Chapter Text
We knew that land once, You and I
and once we wandered there
in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair.
- JRR Tolkien, The Little House of Lost Play
The cottage had lain abandoned long enough that the grass was growing long around the door and the tiles had started to fall from the roof. The man who used to live there came with them from Doriath. Everyone knew him as Randir; Elwing did not know his right name. Who knows, perhaps Randir was his right name. It certainly suited him well enough: he rarely came into town, but wandered along the cliff-paths or the beach, his clothes in tatters, his long silver hair matted and crusted with salt. Once, when she crept out on an evening to play on the beach, Elwing saw him standing up to his waist in the sea, letting the waves crash against him again and again, singing tunelessly. Not long afterwards, he vanished altogether: he was no longer seen on the cliffs or the beach, and the marchwardens reported no sign of him further afield, and his cottage lay empty.
After Randir disappeared, Elwing asked Lord Gereth if they should not search for him. He was of Doriath-that-was, after all – was she not responsible for him, as her people’s Queen? Lord Gereth smiled. ‘You should not worry about him, my Queen. It was ever Randir’s custom to wander abroad – why, in Doriath-that-was, he would disappear for months into the deep woods, sleeping in trees and hollows, or on the bare ground. Then he would return, as if he had never been away at all. His ways did not trouble King Elu Thingol of blessed memory, nor your lord father, and they should not trouble you’.
Her guardian was trying to be kind, she could tell, but be that as it may his words stung a little. It must have shown on her face, because he added more gently ‘You are a good Queen, Elwing, to care so for the wellbeing of every last one of your people. I am merely saying that Randir would not want any of us to worry, or to search for him. He wanders for his own reasons, and he will return when it seems good to him’.
Despite Lord Gereth’s assurances, Randir did not return. After a while nobody spoke of him any longer, but his cottage still stood out on the lonely headland, abandoned and falling into ruin. Everybody avoided it – that is, until one day Elwing was out on the beach near the headland with Earendil, playing and hunting for crabs. It was a fine day in late summer, but all of a sudden the sky turned dark and there was a loud rumble of thunder, and then it began to rain, heavily enough that the raindrops bounced upwards from the rocks.
‘We could hide in there’, Earendil shouted, trying to make himself heard over the storm and pointing to the cottage. They ran there through the downpour, Earendil slightly ahead, trying not to slip on the wet ground. The cottage door was shut, and at first Elwing feared it wouldn’t budge and that they would have to walk all the way home in this weather, but Earendil gave it a strong shove with his shoulder and it opened inwards. Inside it was dusty, enough to make them cough, but it was dry. There was a chair inside, and a narrow bed, but they sat on the floor and talked. While they were talking they forgot to pay attention to the bucket with the crabs, and before they realised what was happening one of them climbed out of the bucket and scuttled away. They sprang up and looked for it, and eventually found it under a small wooden table. While Earendil picked up the crab and put it back in the bucket, Elwing looked at what was on the table. Two portraits, drawn by a skilful hand: one of a woman with dark hair and kind eyes, the other of two little girls with silver hair. She picked up the second picture and held it out to Earendil. ‘Look’.
‘Put it back’, he hissed, but she ignored him and pressed the picture into his hands. ‘Look! Do you think they are his daughters? And the other lady is his wife?’
He glanced at the picture and shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe he lost his whole family and that’s what made him crazy’.
Elwing felt her cheeks burning and anger rising inside her like a furnace. ‘What do you know about losing your whole family?’
‘I’m sorry! That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’m not crazy’, she said, putting the picture back on the table.
Earendil looked at her and grinned. ‘You are a little crazy, sometimes’, he said, and dodged as she aimed a punch at his shoulder.
After that they went to the cottage often, when it was too cold or wet to be outside, or when they wanted to play indoors without being watched over by Earendil’s parents, or by Meleth or Evranin. One day towards the end of that year it was cold, as cold as any day Elwing could remember, with frost on the ground and a bitter wind blowing in from the sea and shrieking around the walls of the cottage, and Elwing persuaded Earendil to try making a fire using some old papers and a flint they found in a drawer next to the bed. It took a while to light – Earendil had seen his Ada do this many a time but had never been allowed to try it himself – but after a while the fire was crackling away merrily and they were warming their hands and faces. Suddenly, the cottage door crashed open and Lord Tuor was standing there, with an angry look on his face that Elwing had never seen before. He took in the scene before him, then without a word ran outside and returned with a bucket of water which he threw over the fire, quenching it. Then, he turned to Earendil and Elwing. He sounded furious as he told them that they should be ashamed, that they had no right to enter a man’s house, let alone to set fires. Elwing had never heard him shout before, had never even seen him in anger; normally, he was the calmest person she had ever met. She could not meet his eyes or speak, and she turned away so that neither he nor Earendil would see the tears running down her cheeks. She hated for anyone to see her cry, back then.
After that it was several years before they returned to the cottage. Randir was never seen in Sirion again, and the rumour spread that he had cast himself into the sea, unable in the end to bear the loss of Doriath. Elwing asked Earendil once if his people were as prone to nostalgia as hers, if they talked about their white city in the mountains as much as Lord Faranon and the rest talked about the deep woods and the carven halls of Menegroth. Her friend just laughed. ‘They never stop! It’s all Gondolin this and King Turgon that. Amil says they were exactly the same back in Gondolin – only back then it was all Tirion this and King Finwe that. It’s how these Elves are, always living in the past’.
‘”These Elves”. Are you not an Elf yourself?’
Earendil just shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t feel much like one’.
In time, the two of them found themselves once again wanting a place where they could be alone, where they could be together without the risk of Earendil’s parents walking in on him, as Princess Idril did once – an incident Earendil could not speak about without going bright red, right to the tips of his ears. And somewhere far away from Elwing’s guardians, who if they knew what she was getting up to with the refugee prince of Gondolin would probably try to send Earendil off to Angband on a quest to reclaim the remaining two Silmarils. ‘Or maybe they’d just order me to be thrown into the sea from the highest cliff, he said, grinning widely.
They avoided the bed at first, but it wasn’t long before they found themselves drawn there, and they lay there for hours, kissing and exploring one another’s bodies. One evening when Earendil’s parents were dining with Pengolodh and Celeiris, they agreed to meet at the cottage. Earendil arrived late, as he usually did, out of breath, his hair wind-blown and tangled. He sat down next to Elwing, and pulled out from his satchel a bottle of wine and some paper.
‘What’s that?’, Elwing asked.
Earendil brandished the bottle. ‘Wine, from Balar. Cirdan gifted it to me when I was last over there’.
‘I know what wine is. What do you plan to do with the paper?’
Not just his ears turned red this time, but his cheeks too. His skin was fairer than Elwing’s, and he blushed easily. ‘I wanted to sketch you. If you would be willing’.
‘You have sketched me many times. Me, and half of Sirion, and what seems like every seabird and starfish from here to Balar. Why do you need to ask?’ As long as she had known him, Earendil had loved to sketch. The sea and the cliffs and the sky; the creatures that lived in the sea and in rock-pools; his mother and father and the people of Sirion; her. He was good at it, too. ‘It’s the Noldo in him’, his mother would say, with an indulgent smile. ‘He gets it from his grandfather’.
He flushed an even deeper red, at her question. Elwing had known him almost as long as she could remember; never to her knowledge had she seen him so embarrassed. ‘I mean – I want to sketch all of you. Without your clothes. If you would be willing’.
She was shocked, but intrigued. ‘Why?’
‘Because you are beautiful’.
She thought about it for a moment. There seemed little harm in it; Earendil had already seen her naked, after all, many a time, and she hoped there would be many more times and that he would not tire of the sight. And there was little chance of them being discovered, so long as they hid the drawings well. ‘All right. On one condition’.
‘Name it’.
‘If I must be naked, then so must you. It would not do, for us to be unequal. I am a Queen, after all.
‘That seems fair’, he said, flashing her a grin before taking off his tunic and trousers and settling himself cross-legged before her. She tried not to look at his broad chest; at the golden hair that grew on his chest and arms, so different to any of the Elf-men she had seen without their shirts down at the docks; at what was between his legs. Instead she shed her gown and slip and settled herself on the bed, facing him. He handed her the bottle of wine and she drank a long draught from it before asking him ‘Why are you really doing this? Drawing me, like this?’ She could hear herself slurring slightly; wine was a rare indulgence, at Sirion.
‘Beauty deserves to be immortalised. And you are the most beautiful thing I know’.
‘Immortalised! So, you think I will age, turn into an old crone. That is why you are doing this’.
‘No!’ This was a conversation they had had many times – about their nature and kind, and what their fate would be. ‘You know I care not for these questions – Elf, Man, mortal, immortal, it is all the same to me. I am just a simple sailor, who enjoys beautiful things. Because they are beautiful, and for no other reason.’
Once Earendil was satisfied with his sketch, they turned their attention to the wine and to each other. Later on, when the moon was full in the sky and it was time for them to go home, Elwing asked what he was going to do with the drawing. ‘You cannot keep it in your room. If your mother sees it I will never be able to look her in the face again’, she said. In the end, they hid it under a loose floorboard, where they used to hide children’s treasures, seashells and bits of sea-glass and the little ships that Earendil liked to carve out of driftwood.
Not long after that evening they were engaged, and a year later they were married, with a house of their own and no need to sneak around in private. After that, the cottage lay abandoned once more.