive. Most of them didn’t even look like gardens. Something brought her back, again and again, to the hills and the secret, minor valleys of Belfalas, where, in thin, black soil, slow-growing things unfurled furtively, taking their time, promising nothing. Imrahil remembered most of these endeavors, but the coconut trees were special. In the black sand and upturned earth, where cliff met the forest, his daughter tried to plant a grove of coconut trees to replace those uprooted by a Cerveth storm which tarried in the Bay – moaning wind, clustered towers of clouds, and the ocean blistering beneath it – for three days. Cerveth, the month that took the year from heat to cool, found the ocean long been heated through the summer, bringing cooler winds from the southwest. In the dome of the heavens, the storms brewed long, ripening into devastation. For three days, time collapsed into the meagre minutes of terror, discontent, and impatience that Imrahil could not dispel. The punishing arm of the storm battered the coast as it travelled south, ripping through Belfalas and the lush green of its promontory. Here, Lothiriel and Orfalas found them: ancient and in pain, the clutch of coconut trees clustered and grown together, gripping the rock such that they should have been inextricable from the earth, yet their roots had become lewdly exposed, flung to the sky. They formed part of the line of sentinel trees that ringed the loamy, black soil of the interior forest, demarcating the beginning and end of the grey cliffs. Here, Orfalas taught Lothiriel how to mourn, the texture of grief, and where it sat in her body. 

This was where Lothiriel wanted to focus one of her first endeavors – three kilometers north of Dol Amroth, where the soil was loose and there was little of it. ‘Gardens of surprise’, she called them. She liked a challenge, his daughter. Imrahil reflected on the long-held and beloved idea of a stubborn Lothiriel, willful and energetic, setting her will and desires against the world. It was only lately – the missives from Dol Amroth, her stewardship, and her earnestness – that Imrahil, her father, realized he misunderstood her relationship with the world. She did not impose her will against the elements of the world to test her own strength. Dominion over rock, sea, or tree, the ability to wrest what she desired from the world had seldom occurred to her; instead, she valued access to an intimate knowledge of the world through her discernment. And it was this advocating that Imrahil misjudged as stubbornness. How little he knew her. How little and how softly had he examined his knowledge of Lothiriel! And how unchanged it had remained against her own flourishing. It must have been his fantasy of her, his own flesh and blood, that also turned his sight opaque. How could he look far upon the path she was treading, if he had lost sight of her entirely? It was not shame he felt, only some fear – an anxiety and trepidation to make things right. 

Orfalas, who had nurtured and trained her gifts, was still surprised at her expressions and readings. How much of the world could Lothiriel perceive that he could not even imagine? What world could she step into, now? And, more importantly for Imrahil, why had the world brought her forth – for what purpose, for what design? He allowed himself this generosity: a fantasy of sharing even a modicum of the secret knowledge of the path that Lothiriel might follow, the path that she had already chosen for herself. Farsight had given Imrahil a certain steadfastness – the courage that came with certainty – and, as a younger man, he had been victim to the debilitating belief that, somehow, knowledge of a thing was akin to understanding what it meant. No longer. He had lived long enough to know that whatever vision accessed, he was limited by his own understanding, and limited by his own finitude. Maybe it was a form of prayer, a kind of worship, this servitude to the inevitable, as he hurtled forward to meet it. He hoped Lothiriel would understand, and would see, with her uncanny knowing, what seeds might explode into life.  

Imrahil led Erchirion and Éomer off to the side of the hall, and through into the adjacent dining space that faced north, and offered a clear, unobstructed view of Osgiliath. From the bay of windows in this antechamber, the Anduin seemed to recede, the taut string of a bow, pulled back almost to meet the foothills of the Ephel Dúath. Precarious upon its banks, the city of Osgiliath challenged not only the long, great river: it seemed to provoke the very mountains it faced, defiantly straddling the river. Despite knowing that, behind them, Mordor had been emptied of threat, it seemed to him that the Ephel Dúath resembled still a cresting wave ready to break over the plains. Imrahil briefly caught himself; so much of his heart and mind had darkened into fear and distrust – much of himself must be reclaimed, Imrahil thought. He led Erchirion and Éomer toward the bank of windows.

“My daughter sent me to ensure that you find peace, Lord,” Imrahil said. He glanced at Erchirion, who stood motionless between him and the neophyte King. His son’s face was studied and neutral, although he cocked his head at his father, betraying his curiosity. Behind them both, the setting sun bathed Imrahil’s vision in warmth.

Imrahil smiled at Erchirion as he continued, “My sons – this one, in particular, all know me to be a poor politician, so let us speak plainly, as plainly as we can both manage without danger of overstepping our familiarity. My daughter, Lothiriel, received a letter addressed to the Steward of Dol Amroth ere we marched for the Morannon. She it is that has held the post in Elphir’s stead, in my stead. For any intrusion into the privacy of your correspondence, Éomer King, I plead you accept my apology.”

“The Steward, your daughter, she wrote to me, Lord,” Éomer said. “With great feeling. If it is my peace your daughter sought to safeguard, she has certainly succeeded. And her missive came still warm from the hands of a beloved soldier, whom she had sheltered during –” Éomer paused, nodded at Erchirion and Imrahil wordlessly. “There is nothing to forgive,” he said. The young man’s face was briefly unreadable – some shade passed, a thought on shadow-wings, or a broken memory imbued with pain, or fear. Imrahil perceived, for the first time, the shade and shape of the Rohir King. “Although if I am granted any privilege, be it that I might ask for the missive back – I fear I have disturbed her conscience and her peace enough,” Éomer said.  

Erchirion chuckled at this. He glanced at his father with a wide smile, and said, “Éomer King, my sister has not returned your missive. We could not return it to you now even if we so wished. We ask your forgiveness for Lothiriel’s indiscretion again!”

Éomer smiled at that, shaking his head gently. “At some point, Lord,” the boyish expression on the King’s face was fleeting, but instantly recognizable to Imrahil, the father of three sons. It was one of shyness. “I must be allowed to thank your daughter in the manner that my uncle would find sufficiently honorable,” he said.   

“She will be mortified that we have spoken of her so much, truly,” Erchirion said. “She is not one to enjoy attention, no matter how complimentary.”

“She may have to suffer it a bit longer, Erchirion,” Imrahil said. “Tell us, Lord, when do you plan a return to the Riddermark?”

Éomer’s expression stilled at the question. He glanced behind Imrahil – at the way they came and through into the Hall where Faramir and Éowyn had stayed behind. “My men are not yet ready to take the long road home. Their bodies must be healed wholly and completely. Our beasts and horses are also recuperating – we fear many have been lamed, injured, and many have died. There are preparations to think of, before we are able to return to the Mark,” Éomer replied. Meeting Erchirion’s gaze first before settling on Imrahil, Éomer continued: “Our eagerness to return home I cannot describe, but I also cannot yet fix a date for our departure from Minas Tirith until I see clearly through the forest of our urgent needs. It is my understanding that we share similar concerns.”

“We also have to think of the storms brewing in the Bay before we push for the long journey south,” Erchirion said. He brought Éomer to the edge of the window, pointed south following the Anduin, “we follow the Anduin into the Bay, passing Lebennin and the many small, green isles decorating the estuary. From there, it is a tricky journey northwest for larger vessels, so our ships are light and quick to make it to the harbors of Belfalas. Storms and typhoons can devastate our smaller ships, and their season is not likely to end until this month fails.”

Éomer’s eyes had gone round with something like shock. He finally shook his head. “It is a gift, this. In my life, I had never thought to be in conversation with Stormriders!”

“That is a beautiful name for a terrifying inheritance,” Erchirion laughed. “We try very hard not to ride any storm, if we can help it!”

Éomer’s seemed to be weighing his next words. “Théoden King lived in Gondor for a time, did you know?” He addressed Erchirion, but his gaze slipped quickly back to Imrahil. “When Éowyn and I came to live at Meduseld, we were enamored by his oft-remembered and retold stories of the city and its people. His bereavement upon leaving it, felt so keenly despite being a young child at the time, persisted even unto the end of his days. But neither Éowyn nor I had ever been to visit. So much of your company has been an education on the wide world and our ignorance of it. My heart tells me Éowyn will have many reasons to remain long in the city, and to travel here often. Not least to pursue this new education of the world as she strives to become a Healer.” 

At this, Imrahil touched the young King’s forearm. “Aye, Lord, at last we come to it.” He nodded, refusing to turn around. “I am glad that though our parting will arrive, but not before we have had many conversations about this new Fourth Age. What might it look like, and the kind of people might lead.”

The King nodded and he was quiet for a little while, withdrawing from the conversation as father and son exchanged ideas and observations: they talked about Minas Tirith being rebuilt, and expanded. What it might take to build the city out. Imrahil pointed again at Osgiliath and, in a sweeping motion, indicated the journey south to Gondor’s vassal states. It was talk of governance: the people who might swell the roads, how trade might again flourish, and where people might find themselves settling. They talked even about a Princedom east of Osgiliath, and how the strategic post might make-safe travels north to south, and back, to enrich the trade and merchants.

“The corridors of land on either side of the Anduin should be dense with protection against fleeing Haradrim, and ensure that none of their ilk might cross into the Wetwang,” Éomer remarked sharply jumping into the conversation, thinking of the villages and nomadic people of the Eastfold living near the mouths of the Entwash. The villages here were spread out, making use of the fertile land as much as they could, but that left many of the Eastfold more vulnerable to attacks.  

“And what of those seeking refuge?” Erchirion asked, his voice low and firm. “Those travelling from Hârâd or  west crossing the Marshes. Long have peaceful families and merchants traveling the Hârâd Road crossed into Ithilien and onwards to Rhovanion, even as far the Limlight, I have heard tell.”

“If these reports are to be trusted, I cannot guarantee. My Éored scouts as far as Cäir Andros. Neither Southrons nor Easterlings have made it north of the Rauros. We encounter and dispatch the groups of petty thieves, bandits, or else mischievous men attempting some form of small evil, coming out of the South. There is much distrust among my kin for those traveling North up that way. Refuge-seekers? You cannot fault us for being wary, especially as we needs must protect the crops, animals, and living trade coming out of our Eastfold,” the King replied, bristling a little.  

Before his son could respond, Imrahil said, “You are overcome.” The prince reached over to clasp Éomer’s arm again. “You must be full of our apologies this day, Éomer King.”

Éomer’s mind travelled back north to his own country: what crop might be harvested this year, if any at all. The Hornburg, and its defenses. The villages that had been burned and obliterated. Where he might find wood and men to rebuild, how they might fortify the remaining towns. What to do first, a question that spun him almost off his feet. He thought his head might burst, suddenly filled to the brim with new concerns. He touched his forehead lightly, pressing his knuckles into his temples to relieve the pressure, and the building fear.

“As always, this has been instructive,” Éomer said, forcing a grin. “I have no answers; truthfully, I am taking-stock of all the questions first. If I take anything back home with me from this sojourn here, I must return to Édoras at least having learned something of governance than before I left. Marshalling’s chief concern was protection – men, arms, the safety of our people from bandits and orc-raiders. Sometimes, war,” he grimaced. “This is harder than war. It is not something I can win.”

“No, Lord. Tis not. You cannot think of your Rule as you would a battle for conquest,” Imrahil said. Éomer turned to face the older man: the sternness of his countenance had returned. Imrahil was a shorter man, but his presence solidified into a force in that moment: “It is alliance that you seek when you rule. Coordination, cooperation. I do not need my farsight to know for certain that you will need a helpmeet, young King.” Imrahil took a shaky breath. “A helpmeet you shall have.”

Erchirion had turned to stone beside Éomer. “Father?” he asked softly, unable to continue.

“I do not offer this lightly, Éomer King. And neither do I deny her the right to choose for herself. For choose she will, when the time is upon us. Lothiriel is among the wisest women I have ever known – and it is my great honor that she is my daughter. No small thing moves me to offer her hand and her life for this task.” Imrahil lifted his chin, which quivered. Outside, the Anduin continued to dig deeper into the earth, on and on, collecting its bounty of secrets, and stories, and lives’ tales from the hidden valleys in Rhovanion, spilling these into the Sea.

In retellings of this moment, Éomer will describe the tiny infinity that he stumbled into, the gulf that opened beneath him. He looked into that abyss and shut his eyes; he was afraid. He found that he was chained to that terror. It would not be diluted or dislodged. The abyss of fear was part of him, and he was anchored to it; he lived on some mountain in that void, and he glimpsed what he might become should he follow where terror led: not feeble, but cruel. So fearful that he would not be able to tell friend from foe, resorting to cruelty and suspicion. Cruelty in lieu of trust, and hope. As he stood beneath the Morannon fighting for the lives of those who weren’t on the field of fire, Orodruin spasmed, spilling molten rock from every chasm. He finally understood how it was fear that had planted that mountain. In time, he thought, he might grow into a King that the Eorlingas needed, but for now, here was a defense against terror, and the seed of terror that had lodged already in his body: how much he longed not to be left alone.

“If the Lady will accept me, Prince Imrahil, I intend to receive her.” Something in him sang, perhaps with relief.

“If she accepts you,” Erchirion gasped, stepping suddenly in front of his father. His ears were ringing, and his face was hot. “We shall arrange it, then. Father will send for her to attend the Coronation.” The eyes he turned on Imrahil were dark with betrayal and distrust. Imrahil did not flinch.  

“Do you remember, Chiri, the gardens you sister planted?” Imrahil asked his son. “Her gardens of surprise?” Erchirion nodded, not understanding. Imrahil smiled. His son had something else to learn from him. “I will send her a message about these proceedings, and I shall summon her to Minas Tirith, if either Ulmo or Ossë and their temperamental storms permit,” Imrahil said.

“Ulmo? She will petition Uinen, Father,” Erchirion said, meeting Éomer’s gaze. “Perhaps she will bring the storm with her.”

*

The Eastfold succumbed to the large water without any resistance. Overflowing the banks of the Entwash, it swamped the plain all the way to the Mering Stream, before advancing in every direction. Firien, the grove of hardwoods growing at the base of the White Mountains, quickly disappeared under the flood. Water loosened the hardpacked soil, which first slurried then frothed into a thick mud. Every tree he had ever known was gone, obliterated from memory and from the earth. Éomer’s dreams filled him with grey – the grey of pregnant storm clouds perennially rolling into the valley from the northeast, to dump the sea onto the plain. He stood alone beneath the ancient wooden arches that welcomed the Rohirrim into Aldburg, his body just another tower for the flood to consume. Drenched to the bone by the deluge, the cold a claw embedded in his gut, he watched the gray rain curtain rumble, groaning on its approach. It could have been a hoarde of orcs, a stampede of Oliphaunts, an army of war towers. In this dream, the certainty of his solitude pressed upon him, like a weight, an anchor. Behind him, the foothills of the White Mountains grew into daggers impossible to climb. He was trapped.

Was it only a dream, or some malevolent promise? Éomer could now not discern if there were any wisdom and authentic sight that designed the dreams, or if their only architect was the monster of fear plaguing him. In another dream, on another night, Éomer found himself on an island. How had his imagination conjured the geography – something that he had never before seen, or cared to fantasize about? In this dream, the island was shaped like a knife, and he stood with this back to the mainland, meeting the wide, grey-blue sea with sight and soul. The salty water rained on his face and neck. He could not look away: the sky was a net of stars, the waves crashing on the porous, pitted rocks below. If he fell, would he survive? What had fear produced in him?

After Éomer heard Imrahil’s proposal, his dreams took on an urgency that exhausted him. He began to evade sleep, choosing instead to spend time hunting for gardens in the city, pockets of greenery against the white stone, visiting Firefoot at the stables, or else walking out of the city walls and returning only in the deepest night. He found that he had fewer dreams, less intense dreams, if he could push his body to fatigue. He was climbing up to the fifth level, soaked to the bone with sweat, when Erchirion caught sight of him resting on the steps, ready to doze.

“Do your men run you ragged, King?” Erchirion asked, startling Éomer back into wakefulness. He joined Éomer on the step where he had settled.

“Tomorrow, I learn about the crops in the Westfold, and the worsening summer there. We are looking at a month of drought, if this heat persists. What to do with the long grass? It usually means a longer, harsher wet season. How to compensate roof thatchers and builders? Where to find mudbanks? A slew of questions I need to hear, and so much I cannot solve. I thought being King would give me power,” Éomer said.

Erchirion nodded. He was familiar with the pains of governance, though he had been insulated from much of its practice. Imrahil, Elphir, and even Lothiriel – they had been at the frontlines of this kind of service. Erchirion had been more idealistic, and more given over to contributing labor, or entertainment, or war-service.

“My sister thinks of these problems like a puzzle,” he said.

Éomer looked at him, suddenly curious. Erchirion noticed the dark circles under the older soldier’s eyes, and the long strokes of care and weariness that shadowed his expression.

“In some cases, when she doesn’t know where to start, she picks a smaller challenge to answer first. One she’s familiar with. And she starts there,” Erchirion said. Éomer nodded, his eyes shifting to his hands. “Lothiriel has long been in service of our people, yet she still feels as you do. Ineffectual in the face of great need. You must understand that you cannot resolve everything. But you have to try.”

“Your sister – when I read her letter, I imagined her to sound almost as you do,” Éomer said, suddenly laughing. He sounded like bells in the dark.

“She gives her opinions readily,” Erchirion said. “When I think of her, I think of the sea. She is wind-battered. She swims in the sea every day. Her skin is warm brown, browner than mine, from her excursions. Her hair is wild with salt-water!” Éomer’s silence – deep and grooved – gave Erchirion pause. Had the King of Rohan never seen the sea?

“Think you she would read another missive from the King of Rohan if it were addressed to her? Addressed to her properly?” Éomer asked. His voice dropped a little, but he turned to look fully at Erchirion, to read more his expression than to hear his answer. So instead, Erchirion beckoned for him to stand and turn back towards the King’s Steps. He wanted to ask the lord what made him accept his father’s offer, but something stuck in his throat. Not yet. There was, as yet, no real or satisfying answer. Perhaps, there never will be.

“Come, Éomer King. Let me hasten you back to the Houses of Healing, and your men. You have a letter to write, if you do not seek sleep, or if you choose to refuse it. Maybe this exercise will give you more rest than slumber offers.” Erchirion turned and began to climb with Éomer following silent but more awake behind him.

*

The Steward of Dol Amroth

by Hreóhwyn Imrahildohtor, and by Her Name

The depth of revelation I indulged in with my first missive, I have neither the ability nor the desire to retract. You alone have read these words, and I beseech you to burn the letter rather than allow it to be read by anyone else. I had taken from you the choice to remain ignorant of my suffering, and to be spared the grim hour that beset every living Man in Gondor. I only hope that when you receive this missive, you might recognize me, and understand that neither correspondence contains any hint of deception. Instead, I hope to address you now as you lately addressed me, to meet you as we survivors of this war, fumbling residents of a new-made world. I write to you from the Fifth Circle of Minas Tirith, from the home hosting the men of my Éored during our long convalescence. Although your words found me after my return to the Pelennor, you have planted a garden of Hope in me. How you spoke of your home, untouched and unmolested, makes me yearn to sink my hands into the soil of the Folde until I have given myself over to the work of repair, restoration, rebuilding. But as in every dream, when the fervor passed, it is the labor of the flesh and the body that must carry me forward.

The past few days, I have been to the library at Minas Tirith to read about the sea. The exercise has not cured my ignorance, but here is what I have learned so far: the Sea is vaster than the fields of the Enedwaith, and deeper than the White Mountains are tall. My mind’s eye casts itself far abroad, opens itself wider than the mouth of the Anduin, to capture the Sea that you love.

Erchirion, your brother, described the sea to me, but my imagination fails. Where my imagination does not fail, where it overtakes me, is in my dreams. I hope to spare you more details of my distress.

You spoke of living again after the Shadow passed. Lady, the shadow has passed indeed – I witnessed Orodruin broken and humbled, the tower sentinels of the Morannon abandoned in the greedy way our foes scampered into the tunnels of the Ash Mountains, craving to be lost. Hundreds of men heard the cries of the Eagles mingled with the sound of the earth shuddering to dispel the Evil from its foundation. Your father and brothers and I were on the same field when the stacked clouds veiling the Black Lands began to be swept away so that we might see again unto the horizon. Lady, here we live. The living has begun. When the tower of the Eye collapsed and the earth exhaled, suddenly and irrevocably delivering us all – whole and unprepared – into the world without, I was still in the middle of this war, and obligated to continue the fierce trade of soldiering. The world itself has trapped many of us to continue fighting until no more fighting is required, until there are no more swords raised against us.

I regret, Imrahildohtor, that the garden in me must be held deeply and safely hidden before it might be a garden in the sun of our world. It is hard-won, this world, our world, in which a garden such as yours might be nurtured.

I regret, Lady, that in the sun I cannot yet reside, whole and refreshed. There are many Evils and evil-besotted Men that plague even Belfalas, Lebennin, and Hârondor, many that travel the Hârâd Road. You may yet know more about the travels of these Men, and their motives, but that must be the content of another letter, or conversation.

I regret, Lady, that I must distress you more. It is unconscionable, so I beg for more patience. Any missive without the following disclosure would become nothing but a terrible lie. How is there no way to phrase this with the gentleness and delicacy that I would prefer? Imrahil has spoken of a union between us, which I have received with gladness. But in this you are not powerless, or robbed of choice or agency. My hand that has written these words, these words that must reach out in their stead, if you are able to accept this match. If you are come to Minas Tirith, you might judge the fairness and value of our union.

I regret, Lady, that I must place in your steady, capable hands the choice of your future and mine.

If you are to come to Minas Tirith, Imrahildohtor, I will sing your name.

Éomundson 

*

Lothiriel leaned forward on the bench that she straddled, to watch closely how Orfalas squeeze the grated pulp of the coconut until thick, white juice ran down her fingers, and into the bowl. There must have been a technique to it – a certain slowness or evenness in the pressure. Orfalas showed Lothiriel her interlocked fingers, how she steadily pressed the heels of her hands together. The young coconut Orfalas harvested always seemed to stretch a miraculous amount so that at any given day, there was at least one dish fragrant with coconut oil, or topped with desiccated and lightly salted coconut flesh that had dried out safely under a blanket in the sun, or else there was a bowl of grated young coconut sweetened lightly with brown sugar and served with sticky rice. Lothiriel’s excuse for this visit was the delivery of some woven fabrics and supplies to the sitting house: a pair of newly sharpened knives, a pair of finely made toys that threw shadow scenes on the wall, and thread in several colors as the Elf requested.

Yusraa, who had been given her own cot in the Sitting House, was busy in the covered space beneath the house, planting small seeds in neat rows. Orfalas had advised that she stay with the Elf during the remaining months of her pregnancy. The child, Orfalas said, would benefit from the fresh air and their proximity to the sea. The mother would benefit from the silence, and the peace. When she arrived, Lothiriel came upon Yusraa and Orfalas quietly working together on a plate of seeds in the space beneath the Sitting House. Something hard and painful passed through Lothiriel’s body, something she quickly dismissed; how could she desire another life, another situation, than to steward Dol Amroth until her father and brothers returned, when so much uncertainty threatened the world? How could she so much as imagine herself envious of a woman, of a moment, against the abundance of her own friendship with Orfalas? With Yusraa?

And yet. She couldn’t turn towards that emotion – she could barely name it past the pain it caused her. But to look fully at its sharpness terrified her, and filled her with despair all at once. She carried it with her into the Sitting House where it seemed to grow, and hum, like a pet or a pest.  

“This I can store in the cool water of shallow pools nearby,” Orfalas said. She showed Lothiriel the juice of the coconut in thick, narrow glass bottles whose mouths were sealed with wax. “Yavanna truly made good this land,” the Elf said, mostly to herself. Lothiriel smiled.

“Nourished by Ulmo, how could it not be?” Lothiriel said, smiling. “Perhaps even these beloved trees, these fruits, know of Uinen, and her kindness. Is this pulp dry enough?” She showed the coconut pulp that she had squeezed, following Orfalas’s instruction. Orfalas took Lothiriel’s hands between hers, and squeezed the pulp until all the juice had been released. Her hands felt cool and firm on top of Lothiriel’s.

“There is no special instruction here, simply use the strength you have. ‘Tis a small exertion,” Orfalas said. She gestured to a bowl beside them. “We have only this now. I shall have to teach you or some of your young boys how to grate the young meat into strands. The gathering of the fruit, I can teach the new-come men. I expect that many of them will want to shake off their idleness soon.”

“There will be time now. My kin and the rest of the Swan Knights are surely going to return sooner rather than later. There will be time for all kinds of lessons.” It occurred to Lothiriel that new occupations must be found for the refuge seekers who have settled and begun their lives in their region. The tally of refuge seekers was bare, and incomplete: there were names, a loose mapping of which individuals belonged with whom, and where they resided in the region. But little else. The Steward – Lothiriel shook her head. As long as her father had not yet returned, she needed to assume the role of Stewardship. It would be up to her. What else did she need to do to ensure that her father would be able to receive the Stewardship as smoothly as possible? She took up again the curious thought – what would happen when the soldiers returned, when the land swelled again with their presence, and the tight community at Dol Amroth finally disbanded, returned to their own lives? The refuge seekers must have their own occupations, must be able to work the land, must be able to build their own lives. They must all begin again, in a new constellation.

“The muscle you use for this grappling with the future – it is the same muscle your discernment uses,” Orfalas said. “You must harness it, train it with questions. You are far too advanced now to let mere curiosity rule your work,” Orfalas continued. “You must rely upon something more,” she said. Orfalas moved the bowl of pulp close to Lothiriel, and directed her to make sure the squeezed pulp was loose on the tray so it might dry completely, and dry quickly. “We must set aside at least one other afternoon, Lothiriel, to speak about fastening your discernment, and practicing it until the muscle is heavy and strong, especially if you must wrestle with different, foreign materials. Your intuition on the missive was impressive, and it served you well – but you will need stamina, and greater control.”

The Rohir King. Lothiriel almost frowned. When she told Orfalas about the letter, the Elf had been concerned. It was dangerous to embody the memories and experiences of other people, even when the work was easy. Especially when the work was easy, and she could fall into the trap of imagination and, often, exaggeration. And when she could not see clearly, her judgments and emotions were unclear and less sharp.

“This is not a priority, Orfalas. If you would, then you need first teach the refuge seekers about this place, their new home, should they intend to stay. Some of them, I doubt, know even how to swim or float,” Lothiriel said. She tried to sound light, even as she struggled to squeeze handfuls of the coconut pulp. She eyed the jar of deep, brown sugar with naked hunger. She would ask Orfalas to make sweets afterward – her favorite: glutinous balls of pounded rice boiled and then doused in the sweet molasses, then served with fresh coconut.

Orfalas glanced at Lothiriel, and then laughed. “I do not need discernment to know what you are after, Lothiriel!” Yusraa appeared in the doorway just then, her face shining with fragrant sweat; she had brought the scent of the dark, nourishing soil, and the sharp saltiness of the sea into the room with her. She showed the wide woven plate empty of seeds, all planted beneath them. Glancing quickly at Lothiriel, Yusraa walked quickly to Orfalas. They reached for each other, Yusraa quickly grasping Orfalas’s palms. It was a moment of discernment, quick and efficient, like thought passing from one to the next. Lothiriel could not know in which direction it traveled, and she felt as though she was intruding on a private conversation, or sitting at the edge of a whispered conversation. After the exchange, Orfalas came back to her.

“Yusraa is familiar already with your favorite dessert. She can make some for us to share after our meal,” Orfalas smiled, nodding at Yusraa. The girl began to set the table for them, pulling plates and cutlery onto the table with an ease that discomfited Lothiriel, robbing her of the pleasure of anticipating the dessert. She concentrated on her task, squeezing every handful until her wrist and arms were numb and sapped of strength. When she looked up, Orfalas had moved closer to her, her expression unreadable. It had taken Lothiriel a long time to understand that the Elf in these moments was not trying to become less knowable as she grasped harder to listen to something preternatural, something she could not hear or tune into. Something under or above the fabric of the world to which she and Yusraa both belonged.

“Yusraa has prepared a meal for all of us, Lothiriel. From her land. She is very nervous that you might not enjoy it,” Orfalas said kindly. “We have other matters to discuss, and I think her meal will be instructive for you, as well. It will give you a chance to practice your discernment in a different direction, and I shall know if you are ready.”

The meal was simple: diced red onions pickled in a sweet, sugarcane vinegar; a paste of fermented fish; a pile of steamed fresh okra; fluffy white rice served with runny egg; and a pair of garlicky, sweet sausage. All the flavors had been remade: they ate with their hands, and with every bite, Lothiriel uncovered another facet of Yusraa’s journey. Glimpses, hidden behind the twin veils of time and memory, of her home somewhere in Near Hârâd: twisting paths that skirted a city whose dwellings were arranged in no discernible pattern, the joy of singing in the streets during festivals, and so much color that her eyes burned. There were glimpses, again, of the journey north, and the girl’s fear – the feeling of chains against her throat, hands pulling at her clothes and scratching her face, the threat of abduction and torture and death. She would have taken all of these if she could forget the sight of the Mountains of Shadow, ascending forever unbroken, a certainty unbreakable by light. And yet. This was Yusraa: a quiet but persistent refusal to stop walking, the refusal buoyed now by the life she had known in Hârâd. The flavors of Yusraa’s meal were balanced, even delicate, and they carried this quality into Lothiriel’s discernment. Before she had finished her meal, Orfalas reached over and placed Lothiriel’s hand in Yusraa’s. She felt a tug. Lothiriel looked up, meeting Yusraa’s eyes.

“This is what we call longer thought, softer thought,” Yusraa began, holding Lothiriel’s wrist delicately, two fingers on her pulse. Her voice was low, and sweet. She tilted her head, curious but wary. Her eyes were a similar shape to Astoreth’s eyes, Lothiriel realized, the recognition jolting her.

The series of images were deeper, and sweeter than any of Lothiriel’s previous discernments. It was Yusraa, who built the snippets as she sent them – they were memories, emotions, bits of conversation. Lothiriel had never been able to hear before, but she heard now, or thought she did, more voices speaking a language that Yusraa still sometimes slipped into. She felt a hand in her hand – in Yusraa’s hand – grasping hers tightly. A man, maybe a father, their grip warm and comforting. This sliver of memory accompanied by Yusraa’s hope for a reunion, the bright certainty that the reunion would come if she waited. The trees were sparse, and violently orange in the rising sun. A long, uninterrupted plain planted with rows of trees, or crops, and tall, proud stalks that greeted the sky.  

The selection had been random, and uncurated. In the next few weeks, Yusraa would describe this first shared discernment as akin to whispering to one another while separated by a sheet of leather and blankets of thick linen. She could push through or imprint a shadow of her thought for Lothiriel to discern, but even that could be inaccurate and easy to misread. In the Sitting House, Lothiriel gasped, and then she reeled. She looked at Yusraa with wonder, and then some fear.

“I have brought you together because there is work to be done, Lothiriel, and I will not be here for the long labor ahead of you,” Orfalas said. “The sea calls me home, finally, and I am going to answer.”

The sea was inside Lothiriel: its roar, the tug of its current, the waves going over her head. She thought she must drown, thought her vision must fail, her breath caught forever between her ribs. But none of the catastrophe came: she merely continued, blinking, bound to understanding that Orfalas was about to depart, and be gone. Must she endure, Lothiriel thought, even this?

Orfalas was her Kilmessë, a disguse, and an easy way to think of their life on the shores of Middle Earth. A map to remember their home here. But Orfalas had revealed precious few of their long life, where they had been born, and of whom. Lothiriel counted what she knew: the shape of the Elf’s mouth when she was displeased, for the Elf was never outrightly angry. Instead, Orfalas pressed their lips together, tilted their head, and was silent. Lothiriel knew the Elf’s favorite food, their favorite time to disappear into the sea for a swim. She knew when they returned to the Sitting House, they enjoyed company, someone to people the small space. The Elf had been part of her life ever since her mind opened to the world, and their departure would unearth her, displace her. Even the news of it already had.

She must have said, “I understand,” because she heard her voice, and the tremor that followed.  

Orfalas was taller than they had ever been when they moved beside Lothiriel, dwarfing her. They were warmer than the sand of the Anfalas at high noon when they put their hands around Lothiriel’s shoulders, lifting her gently up from her seat. Lothiriel was small, so small, beside the Elf. She was smaller than her kin, but she was just as sturdily built: thick thighs that propelled her through the water, a round belly that she was proud of and that she dressed up with woven belts made of beads and tiny bells in elegant and bright patterns, her small feet that made her quick and quiet, and her hands. Her hands now clasping Orfalas’s waist, pulling herself toward the body that was more fully part of the world than she would ever be. In turn, she felt more deeply connected to her body, pushed fully into her body and an increased almost painful awareness of her own flesh by Orfalas’s proximity, the Elf’s arms around her pressing her against their chest just so. Where was Yusraa? Her mind grasped at the shadow of the question; Lothiriel’s eyes were pouring tears and there was no more room for any shame.  

“Please, I understand,” Lothiriel said. Orfalas held her up easily, despite her weight. She felt the Elf’s breathing, steady and sure and deep, an anchor against the tide. She must have known this day would come, when Orfalas decided to abandon Middle Earth finally. So many Elves had made that journey already. But the knowledge had not been real, it had stayed words and sound in her mind. Orfalas held them still that way for a while, until Lothiriel could no longer weep, until the tears had moved clean through her, leaving her clear and empty, and she could see again. Then, she noticed Yusraa was not in the Sitting House, and there were voices just outside.

“I am only an Elf of no special standing,” Orfalas said quietly. They let go, Orfalas pulled themself away just far enough to look at Lothiriel. “And at long last, I have delivered the fruits of my final and last labor here. I know you understand, how could you not, Lothiriel? I see into your life, and I am glad,” they said. And then they covered Lothiriel’s mouth with theirs, briefly, lightly, to return the warmth of life and feeling.

*

This time, the missive came folded in the shape of a horse, pressed flat and safe in the stiff leather pouch that Héoleth used to preserve correspondences during travel. Dírhael had been among the force of knights which had absorbed the first shock of attack against the horde of screaming mûmaks. Dírhael had been lucky to make it back to the Houses of Healing, missing only a few fingers and the facility to speak. The Healers there said he had been silent since his arrival, and he had painfully scratched his name on a document to make known his identity. That was how Héoleth found him, finally, through the Lady Éowyn. Dírhael was an older man, thickset, with deeply brown skin the color of water-soaked roots. In the Houses, Héoleth found him asleep and healing, his left hand bound securely with linen. But to his own name, he refused to respond. Only when Héoleth mentioned Astoreth’s name, and the favor she had secured from him, did the man turn his head to face him. His letter was the labor of several afternoons – Dírhael learning how to hold the slim quills without breaking them, learning to adjust the pressure on the page without damaging the tip, and then painstakingly writing each word with an uncooperative, dumb hand. It was a short letter. It could not be any longer. Dírhael folded it into the shape of Héoleth’s horse, a custom from the Folde to protect the missive and its messenger intent on its delivery. When Astoreth received it, Héoleth hoped she would recognize Mithroc, the mare’s grey coat and the black spots that adorned its hind quarters. In this way, the animal might make its way back to the sea, for Mithroc would not bear her rider home.

This time, Héoleth volunteered to carry the letters again to Dol Amroth. It was a thicker packet; Grimbold had gone around to ask the Swan Knights if there were missives for their own families that Héoleth might carry home for them with little encumbrance. It generated a curious chatter among the men and women the correspondence between the uncrowned King of Rohan, and the current interim Steward of Dol Amroth. Grimbold was tightlipped by no choice of his own: Éomer had taken no one into his confidence. Still, the soldiers had more idle time now in their period of recuperation, and some of them were outrightly curious and asking questions: are the gears of that great, invisible machine of power and politics turning once again, and if so, in what direction? Many agreed that relations among Gondor and Rohan were warm, friendly – and bound to get friendlier still now that the late Steward of Gondor’s surviving son has found comfort with the White Lady. Many had seen them on the walls of Minas Tirith, in some of its gardens, speaking carefully and quietly. Some have seen their hands clasped, as the White Lady checked on Faramir’s remaining minor injuries. More still have seen them merely walking together all over the city, as though committing its interior to memory. Many further speculated that perhaps Faramir was waiting to move to Dol Amroth permanently after the High King took back the throne. Too many of the Swan Knights were still recovering from their injuries, and the able-bodied were engaged in rebuilding parts of the city that were most grievously damaged: the main gate, the roads on the lower levels, and many houses. Many wanted to stay for the Coronation. There was a shared desire to see the Fourth Age ushered into the city welcoming a Healer as its King. In many ways, Lothiriel’s letter had been prophetic: this was the culmination of a shared Hope, and the first step towards renewal.

This time, Héoleth went willingly, his heart as open as the southern fields studded with groves of trees, and many rivers. The leatherbound packet was secure in a pack behind him, barely any weight as Gracefire raced gleefully south. The mare was no longer young, but Héoleth found that the southlands agreed with her: its hundreds of tributaries flowing out of the White Mountains towards the Anduin, the little pools that eddied beneath small waterfalls. Héoleth gave her free reign to drink from as many pools as she wanted where the water was cool and almost sweet. They kept the little hills to their right on their journey south, and the Anduin to their left. Héoleth let her run, driving her hard only when they were crossing the rivers. Yet even these crossings, the mare savored the challenge. It must have reminded her of the soaked lands, the Entwash delta, and its many mouths. At the crossing of the River Sirith, Gracefire celebrated on each bank, turning up mud with her hooves. She was not made of the city, the constant noise of people living their lives, of strangers cheek-by-jowl with each other and their many strange voices. Gracefire was ecstatic in her relief. Héoleth was almost successful in convincing himself that his own joy was merely a reflection of Gracefire’s, that he was also tired of the city, and glad of the excuse to see more of the world without the threat of war. After the confluence of the rivers Gilrain and Serni, they at last entered the domain of the minor peninsula of Belfalas. The land became rockier, the soil darker. To the south, at their left, the land seemed to rise slightly as the cliffs became more pronounced. The Bay of Belfalas lay just beyond, and in front of them, the tallest of the southern hills. The sea was at last audible: and the air that greeted them was spiked with salt and the curious metallic taste of sand. Something at last felt keenly alive, keening at the chance to swim, to become submerged in the sea. Héoleth struggled to find a name for the sensation, because no word in Rohirric could describe the sea-longing.

This time, Héoleth arrived at Dol Amroth in the early evening. By the time Astoreth found him in the hall, a plate of food before him, he had begun to examine the names printed on the letters. A crowd had gathered in front of him: some men and women standing aside hoping for a letter, dark-haired children curious about the newcomer, and even some refuge-seekers longing for more news. He called her name, and took her hands. Be still, he said. I bring a letter from your husband. Astoreth took the boy’s face in her hands and kissed his temple, and then his hands.

This time, still, the woman could not weep. She could not tremble. Still fully herself, Astoreth deftly unfolded the horse-shape, savoring the smooth paper. It took no time at all for Dírhael’s words, his voice, and his countenance to come back with a force as powerful as a Cerveth storm. He had written: Come to Minas Tirith to see our new King crowned. Come to Minas Tirith to take me home.

Chapter Text

The Rider was right: with the sea behind them and partly obscured by the spine of hills that protected Dol Amroth to the east, the taste of the air was sweet. They turned north, a pair of racing bullets from the southwest, and Astoreth found herself several times wondering at the boy’s sensitivity to the world. She had insisted on riding back with Héoleth—her young mare following Gracefire’s brisk gallop and the horse’s joyful fording of all five tributaries to the Anduin—all the way to Minas Tirith and then on to meet Dírhael. Take me home, her husband had written. He called her to him, so she would come. She heard it more than she read it, her husband’s voice sudden and keening in her mind begging her: Take me home.

For the first time in her life, she lost sight of the sea in the middle of two battling tides of desire: to retrieve her husband, finally, to bring him back, to set her body clean and whole against the violence of the world that had snatched him and hundreds of other men from their lives; and to remain beside Lothiriel at Dol Amroth as it tumbled forward to meet the inelegant but swiftly unfurling future. Even as she held the reigns of her mount steady, keeping the animal and her body in as straight a line as she could to follow Héoleth’s diminishing figure, she also longed to return to the work that she left behind. Her mind and heart were divided thus: her duty to Dol Amroth and everything that entailed including as a wife to a Swan Knight, to Dírhael, and now her duty to a new world and the future she shared with the people on the precipice of the Age of Men. The hope burned within her, made her want to fold the hills in half, made her long for the long days of toil to be over and for the new world to arrive, complete and harmonious. This desire had given her the strength to ask the Steward for permission to ride north, to find Dírhael, to bring him home. Her husband would help usher the new world in, and their return together will only shut the war away farther. When Astoreth brought her husband’s letter to Lothiriel, the Steward refused to contain her joy.

“You need not seek any permission from me to go to your husband. I would have put you on the steed myself! There will be always be work to do, Astoreth,” Lothiriel had laughed, wide and unbound, sounding younger in that moment than she had in the months since she became Steward in her father’s stead. Her mirth, her relief, were infectious; Astoreth allowed herself to smile. The younger woman had shaken her head, and taken both of Astoreth’s hands in her own.

“I promise to keep some of your work for your return, although with Dírhael home, I know you will be doubly occupied,” Lothiriel said. “As you should be, Astoreth.”

With her left hand, the older woman tentatively reached toward her right rib where Lothiriel’s sealed missives were warm against her body. The Steward had not confided in her about the news, or about the contents of the Rohir King’s last letter, or the content of her letter in response. Except for the token, Astoreth thought hard. The token that Lothiriel instructed her to receive from the King. The shadow of a suspicion planted in her mind, the answer stitched into her shirt and pressed against her rib. She carried a set of missives to be delivered to both the King of Rohan, and Prince Imrahil. Astoreth herself had taken an hour to make sure the stitches were tight and clean, the secret pocket reinforced by a cloth stiffened with wax. It was the safest way to travel covertly with important news. She felt the wax seal of the Steward of Dol Amroth burning into her lungs. In lieu of Knights, we send a Knight’s wife, she thought, almost grimacing at their poverty. She could almost laugh, if she thought her voice might not disturb the sky and the mountains that pressed against her. I hope their King will not think us too wretched or foolish, she thought fiercely.

The animal beneath her surged forward, chasing some scent upon the wind that blew into her face to blur her vision. She felt a force of wind behind her, between her shoulder blades, biting and cold and brisk to spill salt into the air, the breath of a thousand unknown lands, an exhale from the edge of the world. Caught between the prayerful palms of two meeting headwinds, an answering breath blew the taste of fruits into her mouth in warm gusts.

Gracefire and most Rohir-raised horses loved the sound of their hooves on the earth most, and they especially loved their power and speed. Astoreth’s mount, raised near the sea and more accustomed to short, brisk runs, fought to keep up; the sweat sheened on her body as they raced after a shrinking Héoleth. Following her made the journey easier and safer: Gracefire already knew to avoid where spots of soft soil had accumulated from sudden rains, where the denser thickets could catch and delay them. She knew where the sweetest streams flowed, where the long, untouched grass grew with wild berries hidden among the unruly and sporadic thickets spread at the base of the White Mountains. During one of their breaks, Héoleth mused that Gracefire had already picked out the swiftest route and begun laying the foundation for the new southern road into Dol Amroth all by herself.

“If so, Rider, direct her to strike out far enough away that those families might not be netted into trade against their ambition of peace,” Astoreth said, gesturing to the sloping land behind them. There, they had passed the rough beginnings of holdings and clustered homes, too small even to be called villages, sheltered among the foothills. Many of these homesteads were newly built, the wood and stone still freshly assembled and bound together, still smelling sweet and alive. Some of the buildings were occupied by Southern Gondorians, but even more were refuge seekers, constellations of strangers pulled together into found families, like Yusraa’s, who had chosen sites farther inland from the sea. From the Sitting House where she had been invited to stay, Yusraa had insisted on moving to a new home with eight other refuge seekers, all of them coming up from Hârâd or even farther southeast, from Khând. In this family, Yusraa was among the eldest, and the only one among them who had found an occupation with the Elf Orfalas. Her home, as the others’, were marked out by the fresh trails that recorded the people’s industry, the aroma of turned earth where they were marking out family gardens, new lines of vegetables decorating the earth and writing new stories in soil and leaves. Even here, far enough away to be out of sight, the wind carried the faintly metallic scent of upturned earth. New roads broke the region and changed the land.

Héoleth looked at Astoreth with some guilt then, and said, “I have found myself visiting here as I ride south or north, Lady, to bring news. If these families will it, I will continue to ride out to meet them. Many, as you said, are new-come to the land. I might be among the first to bring them news after months of isolation. But yes, only so long as they allow it.”

It was strange for Astoreth to think that Héoleth with his sand-colored hair, the flush of red deep in his skin brought out by the warmth and heat of the coast, and the persistent alienness of his green robes, that this boy had seen more of her country than she had recently traveled. It brought a strange, sharp pain to her heart. Her eyes had been filled with the sea, and the storm ever at the horizon, threatening to raise towers of water against their shores. The fear that had taken hold of the region even before Prince Imrahil had set out to meet the war was heavy in her limbs, and it had erased the vista of their future from her eyes. She was only starting to see, again, the land that she loved most, as the threat of war receded slowly into a long myth, a fading nightmare.

*

On the second afternoon on their journey north, Héoleth led them to rest by a stream as the sun settled high above them. They sat on the edge of the running water, on a shelf of flat rocks from where they refilled their waterskins. Out here, at high noon, the vastness of the world was wild and impossible to comprehend: each stream glittered, a knife that sliced easily across a shadowless world. The sun bleached the world of color, and every surface was a mirror of its illumination. Each blade of grass, grove, or thicket gleamed. Astoreth yearned to rest her eyes, to turn the world away for a few moments, perhaps to meet with memories of her husband and to steel herself for their impending meeting. Even as she pursued the hope of him, the shadow of another fear laid itself upon her and against her heart. The questions swirled within her: would she recognize him? Would she be able to nurse him in the way that he would need? Behind them, even softer, would she still know how to give him what he needed? 

“You seem much at home here, Héoleth,” Astoreth observed, turning away from the world. She smiled with pleasure at the young man, instead. She recalled the early threat that Héoleth had briefly presented to the new-come refuge seekers amassing at Dol Amroth, how ill-delivered news might lead to the Princedom becoming a permanent outpost seeking war, and the refuge seekers made prisoners in permanent dislocation and dispossession where there should have been roads for industry. Astoreth thought, it must not have been easy or simple for the soldier to come so close, and to befriend unfamiliar things. Did they teach this grace in the Horselands? Or did their people simply have this grace bred into them? How strange, Astoreth thought, as her mind grasped forward, longing to expand into the unknown.

“These lands will not be wild for long,” she continued. Her heart faltered: what did it mean that the world was becoming more known, that there were shades vanished forever?

But Héoleth was in the sunshine-speckled shade, untouchable because he was young, and he said, “In Aldburg, Lady, there are many who provide this service. Our villages are much scattered, like these, surrounded on every side by grazing land, by small farms. The service keeps us together, and there is both joy and purpose in the labor.”

From one of the bags strapped to Gracefire, he produced a tightly bound parcel of rice cakes, each flat and hefty, the size of his palm. There were perhaps six or maybe more of them tied together. These had been bound in leaves, the sticky rice sweetened with grated ginger, stuffed with flaked meat, and then steamed in some kind of flavorful stock. They were moist and soft, even after several days’ ride. They ate in silence, dipping their fingers into the stream every now and then.  

“They allow it because they are familiar with you, because you have spent time with these people,” Astoreth supplied, touching briefly on the time Héoleth spent with various refuge seekers when most of them had recuperated at Dol Amroth to become acquainted with the Sea.

“We are alike in many ways,” Héoleth said, nodding. It was not lost on Astoreth how the boy thought himself seeking refuge, as well. Although from what, she could only guess. “For one, we are all unfamiliar with the wide water, and these lands. So, we have lashed ourselves together -- collect what we can of our fears, of our hopes, what we know, to make sense of where we have found ourselves. The weeks I spent here in Dol Amroth have taught me much, including how closely my life seems to mirror the lives of some Haradrim,” Héoleth said, his voice charged and low as he continued. Astoreth smiled with the knowledge that Lothiriel’s plan had worked.

“The Lady Steward will be happy to know her machinations have brought you an education,” she quipped. “As she had hoped, as she predicted. To empty you of fear, once you had enough time to heal from your earliest suspicions. That you have rid yourself of it entirely is how I know you have been marked for peace-time.”

“Then I am nothing but grateful! It was an education that has moved me greatly,” he said, looking up at the sky through the leaves, his eyes wide. “It continues to move me across the leagues to return,” he finished, making his voice light. “The world has shrunk for me, has become familiar, its people less strange. The education has made me less strange, as well,” he mused.

Astoreth could only guess how far it had taken the young soldier to travel to this insight – she, who had married a Knight, who knew that part of the discipline to protect was also the horrible and horrifying duty to take life, when it was commanded. But no man willingly endured that responsibility, to live with that horror in themselves, to live with the shame of having slain another man. And yet. And so: instead of slaying men, they slayed enemies, slayed Haradrim or Easterling or Southron, slayed thieves, or pillagers, or enemy warriors.   

“Would that more Men of war spoke thus, Rider. Even I can see how joyfully you take to the duty of helping the refuge seekers to build their lives with us and among us,” Astoreth said. She paused, gathering her words, thinking about the long road that they had yet to travel. “Do you know what we whispered about you when you were new-come to us, Héoleth?”

He shook his head, puzzled. He took another rice cake from his pouch, breaking it in half to offer to her. She declined. The cakes were heavy in her hands, and nourishing.  

“We said of you, and of the lands and people that had sent you: the north was not safe,” Astoreth replied gently although the coals of her rage were still warm at the lingering threat of annihilation that could still consume them.

“Is it still so? What of the refuge seekers who travel up north, towards Gondor, towards Rohan?”

For a long moment, his gaze seemed to diffuse, to lose sight of the vista around them, to snap the distance shut so that he might arrive elsewhere. Astoreth’s vision was still so full of the sea and the sun, she could not make out what he was trying to find. When Héoleth turned back to her, his gaze was troubled and unstill.  

“Think you the world has been as kind as your people, Lady? This is not so. Even now, as we speak, I do not doubt that Éomundson allows the scouting parties little restraint and even less gentleness when they seek out and route bands of people traveling under no banner, in stealth, and pursuing a journey north with no clear destination. My own Captain Grimbold has been restless in the city. No doubt many of the soldiers, though occupied, are fretful at being so caged, so on the precipice of an unusual though hard-won peace. He says that the War may be won, but that our enemies prowl at night, eager to take their vengeance against us. He says there is no time for rest, not yet. There are many among us who fear that this peace will not last, that it is only, still, a shifting illusion.”

“The Lady Steward had anticipated this, the ways that men can be turned cruel in their fear and suspicion,” Astoreth said, filing away Héoleth’s intelligence for Lothiriel. She would turn her keen eyes to the soldiers and Knights in the White City, and speak to them if she can. The work of Hope was still in her belly, urging her to speak again. “And what do you think, Rider?”

“That fear should not be allowed to unmake Men,” he said. “But equally, that fear helps us make wise choices. Our captains are not evil men, Lady, although they have acted with cruelty, their hands forced to wield weapons of War. Fear doesn’t direct them as much as love and survival. And is it not a greater folly to distrust what years of evidence and experience have taught us to be true? That the world can be cruel, and that Men are among the cruelest animals?” He sounded bitter, even in the high noon, chasing the shadows and unable to stand still in the sun.

“And now in the Age of Peace, Rider? To build is not as easy as to destroy. Even Gracefire knows this as she remakes the roads across Northern Lebennin,” she said, her lips quirking upward, trying for some levity, trying to make room for light between them.  

Héoleth finished his meal, shredding the leaves between his hands, and staining his fingers in the process. “Did you enjoy the meal, Lady? Yusraa made them for us. She insisted on helping to stock our provisions to keep us well-fed. She knew the distance we would need to travel, she said that even her journey had led her to approach the White City before she turned back in fear. All this, yet she had feared me, too, at first,” Héoleth said.

That made the older woman smile widely, her joy breaking through to both of them. The word-lists project had taken root, broken ground, and begun to bear its first fruits. During gatherings on the beach, the young encamped themselves among the gently twisted trees to weave rope or baskets or other useful things besides. During their chores, they talked, their exchange quick and efficient, learning words from each other, and making new ones, expanding each other’s language. The labor was productive, in more ways than one. Among them, Yusraa had given them the gift of names for fruit, for the music that they sang from Near Hârâd, and in turn their words sounded soft and pliant and new in her mouth, from her tongue.

“What would make the world more suitable for women like Yusraa?” Astoreth asked, knowing she was asking him as much as herself. “For women like Yusraa—and I?” She could hardly believe that she had asked this aloud, although the question had long resided in the dark of her mind.

“I do not know, Lady,” he said, after considering the question. His expression twisted into with concern, trying to grasp the unknowing, and trying to capture the shape of his own ignorance. “I am afraid you have taken in the wrong Rider. You have equipped me only with these stories, with these words, and with the desire to come back to the Sea.”

“It is a shame that we must consume Yusraa’s rice cakes on the way. Perhaps their flavor might convince your Captain, and your King to think again upon the changing world, and the fate of the people who have been displaced therein.” It sounded to Astoreth like a weak argument, but she had nothing left to give. She could not know about war, about the kind of counsel that generals or captains or kings listened to. It was not easy to hope then, as the world tilted slowly on its axis in an immovable and unchangeable history.

“Perhaps, Lady.” Héoleth said, blinking. “Although, ‘tis a mighty charge for Yusraa’s rice cakes to take upon themselves, nourishing as they are!” His laugh lifted Astoreth’s gloom.

*

After riding for four days, the sight of Minas Tirith dwarfed their conversations. The Anduin rounded out to meet them, stretching languidly westward to avoid a cluster of hills on the east bank. Beyond, only a few leagues out, was the outline of the stronghold city, glistening like a stranded star set against the eastern spine of the White Mountains. Héoleth and Astoreth had forded three rivers, putting the third behind them in the morning. They rested now in the forested doab between Sirith and Celos: the interfluvial place was an island, surrounded at one point by the banks of two rivers and the wider mouth of their confluence to the south. It would take them less than two days now to reach the city. And there was only one remaining rice cake between them, which Astoreth refused, repeating her desire for Héoleth to bring the rice cakes to the other soldiers, in celebration of Yusraa.  

The reunion with her husband became an imminent event now that she could see the spires of the city; Astoreth’s mind began to gnaw against her fear of an unkind meeting, or one in which her presence would bring none of the comfort or relief that Dírhael sought. Astoreth dangled her feet into the gently flowing Celos mere meters away from where its slightly murky, blue water was engulfed whole by the Sirith as it gushed south, the river frothing against its banks, a ribbon of light chasing the Pelargir. Her body shivered in protest, sending prickles of gooseflesh up her spine. Before most of her excitement turned into trepidation, she angled her body toward Héoleth, who sat a little way from her. He was writing on a thick piece of paper folded over several times, protected from the spray of the dewy grass by a length of stiff leather propped upon his lap. The ink he carried was in a small vial wrapped in hide and fortified with soft rope, and his quill was any hard twig that he rolled between his thumb and forefinger then sharpened into a point just enough to make his letters legible. He sat in the sun, soaking himself in the light as he wrote. Astoreth regretted the intrusion, almost. She hoped her voice would not waver.

“Tell me, Rider. How did you find my husband? Was he well?” She swallowed against the terror that held her, sudden and complete. But she was a Knight’s wife, and this was her duty as well: to prepare herself and her husband for battle, to face the grim consequences of her husband’s warring, and to endure. She steeled herself against Héoleth’s response.

“I left him still healing, Lady. He will need to heal for a while yet,” He glanced at her, gauging how much of the truth he might disclose. Methodically, he put away the bottle of ink, tying the stopper into place with more rope, and he tucked the paper into a pocket.

Astoreth kept her face placid, unmoving. Gently, she tilted her chin up, a gesture that Héoleth had learned to interpret as a signal to continue. He described Dírhael’s injuries, his muteness, how he had produced the letter to deliver to her. How only the sound of her name seemed to return him to himself. At this, Astoreth bowed her head, and pressed her eyes closed against the gleaming world. She bit into the flesh of her knuckles to stifle herself. It was too much and too sudden, the force of it sent her reeling against the world. Astoreth was silent as she wept, the tears squeezed from her shut eyes. Not even her breath mingled with the wind. Under the leather riding cloths, the light linen of her dress was pristine, still.

Take me home, her husband’s words still a refrain, endlessly ringing in her mind, a bell that called to her.

“Writing the letter to you, Lady, has kept him sane,” Héoleth pressed on, now unable to stop, something urging him on. “The battle took some of him away. But more than that, I see in him that which ails others in my own éored. A kind of wasting terror that eclipses the mind and makes it dark and impervious. It may be that this condition will require you to stay a while in the city before you attempt the ride back home.” 

“I see,” she said, nodding faintly. “Think you – the journey—” she wrenched her eyes heavenward, struggling to ask the question. “Will he survive the journey home?”

More than that, she knew Dírhael feared that there would be no home for him to return to. She had packed precious little to remind him of the sea, the impossible pull of the water, and the life that they had built together: a few pieces of sea glass gathered from the most recent low tide, and a few bundles of dried fragrant wild grass that she kept in bowls to sweeten the air in their room. Astoreth’s mind climbed towards hysteria, and she wished, not for the last time, that she had access to Lothiriel’s discernment so that she, too, might glean something of her husband from his letter, that she might sit as close as possible to his fear. Instead, she had asked the Steward to glean on her behalf, to discern what she could. At first, Lothiriel had refused her request, recoiling even at the idea, and pulling herself away from Astoreth.

Lothiriel shook her head and lay her arms across her chest protectively, hiding her hands from the paper that contained Dírhael’s message. Astoreth stood in the center of Lothiriel’s cramped office, the room slightly less crowded as Lothiriel had begun to clear away older stacks of parchment, books, and empty ink bottles. Reaching down to where Lothiriel sat, Astoreth had grasped Lothiriel’s shoulders, her eyes skewed almost shut by the request. The Steward looked distressed, her brown face contorted by con fusion and terror, her lips set in a thin, tight line. The small paper horse lay on Lothiriel’s lap, creased and soft from use. By now, every word of the short missive had been seared into the darkness behind Astoreth’s closed eyes, her husband’s name a brand that haunted her. His handwriting had been scratchy and stiff, each stroke painfully etched. She could not bear it – she could not bear for his pain to render him an alien to her, unknowable, and stranded on some far, separate place. She would find a way – any way – to breach that gulf. She tumbled to her knees, her arms heavy as lead, clutching at Lothiriel’s shoulders, her forehead in the girl’s lap. The chair groaned beneath their weight.

“Please, Steward,” Astoreth said, her voice muffled. “Knowing is the only way I can share this horror with my husband. I cannot come to him—” she felt herself suddenly weak, suddenly crumbling. “I cannot even approach him now. What could I even say?”

“We do not know what I might unearth in the discernment, Astoreth,” Lothiriel said, her voice small and high. “There is much pain here. Pain which I do not know if I can understand, let alone interpret. I do not need to even touch the letter to understand this. The gleaning of it will be dangerous.” The potent letter—its somber words, even the very ink of the missive—had its own gravity. It pulsed between the women with a heartbeat of its own. They stayed in that silence, neither one relenting, for a while.  

“I know it is much to ask of you, Lothiriel,” Astoreth said, turning her face up in supplication. “And I will not ask again, only know that there is no greater pain than to be parted from him, and parted so absolutely in this way.”

A moment passed between them, suspended in silence, as Astoreth allowed hunger and pain and grief to cross her expression.  

“And what would you want me to discern of him, Astoreth?” Lothiriel asked, finally giving way. She gripped Astoreth’s arms with her hands, holding them in place, together.

“Pain, fear, all of it!” Astoreth cried. The missive was soft and creased from the hundreds of times that Astoreth had folded and unfolded it.

“So be it,” Lothiriel said, shakily. “And if I must meet with yet more correspondence, surely I should not fear to tread a similar path,” she murmured. Astoreth had not missed it even then, frantic as she had been: Lothiriel’s tremor of fear, the way her body stiffened and braced itself. And then the younger woman was still as the small paper horse disappeared into her grip, briefly, before she began to unfold it and trace the letters, following the path of the ink and the hand that wrote it. Lothiriel swayed in her seat. Her eyes became unfocused, she stopped blinking, and her body grew warm to the touch. Astoreth removed herself from Lothiriel’s lap, sitting on the floor a foot away, hugging her knees to her chest.

When Lothiriel practiced her discernment, Astoreth knew how rarely she lost control of her own body. Only working with the Rohir King’s letters had made her lose herself, made it difficult to return to herself, and to anchor herself back to the present. She knew that Lothiriel had been shaken by the practice of discerning into the alien and unknown mind of the foreign King, and yet she had asked this of the Steward. She felt cruel and wicked, especially as she found she had no remorse, no regret, as she waited on the floor of the tower room. She watched Lothiriel trace her husband’s words to draw out the discernment, and then when the younger woman spoke, Astoreth felt nothing but relief.

“The handwriting is deceptive, Astoreth. There is pain, but it is only in his body as it heals, as parts of him resist healing. The greater hurt is his soldier’s pride, his shame at surviving. And there is a great thread here—” she reached out into the room, her finger tips stretched out in full as though to grasp something, “there is a thread here of fear that you might pity him his disfigurement.” She gently pushed the air aside, returning her hand to the missive. “But your husband is not yet whole, Astoreth. When he wrote to you, there was shame in the request that you come to his aid. Shame that could not overpower his need for you, to hold you,” she said. Lothiriel swallowed, then opened her eyes. “And there is so much shame in him, shame as he imagined how the Rohir soldiers found him in the field, shame for his new helplessness. Shame that had become distrust for the Healer who had him in her charge. Who could care for him, after all of that?” For a long moment, Lothiriel’s countenance seemed to morph into Dírhael’s likeness, his stare transported through time and space and ink, drawn over Lothiriel’s face: the shape of her mouth turning up into a grimace that was his, the slight twitch that lived at the corner of his eye, the expression of pain.

“Underneath all of this, the desperate and keening desire to return home, and the fear of it. The fear that he will no longer have a home to return to,” Lothiriel finished and Dírhael vanished.

In the tower room, as Lothiriel’s pronouncements faded into silence, Astoreth could not weep. She had asked for the pain, and for her husband’s torment to be unmasked and named. She endured it. But now, in the forest with no one but a young soldier as witness, Astoreth’s tears fell onto the river-rock on which she perched, the wind quickly stealing them away. Héoleth could not touch her; he could not attempt to address her grief and terror as they emerged. Wherever she had gone, Héoleth could not follow, could not comprehend it, and so instead he bore witness in silence, at first, until he began to sing. The words were melodious but alien to Astoreth, the gentle rolling consonants snagging her attention only briefly. But he sang as much for her as for himself, to create a way for him to be with the older woman without disturbing her grief; it was like a gauzy veil. They stayed like that for a while, a pair of animals making noise in the world and disturbing nothing.

Gently, the shadows returned as the heat of the sun waned just enough to color the fields and the steel-tipped mountains that hunkered down against them, an imposition and a question against the territories of the sky. When Astoreth lifted her head, her knuckles were bruised from where she had smothered herself against the bones of her hand. Héoleth continued to sing, his voice now straining, eyes fixed towards the grove of trees and tall grass where Gracefire and Astoreth’s mare stood. Astoreth sought to compose herself as much as she could without moving too much: she brushed away the remaining tears on her cheeks, ran a hand across her rib, and then she took a shaky breath. When he finished, he drew breath and then finally, hesitantly, looked over at her.

“Do not worry yourself, Rider,” Astoreth said, weakly. “We shall arrive at Minas Tirith, your errand completed, and I shall find my own way back to Dol Amroth.” She smiled at the boy, and added, “You sang that song beautifully, although I am afraid most of its meaning was lost on me.”

“It was a lullaby, as far as I could tell. Yusraa and some of the younger children taught it to me, although I can only mimic the sound of the words. I do not know its meaning, either, not in full,” Héoleth said, blushing with the memory. “You must think me foolish, but I hoped even the sound of it might comfort you as I have witnessed her comfort so many others.”  

“Yusraa is truly a miracle worker, for even the music of her people have found a home in you!” She paused then to regard him before she continued, “You have taken her with you.” She considered it: how, through Héoleth, other soldiers might hear Yusraa’s story, her words, even some of the music that her people sang. How one Rider might begin the work of peace-building. Héoleth had been long at sea during this last visit, Astoreth remembered. From there he would come home with a light in his eyes that she recognized from Orfalas and the other Elves who kept most to themselves: a kind of stirring that clouded over and pulled their gaze to the horizon. Astoreth unfolded herself quickly and approached him, her own eyes still red-rimmed from weeping even as she reached forward to clasp one of his hands. “It is important, Héoleth, that this is part of how you return. That you have heard these songs, this music, and that you have listened to Yusraa and other refuge seekers like her. They will come to that city, not as a stranger, but through you. Do you feel the weight of this responsibility, of your witnessing?”

Héoleth squeezed her hand; the wind rose around them, lifting the smell of the gentle, untrampled earth. The grass had dried around them and turned luminous, emerging fitfully from the world, whole and new. The missive that Héoleth was writing was still in his lap, and still carefully protected against the wind. She glanced down quickly at the dark brown ink stains on the side of his fingers.

“Aye, Lady. I’m afraid that Yusraa’s rice cakes, what we know of her history, and even what I witnessed of the refuge seekers may all be insufficiently rendered – but they are here, I have them, as much as I can. My hope is that my account might be supplanted by their own telling, by their own voices,” he met her eyes shyly. The wisdom of his wish struck her with a new force, taking her breath. “And if you are willing, you might add your own account. Éomundson would hear it, would hear you, I am certain.”

Astoreth let go of his hand to touch the missive from Lothiriel, the secret weight of which seemed less burdensome now. In the tower room after the discernment, Lothiriel sat with her legs stretched on the floor, her palms flat on the stone, her cheeks flushed and her skin overheated from the effort. In a firm voice, she instructed Astoreth to return to Dol Amroth carrying a personal token from the Rohir King.

“The Steward gave me specific instructions about my duties to her in Minas Tirith, including the delivery of her correspondence with the Rohir King. I would place her letter into his hand myself,” she said, levelling the Rider with her gaze. “I would speak with him if he will it. And the Steward tasked me to receive a token for her, from the King.”

“A token from a King?” Héoleth repeated, sounding surprised. Astoreth knew how it sounded, the unusual nature of it, and its expectation of intimacy. She knew that if Lothiriel were to use it for her discernment, as she thought the Steward intended, then any token would be dangerous in her hands. What was it for? Lothiriel’s continued correspondence with the Rohir King had seemed, at first, a curiosity. And with the news from the north and the proceedings after the war that Héoleth brought, Lothiriel had used the correspondence as a bridge for Dol Amroth and Rohan, in the service of peace. But a personal token was different. It signified a more permanent change. Astoreth’s thoughts swirled, unable and unwilling to grasp at the only probable reason.

“It should be something small,” Astoreth said instead, repeating Lothiriel’s words. And potent, she supplied, herself.

Without another word, Héoleth stood up and whistled. Gracefire trotted up to stand beside him. From one of the bags still strapped to her side, he removed another leather folder that he unfolded to reveal three portraits of Lothiriel rendered in black and blue ink. Lothiriel’s face gazed up at them in the dappled light, her expression solemn and fierce. In the next sketch, Lothiriel was sitting on a log in the shade of a sandy grove, her face turned to the sea, and her hands busy coiling fiber into rope. Baskets waited by her feet. In the sketch, her hair was light blue in the sunlight, her expression serene. In the distance was the shadow of the cliff on which Dol Amroth perched. The sea was a blur in the soft, hazy distance, running off of the page. In the final sketch, Lothiriel stood in the middle of the paper, her hair cropped to above her shoulder, her round face soft and yielding to an easy joy, caught in the middle of a laugh. She had been rendered in a simple dress, plain except for the intricate patterns that followed the lines of her body, the roundness and heaviness of her stomach and the shape of her legs. The coy neckline dipped to just below her collar, decorated by a fleet of galloping horses. She looked like herself: striking, but not beautiful.

“The Elf Orfalas bid me put this in the hands of my King. It was unsealed, as you saw,” he said. “I offered to bind it or tie it,” he shook his head. “They told me it was unnecessary, that the portraits would not need the protection. That I should show it to you when I felt the time was ripe. There is another—” Héoleth revealed a packet of folded pages behind the portraits from Orfalas and addressed to the King of Rohan. Instead of wax, this correspondence had been bound with thin fibers of rope.

“Was I mistaken in showing all of this to you, Lady?” Héoleth asked. The Eldar had captured even the tiny crinkle between Lothiriel’s brows that made her look as fierce as she could be. Astoreth reached over, her hand hovering over the image. She stopped herself. The portraits could be smudged, torn, dirtied or otherwise harmed, and then they would hardly be a fitting troth-token. She knew this just as surely as if Lothiriel herself had informed her.

“No, you were not. These are but the first fruits of war, strange but not uncalled for,” Astoreth said so softly that she hoped Héoleth would not divine her meaning. Her entire body had become stiff with worry, and she knew, if her reasoning was sound, that Lothiriel had spared her the knowledge exactly to save her from her own fear, her own clawing terror and the fatigue of bearing it. She turned away from him.

“Let us make haste now, Rider. The winds are rising, and I long now to put myself against the desire to return,” she said.

A gust of cool air rushed through the clearing then, sweeter now than Astoreth had ever tasted. It bore none of the sea-saltiness with which she was familiar. Turning northward, she sought more. Though they had lost sight of the city as they forded the rivers, Astoreth glimpsed it now, framed by the branches of the tallest trees: white walls climbing up to cleave the mountain rock; thousands of glass windows twinkling faintly; the hulking shape of the city crowding the light from the sky. It took a little while for Astoreth to realize that she could no longer hear the Sea, that she had not been able to, for a while.

They forded the Celos quickly, both horses sure-footed from days learning the land, and onward they barreled towards the Erui and then past it, on and on northward in a near straight line towards Minas Tirith. It was not until Minas Tirith covered their horizon entirely that Astoreth asked for another brief rest before they began their final approach. She had never felt as unmoored as she did in that moment, caught waiting for the larger pieces of her life to fall into place: in front of her, a husband waiting for his wife; behind her, Dol Amroth where Lothiriel waited for a husband of her own and the loss that her absence will create. Héoleth and Astoreth stood together briefly, their backs to the mountains to face the Sea that had become obscured by the land and distance.

“You asked me, Lady, if your husband might survive your return journey to Dol Amroth,” Héoleth began, his posture suddenly rigid. “He will. I will make sure of it,” he declared. “He will not suffer the loss of his life near the Sea, not if I am free to aid him. I have often thought how strange it was that my mind and heart had once not known about the Sea. I confess, Lady, that I am grown more and more desperate to remain near it. Somewhere, a hook has been buried in my heart, a kind of strange bereavement. I long to make this journey again.”

She glanced at him, surprised. This Rider, too, stood as a pawn in the shifting sand, his body and his life bracketed on all sides by the fatal politics of power already carving up the world into new shapes, birthing new authorities. When the Rohirrim return to their own lands, how far then do the leagues stretch, how firm must his will and cunning become, to bring Héoleth back to the Sea? Astoreth thought.  

“I take you at your word, for the Sea has you now and I trust that the Lady Uinen shall call you hence to her service,” she smiled, hoping that he will feel the warmth and kinship there.

“I share that hope, Lady. I still have to learn how to swim,” he said, a dreamy look coming over him briefly. Then he urged Gracefire around, towards the city, and its lesser gates.

*

Orfalas told her when she was young—before, when the fears she had catalogued were small and pervaded less of her life—that only those unfamiliar with the sea could think it cruel. She thought it cruel, now, when it threatened to take the Elf past the reach even of her imagination. The leagues stretched into the dimness that only her ignorance could fathom. Had she ever been that young?

The water lapped at her cheeks as she floated on her back, her breasts and belly exposed to the air, her sea clothes offering little protection from the chill. Lothiriel could not even think of the sea without Orfalas. If she beseeched the Lady through fervent prayer, would the Maia understand? Though she knew that not even Uinen could save her, not even Uinen could work against the Elf’s decision to leave Middle Earth, one of the few who had stayed as long.

She floated on her back, willing time to slow down even as she trembled from the effort to breathe slowly. It had been days since Astoreth rode to Minas Tirith. By her reckoning, Astoreth would likely be entering the walled city soon. Her heart hammered in her chest, flooding her ears with her own heartbeat. Above her, the sky was bright and cloudless, its clarity pierced her clean through until she felt hot tears pricking her eyes from the light, and from feeling. Orfalas was leaving the following dawn to walk across the Anfalas, following the coast west through Pinnath Gelin, before then making their way up north past the river Lefnui. Where the White Mountains failed to reach the sea, the elf would make for the narrow crossing decorated by scraggly hills and an uneven plain. Only then would they have passed through Gondor completely, turning finally away from the south to make as straight a line as possible up to the Gulf of Lune, and the waiting ships ready to bear them away.

Farther upon the slope of the shore, above the artificial line in the sand where the shore ended, Orfalas arranged woven baskets from the crooked trees that held the line of the beach against the forest. The baskets were packed with plaited cloth scraps to retain its shape; the baskets would hang to dry against the salt-speckled wind for a month before being taken down and then sealed with a special paint. After that, the baskets were nearly indestructible: lightweight, waterproof, and able to travel long distances without any harm. Even the woven pattern was unique to each basket, especially the ones the Elf wove. They had once told her some of the runes were for protection, and some were to call upon strength, or resilience, or speed. Orfalas wove several of the baskets themself; Lothiriel would travel on to meet the Rohir King with some of these when she left Dol Amroth. The Rohir King, whom she agreed to wed, whose troth she accepted. The thought burned in her mind, bright like a beacon, illuminating a path that she had long evaded. But the day would come, just as today had come.

As she often did now, fending off the dread of the Elf’s departure and her own, Lothiriel closed her eyes and willed herself to dissolve. She was the salt in the sea, perhaps even the thing that buoyed up the boat that would take Orfalas west, and out of Middle Earth. As salt, as the sea itself, her wide shores would reach even the uttermost West, beyond human error, beyond mortal death. She allowed herself to feel weightless, to float in the even calm of the gently swaying water, and she knew even Uinen could feel her grief. She said the prayer again, asking the Maia to take the grief away, to let it wash away from her skin, from the essence of her bones, as she struggled to keep breathing. Lothiriel flipped herself in the water and swam back to shore. She had no more time; she had spent Orfalas’s last week shirking her duties as Steward, finding ways to escape to the Sitting House, only to watch the Elf slowly dismantle it. When Lothiriel discovered this slowest destruction, she cried, that there would be nothing left of them in Middle Earth, and nothing left to remind her of them.

“But that is not true, Lothiriel,” and the Elf had touched her chest, tracing a line with their finger from Lothiriel’s sternum up to her throat. “You are here, and I have served the world well to keep you.” Her body had burned at their touch, every muscle and bone taut with the anticipation of another kiss. It never came. Orfalas never kissed her again.  Her heart clenched at the thought, but she took a shaking breath and dove. She would not think of it. Not today.

Her eyes stung, but she kept them open as she swam deeper, letting the ache of her lungs overtake every other pain, real or imagined. She dove and pushed her body down, allowing the pressure of the water above her to push her deeper. All too quickly, the muscles around her lungs and throat began to tighten, the desire to breathe a noose snapped shut. Uinen, she thought, desperate. Her eyes blurred against the black-blue stillness, and from the tips of her body began to tingle, began to burn. If she surfaced, it would be day. Day, still. Orfalas’s last day on Middle Earth. The thought was a stone, it sank her deeper, until she felt she had entered a cool river somewhere in the depths. Tugged forward and back, she pumped her limbs, trying to escape the pull of the stray, wild current. But if she were the sea, her will would be the sea’s will, would it not? The current brought her up, brought her closer to the shore, brought her back to the day.

When she surfaced, her first lungful of air was sweet, and she found that the current had pulled her into the bay, but farther from where Yusraa had watched her disappear. The girl was facing away from her where she had stubbornly stayed in the shallows. The water came up to caress Yusraa’s knees as she softly rested one hand on her belly. Yusraa’s belly had curved and swollen, growing ripe, as she approached her sixth month of pregnancy. Lothiriel had told the young mother that the sea water would help ease some of the pain of carrying a growing child, but the girl simply could not believe her. She was used to the lakes and rivers that decorated the interior of Middle Earth, the water there warmer even than in Dol Amroth. Her body seemed to crave walking, the mechanical and rhythmic motion of it, so much so that she had left the Sitting House for a home farther inland. Her fluency aided by her softer thought, Yusraa communicated how the cities in her homeland were built almost on top of the rivers that veined the plain with iridescent water: still, silent, and sweet. Cities built of a tough, light wood that grew aplenty in the east. Cities that disappeared when their plains disappeared beneath swollen riverbanks, built for a season instead of an empire. Homes on tall stilts, rebuilt over and over again, claiming nothing but a few seasons; houses that even moved or swayed as needed to ride the gush of river current. These houses weren’t stone, and hadn’t been built to last.

“We don’t want to resist—” Yusraa said slowly. When she spoke, it was in short bursts still suspended in longer pauses. But she persisted through the discomfort of another language, the long work of assimilation. “—fate and what needed to happen. It is wiser simply to build again, build anew. Our time is shorter,” the girl finished. What she meant, Lothiriel thought, was that their reckoning of time was the season, not the year, stitching their lives to the moon, not the sun.

Orfalas and Lothiriel found that the girl could not swim, and that she was unused to the deep water. There was something stiff in her limbs, something stitching her to the ground, and making her body as heavy and unyielding as rock. A stone, in all their pretty colors and shades. Stones sank. It had taken Lothiriel half a day to convince Yusraa to take to the sea with her, to wade farther than the wet sand, but even with Orfalas’s blessing, and their promise to remain on the beach as long as both women were in the water, Yusraa kept her fear close, and kept herself away from the sea. This was one of Orfalas’s final tasks for them: for Lothiriel’s heart to open wider to the girl. What had been hard and painful during their first meeting, the strange seeds of envy and longing, had finally dissipated.

Lothiriel swam until the shallows, and she could reach the sea floor. She stood up clumsily and made her way to Yusraa, who looked relieved to see her back. Her sea clothes stuck to her body, its roundness almost an equal to Yusraa’s. The girl held out her hand, and she took it, their discernment—their habit of shared thinking, of thinking in parallel and of exchanging longer thoughts—now seamless as if their ideas flowed down only one river. They were never words that she gleaned from Yusraa, because language had to be built like a bridge between and among people. For them, for their quick bracing hands, Yusraa offered snippets of feeling and image: now, a tangle of dark grass and weeds, scratchy and thin-bladed, a vague shape on the ground where the Sitting House had been. Orfalas’ face turning away from them, disappearing against the blazing horizon. Lothiriel’s mouth was full of salt. She glanced at Yusraa, whose face was clouded, whose gaze was steady.

“Are you ready, Lothiriel?” Yusraa asked, still warm and receptive despite the occasion, waiting for her to gather herself. Lothiriel nodded, taking the girl’s hand. Where their fingers intertwined, she sought the pulse of comfort that came so easily from Yusraa. An unfamiliar trust in the rightness of the world. It was a kind of faith that evaded Lothiriel. As one, they turned to Orfalas, who stood and then gestured for the women to follow them. When they reached the tree line, Lothiriel paused to handle a few of the hanging baskets. The refuge seekers had taken to the craft easily, and they had been making many recently to help everyone who wanted to travel, to settle, to build roots. The basket designs had changed too, with their hands. One pattern, Lothiriel saw with a start, seemed to resemble a lidless eye.  

The clearing where the Sitting House had been was finally bare, save for the neatly planted rows of vegetables that Yusraa had tended and kept. A garden of surprise, of her own, Lothiriel thought fondly. The Elf had taken to wandering in the evenings instead of staying in the clearing, or seeking a darker place near the tip of the peninsula where they could lie under the flickering light of the stars. Now, there was only a single woven basket carefully packed with some food and cloth. Orfalas stood facing them, their hands loose at their side, and their expression warm and open.

“You must know how I take no pleasure in our separation,” the Elf began softly, trying already to be gentle but firm. There was no hint of remorse in the line of Orfalas’s body. “But I do not expect that the knowledge has given you any strength, or comfort. At least, Lothiriel, I can offer you one final lesson. Yusraa already has a level of facility with longer thought, but I must teach you a way to use your discernment in the same direction.” They turned to the garden of surprise and sat at the edge. The soil was fragrant from being newly tilled. Yusraa had added longer spokes to support the gripping vines and their heavy, verdant leaves. Fragile clumps of young fruit had appeared sporadically among the stalks, pale green or bright yellow, peeking out at shyly as they grew.

“I do not think I can learn anything right now, Elder,” Lothiriel said even as she helped Yusraa arrange herself on the grassy earth beside the Elf. She settled on Orfalas’s other side. “I feel too full of feeling,” she said, her voice tight. “I can barely summon myself to think.” Already the tears threatened. She bit her lower lip, focusing on the sudden sensation.

Orfalas smiled sadly at her, and it seemed to Lothiriel that she had already been in that moment: she had already inhabited the clearing as it was, picked clean of its history and the Sitting House nothing but a shadow on the ground. She had already received Orfalas’s smile of consolation even as they pulled Lothiriel’s hand, pressing her palm into the soil. Yusraa mimicked the action and then laid a hand on Orfalas’s knee.

“I have no more time, and I will not leave you without this,” Orfalas insisted. “You have refined your discernment to the precision of a small blade, clean and thorough, so that you might peek into the world. Now you must understand that it cannot be a weapon with which you harvest without consequence. To take is easy, Lothiriel. But now, we learn balance. We learn to give of you.” Orfalas said. “You must be more careful, and the sensitivity with which you reap must be the same sensitivity you use to discern in the other direction. I will teach you, child, how to become more than the blade, to understand the wound that you might inflict, and how you might yourself become wounded. Come, tell me the story of this place.”

Lothiriel closed her eyes, still obedient. Despite her dread, she was curious and eager, and in this she felt she had betrayed herself. Confusion roiled within her: was this to be her final moments with the elf? Had she no choice in the matter? For a moment, she wanted to become disobedient and resist Orfalas’s lessons. Frustration and pain swirled through her, a pair of meeting storms, crashing against the bones of her ribs. Was this inheritance and her stewardship of this gift the only thing of value Orfalas could see of her? Was her discernment and her mastery of it the only things that had tethered the Elf so long to Dol Amroth?

“Lothiriel,” Orfalas pleaded. “Come find me in the gleaning.”

She could not muster the grace to be grateful. But she obeyed, shutting her eyes and narrowing her senses, feeling only the warm earth until all around her the Sitting House unfolded itself: the floor raised on large posts and lashed together with rope, a pair of windows almost too wide for its frame, sealed half-shut with panes polished from iridescent shells, and the flat roof refreshed monthly with newly dried leaves.

The soil was rich and nourishing and awake, every particle glowing with sound and promise; tucked within, the young plants sang, hungry and aching for more. More light, more air, more space to spread their fine roots. But Orfalas wasn’t there – the clearing should have been full of their footsteps, electric with the salt of their sweat or the care that they had poured into the garden. As though the air itself contracted with Orfalas’s thought, Lothiriel felt the Elf’s will like gravity, a force by itself, wordless but powerful, pushing her further. She looked up, found herself in her own body, examining the Sitting House. There was some smoke, blue and floral, rising out of a special slat where one wall met the thatched roof. It was the Sitting House when Lothiriel wrote the letter that sealed her fate and accepted the Rohir King’s troth. She wrote it here when she had begun spending most of her early evenings, sharpening her gift, and then learning as much as Orfalas was willing to teach her about Rohan, and the land surrounding it. The Elf had been amused, at first. Lothiriel had always stood bare and readable to them: the Elf’s keen sight, their depth of thought and understanding of the world, could shred any disguise and obliterate any of Lothiriel’s desire to hide.

The door of the Sitting House opened, Orfalas stepped out and came towards her. She felt her mind begin to tear, struggling to understand the split in the seam of the world through which she had fallen. For here was Orfalas, whole and sure and smiling but she knew that her hands were still buried in the earth beneath them. She looked around for Yusraa, but found that they were alone in this other place.

“Where are we?” She asked, holding a hand to cool her forehead – and found that her touch was muffled, the warmth of her hand distant, as though she was remembering the sensation instead of feeling it directly.

Orfalas stood beside her and touched her arm. “In my thoughts, in a place I have prepared for your practice. You are gleaning of me. Your discernment is strong enough now to bring you more than the trickle of the world, Lothiriel. This is a kind of longer thought, kin to the gleaning that Yusraa practices. But more expansive. For when she touches you, you receive her own gleaning and the message is simpler between you. Because you are the same. This is easier with Yusraa, who has a language like yours, feelings like yours. The shadow and shape of her thoughts and emotions are familiar to you. When you speak with her, it is an exchange, a rope-tug between your hand and hers. But this gleaning, now, can render the world softer to you. Soft enough for you to touch. Let me lead you to it. Where are your hands now, Lothiriel?”

She felt far away, and somewhere else. She knew that her body had been left tethered to another world, but she felt that the world had stilled, had become softer. Fabric stretched over metal, over an exposed blade.

“Somewhere – my hands are in the soil of a garden.” They walked over to the Sitting House, crouched and folded their bodies into the space beneath to reach the soil where their other-bodies would have been.

“When you handle the world in your hands,” Orfalas continued, patient as ever, as though they were not really leaving. As though they both had time to spend in that liminal space. Maybe in this place, even time was only a bit of cloth for the world to slice through. “When you glean, the object itself seems to push forward, do they not? You receive the gleaning, and your task is to understand, somehow, to make sense of it. Now, we go in the other direction. The trick is to find a language the rest of creation understands. How can you ask something of the soil, or the seeds, such as they are? That is the challenge. It knows you as you know it, it has learned of you as you have.”

When Orfalas laid one hand over hers, she felt the elf working gently to pull her closer towards the soil. Orfalas found the faintest tendril of the nearest plant and then, a gentle hum around that was the singular voice of the soil itself, a small portion of the earth that supported them. Around her, instead of within her, in the longer thought that Orfalas had built, she heard and felt the soil murmur, pliant and patient and waiting. Beneath her hands, the earth rumbled with eagerness and recognition. Lothiriel found that the soil had always been waiting, ready and aching to be useful.

“Good. Now, here. You do not only take. You push more of yourself into the world, into the seam. Can you feel it?” The air was filled with gossamer thread and she could feel the thought within the world, the gravity of another living creature, waiting for her to find them. The sound of the humming increased, became a chorus, trilling in the air.

“What can I ask? How will it answer?” Lothiriel looked at the elf, her face stunned.

Orfalas laughed louder than Lothiriel had ever heard them laugh. “Ask only what each creature can give, Lothiriel! Otherwise, you will be cruel. You must be gentle, and this, I cannot teach you. You must cultivate that yourself. Ask.”

Around them, the air still buzzed with anticipation. Words were not enough; outside language, Lothiriel struggled to shape her request. She felt her own thoughts coursing through her fingertips until they dropped into the soil and charged the air: feed the seeds, help them grow, cover them always. She asked it to impart its patience to the growing things that it nurtured. She felt her hands grow warm, and then hot, nearly unbearable. Orfalas’s grip tightened around hers, helping her not to squirm. In the garden of surprise, the soil rumbled and throbbed, pulsed just beneath her.

When the soil answered, it was not in a language either. An easier gleaning came from it, in the shape of an assent, and yet more radiant joy. It was pure feeling: a surge of relief and then delight that had a shiver crawling up Lothiriel’s arms. The garden of surprise bloomed, right in front of them. Tall, thick stalks burst from the ground all together, pushing out lush leaves and flowers so bright they shone in the blotted sunlight. Heavy fruits knocked against each other, competing for space on the crowded branches. Vines crawled over Lothiriel’s hands, swirling across her fingers. She felt them growing, felt them expanding beneath her, an answer to her request. She felt the hot prick of tears against the corners of her eyes, and she turned to Orfalas, who could only watch her. It was then that she understood the elf’s kinship with the rest of the world: not with the life of a growing thing, but with the fabric of their creation, the matter that shaped their bones and the greater thought that had wrought their shape. Closer kin to the stars, the long-lived trees, the stone of every mountain, and the soil of the earth. Something cracked with finality within her, the sad certainty that Orfalas never needed to leave Middle Earth to be parted from her: this was the gulf of understanding neither of them could cross.  

“You must temper the desire to demand from the world, Lothiriel. I fear you may be tempted to test the limits of this gleaning.” Orfalas warned, releasing her hands. Time and gravity pulsed around them: the long-thought was ending, Lothiriel felt it as the world seemed to thin and slowly dissolve, as she felt her body move closer, each sensation sharpening. The sting of salt on her lips and on her tongue, the sharp grass on her bare legs in the dirt. Her own empty hands.

“I know nothing can soften this parting for you,” Orfalas said, all around her. “But this is all I can offer, child. Will you consider this generosity? That we have had this time together? Please, do not think poorly of me,” Orfalas pleaded again.

Lothiriel scrabbled to find purchase, to remain in their joined thought, to be close to Orfalas in that way longer – but she found herself back fully in her body, with her own thoughts. She pulled her hands out of the soil, examining the garden, and terrified that, now, truly, was Orfalas’s departure.

Beside her, the elf stood up carefully. Yusraa had fallen asleep. From their woven basket, Orfalas produced a thin blanket that they wrapped around the younger girl. When they were finished, the elf took up the basket.

“Here at last,” Orfalas said, turning finally to Lothiriel. Even as she studied the Elf’s face, Lothiriel knew she would forget their features and that even this memory would dim with time, softened first and then buried and then lost in the avalanche of a new life. Lothiriel held her eyes open as she wept, the hot tears on her collar, on her chest, and then her lap. Orfalas caressed her cheek once, nodded, turned around, and walked out of the clearing. Lothiriel did not attempt to follow. She wept, and for a time, she could not stop. When her knees buckled beneath her, a wind blew a charge of dust into her face and into her mouth. She tasted the sea. When Yusraa’s arms encircled her—the girl was always warm—not even the softness of the girl’s thoughts was a comfort. She turned her face and buried it into the crook of Yusraa’s neck to muffle her sobbing.

Hours later, as the sun began to set and the clearing darkened, Yusraa pulled Lothiriel up to her feet and brought her slowly out of the clearing. They walked slowly, trying not to stumble. By the time they reached the beach path towards Dol Amroth, the sun’s final, orange rays streaked the water, turning it into a lake of fire. There was a shadow on the beach, at first still, and then running to meet them. Yusraa’s alarm roused Lothiriel from her stupor, and she looked up, body tense, to fin­­­­d the man almost upon them: Erchirion.

*

There were some things that war had not touched: how the sunrise slicked the Ethir Anduin with gold and purple light until the shards of land that crowded and littered the delta temporarily cast off their dusting of dull tall grass and barrenness. The animal thrill of following the flowing river until it merged with the sea, and he could taste the salt on his tongue. All Erchirion felt was the tug of the current, swift and fluid, gravity given form. It was almost like falling. The small craft that he had provisioned was swift and light, and he soon found himself calmly floating in the greater Bay of Belfalas. Dipping a hand into the cool sea, he muttered his gratitude to Uinen, splashing the water on his face more to feel the sting of the salt in his wounds, curing him. The wounds on his chest and arms were healing underneath a light shirt, and he knew he would risk some bleeding. But there were no storms lying in wait for him, not even a line of waiting clouds above, and he knew that he was lucky. He was blessed. He turned north, then, his face set against the sun. With the rest of the sea spread out before him, it was possible to forget the War that had been, even though it was a short forgetting.

Erchirion rested on the shallow bottom of his small craft as he sailed slowly up the coast following the bitten-off ridges of the Belfalas. He allowed himself to be a boy learning to sail again: he named the parts of his boat, taught himself again how to wind the slim rope, the names of four corners of the sea. The second son, given over easily to entertainment, not so easily persuaded to join his brothers and sister in serious discussion. The world was lighter with him within it, his siblings agreed. And how had only Erchirion manage to escape the siblings’ inheritance of solemnity? They asked that too, on the beach in their childhood, laughing as they did, their voices a net that stole the day from them. They were all too serious – Elphir, Amrothos, even Lothiriel. How did father do it? they liked to whisper together conspiratorially. Imrahil, shackled as he had always been to power and authority, had also managed to evade severity, and the disposition towards cruelty. For their father had always been kind, and soft-spoken, and genial. And it was this knowledge that sat with him all through the soft, gray night that he spent on the sea, unable to sleep and anticipating his slow approach of the familiar cove above which sat Dol Amroth.

All his life, Erchirion knew his father to be a man who avoided politics whenever he could, who had neither the talent nor patience to learn it, and who despised how the game gambled with peoples’ lives and happiness. Imrahil had adamantly refused to use his power and position for any kind of gain, and in Dol Amroth, the only real authorities that he recognized were the severity of each mercurial season, the rising tides, and the clamor and wellbeing of the people under his care in the towns that they built. That was what he had always thought, and so he had been eager to offer what he could in the project of care: war-service, labor, and entertainment when he could muster it. The proffered betrothal continued to rankle Erchirion: the way his father offered Lothiriel as helpmeet, how he had announced he might summon her to Minas Tirith. Imrahil knew it, and had taken him aside after the pronouncement to give him the duty of the Stewardship, to relieve his sister so that she might travel north. When he could not answer, Imrahil led them back to his quarters, and he had thrown open the windows to tempt a breeze into the room. One of Lothiriel’s letters was on his desk, her writing interspersed with his notes in the margins.

“I know your anger as intimately as I know myself, Chiri. Speak your mind, I would have nothing between us,” his father said, setting himself near one of the windows. He turned back on his son, but even his stance was calm. It angered Erchirion all the more.

“Are you acting on the advice only of your Farsight, father? You must think Lothiriel incredibly weak and foolish to require the safe practices you parrot frequently if these do not merit your own practice,” Erchirion said, holding himself back. “What game is this, Prince, that you barter with your own daughter’s life?”

“You know how much I love your sister, as I love you all,” his father said, not turning to face him. “But you are right. I am acting brashly, quickly, following my farsight, alone. Are you not curious, Chiri, about what I have seen so far?”

Erchirion faltered. Their father had shared only scraps of his visions with them before, and even then, he had not shared them willingly. They were closer to phantasms and so they weren’t real, and though they were always accurate, Imrahil was adamant that the future was fickle and unsure until it was future no longer. Until the gears shifted and fate had arranged the game-pieces. And even then, even when the future unveiled by the Farsight arrived as the prince foretold, Imrahil reminded his children that it was more difficult by far to live through the future, to understand how it had come about. Yet there and then, Imrahil had described what his vision portended. For all the dread that it inspired, Imrahil described Lothiriel on a horse in a loose dress, her hair short, her shoulders bare, and her expression rapturous as she urged the beast up toward a hilly country as cities and homestead and townships erupted in her wake, on either side of the wide path. As she rode farther, the path behind disappeared into a gushing river that became the Sea, the surrounding land morphing into the familiar scraggly hills of Southern Gondor. She turned back to the rising water, her eyes glad and wide, as she outpaced the current. She called out to him, then, called him by name, asked that he come find her when he could. And she was leaving, turning the steed north and riding hard. Imrahil described her triumphant cry as a single, gleaming figure stepped out to meet her on the same path: tall and bright, his hair like molten gold. Behind him was a grassy country, dotted with villages, plains as far as the Sea was wide, the sun above them hot and bright. As Lothiriel reached Éomer, the pair stood together with their hands clasped. When his father finished, Erchirion draped an arm around him to lend him strength.  

“It is no small thing to lose her, I know. And it is no small thing, either, to share this vision. I have never been as terrified of my Farsight as I am in this moment,” Imrahil continued. They both knew that Erchirion was barred from disclosing what he knew, at the risk of burdening Lothiriel with undue expectation or harming the tenuous future that approached her. “But this peace demands it, Erchirion. This future. Will you go? Will you help bring her hence?”

“Your vision shows some of Lothiriel’s future, if she follows the path you have opened for her. But your actions and your vision do not reveal your intentions, Father. What of Lothiriel, and her will? And her hopes? How are you satisfied to sacrifice her at this faintest provocation of a fantasy?” he said, his eyes glinting with anger and distrust. Even upon the Sea, sailing north to his home, Erchirion felt himself recoil from the deception. And yet he had come home. He had followed his father’s direction and he had sailed south, eager to prove him wrong.

Imrahil frowned, took a step toward his son. “Surely you know my mind, if not my Farsight, better than to distrust my actions, Chiri?”

Erchirion’s answer was his leave-taking, his eagerness to climb down from the Citadel to take what he could of the night. What he found was the Rohir King, half-asleep and ragged, overtaken by the burden of leadership and the labor of surviving a war. Writing the missive to his sister seemed to help: he had stayed with the King in a garden as the man wrote in the light of several candles, as the spray from a nearby fountain cooled the air. He wrote much, going through several precious pages and a quill or two—Erchirion was briefly bewildered that the King had the stamina for so many words, and the meticulous attention to his work, rereading several pages, crumpling a few precious pieces to rewrite them—before he was satisfied. How frail they all were, Erchirion thought as he returned to himself in the boat, recalling their hours by the fountain. How much they needed each other. It was only in the last hour that Erchirion, himself, took up a quill. He would take this home with him, he decided, or as much of this evening as he could. Despite his father’s conviction, Imrahil’s uncharacteristic trust of this Farsight vision, Erchirion would not relinquish doubt and worry, could not bring himself to accept the arrangement. If this was among the first fruits of this Age of Peace—bartering their people for the hope of a better alliance or to broker cooperation with foreign powers or even to accumulate influence—then what had changed through the hard-fought War? Did they defeat a tyrant only to replace him with smaller kings in his likeness? It was not a peace he recognized. Peace should mean less power, not more, Erchirion thought. He believed his father agreed with him, but was he wrong?  

When Erchirion glimpsed the few spires of his home, he returned also to the duty that War had thrust upon him: as messenger of a betrothal that would upend the life of his sister if it hadn’t already, as warden and jailer with her sentence, as a thief to rob her of her duty as Steward. In the early evening, the Sea still warm and gently cooling, he finally climbed off the boat and onto the pier, tying the vessel securely to a post. He took only a wide leather bag packed tight with some clothes, a package wrapped in cloth, and a few important trinkets. Something in the early evening bent his eyes towards the beach where he watched two figures making their way through the dusk towards the cliff.

*

“The first thing you do, brother, upon your return, is upbraid me as you would a child?” Lothiriel teased weakly. The girl, Yusraa, had deposited his sister upon a high-backed chair, and then the girl had hurried away, glancing back a few times at him with a curious expression on her mild face. Erchirion sat on a bench, his back against one of the long tables, to face her.

“I found you stumbling in the dark in the arms of a pregnant girl, a stranger, barely able to see through your swollen eyes!” he exclaimed, only half amused. “I can only be concerned.”

Lothiriel grinned blearily at him. “Fair enough, brother. But you expect me not to return the sentiment? You look worse for wear than I!” She leaned over to take his hand. Tilting his palm up, she traced a few of the healing wounds and purple flesh on his arms. A constellation of bruises. His body remembered more of the War than he did: these must have been from a scuffle with several Southron bandits—quick but swarthy men with intense eyes and plaited hair—whose armor was reinforced and studded with steel pellets in a rough, unpolished leather. The gash on the back of his head ached then, as though reeling from the memory, a broadsword catching him unaware, his helmet almost split open from the blow.

“These are healing well. But what of Father? Our other brothers?” For now, Erchirion ignored the twinge of anger that screwed in his belly at the mention of their father.

They were in one of the lesser halls after it had been scrubbed clean and prepared for supper, a meal that stretched usually from the early evening and unreservedly into the gray hours of the next day as members of the household came and went as they pleased, eating as much or as little as they needed. Every table was laden with steaming bowls of fragrant brown rice lightly pan-fried until it gleamed from being tossed in oil and garlic, there were several shallow bowls of raw fish and squid soaked to cook gently in spiced vinegar and coconut wine, and piles of fist-sized brown fruit that would be broken open to reveal the tart heart of sweet, white flesh. These they dipped in rock salt to end their meals. To the east was a bank of tall windows framed by shell-paned shutters. This high upon the cliff-face, the iridescent, semi-transparent shells glowed pink and green from the moonlight.

“I wish I could tell you more about these wounds, my sister, but I find I cannot recall much. Not at the moment. Father, Amrothos, and Elphir are all still recovering, but their wounds are not unhealed,” Erchirion closed his fist, and leaned away from her. It was not the time to talk about the War when his home was clearly still in the middle of holding its breath, waiting for permission to exhale: Dol Amroth continued to shelter displaced families wary of returning to their villages and homesteads, weapons were cleaned and displayed in strategic places around the interior wall, and despite the influx of refuge seekers, the absence of the Knights made his home feel hollow.

“I have missed you, Lothiriel, and by that, I mean that I have missed being your brother, instead of a soldier. Remind me never to fight in a war without you again,” he teased, trying for levity, trying not to talk too much of the absent Prince. He pulled a pitcher of sweet water toward him and poured them both a glass.

“I am come with my arms wide and full with gifts and news. Some from our father – and even from Éomer King,” Erchirion continued, unable to waste any time. He watched for her reaction; Lothiriel merely lifted her chin, ready for the blow.

“Do you wish to provoke me so quickly? So soon upon your return? Well, then. Let me strike first. More than a week ago, I sent Astoreth to Minas Tirith to deliver my consent to his proposal. Did father send you here so I might hurry to the coronation? Because you are too late, Chiri. I have sent word not to expect me, that the business of governance here prevents me from travel.” She lifted her chin defiantly, a challenge if it weren’t for how close they sat together, and how he saw her shiver from the effort.

Erchirion grinned wolfishly at her, impressed despite all of his misgivings. He searched her expression for fear, but he found only resignation. And then his heart plummeted; he had not considered that Lothiriel might accept the troth so easily. He had expected her to share, if not his worry, then surely his disdain for the arrangement, and maybe even his fear. He had expected resistance, even. He steeled himself. Was his Father right? If that is the case, then nothing could be done, the vision will slot into place, firm as a promise and a threat. And if that were the case, then his choice to return home had been more than enough to secure Lothiriel’s departure.

“So, you have accepted his troth, but not his first request of you. You are wise as ever, Lothiriel. I was sent, indeed, to relieve you of your post so that you might be free to travel north. If yo­­­u should desire to meet with the King before he ultimately summons you to Edoras.” He knew it sounded like a threat at first, but Lothiriel was like Imrahil and all his children: they preferred the challenge laid out with no adornments and without ceremony. Let it be as it was. Erchirion looked on his sister fondly, and he could not stop himself from picturing her standing beside the Rohir King, wearing the same defiant scowl that she met him with, part of the vision Imrahil’s Farsight revealed. She was not young, his sister. When he saw her on the beach, she looked frail and wary. He thought of the Rohir King’s staggering height, the way he took up space in every hall with his own gravity, and how he might crowd her, perhaps make her feel small. Lothiriel had never felt small in her life; she was not used to holding herself back or to shrinking against a challenge or a threat. Traits that would serve her well as a Queen. The thought sobered him, made him feel light-headed.

“I believe that Éomer King and you are alike in your stubbornness. He has not relented in his efforts to see you, so he has invited you to Ithilien, to Emyn Arnen. And he has sweetened his request with a troth token, and his words. Here.” What else was to be done, except this? Except to help make sure Lothiriel had a clear view of the horizon before her. From the bag he brought, Erchirion pulled out the package, and unwound the cloth. He had sealed a few pages between two smooth wooden blocks bound tightly together by rope and cloth. He also took out a pouch tied tightly. He handed both to Lothiriel. When the Rohri King asked him to take the tokens back with him to his sister, it had never even occurred to Erchirion to deny him the request. Such was the strength of his conviction that Lothiriel would refuse to accept any of his efforts at courtship. But his sister took the pouch first. Within was a woven bracelet made of pliant, brown leather. It was not artfully made—in fact, it felt to Lothiriel closer to armor than to an adornment--and it felt heavy and serious in her hand, Lothiriel noticed. It pulsed like it was alive. The bracelet was more of a cuff, the leather strands gleamed with patina. Its clasp was gold in color, plain and shining and warm, but it was not heavy. A phrase was inscribed where the clasp might sit against her pulse: And so, I come to you.  

“The leather was from one of the Rohir King’s vambraces. I believe, the one that saved his writing hand from grievous injury. He took it to a leather-working shop in the city where it was stripped into these fine strands, and then he helped to braid and seal them. The gold-seeming metal was cast from brass fortified by the iron of several pen-tips that he had used to write to you. He said the materials will gleam brighter from frequent use. Does it please you?”

“It does not displease me,” she said, handling the bracelet carefully, her thumb against the carved letters.

“Shall I help you wear it? He showed me how to work its clasp.” He took the bracelet from her, showed her how to hook one end into an eyelet. She waved it away, turning against the offer. Instead, she slipped the item back into the pouch, and rubbed her hands together, almost like she wanted to banish her memory of the item.

“I do not think I can wear it yet,” Lothiriel motioned for a glass of water and held it lightly against her forehead.

“Should I have advised the King that you would have preferred a trunk of golden trinkets?” Erchirion bit his lip at the absurdity of it. That he had survived a war, that he had returned to his home, and that he was having this conversation with his sister. That his home was untouched and had even thrived under her leadership, despite the circumstances. The parade of homesteads, towns, and villages that his father described in his vision leapt into Erchirion’s mind, filling him up completely.

“Does it make you afraid—that it is what you have accepted for yourself in accepting the Rohir’s proposal?” it was an absurd thing to ask; Lothiriel had never let fear deter her from any action. It would not deter her from her choice, but if there was so much as a sliver of doubt, then he would stop her, caution her, refuse to take the mantle of Steward from her.

“I feel too much for fear to crowd into me. Maybe I will make space for fear later. But this night can only be the evening that you arrived, and Orfalas departed.”

Erchirion’s glance sharpened with understanding. “You are grieving them,” he muttered, more for his own benefit, as his own grief descended. Not for himself, but for his sister, who loved the Elf, and who sought for the love to be returned. “Lothiriel, you knew this would come to pass.”

“And we know that we all die, and yet we grieve the passing!” she spat, her voice high, and her face crumpling. No certainty of knowing could have ushered her away from this pummeling grief. Erchirion flinched.

“I’m sorry, Chiri, I’m sorry—” she said, leaning forward to place a hand on his arm. He took himself away, shaking his head. It was so easy to return to the War, to the fighting, that mentions of death derailed him often.

“Peace, Lothiriel. I know the wound is raw. Do you have the words?” He shifted away from her then, trying to keep his body from touching hers.

“No, Chiri.”

And so they were silent, for a little while at last while Lothiriel was unreachable in her new grief, and Erchirion sat on the other side of it. The other diners looked at them curiously as the household passed into the hall to eat, and then to leave for their evening activities. Dol Amroth was never still; even in the evening, the luminous stars sometimes tempted different creatures out of the sea, and there were always a few smaller boats with their lanterns dotting the calm cove. Erchirion listened to the water below them as it carved the rock of the cliff slowly, as the waves continued its calm demolition, letting the surprise settle into his body, and then slowly ebb away.

“I am relieved that you have come home,” Lothiriel said, and he felt how she meant it. She unfurled herself from her seat, stood, and prepared two plates for them: rice, fish, fruit all in small quantities. A peace offering. As they ate, Erchirion described the City after the war, his voice low, seeking to distract her with news: he described the rubble and the piles of white stone that citizens built as they cleaned their houses or repaired their roads and walls and gardens and the long road that brought them up to the Citadel; the sheen of dust that covered the steps and even the bodies of their soldiers and the trapped innocents; the labor it took to find their dead, to mourn them, to bury them that were excuses for their exhaustion. And the grief afterward, continuing on and on. He spoke about the march to the Morannon, and the journey home as two days of stunned disbelief, how he barely felt his body carry him back to the City, and how he could scarcely believe that he and their family survived. He took her hand, then, without thinking. She squeezed his fingers.

“Father shared your missives with me – and if I am to relieve you and bear the burden even for a short time, I must understand. Tell me about the refuge-seek­­ers,” he urged Lothiriel. She needed little provocation, and continued without pause, speaking at length about the new homes being built in the hills of Belfalas, the homesteads and tiny villages that are beginning to tame the hills around them. She described Astoreth’s word-lists, the shortages that threatened the region, and how Yusraa had come to her. How the earliest refuge-seekers had helped to find more arable land, to turn even the thin mountain soil more productive and more prolific with their different knowledge. They seemed to coax more out of the earth, and at least some of the seeds they brought from the east had started to bear fruit. She spoke too of how there were more refuge-seekers still walking north, how she could not see when the migration might stop and how this movement across borders and kingdoms must be encouraged now that the Age of Men had arrived. Lothiriel paused here, as though the pieces had suddenly found their place, and briefly her face shone bright and fierce.

“Traveling north has been perilous before, and that is likely not to change. Unless—” She balled her fists before she continued to describe the influx of people. The more settled refuge seekers—homesteaders who had found families and livelihood in the nearby hills, those who had travelled with family and had miraculously stayed together—had become instrumental to keeping the peace by managing to help other groups integrate or continue their journey going up as far as they knew to the Brown Lands, and then on to Eryn Lasgalen. They had brought much new knowledge, many new ways of thinking and speaking and living that had enriched Dol Amroth, even in the few short months that they had settled here. When she was finished, Erchirion had two plates in front of him, and an empty pitcher of sweet water. His lips were white from eating the fruit whose flesh he dipped in salt and vinegar.

“What is he like?” Lothiriel asked in a small voice after she finished. Erchirion sensed she wanted to look for anything else to stave off the rest of the night, to keep herself from collapsing into exhaustion.

“Perhaps I can show you,” Erchirion said. Wiping his hands clean, he finally picked up the wooden blocks he brought, and unbound them. The press preserved both of the rough portraits perfectly. Both sheets of paper were unmarred, smooth, and the Rohir King’s blazing gaze met Lothiriel from the page. Her mouth dropped open a little as she examined the images, her hands on the edge of the paper, hesitating to touch the image at all.

Erchirion’s gift was not as pronounced as his father’s or his sister’s. Instead of Farsight and his sister’s discernment, his talent was in his gaze, his memory, and in the deftness and accuracy of his remembering. His mind was a bright room into which he saved pieces of the world to examine, to turn over in his hands, and from there to render in a portrait or a sketch. He had sketched the younger man in the half dark, and he had no time to revise the portraits, but he thought these had come reasonably close to their subject. The Rohir King was framed by a fountain in a walled garden in the City, wearing the formal, ceremonial armor that he had donned to visit his late uncle where the monarch lay in state. The sketch included the shadows from the brick walls, the arch of an entryway above his head, the pommel of his sword, the curve of muscle in his back. The force of the man was impossible to ignore and impossible to divorce from him. Erchirion drew the Rohir’s shoulder-length hair, his tentative smile in a lined face, the eyes that had not yet sunk into their sockets from weariness. The other portrait was the King in profile, his head tilted just so that his gaze seemed to stare back: instead of a smile, Erchirion drew him worried, and wary, his expression pinched into sternness, a replica of the expression he wore when Erchirion found him by the steps and roused him from his half-sleep. Lothiriel would not need her discernment, would need no special sight, to understand the gift that he had given her: the Rohir King through his understanding.

“Well?” he prompted.

Lothiriel looked up at him and nodded her thanks. He realized suddenly that this was his sister’s betrothed, and that this was likely the first time she had seen him – and even then, it was through a looking-glass, darkly.

“Does he resemble the man in your discernment?”

“This is the first I have seen him, brother,” she slowly traced the image with just the tip of her fingers, being careful not to be burnt.   

“He is not an unpleasant sort of man, Lothiriel,” he said. He offered her the pouch and the bracelet again. “I do not think he will be cruel, either. I do not wish for you to be afraid, if this is truly the life you have chosen.”

“I am not afraid of him or of the life I accepted with him, Chiri. But your endorsement is well received,” she said.

“That is far, indeed, from—”

But Lothiriel held up a hand to stop him. “I do not want you waste your breath convincing me. It is enough that I understand who he is, and what he must face, I think. The kind of King he is, and the kind of leadership and governance he intends to fulfill, the kinship I felt with him when I read his letters. Those are much more important. I think I understand why Father brokered this marriage on my behalf—and how I might strengthen peace, make it last. And if that is so, brother, then what else must I know of the Rohir King?” And she grimaced at this, lifting her gaze as though to challenge her older brother.

­­

“You must know that he is tall, with great stature,” Erchirion responded, breathless. He could not be sad, could not summon the capacity for sadness. After all, he could not correct her without revealing Imrahil’s vision. And perhaps she had gleaned more than he could of his father’s truer intentions.

Lothiriel laughed and shook her head. “Then what a picture we would make together! He will dwarf me, surely. But one thing does give me strength, fortifies me, has seen me through.” She looked at her brother, smiling. “It is that he writes well. His thoughts are clear on the page, from the first correspondence I unwittingly read. I anticipate some pleasure in finally speaking with him,” Lothiriel blushed at this. “And I knew this was the path I would take, even though it has taken a War for me to arrive. Maybe that is the work of peace I that I might yet contribute, with only a minor sacrifice. Afterall, this is no marriage to a cruel man. A stranger, yes, but that is not uncommon. I knew, and yet I hoped it would not be so. I have been foolish.”  

The resignation in her voice was touching, Erchirion thought. She took the pouch and the bracelet then and held out her left hand for Erchirion, inviting him to clasp the leather bracelet around her wrist. He indulged her; it was a good fit, and the brass cooled her skin. The leather felt light, but the bracelet itself was so wide that it took up nearly half of her forearm. If she had been younger, the pull of her discernment and contact with the pulsing thing would have been impossible to resist, but she held back. The Rohir King’s token promised to tell her about the war, how it had been shaped to fit and protect his body, and the kind of trauma and pain it endured. And Lothiriel felt this was a kind of intimate knowledge she could not take from him, felt that in this instance, her discernment was an intrusion into his pain. Whereas he had written of the War in his letters, the band was meant only as a token of their partnership, a way he could make a claim and, by wearing it, how she had accepted that claim. Lothiriel not betray this first exchange of trust by peering into more of his personal history. But, she did not remove it. In fact, it felt right to wear the clasp, felt right to mark the change in her situation with a physical signal, even though its true meaning was covert for the time being. She returned the portraits safely between the blocks of wood, and asked Erchirion to rebind and seal them.  

“Convincing you to take up his offer was never an option for me, sister. You need to know that,” Erchirion said as he finished. He set the portraits aside. “I can take these until you are ready for them, and you will remain Steward until you are ready to accept the Rohir lord’s proposal and then meet him,” he said gently.

Gathering their belongings, she led them from the dining room and through back to the courtyard and up onto the walls, where they might watch a few boats night-fishing among a constellation of candles on floating rafts making haloes and eyes against the dark water. The water rose, tenting over large animal bodies moving just beneath the boats, while smaller fish gathered greedily up to the light. For the most part, the night-fishermen were quiet, scooping up the unsuspecting fish with long nets, and then moving the rafts to the deeper parts of the bay. This close to the cliffs, the movement of the wind through the rockface created a low, keening sound.  

“Erchirion, I am glad you are come, especially because you are right. I had anticipated—even prepared—for Orfalas to leave. It was no surprise. But is it strange, brother, that I expected more of myself to survive the absence? With Orfalas having sailed away, I fear that some portion of my heart and happiness have also escaped me, forever. I do not want to bring only half of myself into this new Age, into this new country. I will not be able to meet them with joy, or with gratitude. But I have not enough of myself yet to give. Does this sound foolish?” She laughed bitterly then, her eyes prickling with tears. Her brother moved, stood beside her, took her in his arms and pressed his cheek to the top of her head, neither one knowing who needed to be comforted.

Erchirion felt the world was spinning out of control, the night an endless thread that would not unspool. Lothiriel’s actions surprised him, unsettled him, but some calm had begun to settle into his heart. Whatever he was supposed to do, he had a feeling he had followed the path his Father had already anticipated, played his part to push his sister forward and into the world. There was no time for grieving, not anymore.

“Not foolish, my sister. But no amount of courage will make this easy or painless.”

Nodding, Lothiriel looked up at her brother, and said, “Then I cede the Stewardship to you, Erchirion of Dol Amroth, on the condition that you will accompany me tomorrow to the townships and homesteads so that I might introduce you to our new people, and on the condition that you vouchsafe the passage of any refuge-seekers who travel through our land, and accept those who will settle here. Do you accept these terms, brother?”

“Aye, Lothiriel. Aye. But there is no hurry, you do not have to do this so quickly.”

“I am leaving the day behind, as you instructed,” she grinned. She faced the Sea again, her face in the shadow. “I will make for Minas Tirith within a fortnight, and I leave our home to your stewardship, Erchirion. Make it safe until Father should return.” There was steel and thunder in her voice, and her eyes were hard. It was as graceful a leave-taking as she could muster. Erchirion felt her aching to begin, aching to leave all the painful absence behind, to fill it with something more.  

“Do you think you could be happy without the Sea?”

“I am willing to be surprised,” she said. “And hope that my joy might follow me.”

*

Lothiriel’s bare feet were planted in some soft soil, aromatic but bitter and black. The water in the air was different: sweeter and lighter than the salt-heavy wind that frayed her hair and roughened her skin. It meant she was far away from the Sea, and the salt had tumbled out of the air across the many leagues. And yet, she could not bring herself to be afraid of the strangeness.

She felt lighter than she had in weeks, and even the grief of Orfalas’s departure felt less immediate. No longer a searing heat. Instead, the air tasted metallic: brass, steel, gold. Everywhere was bright and even her body was renewed and then reborn into something different: shining just as bright as the air. Barefoot and in her sheer sea clothes, Lothiriel found herself standing on the wide crown of a small hill in a country dotted with them. To her left, she couldn’t count how many hilltops bowed towards the banks of a river, loud and thrashing, running southward. North of her were giant trees wide and ancient and unknown, reaching up to the dome of the sky, their leaves jagged and small, so different from the wide, glossy leaves from her seaside gardens, sentinels against crashing waves. The world tilted forward, brought her suddenly reeling to her feet, her bare toes still stuck in the soil. Lothiriel’s body lurched forward as the world upended itself. She swiveled, searching for something to grasp—but every tree was too far away—twisting her body to align with gravity—and then felt herself caught and held fast against someone’s chest.

“Don’t look,” their voice said quietly, like they were afraid of disturbing the silence. “It is not a pretty sight, even after the evil has been chased away from there,” the same voice warned from above her. She felt their breath in her hair, and then upon her forehead as she turned to look up at them. Even in the shade, and despite the glare of a sun brighter than it had ever been, she recognized the man immediately although she had never seen him before, and even though it was impossible for him to be here with her. Somehow, the unconquerable distance no longer existed. The Rohir King towered above her, his gray eyes wide and bright to take her in, and he looked exactly as he had in Erchirion’s portrait, except that his hair gleamed like molten gold, long and curling at the tips where they fell past his shoulders. His eyes were storm-grey, the same shade as the sucking depths of the Sea. She tried to pull herself away, but he had wound one arm around her waist and one hand on her left wrist where she wore the troth token. When she swayed, she swayed against his hold, and he kept her upright as the world tilted around her. The clasp dug into her skin. Did she imagine it was warm? When he noticed the troth token, he looked pleased. Around her, the sunlight had its own gravity and the air shimmered with traces of bright indigo and green and blue, all the shades glinting like glass. And she knew. This was no dream: no imagining had ever felt as solid, and no phantom that she could summon could have been as warm. Wherever she was, however it was possible, they found themselves together.

“You are hurting me,” she said, setting her stare up against him, feeling small and hating it. His expression changed and he let her go immediately. She stepped back from him, examining herself. Her sea clothes were dry, but her body felt strangely disconnected, like she could float away from herself at any time. Her arms twitched to slide across her soft, round stomach. 

“What is this place?” she asked. The sounds of the animals around them were blunted and vague, more like the suggestion of noise.

“Over there, can you see it?” The Rohir pointed south where a river sliced a valley between the hilly country. She turned where he pointed. “Emyn Arnen. We are in Ithilien, lady,” he said, his voice full of certainty. She had never heard his voice so how did she imagine a sound as pleasant? There was a heavy, sweet timbre in the middle of it that soothed the pit in her belly. She looked down and found that she was in her sea clothes, the thin fabric clinging sinfully to her chest, to the protruding belly that she had never liked. The back of her neck prickled when he spoke again.

“I only remember returning to the city after scouting across the Anduin and into Osgiliath, and this was the exact view that I glimpsed. The trees here remind me of that place. And if, somehow, we have found ourselves there, then do not look east towards Mordor,” his frowned.

“I do not fear the mere sight of the Ephel Dúath, Rohir,” she said, losing her patience suddenly. She whipped around to face him, a challenge in her eyes. The Rohir turned to face her fully, blocking out some of the burning sky as he did so. “There are worse things in the world, more things to fear than this.”

The world hushed further, the sudden silence pressing against her as the ground moved, the very gravity that tethered her to the ground shifting its hold as he approached. She almost tipped over into his arms again, but he was unaffected.  

“If I had been given any real choice, I would not have turned towards them, not for any kind of honor or recognition of valor,” he said. “Only at great need, only the greatest need.”

“We, all of us, had a choice. And every choice has brought us here, where we stand.” Every choice had also brought her to the end of her life as she knew it, travelling to meet a stranger—this man—in some unknown country to build another life. Just as the refuge seekers had done. She found a little comfort in that, but she could not summon any grace in the moment to linger in that pleasure. Instead, she was fire, and molten rock.

“I did not take you as a person who lived with regret, and whose life was ruled by fantasies of what could have been and what isn’t, especially when so many of your words were about the daily, unspeakable tasks that a shared Hope has set before him. Fear is one thing. I do not fear what we had to overcome to arrive where we are, though I tremble with fear at the horizon I face.” She held up her hand, the clasp gleaming. “Do you know me, Lord? Tell me true. You know who I am.”

“You are the interim Steward of Dol Amroth,” he said, putting his hands up in a gesture of peace, asking for restraint. “I recognize the leather band that I sent for you with your brother, and I hear you finally with your own voice. But if you are she, then this is truly some kind of dream magick,” the Rohir said. “We meet each other here, in our fear,” he said, taking a step back himself. “I do not wish for you to be afraid of me.”

“I am not afraid of you,” said Lothiriel, breathing deeply.  

He quirked an eyebrow up at her. “That gives me more pleasure than I had hoped.” She noticed that he was not in armor, but in a soft tunic and without a sword. He was wearing slim straps of leather woven into his hair. Lothiriel averted her eyes from him, holding the leather and the metal around her wrist.

“It may be that we are sharing a dream as a form of thought, or of thinking. This is the only way I can guess that this is possible. For I have not left Dol Amroth, although I intend to make the journey to Minas Tirith soon.” Lothiriel kept her gaze to the west. She suspected that she had conjured either herself—uninvited and unprovoked—into the Rohir King’s dream, or she had conjured him to hers. A sweeping sense of guilt crashed through her. How could she have left her mind open, her seeking discernment untrained, and ended up invading his very mind and conjuring him to her? After Erchirion disappeared into his old room, Lothiriel found herself walking not to her bed but back to her desk. She had reread the Rohir’s earlier missives, found herself repeating the words, and stopping herself from tunneling back into her discernment of him. She must have fallen asleep, too exhausted to close herself off. And then she was here, in the liminal space that he had built for them.

She noticed the Rider looking at her still, his attention unwavering, and suddenly – she was shy. She was nine and twenty, hardly a girl, but in all the ways of womanhood, she had little experience. Though the women in her province lived freely with their men or other women, she had done little imagining for herself, about a life that would involve more than her role in service. But now—this was her husband to be, and he was a stranger. As she stood in the trees with the man who would be her husband, the force of the thought brought the trees to visibly shiver, and a sound of bells—clear, clean, and riotous—boomed around them. She ducked, covered her ears, waited for the assault to finish. She felt his shadow, the weight of him, above her, shielding her with his body as he bent over her, covering his own ears. His eyes were closed, his face set in a grim line. She could have counted, if she wanted, the leather coiled in his hair. When the sound finally ended, as abruptly as it began, they froze together, their bodies tense, before he straightened himself and backed away.

“So it is,” Lothiriel said when she could breathe. “It would seem that this is my thought, not yours. Although, ” She held up the cuff, warmer now than ever. “I believe it is through your token that I have called you. I am grateful that you heeded my request for a personal token. This is generous of you.” Is this the rest of Middle Earth? she thought. She approached one of the trees, keeping her back to the east, and laid a hand on a low-hanging branch. Silence, strangely. In Orfalas’s thought, every seed was given a voice that she could understand by Orfalas who acted as a conduit to the material world. But maybe in this thought, it was different. The air pulsed again around her in time with the breath in her lungs.

The Rohir looked at her curiously before he smiled.

“I have many questions and concerns, but you have answered the chief of them—the possibility of this meeting, and how it was possible. I fear I have gone mad,” he said, and then, inexplicably, the Rohir laughed and the world moved under her, brought her closer to him somehow, the space between them evaporating. “If I do not believe this to be possible, it is a strike against my imagination and my faith, not on any of your abilities, Lady. Perhaps it is comforting to think that you are a dream, that I have imagined you into being just to speak to you.”

The world was soft, and some invisible force pressed itself against her in a gesture to soothe and placate. An apology. There were hollows and grey bruising under his eyes, and his weariness emanated from him. Do not look East, a directive more for himself than for her. Their longer-thought was a mirror that she held up against him, and a beacon of light that revealed him to her. She wondered what her own form laid bare, even as he struggled to accept that she was not some phantom or fantasy.

“My worry about travelling cross-country has seeped into even my dreaming. Will you travel to Minas Tirith with a large enough contingent of guards, for I know that many if not all of your knights were mustered and marched with us. There are many traveling North who may seek to waylay you, or harm fellow travelers.”

She shook her head, knowing that he referenced the refuge seekers, and his gentleness about the topic was not lost on her. He was wary; he had a right to be. Even if he disbelieved their meeting.  

“I will travel with a kinswoman so we may not move very quickly,” she thought of Yusraa, thought of her child coming to the world. “But the road will run through my own country, until we reach the northernmost border of my province, and then it will be a swift ride to the City.”

“Then if that is your plan, I should hasten to meet your escort,” he said, still gallant. “When you reach the bend in the Anduin, where the hills of the Emyn Arnen stretch west, my men and I should safeguard your passage.”

“I do not want to be a burden, Lord. Not when you have been taken up by scouting, and by the many duties of governance.” A shadow appeared behind him, moving swiftly towards them from the East. The sunlight flickered.

“Governance itself fills me with dread, you must know. Surely, you must know. Your father and your brother have advised me for some of the tasks and listened to me speak about its many challenges. But even then, it was only when I read your letter, Lady, that my heart could rest for a short moment. I cannot hide myself from you, here. I refuse it—if this be a dream, as I suspect, then you cannot hold it against me. Knowing that you will share in my burden and even advise me in making one decision after another has brought me more relief than I can express. I am spent. I cannot rule alone. Do not let me.” The nearby hills disappeared in the encroaching shadow of the eastern mountains, their ridges sharpening into knife points to reflect his fear.

They were running out of time. Lothiriel shuddered, doused with cold dread. His dread. There was something she needed to tell him, a tolling in the cavity of her chest, a secret she could not keep.

“I am grieving, too, Rohir! I should not come to you half of myself!” She gasped. Her voice was swallowed up by the forest, it did not echo. She covered her mouth first with her fist, biting down into her knuckles, and then with her other hand.

“I have less than that to offer,” he frowned, but there was no malice there. “If this is a place where we can be honest with each other, then. Come as you are, and we can make a life together.” He turned back to her then, turned towards the mountains, turned east.  

“Lothiriel,” he breathed, as his figure receded, the dream bubble bursting as she thought it might.

*