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She is passing through her woods in the cool of the evening when she sees something amid the silver and gold, something that doesn’t belong. As she walks up to the tree – one of the older ones, in this part of the wood – a lone voice breaks into song, not far to the north-west. The melody is not one she knows, but it reminds her of the songs of the Avari, that she found so strange and haunting when she first heard them, around the camp-fire at the great Feast of Reuniting. The singer is likely a scout on patrol; she whistles the melody back to him, to let him know that she is abroad in the land, that she will know if he is lax in his duty. The music stops.
The offending leaf is on one of the lower branches, and she barely has to reach up to inspect it. The underside is covered with uneven blots, of a rusty orange colour that she has not seen on her mellyrn before. It is a colour that does not belong here, that she associates with war and upheaval, with flame. A continent violently tearing itself apart before sinking into the sea. A distant glow on the horizon, as the ships burned and her people’s hopes with them.
It is also, she realises, the colour of her eldest cousin’s hair. Time has eroded her memory slowly but surely, like a great river wearing down stone. She has forgotten much, and much of what she remembers has lost its clarity, but the day she first met her cousin – that day she remembers as clearly as ever.
…
She was young – still in her first decade, or perhaps just out of it – and she had gone with her father and brothers to the Calacirya, for the Festival of Arrival. As they stood amid the milling crowd waiting for the procession to begin, a tall man came over and bowed to Father, who laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and invited him to stay with them to watch the procession. The newcomer was the tallest man she’d ever seen and very handsome, but it was his hair that most caught her attention, that she kept stealing glances at. It hung loose and wavy down his back, and it was the colour of the copper in the workshops on the Street of the Artisans in Tirion, that she had seen on shopping trips, trailing after her parents.
It seemed to take an eternity for the procession to begin, and she was about to ask Father to take her to buy a candied apple, but then they heard the drums beating in a slow steady rhythm. She realised that she would not be able to see the procession, and was pulling at her father’s hand to get his attention when a pair of strong arms lifted her up, high above the crowd. The tall newcomer set her on his shoulders, and she found herself looking out over a sea of heads – black, and a few golden like her own, and just the one coppery. From up there she could see it all. The musicians walked in front, playing on pipes and lyres and rough-hewn wooden flutes, instruments brought from Endore. As they neared the pass, a dark-haired man walking in the front row began to sing a hymn to Manwe and Varda in a voice as clear as a bell, so beautiful it made her shiver. As he passed, the singer turned to look at them, and the copper-haired man took his hand off her ankle where he was using it to steady her and waved. The singer rolled his eyes, and she felt her new friend’s shoulders shake with laughter.
After the musicians came the main procession of men and women with lit torches, dressed in clothes made to look like animal-skins, with their feet bare and crowns of leaves on their heads. Some drew along with them beasts of Endore, with horns and tusks, sculpted by the workshops in the city. In the very middle was the figure of a beast with two huge antlers, almost the width of the Calacirya, drawn along by six strong young men. Atop it sat her eldest brother, who had been chosen to play the part of King Finwe. His hair had been stained black with berry-juice and he had borrowed one of Grandfather’s circlets, but the broad smile on his face was that of a carefree young man, not a stern warrior-king. She bounced up and down and called his name, and when he spotted her he smiled even wider and waved. The procession made its way to the cleft in the mountains, and her brother dismounted and made his way to the front. He bowed to the actors playing Manwe and Varda, and a great wind passed through the Calacirya, extinguishing all the torches.
The crowd applauded, but she let out a sound of dismay, and the copper-haired man asked her what was wrong. She replied that the torches were pretty, that she had hoped they would give her one to take home.
The man chuckled. ‘You really shouldn’t play with fire. Besides, that’s what the Festival of Arrival is all about. It was dark in Endore, so our people needed torches to light their way. Once they came into the light of the Trees, they weren’t needed any more’.
She knew all that already, of course, but it didn’t make the torches any less pretty. It was a shame to put them all out like that. ‘I want to go to Endore, one day’.
‘Goodness me, whatever for?’
So many reasons. She paused a moment to choose the best one, before answering that she wanted to see an andamunda. The man laughed before lifting her from his shoulders and setting her down on the grass, in front of Father. Father asked if she enjoyed the procession, and told her to thank her cousin for giving her such a good view and being so patient with her.
‘You’re my cousin? Like Irisse?’ The man exchanged a look with Father before replying that yes, their fathers were brothers.
‘Thank you’, she said, and then paused a moment. ‘You remind me of my friend Alaire. She has a cat with orange hair, like yours. He scratches sometimes, but if you give him fish he’ll lick your hands’.
The man – her cousin – threw his head back and laughed, so much that it made her giggle a bit too. ‘Is that so? I’m very flattered’.
…
She saw him during the following years, of course, many times. At family celebrations, his copper hair elegantly braided, speaking with her father and her older cousins. Under crackling torchlight after night fell on Valinor, in a twisted parody of the festival they had watched years before, and at Alqualonde, his sword wet with the blood of her mother’s people. As a near-corpse carried back from Thangorodrim beyond all hope, and as a fearsome warlord with a perilous light in his eyes, straddling the border between determination and madness. Many times indeed, and he was many men, as she has been many women. The last time of all was near the end – of his life, of Beleriand, of the Age of the Jewels, of all of it – in a place that now exists only in memory.
She paused a moment by the great door of carved oak, now scored deeply by sword and axe. She arranged her braid over her shoulder and checked the sword at her hip and the dagger at her thigh before entering, walking straight, her head high. They may have lost the day but she was not going to grovel, least of all to a thief and a kidnapper of children.
It took all her self-control not to cry out at the sight of proud Thingol’s throne-room, now a charnel house. As she approached the dais, two soldiers with the star of Feanor on their armour and the light of Aman in their eyes walked past carrying the body of a man, either not noticing or not caring that his long dark hair was trailing on the ground, in the blood. As they passed her she recognised her king, his face as beautiful as ever but his chest a red ruin. Stupid, stupid boy. In face Dior was Luthien come again, but he was not blessed with his mother’s luck, her ability to forge through any trouble and win the day with little more than desperate hope on her side. She tasted bile in her mouth as they carried him a few more yards then slung him onto a pile of bodies clad in green and brown with black and silver hair: the dead of Doriath.
Her cousin was not sitting in triumph on Thingol’s throne, but on the low steps leading up to the dais. His head was bowed, and when he raised it to look at her she breathed in sharply. He looked ghastly, his cheeks hollow, his eyes burning with a feverish glow. He looked mad, as mad as his father, when in the flickering torchlight amid the endless dark he said those terrible words that doomed them all.
‘My lord Maedhros – ‘ One of the soldiers hurried back towards the dais, clearly fearing that she would seek to avenge the king whose body they were just treating with such indignity, as if he was nothing more than a piece of meat or one of Morgoth’s orcs.
‘I’ll deal with her myself. Go, search the lower halls with the others. Send word when you find it’.
His Sindarin bore the accent of Valinor and his voice was still mild and pleasant, but it was no longer the voice of a prince or a diplomat, or indeed a kindly cousin. Rather, it was the voice of a commander, a warlord. Someone who commands his men and expects to be obeyed, even if he is commanding them to slay their own kind, or to kidnap children.
‘Artanis’. Once the men were gone, he greeted her with her father-name and a respectful nod of the head. She did not greet him in return, but looked him straight in the eye and asked what he had done with the children.
Copper brows knitted together in apparent confusion. ‘Children?’
‘Dior’s children. The twins and the little princess. What have you done with them?’
He replied that he assumed they were hiding somewhere, that they would be found soon enough by the men searching the lower halls for the Jewel. That they would not be harmed.
‘You won’t find anything down there’, she spat. ‘I went to fetch them from their hiding-place, to bring them to safety, but when I got there the door had been broken down and there was no sign of the children. Their nurse had been killed’. With arrows to her belly and breast, and what looked like a hunting-knife to her throat. Celegorm’s work, or that of the men who rode in his train. She does not say that the woman had been hiding little Elwing under her skirts, that the child was miraculously not discovered.
Her cousin looks at her as if to read whether she speaks the truth. He looks stricken, then drops his glance to the floor. The stairs leading to the dais are streaked with blood: was Dior killed there, descending from the throne that was always too big for him? Or else trying to get to it, hoping that its power would somehow protect him?
‘I will search for them. Myself, since it seems not all my men can be trusted. My quarrel was with Dior, not with his children’. He looked up and met her gaze. His eyes were no longer as bright and feverish as before; instead, he just looked tired. ‘You should leave. It isn’t safe for you here’.
‘You aren’t going to kill me?’ Her hand strayed to the dagger on her thigh. ‘Or try, at least?’
He actually looked wounded at that, at the mere suggestion that Beleriand’s most notorious kinslayer would stoop to slaying his own kin. She almost laughed at the sheer gall of it.
‘Kill you?’ He spoke now in Quenya, and the sound of her father-tongue in his quiet, pleasant voice tugged at her heart, even in that place. ‘What do you think I am, cousin?’
She stepped forward. For the first time in her life she towered over his hunched figure, sitting on the steps. ‘We curse Morgoth’s orcs and call them monsters, but they had no choice in what they are. Everything you are, everything you have become, is by your own choice. You are worse than any orc. It would have been better if you had died on Thangorodrim. For all of Beleriand, and for you’.
He did not reply, but sighed deeply and was silent a moment before telling her to go, quickly, before the men returned. Her hand went again to the dagger at her thigh: he was unguarded, vulnerable, seemingly distracted. She could try, at least. To bury it between his shoulder-blades, or slit his kinslayer’s throat. She could rid Beleriand of him, free him of the burden of being what he had become. But Celeborn was waiting for her in the passage, with the little princess and the jewel; besides, she couldn’t help but think there had been enough kinslaying for one day.
She looked back only once, as she left Menegroth for the last time. She took in the shattered lanterns, the walls and floor streaked with blood, the bodies piled up by the door. And her cousin, sitting on the steps, his coppery head cradled between his stump and his remaining hand, shaking.
…
The scout sings his strange song again, and she returns to the present. Hundreds of leagues and a fathomless stretch of years away from Menegroth, safe under the eaves of her wood. She hasn’t thought of her cousin in years: he died with Beleriand, with the land he fought so hard to free from Morgoth, and ended up marring with his own bloody trail of violence, and she was not sorry to hear it. Her only sorrow was for her Aunt Nerdanel: a husband and seven sons gone across the sea seeking vengeance, and not one returned. Only tales of what they did, what they became. It is hard, being a mother.
She strokes the underside of the leaf, the marred side. It leaves a trail of copper dust on her finger. She’s not sure what it is, she’ll have to ask her husband. Craft, the arts of ruling and of war, the past and the future, these are her domains – but the trees are his. He might have seen something like it before, in Doriath after Melian departed, or in the last days of Beleriand as the land sickened and died from Morgoth’s poison. It is a corruption, a rot, she is sure of it. A sign that Nenya’s power is fading and hers with it. She knew this day would come, in time. After all, if Doriath and Gondolin could fall, if mighty Numenor could sink beneath the waves, what hope was there for her little oasis, her sanctuary?
Sighing, she lets go of the leaf. These are weighty matters and there is no time to dwell on them now. She needs to prepare for the Ringbearer’s party: they departed Rivendell at the dying of the old year and should be here soon, though there have been no reports from the scouts. She begins to walk away, back towards Caras Galadhon, but a thought occurs to her and she returns to the tree, looks again at the leaf. Whatever the rust is, it has not yet spread. The other leaves on the branch are whole and unmarred, as golden as Laurelin. Perhaps the decay can be halted, even if it cannot be stopped altogether. She grips the marred leaf firmly and twists the stem to pull it from the branch, then lets it fall gently to the floor.