Flesh of my flesh

Faramir

Fíriel’s beginning was darkness, the greatest darkness Eowyn and I ever knew together. Perhaps all the greatest joys are rooted in darkness.

She came to us because we lost Húrin. For my wife that loss was too much to bear; if one of them had to die, she wanted it to have been herself. With all her heart she wanted what she could not have, his life and her death. 

They gave her the child to hold because I commanded it. They were all against it, but I thought she had the right. But she clasped him fiercely, and bared her teeth like a she-wolf when the hunters come for her cubs, and when we tore him out of her arms, she gave a shriek that haunts me yet.

We wrapped him in the shawl that had been prepared for him, though he had no need of its warmth, and I carried him away. I gave him his name because it was all I had to give him.

Outside her chamber, one of the doctors touched my arm and said, ‘My lord, there is something you should know – that the Lady Eowyn your wife is not hurt – that is, she may bear again some day.’

I turned on him. ‘Do you think that would comfort her now?’

‘No, lord,’ he answered steadily, ’but I thought it might comfort you.’

It did not, not then.

* * *

We buried Húrin in the corner of the orchard and laid green turf over the grave. As soon as Eowyn was able to walk we took her to the spot, and she watched while Elboron and I planted the roots of simbelmynë that Lothíriel had sent us, wrapped in a damp cloth to keep them fresh. She watched, but said nothing, and her eyes were dry.

It was not long before she recovered, in body at least, for she was a strong woman. Life recovered something of its old course, and I was glad that the King summoned me seldom to the City, for I hated to leave her even when she had not a glance for me.  It was not till long afterwards that I realised why the summons so seldom came, and remembered to be grateful.

There came a night when I thought I should return to her, since neither of us was likely to find any great comfort elsewhere. She put her arms round me, but without eagerness, and when I kissed her she closed her eyes, but not before I had seen the gleam of terror in them. She felt tense in my arms, and with horror I realised that she was submitting.  I drew back at once, and as she neither spoke nor moved, I said, ‘Perhaps you would sleep better if I were not with you.’ She nodded without opening her eyes, and I saw that her hands were clenched at her sides so that the knuckles showed bone-pale in the moonlight.

I went back to my own chamber and lay sleepless for the rest of the night, listening. She did not weep, but from time to time I heard a ragged breath, a sound that might have been made by one determined to keep silence under torture. When I went out in the morning, she was still lying there, as if she had not moved a muscle.

So it remained. I dare say all Ithilien, if not all Gondor, knew how it was between us. Women gossip, and men scarcely less, but no hint was ever breathed in our presence.  All of us in Emyn Arnen were actors in the pretence, because a pretence was all we had. Eowyn spent her days walking round the house, swiftly and without a pause, but without seeming to notice anything that passed; servants fled from her as if they had seen a ghost. When she was too tired to walk any more, she would sit at the window of her bower, which looked towards the orchard, and stare out from a face that seemed turned to stone, like a statue’s. If she was not to be found in the house, she would be in the orchard, sitting by the grave, hugging her knees and staring into emptiness, unmoving, not weeping. Elboron began to avoid her; she did not repulse him exactly, but looked at him as if she did not know who he was. But she did know, because when she saw us together – he spent as much time as he could with me – a look of anger would come over her, like someone who sees a thief disporting himself in stolen finery.

It clouded Elboron’s blessed sunny nature. Sometimes he would forget, and begin to laugh at some play, and then pull himself up abruptly. One day, some months after Hurin’s death  - a very long time to a child of five - he said to me, ‘Father, why is Mother so sad? Is it still because of little brother who died?’

            ‘Yes, it is still because of that.’

            ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, ‘but it’s getting harder and harder. Soon I think I shan’t be sorry any more. Will you be angry when I’m not sorry any more?’

            ‘No, senya.’

            ‘Will Mother?’

            ‘Perhaps,’ I answered. ‘It is harder for her. Little brother was part of her, you see, so losing him hurts her more.’   

            ‘Will she stop being sorry, in the end?’

            ‘Not stop being sorry, but learn to be happy again in spite of it. It will be hard for her We must be very, very patient, you and I.’

            He sighed. ‘I don’t think I’m a very patient person, Father. Can we go somewhere that Mother can’t see or hear us, and play catch?’

            So we did, and for a little while he forgot to be sorry, and I let him laugh, and mocked myself inwardly for my brave words.

* * *

Time dragged on, and the spring that had been frozen for us turned into summer, one of the hottest we could remember. Grass burned brown and streams dried up, and many crops failed so that we were glad of the stores we had laid by for such times. In the orchard the leaves of the fruit trees began to curl and fall, and the little fruits withered and dropped instead of swelling to ripeness. Only on Húrin’s grave did the grass still grow green, after the white cloak of the simbelmynë had faded. Elboron and I watered it with water from our deepest well, and Eowyn perhaps with her tears, though I never saw her weep there.

Towards the middle of August the heat became unbearable, the sticky heat that precedes a storm, but no storm came and the skies remained bitter blue. There seemed no freshness anywhere, day or night. Even Elboron began to look listless and feverish, and Morwen felt his brow a dozen times a day, and dosed him with bitter medicines till he wailed loudly in protest; but Eowyn seemed not to hear.

At last came a night so suffocating that I felt I would go mad. I lay on my solitary bed  exhausted but restless, in that state when reality blurs into waking dream. The moon shone through my window so brightly that it hurt my eyes, so that I got up and went to close the shutters, despite the heat. As I looked out the light was suddenly dimmed, and I saw that the stars had been blotted out from half the sky; and at the same moment I heard a growl of thunder, and the trees outside bent under a slap of wind. The weather was breaking at last.  

As the distant thunder died I realised that all other sounds were hushed; the night-creatures had taken refuge from the coming storm. Behind me, also, was a silence that shouted. Without looking in her room, I knew that Eowyn was not there. And if she was not, there was only one place where she could be.

I flung on a gown and hurried out, waving the sentries aside. Cold breaths of wind pawed me as I crossed the garden, and in the orchard the dead leaves rustled. She was there, bent over the grave, a white ghost, rocking to and fro and murmuring, ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’ over and over again.

I did not go to her. I spoke from the gate. ‘Eowyn, it was not your fault. It was not your fault. Now come away out of the storm.’

She seemed not to hear me. She went on rocking.  Then the skies split over our heads and spilled blue lightning, and at last it began to rain, sharp angry rain that splattered in the dust.

‘Eowyn, come away!’

Still she took no notice. There was nothing else for it; I went and dragged her to her feet and pinioned her arms as her hands came up to claw me. She struggled wildly and I put forth my strength against her as I would never have thought to do against any woman.

The thunder crashed and I shouted over it, ‘Let Húrin go! Eowyn, let him go! Let him go!’ and began to drag her away. As we left the orchard the rain came down in a sudden savage flood, soaking us in an instant, and she ceased to struggle and fell against me. I lifted her - grief-wasted as she was, she was no great weight – and carried her towards the house, and though I could hear nothing but the roar of rain and thunder, I could feel her whole body shuddering with violent sobs.

I took her back to her room and would have left her on the bed while I called for a woman to help her off with her wet clothes, but she clung to me when I would have drawn back, and her lips fastened on mine; and then we tore off our wet things, and needed no others.

When I awoke in the morning, the air was cool and the sun was bright, and all the birds that had been silenced by the drought were shouting in celebration; and over their music was another one, because my wife was sitting at her window, combing her hair in the sunlight, and as she combed she sang, and when she felt my gaze upon her, she looked up and smiled.

* * *

It was some weeks later that she told me she had conceived again, though I think I already knew it. I studied her face for signs of fear, but there were none. We smiled at one another and kissed, and knew beyond any doubt that this time, it would be all right.

* * *

A few days after that I came upon Elboron in the corridor. He was wandering along, clutching the side of his head and making an extraordinary humming noise, like a swarm of warrior bees.

            ‘What’s the matter, senya?’

            He looked up at me with a gap-toothed grin.

            ‘Mother boxed my ear,’ he said, in a joyful tone which, a year earlier, would have puzzled me exceedingly. ‘She found me stealing sugar-drops – at least she said it was stealing – and boxed my ear, and said that if she found me so again, she’d chase me up the highest tree in Emyn Arnen.’ He seized my hand and swung on it ecstatically. ‘She did! She really did! She said it like herself, and then she laughed and told me to be off, and she let me keep one sugar-drop!’ He opened his small pink mouth to show me the fast-diminishing evidence. ‘Is everything going to be as it was before, now?’

            ‘Yes, my son, I really think it is,’ I said, and snatched him up and danced with him down the corridor and out into the garden, amidst the brightness of the new grass.

The moon child

Eowyn

After I lost Hurin, I think I was out of my mind for a while. What I did or said during that time I can scarcely remember. Even Faramir ceased to be quite real to me, and I repelled any comfort he offered even while something at the back of my mind wept and called frantically for him. I am ashamed now to think that I did nothing to comfort him in his grief, was indeed not aware of it, only of my own. I am sure many men so afflicted would have been driven to seek comfort – and much more – elsewhere, and I know that many other women would have been only too pleased to give it. I know, too, that he would never have sought it, or taken it if it was offered. I never thanked him for it; but then he never expected thanks for being what he was.

It seems strange – it seemed strange at the time – that when I realised I had conceived again I felt no fear, only happiness. It was as if the child spoke to me from the beginning, reassuring me. Begotten in grief and storm, she was all serenity and content. I was never sick or weary with her, as I had been with the other two, and as she grew she lay quiet and contented in the womb, only stirring occasionally to show me all was well with her.

It was the same when she was born, on an April night when the moon shone so bright you could almost see colours. She caused me as little pain as a child can, and coming so swiftly and gladly into the world, she was beautiful from the beginning, all black and silver like the true child of Gondor that she was. They laid her warm with life on my breast, and the moon smiled on her and spread his golden cloak over her, as a sign that he took her for his own.

When Faramir came in I held her out to him and he took her fearlessly, knowing by now how to handle a babe. (His expression of mingled triumph and terror when he first held Elboron made me laugh out loud; but perhaps I would never have loved him so dearly if I had not been able, now and again, to laugh at him.) He stood for a long while in the moonlight with his daughter in his arms, looking into her face, and when he turned to me again, I realised that he was not the same man as he had been when he came into the room.

            ‘Are you content?’ I asked him.

            He at beside me and took my hand and kissed it, the baby still held in the crook of his arm. ‘Sweetheart, it is more than that. I have no words to tell you what you have given me tonight. My Fíriel … With her I am…’ he hesitated for a word, something he seldom did for he was a master of words, but I know now that there were no words for what he was trying to say. ‘I am … complete. This is the fulfilment of everything I ever was. There is no more to be done.’ I was puzzled, but pleased that he was pleased; I did not know, then, what a great matter we had begun between us. Seeing my eyelids begin to droop, he said, ‘I must let you sleep now, my love.’ He got up.

            ‘Before you go, my lord,’ I chided him, ‘give me the babe.’

            He started, as if he had forgotten that he held her at all, or rather, forgotten that she was not a part of him; then he returned the child to my arms, and as he did so she gave a whimper of protest.

            ‘I will come soon again,’ he promised, speaking not to me but to the child, and softly went out.

All the time I lay abed, which was not for long for there was no need, Ithilien went wild with rejoicing, and we could hear the bells ringing even in the City. We were showered with gifts and congratulations as we had not been even when Elboron was born, because Gondor had taken our earlier grief to its heart. We had taken Elboron to the City to present him to the King, but for Fíriel the King and Queen came to us, in all their splendour, and took her under their special protection, almost as if she were a child of their own. When Fíriel was three days old Legolas of the elves came to us, appearing unexpectedly in the evening as he always did, and kissed and blessed Fíriel and gave me two gifts to keep for her, a coronet set with gems and a length of fine silken stuff which he said was for her wedding gown. I laughed and said it was a little early to think of my daughter’s wedding day, but Legolas shook his head and said that the time would come before we looked for it. I put the gifts away very carefully, but as the busy years went by I very nearly, but never quite, forgot about them.

Fíriel thrived from the first, but her quietness in the womb proved to have been a little misleading once she had come among us, for there was no doubt she was passionate. If anything displeased her she would roar more heartily than Elboron ever had, though as soon as she had what she wanted she would at once be quiet again. I soon realised that apart from food, which every baby roars for, there was usually only one thing that Fíriel wanted, and that was her father. As soon as he was near her cries would subside, and as soon as he took her up there would be nothing but contented silence. When she learned to smile, she smiled first for him, and thereafter seldom for anyone else. As soon as her eyes had learned to see, they looked always for him.

As for Faramir, he was never without her if by any means he could be with her, and if they were apart, and she was in any kind of distress, he would be uneasy until he could come to her. Of course any father would want to comfort his own child in distress, and for a long time I did not realise the closeness of their communion, or the fact that it worked both ways – not until one morning when Fíriel suddenly woke out of a peaceful sleep and began to howl, and continued to howl hour after hour, refusing all comfort, until Morwen and I were almost frantic with worry. In the mid-afternoon a message came that Faramir had been hurt: his war-horse in training – a great, ugly, evil-tempered brute, a disgrace to Rohan whence it came, to which my husband was inexplicably devoted – had tried to savage a groom, and in rescuing the groom Faramir had caught a glancing blow from one of the beast’s hooves that had broken his collar bone. The hurt was not serious, but it was painful, and when he came home we had to set the bone, and that was painful again.

Fíriel, who had quietened a little when her father arrived home, howled steadily throughout the operation and was only soothed when Faramir took her up, somewhat awkwardly, in his sound arm, upon which she immediately smiled and went to sleep. It was then that I realised why Faramir had said that Fíriel’s birth had made him complete. They were like a single soul in two bodies, and so they always have been and always will be. It is their great bliss and also their great agony. 

This communion was their great secret, and all their lives together they have worked to keep it, so that only I and Elboron and one or two others know anything of it. Have I ever been jealous that my husband should be so part and parcel of another woman, even if she is my own daughter? I can honestly say that I have not. As I said once to Elboron, on one of the rare occasions when he sulked and thought himself passed over, Faramir does not love the rest of us any the less because he loves Fíriel more. It is not by their choice that they are as they are; it is their fate to be so. You might as well chide the Sun for setting in the west, or a river for flowing towards the sea.

The Flowering

Elboron

I think I told you before that nobody could ever really explain Fíriel. Only Father ever really understands, but even he couldn’t explain her to anyone else. They say you can’t explain colours to a man blind from birth. Where Father and Fíriel are concerned, they alone see the colours and all the rest of us are blind; there are no words which can make us understand  what they feel. Only a very few people even know the colours exist; apart from Mother and myself, perhaps only two.  

I can only tell you a few of the things that I remember. It may help, a little, to explain how Fíriel came to leave Father and leave Ithilien. And if you think a young woman leaving her father’s house is a small thing to make so much trouble over, it only shows how little you understand. Imagine a man cutting off his own right hand, or a lark tearing itself out of the sky, and you might begin to  understand better.

Where did it begin?

I can remember Eldarion’s early visits to us well enough; like a number of other well-born boys he came to study with Father, and perhaps to breathe a freer air than the King’s son could enjoy in the City. Though he was friendly and did not stand on ceremony,  I was never at ease with him as I was with Elfwine, once we’d exchanged the necessary quota of broken teeth and black eyes. Although Eldarion never stood on his dignity, the idea of giving him a black eye was unthinkable; there was always a kind of remoteness about him, as about his father, which forbade familiarity. The only person to whom he unbent entirely was Fíriel, perhaps because Fíriel, who was only six or seven when Eldarion first came to us, was the only person except Father who wasn’t in the least overawed by either his rank or his manner. She treated him exactly as she treated anyone else who was not-Father, with a kindly imperiousness and a confidence born of her own complete and happy security. She welcomed him into her little world without a shadow of foreknowledge that he was the one fated to tear it apart. As for Eldarion, I don’t think that he saw her, at first, as anything other than a charming and amusing child.

When did that change? So often it’s the little, unimportant things that carry meaning. There is a tiny scene which comes to my memory, as bright and real as a vision conjured by an elf minstrel, whenever I think of Fíriel and Eldarion. It is an evening in early summer; the song of the birds is just  beginning to take on a sleepy note and the shadows are lengthening. The moon is already well up, but pale silver rather than golden as he will be when the sun surrenders him the sky. The grass is still vivid green, not burnt-tawny as it will be in high summer, and the gardeners have been cutting the lawns, so that the sweet hay-smell conquers even the fragrance of Ithilien’s flowers. I am very aware of the hay-scent because I am lying with my face in it, pinned down by Eldarion sitting on my back, while Fíriel trots solemnly to and fro collecting and covering me with grass-clippings. Quite why she thinks this is necessary I don’t know, but she is as unmoved by my protests as Eldarion is by my squirms. I am saved by a dryly amused voice from far above asking the identity of the unfortunate victim that Fíriel and Eldarion seem intent on burying alive; the weight on my back disappears as Eldarion scrambles to his feet, and a pair of strong hands takes me under the arms and heaves me upright in a shower of grass. When I have blinked the grass-seeds out of my eyes and sneezed several times I realise that it’s Father, and that Fíriel is already beside him, holding protectively on to his arm, and the two of them have that air of indefinable completeness that they always have when they’re together. Eldarion apologises for my grassy state, and Father says, still dryly, that while he’s bound to do all he can to fulfil the wishes of the heir to the throne, he hopes that these will not extend to having his own son and heir forcibly transformed into a compost heap. Eldarion says that this is by no means his wish, but that he dared not disobey the will of Lady Fíriel; Fíriel gives him a queenly smile of approval and says that he’s quite right. Father chides her mildly for her forwardness, but Eldarion intercedes for her, she beams at him and offers him her free hand, and shortly afterwards, the supper bell summons us all back to the house.

Was it then that Eldarion first became truly aware of her?

Soon after that he went away, and with Father being away so often, and for so long, on his embassies, that was the end of Eldarion’s lengthy sojourns in Ithilien. The next thing I remember, which seems important now, has nothing to do with Eldarion directly, but it has stuck in my mind as the day when Fíriel was first made starkly aware of her probable fate. It may seem strange that it didn’t happen earlier, but, as perhaps you understand by now, the idea of her separating herself from Father seemed unthinkable to anyone who had ever seen them together. You might as well have asked her to stop breathing.

It was Túrin who did it, not surprisingly, for he was a great disturber of our peace.  From time to time, even when very young, he could display the same unerring awareness of truth as Father had, though Father never expressed it as brutally as Túrin always did.

It was another summer evening in the garden; perhaps that’s why the two scenes go together in my mind. I think I was on my way back from archery practice when I came across Fíriel leaning against a tree, with five-year-old Túrin at her feet. She told me, with a weary smile, that she’d agreed to watch him while Eldis, his long-suffering nurse, kept a tryst with Beleg, of the guard. (Eldis and Beleg fondly imagined that neither Mother nor Father knew about their affair, and had sworn Fíriel and me to secrecy. Fíriel and I honourably refrained from saying a word to Mother, but we knew perfectly well that she knew all about it and only tolerated it because Beleg’s intentions appeared to be honourable, which turned out to be the case.) In point of fact, watching Túrin was the last thing anybody would have wanted to do, because he was lying on his stomach, painstakingly taking a beetle to pieces. I have no doubt the beetle was dead before he started – Father had forbidden him to torture living creatures, however lowly, in terms that not even Túrin dared to disobey – but it was still an unpleasant sight. To distract ourselves, Fíriel and I turned our eyes towards Mindolluin, watching as the setting sun turned the snow on the distant peaks from dazzling white to pink, and conjured a last diamond flash from every window in the topmost  towers of the City.

            ‘How many times will we see that sight in our lifetimes, I wonder?’ I murmured as I gazed.

            ‘As often as there are summer sunsets, I suppose, and never tire of it,’ she replied softly, taking a deep breath. ‘Elboron, I could never, never leave Ithilien. I sometimes think that I would choke in any other air, like a poor fish snatched out of the river.’

            I smiled at her; I knew what she meant. Then Túrin, who had not appeared to be paying the slightest attention to us, looked up and said in a tone of withering scorn, ‘Of course you wouldn’t. The air’s the same everywhere.’

            ‘It isn’t!’ retorted Fíriel. ‘No other air has the sweetness of Ithilien’s; even the King says so, and he’s travelled more than any other man alive, so it must be true. And I shall never leave Ithilien, never.’

            ‘You will,’ said Túrin. ‘You’ll have to leave when you get married. You can’t marry anyone in Ithilien because there’s nobody in Ithilien important enough to marry you, so you’ll have to go somewhere else.’

            ‘I shall never get married if it means I have to leave Ithilien, so there!’ said Fíriel furiously.

            ‘You will, they’ll make you,’ replied Túrin with infuriating calmness.

            Fíriel gave me an anguished look. ‘They couldn’t make me marry anyone, could they, Elboron? And leave Ithilien?’

            ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Father wouldn’t let them.’

            ‘He would,’ said Túrin. ‘They made Mother leave Rohan and Aunt Lothíriel leave Dol Amroth, and they’ll make you leave Ithilien whether you want to or not.’

            ‘Mother wanted to come here! She wanted to be with Father, she didn’t mind leaving Rohan!’ said Fíriel.

‘But Aunt Lothíriel didn’t want to leave Dol Amroth,’ retorted Túrin. Fíriel and I exchanged a guilty look, because we knew Túrin was right, though nobody in the family ever admitted it out loud; Aunt Lothiriel was the unhappiest person we knew.

‘I would never leave Father, and Father wouldn’t make me! He couldn’t!’

‘Take no notice of him, Fíriel,’ I said. ‘He’s only a baby, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Anyway, you’re too young to worry about it yet.’

‘Huh!’ said Túrin, with horrid conviction, and returned to his beetle.

‘Watch him for me, Elboron,’ said Fíriel, and turned and ran away as if pursued. I knew she had gone to find Father and I knew that Father would console her as far as he could, but Father was a truth-speaker, and the truth was that he was the highest noble and the highest minister in the land, after the King, and that the marriage of his only daughter, even if she were not beautiful enough to drive men mad, was bound to be a matter of the greatest concern to the whole kingdom, and as soon as you thought about it seriously, her not getting married seemed an impossibility.

Túrin’s words had shattered the bright invisible walls that had held Fíriel secure, and not even Father could rebuild them as they had been. Perhaps he didn’t want to; unlike  her, he knew that they couldn’t last for ever.    

* * *

After that there was a long time during which Eldarion seldom if ever saw Fíriel, once he began to spend more and more time in the north kingdom which he was destined to rule. Perhaps he forgot her, or remembered her only as that charming child. Father, I know, assumed that one reason for sending Eldarion to Arnor was to acquaint him with the daughters of some of the nobler houses of the Dúnedain, since it was universally believed that they carried the purest blood of Númenor. Father carried that blood too, of course, but he never imagined that his children, sprung from both Gondor and Rohan, would be accorded comparable status. This did not worry him in the least, for though he revered tradition as much as anybody, he thought of us as belonging to a new and different world, whereas the King and his kindred perforce sought to preserve the purity of the world from which they came. By all accounts the King thought the same, but unbeknown even to the King, it seems that Eldarion did not.

Meanwhile, Fíriel forgot Eldarion. As the Rose of Ithilien grew to her full flowering she acquired enough admirers to turn any girl’s head, but she treated them all, from the goatherds of the Ithilien uplands to captains of the fiefs, with the same sweet, polite indifference, sharpening to exasperation if she considered they were interfering with her life’s work of protecting Father. Songs in praise of her beauty were sung from Belfalas to the Lonely Mountain, but if they were sung in their presence she would listen with the same resolutely controlled irritation as Father when somebody tried to flatter him. The only time I ever saw an intended compliment find its mark was when a gnarled and elderly merchant from Dale told her how very like Father she looked. Fíriel blushed and gave him a smile that any man in Gondor would have given ten years of his life to receive, and for the rest of the merchant’s stay she treated him with a graciousness which he took as a great compliment to himself, while being very puzzled by the surly looks he received from the rest of the household.

‘Why should they praise me for being beautiful?’ she asked me one day in something approaching fury. ‘If I am so, it’s no doing of mine. If they praise anyone, they should praise Mother and Father for  making me as I am.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if people should also blame Father and Mother for my lack of brains and Túrin’s temper, but her eyes were still flashing steel, and I thought better of it.

So time went quietly on until Father’s last great mission to Harad and the East, which took him from us for eighteen months, longer than he had ever been away before. I had mixed feelings about this; I missed him sorely, but I was too absorbed by my first attempt at governing Ithilien – even with Mother discreetly supervising everything I did – to feel the time hang heavy. Mother bore the separation patiently, locking her pain in her own heart, but  Fíriel’s misery was like a grey cloud over the household. She was still aware of Father, indeed we watched her anxiously all the while, knowing that if Father were in any kind of trouble she would feel it; but even if she sensed that all was well with him – and this embassy, exhausting as it was, went well – when they were far apart she lived in a quiet, perpetual winter of her own. She would do anything you asked of her willingly enough, but we all missed the vividness of both her anger and her laugh. One thing did make me smile nonetheless: Mother once came upon a small serving maid sobbing in a corner and asked her kindly what afflicted her. ‘Oh my lady,’ sobbed the child, ‘Lady Fíriel hasn’t lost her temper with me for three weeks now and I don’t know what in the world I’ve done to deserve that!’

Through the colder months Fíriel was most often to be found sitting in the deep embrasure of one of our south-facing windows, gazing wistfully into the distance, with Father’s house dogs at her feet radiating sympathetic gloom as only dogs can. When the days began to grow longer she took to riding by herself, causing Mother and myself some anxiety. We did not fear for her safety, knowing that nothing and no one in Ithilien would harm Fíriel or allow her to come to harm, but we were disquieted  by her secrecy, for she would be up before the Sun and return long after moonrise, and in answer to questions would only shake her head. I said to Mother that if it were any other girl, I would assume she was meeting a lover, but with Fíriel this was impossible; Mother agreed with both propositions but could suggest no other solution.

At long last the message came that all was done and Father was on his way home. The news must have run ahead of the messenger, because all Ithilien erupted with joy that same day, and I knew that Father would have a princely welcome without any effort on my part, for it had become a tradition: if Father had been away for any length of time, anybody who could possibly manage it would call the day a holiday and go down to the riverside to welcome him back, with whatever music, food and (especially) drink, flowers and/or fireworks they could produce. Father had never made these celebrations official, but he was touched by them and had never forbidden them either, although we as a family would far rather have had him to ourselves from the moment he set foot on the eastern shore.

Amidst the general rejoicing, the sweetest thing to see was the change in Fíriel. Everyone else, even Mother, was simply happy, but when Fíriel heard the news, even if it only confirmed what her heart had told her already, it was like seeing winter pass and spring come in a single day, or like a hoar-frosted tree bursting into leaf and blossom all in a moment: the very air around her seemed to quiver with her joy. She abandoned her solitary rides and offered her assistance to me and Mother in anything we cared to ask of her, but it was enough for us simply to see her in such bliss; I even swallowed a few brotherly remarks about how valuable her proffered assistance would have been when I was struggling with the cares of our little country earlier in the year.

A day or two later the same messenger brought me a letter from Father himself, announcing that he would return the next day and that he was bringing us a distinguished guest, none other than the Prince Eldarion, who had happened to be in the City when Father returned and had begged leave to accompany him, as he had been so long away from Ithilien and cherished such happy memories of it. The request could not, of course, be denied, but Mother and I were hard put to conceal our disappointment, and Fíriel fairly spat with fury like an angry cat. Father was Ithilien’s, ours, and most particularly hers, and no intruder, even the King himself, much less the King’s heir, had a right to come between them. There was nothing else for it, however, and when the day came – a lovely day in May, almost worthy of the occasion – we reluctantly dressed with all the uncomfortable magnificence we knew was expected of us (Father and Mother both hated display, and we children took after them) and rode down to the Crossings amidst a press of people quite prepared to give at least one cheer for Prince Eldarion, if it would serve to prolong the holiday.

I don’t know why it was, but when the barge finally arrived, though I was as pleased as anyone else to have Father back and was intensely relieved to find that despite the long strain and anxiety of the past months he looked exactly as usual – he never seemed to change much – after I had convinced myself that all was well with him, my attention fixed on Eldarion, as he engaged in a courteous contest with Father concerning who should disembark first. Eldarion won and stood aside, and Father stepped ashore to be immediately engulfed in a tide of little girls bearing posies of flowers. They were the female element of our school, and any attempt to restrict the presentation of flowers to Father to just one of their number had met with such cries of woe from the rest – together, I’m ashamed to say, with pinchings and pullings of hair – that Mother, after exchanging hasty messages with Father, had decreed that they should all take part. As a result, Father’s attention was distracted during the time he took to disentangle himself, or perhaps he would have seen what I saw and taken the warning. For I saw Eldarion’s eyes fix on Fíriel just as Fíriel’s fixed on Father with a blaze of welcome that transfigured her from something merely beautiful to something scarcely of this earth, and I realised with a kind of panic that for one mad moment Eldarion thought that welcome was for him. He smiled, he stepped on shore, he held out his hands – and as Father freed himself from his garland of little girls, Fíriel darted forward, quite unaware of anything or anybody else, and was in Father’s arms.

She did not know that she had just sealed her own fate, but I knew, and I wished bitterly that  Eldarion had never come to Ithilien, never at all. 

The wooing

Eldarion

Years ago, when I was first in Ithilien, I heard the Lady Eowyn tell a story to her children.

‘Far, far away from here, in the northern lands whence my people came long ago, there once lived a sorcerer who made a girl out of ice…’

I can’t remember every word of the story as she told it, but I remember the substance of it. The sorcerer made the girl so perfectly beautiful that all men fell in love with her, but any who tried to embrace her froze to death in her arms. At last the Sun himself beheld her and tried to take her – I don’t know why this story thinks of the Sun as being a man, perhaps that’s how they think in the far North – and in his fierce embrace she melted away and was lost, except that we see a faint memory of her beauty in the rainbow, when the Sun tries in vain to re-make his lost love.

It’s a pretty story, and for me, a true one. 

A fool might wonder why I should be so captivated by the beauty of a girl of mere mortal stock, and partly of a lesser race at that, when the women of my own kindred are held supreme in beauty even among the Elves. But if he continued in his wonder after he had set eyes on Fíriel, Faramir’s daughter, he would be not merely a fool but a madman. It is not solely her beauty that I love; if one were foolish enough to set her in a contest against my sisters she might, I suppose, come off worse. It is the whole of her: her quickness of body and mind and temper, her courage, her vehemence, her fierce devotion to everything and everything she loves, the sheer grace of her, the unconquerable freedom of her. There are no words fine and swift enough to capture her; no pen or brush skilled enough to depict her. That’s why there are so many songs about her and so many portraits of her, for none of which she cares a jot. More than all this, perhaps, it is the very frailty of her mortality that makes her so dear to me: the very thing that according to her, should have set us forever apart. 

I first came to know her years ago, when she was still a child, and as a child I loved her, as I loved her whole family. They and Ithilien were my refuge from the weight of kingship and glory and dignity which lay so heavily on my own family. Their household combined the most perfect courtesy with the most perfect ease; a king would not have felt slighted by their welcome, nor the lowliest peasant overawed. Perhaps now, looking back over so many bitter years, I exaggerate that happiness, but whether or no, I never afterwards met any great lord but I compared him unfavourably with Faramir, nor any pretty girl without thinking how inferior she was to little Lady Fíriel. It became a habit of mind, the Ithilien I carried with me.

Of the many penalties of being a king’s only son, one of the worst must be the endless speculations about one’s marriage. We are a long-lived race and are not accustomed to marrying in haste – ask my father, for one – but that did not stop people from discussing suitable matches for me while I was still in my cradle. As I grew up I became accustomed to the endless discussions about ‘purity of descent’, and they always irritated me, especially when men of Gondor and Arnor began one of their endless, useless squabbles about which nation had a larger endowment of Númenorean blood.

From time to time I heard complaints that Faramir –whose own descent was as Númenorean as any haughty northerner’s – had betrayed that tradition by marrying a mere woman of Rohan, and they always infuriated me; but by the time I had drawn breath to silence the complainer, somebody else – often my father – had invariably done the job for me. Faramir was of course aware of these remarks, though I think they were never made to his face, but he cared nothing about them except insofar as they were a slight upon his wife. On the only occasion when the subject was mentioned between us he said that the world had changed since the Great War and Gondor could no longer cling to the old certainties, which had served it badly enough in the past; there were worse evils by far than mingled blood, or even shortness of life – and he smiled rather sadly. For my own part, I was increasingly irritated by the assumption that whoever I married would have to come of the ‘pure’ northern stock –  unless I were to follow my father’s example and seek the hand of some elf-woman, but this I  never aspired to at all: the very notion belonged to a world we had lost. The assumption annoyed me so much that I was disposed to scorn any lady who did come of such parentage; and my favourite among my royal predecessors became Eldacar, who caused such trouble by doing precisely what Faramir had done without causing any trouble at all.  Eldacar, however, was a King, ‘which,’  Faramir said to me once, ‘I daily thank the Powers that I am not.’

In later years, as it happened, though I saw a good deal of Faramir, I saw far less of Ithilien and nothing of Fíriel; she became a distant point of light and warmth in my memory. As she grew to womanhood and the fame of her beauty spread abroad, I was not surprised – the promise of it had been plain in the child I had known – but I was curious. It was certainly one reason why, when Faramir talked to me of his homeward journey after his great embassy, I asked to go with him, but it was not the only reason. I was eager to see if the place where I had once been so happy had changed; eager and half-afraid, as one always is when venturing into one’s own past.

Some things, I found, had not changed at all. The scent of Ithilien, as it wafted towards us across the River, was just the same. ‘If I awoke from the dead,’ Elboron had said to me once, ‘and smelled that scent, even if I had no other sense, I’d know I was home again.’ The well-remembered sweetness of it brought tears to my eyes so that the people awaiting us on the riverbank diminished to a blur, and when I could see clearly again we were almost upon them. Three stood in advance of the crowd. The lanky young giant with the anxious expression must be Elboron. (‘I am the tallest man in Ithilien at present,’ Faramir had told me some years previously, ‘but my elder son seems determined to change that.’) The tall woman beside him, proud and golden-haired still, I recognised at once as the Lady Eowyn: the years had dealt lightly with her.

As for Fíriel … I knew she would have changed, and yet I still looked for a laughing child. I knew that most men thought her beautiful, but nothing I had heard about her prepared me for the reality. I had hoped that she would remember me and welcome me, but the look of joy on her face, as she looked at me, took me captive for ever. I knew my own face mirrored it, and that we were fated to be all in all to each other, for the rest of our lives. I knew that no other woman would mean anything to me, ever.

Then I realised that she was not looking at me at all. She had not even noticed I was there.

All that joy was for her father alone. As a child I knew she had adored him, but somehow I had assumed that she would have grown away from him. It was not so.

Everything became a blur again. I was like a man who has been knocked senseless, and when he revives, has forgotten where he is or how he came there. I must somehow have got through the ceremony of greeting, but I don’t remember it; I don’t even remember bowing to Fíriel. Strangely enough, nobody seemed to have noticed anything unusual, not even Faramir who normally missed nothing; surrounded by a press of his own people, one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter, he could be forgiven for being absorbed, just once, in his own affairs. Only one person had noticed, and that was Elboron. As we mounted for the short ride up to Emyn Arnen his eyes met mine in silent, angry challenge, recognising the destroyer of their peace. Elboron always belittled himself, saying he had inherited none of his father’s shrewdness, but at that moment he was unmistakably his father’s son.

I paid him no attention. By the time we had reached the house the world had come into focus again and I knew, quite simply and clearly, what must happen. Fíriel must be brought to look on me as she had just looked on Faramir. Then she must marry me so that I would have that look all to myself forever. It was so obviously necessary that I expected to win her round to my point of view in a few days.

I was not surprised to find that everything conspired to my design. The household continued strangely unsuspecting. Elboron was anxiously rendering account to his father for the affairs of Ithilien over eighteen months – very long months, I hoped, and a very intricate account – and the Lady Eowyn thought it only proper that Fíriel should be the one to accompany me in my re-discovery of Ithilien. We walked together and rode together – the grace of Fíriel, daughter of Gondor and Rohan, when she rode was marvellous to see – and all the time I sought an opportunity to say all I longed to say to her, and was foiled. Soon I realised that she had her father’s skill at steering a conversation, and used it above all to steer away from the topic of herself. She hated nothing more than compliments, which invariably made her frown and bite her lip; the only thing that was sure to bring a gleam of pleasure to her eyes was praise of her father, the one topic I was anxious to avoid. The faintest hint of criticism of him would bring a look of suppressed fury, reminding me of the ferocity with which she had protected him as a child. I only felt safe when talking of Arnor, and particularly about the hobbits of the Shire, a subject that often made her laugh, the same bubbling laughter she had had as a child, restoring a little of our long-lost ease.

The weeks went by and nothing changed. Every day I dreaded a message from my father summoning me home, and I began to wonder how long it would be before I would have outstayed my welcome in Emyn Arnen. Elboron, I was sure, wished me gone already, and Fíriel was no gladder of my presence than she had been at first, yet I could not leave her. I dreaded Faramir’s shrewdness and could not believe that he was not aware of my feelings, but if he was, he made no sign. Mercifully, he was still busy gathering up the threads of his long absence, and I felt a hypocrite as I brushed aside his apologies for paying me so little attention. I felt I must speak, must bind Fíriel to me, before her father intervened, and yet she gave me no opportunity.

It was the moon-festival that brought matters to a head. Faramir warned me one morning that the peace of Ithilien was likely to be greatly troubled for the next few days while the festival was prepared and celebrated, but expressed a polite hope that I would stay for it. In recent years I had thought little about the moon-festival, for it is scarcely celebrated outside Ithilien, but now I resolved that I would stay for it unless my father had me dragged away by force, for at the moon-festival, as all men knew, Fíriel danced the moon-dance.

Of the Festival itself, which lasts three days and nights and culminates at the nearest full moon to midsummer, I have no clear memory. I only remember the dance. It was not by command or by ancient tradition that Fíriel danced. In the beginning, when she was a child – when I first knew her – everybody danced and Fíriel, absorbed and alone, moved about among us with a grace that even then attracted every eye. As she grew older, the custom had grown of ending the general dance at midnight and leaving her to dance alone under the moon; and now it was expected of her.

How can I describe that dance? There was no music and no formal step, only the moonlight, bright golden moonlight that shines only over Ithilien, so bright that it cast clear sharp shadows, and Fíriel, the moon-daughter, all black and silver, her face remote and absorbed, moving among the shadows so lightly that she seemed no more substantial than they. As she passed near me, the sky suddenly darkened as a cloud came over the moon, and I longed to seize her and hold her fast, lest she vanish away; but she danced on, still graceful in the darkness, until, seeming suddenly to tire, she stopped, took a cloak from a maid standing nearby, and walked away, while all the onlookers sighed and murmured as if awakening from a dream. The darkness grew deeper, and soon we felt the first drops of warm rain. The festival was ended, and with it my patience.

The next morning the rain had passed, and I went out early into the sparkling garden, knowing I should find her. She greeted me with her usual cool courtesy and consented to walk with me; I spoke of the dance, and she smiled a little and said she was glad if it had pleased me.

            ‘It made me think of another dance long ago,’ I said, ‘when Beren came upon Lúthien dancing in the …’

            I could not have said anything worse. Her face darkened and she turned on me angrily. ‘So you say. So all men say, but I am no Lúthien. Her dancing was a great thing and the fate of many hung upon it. My dancing is a little thing and is done for Ithilien only. By comparing us you belittle us both – you of all people should understand that.’

            ‘Fíriel,’ I cried, ‘surely you know that your dancing is no little thing to me. You must know you are no less precious to me than Lúthien was to Beren, and that I love you no less than he did her. You know it, you must know it.’  

            ‘Why do you mock me, Prince Eldarion, half-elven son of Elessar, heir to two kingdoms?’ she blazed. ‘I am as I am, a woman of lesser blood, a daughter of both Gondor and Rohan. Beside you I am of no account. My life is a shadow compared to yours. I can be nothing to you.’

            I grasped both her hands. ‘Mock you, daughter of the noblest house in all Gondor? I am so far from mocking you that I want you to be everything to me – I want you for my wife, and if I cannot wed you I shall not wed at all, and there’s an end to kingship.’

            She stared at me. ‘I think the moonlight must have turned your wits, Eldarion. I have nothing to do with kings and kingship. I want nothing to do with them. Now leave me alone.’ She wrenched herself free and ran from me, leaving me once again as one stunned.

The Flight

Eowyn

I was passing by the orchard on my way to the stables when I saw my daughter leaning against a tree near little Húrin’s grave, which was scattered with fresh flowers, something Fíriel often did, though she had never known him. Despite its sorrowful associations, the orchard had always been a place of refuge for her; perhaps something in her knew that her beginning had been there.  I would have left her to herself, but she looked up at me with such desperate appeal that I hastened to her and caught her as she swayed blindly towards me.

‘Is it your head, my love?’ I said. She murmured ‘yes’, and I turned as well as I could while still supporting her, and called to my maidservant to fetch one of the guards.

All three of our living children were blessedly strong and seldom ailed in any way, but for some years Fíriel, when distressed, had been subject to fearful headaches which nothing, not even the hallowed remedy of athelas, could cure. On one occasion, when we were in the town house, we had even fetched the King to her, but he could not help; his skill seemed to work only in great matters, and this was a small matter, or so Fíriel always insisted when she came to herself. She would lie for a day, sometimes two, in a darkened room, and the whole household would go about on tiptoe until she was known to be better. During one of those days, I remember, a kitchen boy dropped a pile of plates with a splintering crash on the stone floor; for a week he crept about like a man caught in a shameful crime, and none of his fellows would speak to him, although Fíriel’s room was on the other side of the house and she could not possibly have heard a thing. Another time I was walking through the City when I heard a mother hiss to her two exuberant children, ‘Hush now! I want you as quiet as Lady Fíriel’s head!’ Fíriel smiled wanly when she heard this and said that she might mean many things to the people of the City, but had never expected to be a bogey to frighten children.

Faramir, of course, always knew when Fíriel was suffering, and would postpone any business that was not essential so that he could come to her. He could not take away the pain, but he would sit beside her for hours, holding her hand and occasionally saying or singing soft words to her, and often this would soothe her to sleep and she would generally, though not always, be recovered when she awoke. 

The guard came at a run, and on my orders reverently picked up Fíriel – looking like a man who has unexpectedly been given a treasure beyond price – and carried her to her room. We laid her on the bed, closed the shutters and prepared to leave her; as I turned to go she murmured, ‘Where has Father gone?’

            ‘To inspect the works at Minas Morgul.’

            She smiled faintly. ‘Not far to come, then.’

            I knew there was no need to send a message, and indeed, Faramir returned some two hours later and went straight to her. I returned to my still-room, knowing my daughter had the only medicine that would do her any good, and was surprised in the silence of the house to hear a sharp knocking on the door. It was Eldarion, and fond as I had always been of him, I was not pleased to see him now.

            ‘Is Lady Fíriel with you?’ he asked abruptly.

            ‘No’, I answered shortly, ‘the Lady Fíriel is not well.’

            ‘What ails her? Can I see her?’

            ‘She will see no one until tomorrow at least. She is very distressed, she has a violent headache and she needs complete quiet.’

            ‘But I must see her – if she is distressed it is because of me.’

            ‘Then the less she sees you the better.’

            We glared at each other, and at that moment, to my relief, another tall figure appeared behind Eldarion, who bit off the protest he had obviously been about to make.

            ‘How is she, my dear?’

            ‘Sleeping. I hope it will not be too bad this time. As for you, my lord’ – Faramir turned to Eldarion and spoke in the soft voice that made those who knew him tremble – ‘perhaps you will tell us what you have done to distress her.’ 

            ‘I’ve done nothing that should distress her,’ said Eldarion in a voice that would have made me smile at another time, for it was the voice of a sulky child. ‘I only asked her to marry me.’

            Faramir sighed. ‘And you thought that was unlikely to distress her?’

            ‘Why should it?’

            ‘Here my daughter is treated with honour. She is not accustomed to being mocked.’

            ‘Why should you think I mocked her? What greater honour could I do her?’

            ‘It is not an honourable thing to make a promise you know you cannot keep.’

            ‘I don’t understand.’ Eldarion raised his voice to an indignant shout, and then flushed with shame. Faramir answered in an even lower tone than before.

            ‘Oh yes you do. You know that the heir to Gondor and Arnor cannot wed with one of lesser blood.’

            Eldarion looked from Faramir to me and opened his mouth to draw the inescapable comparison, but seeking Faramir’s frown, shut it again abruptly. Faramir answered as if he had spoken.

            ‘The two cases are not alike. I am no king but only the king’s servant, to maintain the honour and safety of Gondor as best I may. Rohan and Gondor are bound together in the Lady Eowyn and myself even as we are bound by our marriage, and that is more important to me than purity of blood. You are of the purest race of Númenor and are bound to keep that blood unmingled as your ancestors have done through two thousand years.’

            ‘Then you forbid me to woo the woman I love, even if she loves me?’

            ‘Does she love you, Prince?’

            ‘Not yet,’ he admitted, adding defiantly, ‘but she will do, in time.’

            ‘I do not think so.’

            ‘Then it is because of you. You will let no man woo her because you want to keep her for yourself.’

            I looked at Faramir and flinched. He was so seldom angry that the prospect terrified me, though I had never borne the full weight of that anger.

            ‘For your father’s sake, whom I serve,’ he said, ‘I shall forget that you ever spoke those words. Be thankful that you are your father’s son.’

            There was a moment’s fearful silence, and then Eldarion hung his head, a guilty child again, and mumbled ‘Sorry, sir,’ and bowed to both of us and went out.

            Faramir sat down and started to turn the heavy Steward’s ring about on his finger, a rare but certain sign of anxiety with him.

            ‘Here’s a pretty tangle,’ he said.

            ‘What will you do?’

            ‘Send him home. No, escort him home, as soon as Fíriel is well enough. If neither she nor I can bring him to see reason, no doubt his father can, but he must hear both sides of the argument first.’

* * *

The promised explanation was never given, or at least not then. Fíriel slept quietly all that day, but in the morning, when her maid went to see how she was, the bed was empty and she was gone.

* * *

It seemed that panic spread through the household in a moment. As soon as we were sure that Fíriel was nowhere in the house or gardens, Beregond and Elboron began to organise search parties, while the women indulged in the most unseemly displays of collective woe which I had all I could do to silence. It lasted only for an hour or two before Faramir came out, frowning as black as thunder, and sent them all about their normal business. The Lady Fíriel, he said, was well and safe and would return in her own good time. People stared, murmured, but none dared to protest, and Emyn Arnen returned to an uneasy calm.  

The return

Faramir

Persistent flatterers – that tribe of human houseflies whom I despise more than any other – will have it that the Steward of Gondor is never wrong. Flatterers never stay on truth, but I have known some people who should know better, among them my elder son, express the same opinion despite evidence to the contrary in a host of matters both great and small.

Of all the times I was wrong, the worst was over Eldarion’s wooing of my daughter. I hope and believe that it was not through selfishness I erred, as Eldarion accused me; I had never supposed that she would stay with me for ever, although she always claimed, with passionate earnestness, that she would. Sooner or later she would find a husband to her liking and would leave me; I admit to being selfish enough to hope it would be later rather than sooner.

Was it through false humility? Not false, I think. The purity of the descent of King Elessar was the strongest element in his claim to the throne, triumphing over all the rebellious loremasters’ endeavours to cast doubt on it, and it was further glorified by his marriage to the Lady Arwen; whereas all know that the family tree of the Stewards, noble as it may be, has thrown out some strange branches from time to time; I was by no means the first of our house to court censure in that way. Some say there is royal blood in us (however far off and long ago), many that there is elven blood from the side of Dol Amroth; but none of this compares with the blood of Westernesse unmingled. I was so convinced of the truth, and the importance, of this that it never crossed my mind that Eldarion, raised in the strictest and most hallowed tradition, would be prepared to overthrow it for the sake of my daughter, especially as he had at one time learned to treat her as a younger sister. The conviction blinded me, inexcusably, so that I failed to see what was before my very eyes. Elboron, who always says he has no brains, saw it long before I did, but because he believed that I was never wrong or blind to plain evidence, he forbore to warn me, hating (as he said later in unmerited self-reproach) to be a tale-bearer. It is I, not he, who deserve reproach; but reproaches do no good.  

At one time I thought it strange that Fíriel herself did not warn me. I think she was trying to believe that Eldarion was merely amusing himself during a few weeks of holiday, and would speedily forget her. Flattery annoys her no less than it does me, but she was prepared to endure Eldarion’s flatteries, as she thought them: out of good will, because although she barely remembered it, she knew that he had been kind to her in the past; and out of courtesy and duty, because he was the King’s son. When she realised he meant them seriously, she was shocked and overwhelmed, and she fled. 

I did not fear for her safety. I knew what nobody else knew, even my wife: that Fíriel frequently visited the Elves. She never did this when I was at home, but when I was away, she found that their company eased the ache of separation. Until the day of her flight, she had never stayed long with them, but this time, her absence stretched from days to weeks, and I was compelled to reveal the secret of her whereabouts at least to certain trusted people, to forestall a general panic.

I should explain that while many Elves dwell among us here in Ithilien, they are not subject either to me or to the King, but live according to their own laws. They live in friendship with us and have often helped us at need, but as a rule we go our separate ways, and men seldom venture into what, without a word spoken or written, are known to be elven-woods.

When Fíriel fled Legolas sent me word that Fíriel was among them and was safe – which I knew already – but no other news came from them. Everyone else waited on my word, and I waited on Fíriel’s. Eldarion called loudly on to me to follow her and bring her back, but I would not; I would not have my daughter dragged back to her own home like a recaptured fugitive.

‘Then I will go to my father and have him override your orders and bring her back,’ Eldarion said to me. ‘As he can do.’

‘Indeed he can,’ I answered, ‘and I leave you to judge, Prince Eldarion, whether my daughter will love you the better for it if he does.’

He was silent for a while, and then said in a much milder tone, ‘May I wait here until she returns?’

‘She is much more likely to return, my lord, if she knows you are not here,’ I answered.

He left the next day, and in Ithilien, we continued to wait, like a party of lost travellers in a place where there is no guiding light.

* * *

She returned in the dawn of a misty day in late autumn. I had not slept that night – I had slept only in snatches since she went away – and was sitting by the window that looks over the orchard when I saw a figure through the mist, so dim that for a moment I thought I was seeing the ghost of a past time, when I had found my wife sorrowing there on the wild night that had seen Fíriel’s beginning. Then I understood and ran out to her, even as I had run to Eowyn on that long-ago night, and she swayed towards me and I caught her in my arms.

‘I could not go with them,’ she said in a strange, dull tone, like one repeating a lesson. ‘I am earth’s daughter. I told them I could not go.’

I turned her towards the house and she came with me like a sleep-walker, seeming unaware of who I was. I took her to her little room and sat her on the bed, and suddenly she shook her head and looked up at me, and her eyes were clear.

‘Father? Why do you look at me so?’ she said.

‘How did I look?’

‘So sad and so worried? Is something wrong?’

‘Something wrong? Of course there is something wrong, with you lost to us.’

She looked puzzled. ‘Lost? I have not been long away.’

‘It has seemed long to me,’ I answered, equally perplexed. ‘But you’re tired. Go to sleep now, and all will be well in the morning.’ I was talking as if she were a child again and newly awakened from a bad dream.

She smiled and lay down, and I left her and went to tell my wife the glad news of her return, but as I walked my daughter’s first words pursued me.

Where had she been asked to go? Was it on some journey that had no returning, that would have taken her forever beyond our ken?

I shivered. At least she had come back to me. All our other problems remained, but since she was not lost to me forever, I felt that the rest could be endured.

All the next day she slept, while the news of her homecoming spread through the household and they rejoiced as at the return of one thought dead; but in the evening she came and stood before me as she used to do as a child, when she thought it necessary to accuse herself of some misdemeanour.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ she said.

‘Sorry for what, sweetheart?’

‘For running away. I didn’t mean to be gone long – I did not think I had been gone long. I forgot that time with the elven-folk is not as time with us.’

‘That I understand, but why did you run away from me at all?’

‘Not from you! You know I could no more run away from you than I could stop myself breathing. From him.’

‘Is he so very terrible?’

‘I thought he mocked me. Then I thought he wanted to take me away from you, and I was angry and afraid and I ran away. Then I thought again, and was ashamed to have treated the King’s son so discourteously. Then I was ashamed to have run away, and I came back. Why did you not call me back earlier? You know I would have come.’

She seemed to have forgotten her earlier strange words, as one forgets a dream after the first waking moments, and I did not try to recall them, fearing perhaps that to speak them again would make them true, so that to this day I do not know what really happened. I only answered that I would have her come of her own accord or not at all.

‘You are not angry with me then? I am forgiven?’ she asked anxiously, childlike again for a moment, but when I smiled and assured her there was nothing to forgive for my part, she did not subject me to one of her old strangling embraces but kissed my hand and seated herself close beside me, grave and thoughtful, and I realised with a pang how thoroughly she had left childhood behind. Eldarion had hastened her last steps along that road; the realisation, I must confess, did not endear him further to me.

It was of Eldarion she spoke next.

‘I am glad he has gone from here, but I’m sorry too, in a way,’ she said. ‘He must be regretting his wild words by now, and I am no less sorry for mine. And I should never forgive myself if the understanding between our families was spoiled because of me. Should I write and beg his forgiveness? Or should I wait until he makes it plain that he has forgotten his anger against me?’

I considered. I was by no means convinced that Eldarion had regretted his words, or that he thought them wild, or above all that he was angry with Fíriel; his ardour, like that of all lovers, had only increased as it encountered resistance.

‘Let him be for the time,’ I said finally. ‘I shall send to tell him that you are safely returned – we owe him that at least – and then we shall wait and see. All may be well.’

And I hoped it would be. I did not realise then how thoroughly Eldarion took after his father, who had loved once, and once only, and forever, and whose resolution in pursuit of that love had been without limit. Whether the station of the beloved was far above or far below the lover, it made no difference.

And if the love were not returned?

It still made no difference. When the heirs of Isildur desire a thing, they do not take advice about it, and they do not take ‘no’ for an answer. History, it seems, failed to teach me that lesson, but there was no escaping it in the end.

Author’s note: readers of ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ will identify here an echo of ‘The Last Ship’, in which a mortal girl, Fíriel, is invited by the elves to join them in their voyage over Sea, but refuses because she ‘was born earth’s daughter’. That haunting poem was the origin not only of this chapter but of my Fíriel herself. The name – one of the loveliest ones in Tolkien -   means ‘mortal woman’.

Waiting

Eldarion

When I left Ithilien I was boiling with anger and fear: anger at Fíriel for having spurned me, anger at Faramir for refusing to bring her back after she fled, above all fear that she might not return soon, or at all. There are stories in both Gondor and Arnor of mortals who go to dwell among the Elves and are never seen again, or return only after many years, when all those who knew them are long dead. My mother had taught me to laugh at such tales, which to her certain knowledge were not true; but even she agreed that no mortal could dwell long among the Elves and return unchanged, and I feared change in Fíriel more than anything else except the loss of her. I wanted her as she was, save in one thing:  I wanted her to love me, and that she could and must learn only from me, and not from the Elves.

I said nothing to anyone about what had happened, not even to my father at first. I wondered that nobody in the City seemed to find me changed; I wondered at finding everything at home so apparently unchanged, for the whole world had changed for me. After what seemed an age I received word from Faramir that Fíriel was safely returned and that was sorry for any discourtesy she had shown me and any anxiety she had caused me. Fíriel herself sent no word, but the thought of her walking once again in the gardens of Emyn Arnen, or dancing to the moon under the night-skies of Ithilien, drove me into a fever. I had thought her lost to me, perhaps for ever; now, given a second chance, I must secure her before she vanished again, or married some other suitor – you could say that she had as many suitors as there were men who had ever looked upon her – and so put herself beyond my reach. The fact that she had never been known to look with the slightest favour on any other suitor weighed with me not at all.

That day I spoke to my father.  He answered exactly as Faramir had predicted: that while the Steward was the noblest and most beloved of our subjects, and the highest in honour in the realm save the King only, the daughter of a lord of Gondor who had wedded a woman of Rohan, daughter of kings as she might be and valued ally as Rohan might be, was not a fit wife for me. I argued and pleaded in vain; but if my father remained immovable, so did I. My father said that I was too young to know my own mind, that with time I would learn discretion, and that there was no need to settle whom I should marry until such discretion had been learned. In the end I grew angry and swore before him, by all the Powers, that if I could not marry Fíriel of Ithilien I would never marry at all, early or late, and he grew equally angry and called me a great fool and dismissed me. It was only when I was outside the door that I realised he had never asked me if Fíriel wanted to marry me. Perhaps he assumed that fool as I was, my folly did not extend to seeking an unsuitable wife who did not even want me.

I understood his reasons, but I also resented them. My father, after all, had sought a bride who had been denied him by laws more immutable than those which divided me from Fíriel, and had waited in defiance of those laws for many long years; but, more fortunate than I, he had known as he waited that his beloved would be untouched by those years and would come to him, if she came at all, in the same shape that he had first beheld. Fíriel was a mortal woman and likely to be short-lived by the reckoning of Númenor; I must have her soon, by mortal reckoning, or lose her to the most inexorable of rivals, time. 

The changing of the world

Aragorn

It is a strange thing to live in a world which is full of familiar things, and yet is not the world you were born into, you and a thousand generations of your kindred before you.

So much has been gained, by myself most of all. Yet we have paid for those gains by bitter and irrecoverable loss. For how many thousand years has the dwindling race of Númenor lived in and from a past which to many of them seemed more real, more important, than the present? How often, sighing for what we had lost, did we cast away the good things that were offered to us, thinking that because they were new, they had no worth?

Not long ago, when staying a guest in the Steward’s house – my one place of refuge from the cares and complications of kingship – I unwillingly overheard the protesting voice of Túrin, his second son, perhaps the only person (myself and his wife excepted) who dares to argue openly with Faramir, and one, moreover, who seldom troubles to lower his voice: ‘Why do you always look backwards and never forwards? You, uncle Eomer, cousin Elphir, everybody, and especially the King [thank you kindly, Master Túrin, I thought] – why do you all believe that whatever is old, is good? I say we can do better than the men of old. I say their ways need not be our ways. I say…’

Faramir cut him off at that point; I couldn’t hear what he said, but judging from Túrin’s answer, it was to the effect that we had to look to the past to learn wisdom.

‘Learn wisdom? Learn what follies to avoid, perhaps. The world is changing, I’ve often heard you say so. If we don’t change with it, we’ll be left behind. I don’t want to be left behind, even if you do. I say…’

‘If you would say a little less and listen a little more,’ his father interrupted again, his voice raised in rare irritation, ‘you might say more that is worth hearing, and anger people less when you say it. Now shall we continue where we left off?’ And the boy’s surly voice recommenced reading in the high-elven speech, stumbling often and tense with anger at its own errors.

I walked away, but the further I walked, the louder that harsh protesting voice sounded in my ears: why do you all believe that whatever is old, is good?

Much that is old, is good. You only have to look at the stonework in Minas Anor, or at the workmanship of Orthanc, or, far more, at the humble dwellings that have been built amidst the ruins of the old cities of the North, to realise that we have fallen away from the skills of our forefathers. Even the Elves, long-lived as they are, place the perfection of works in the far past, even as far back as Fëanor who perished, they say, before the sun was made. But for Elves it is different: the past is not lost to them, it walks beside them hour by hour, and there is still one in Middle Earth for whom the Elder Days are a present memory. It cannot be so with men: even the longest-lived among us – even I – are born to fleeting days, and change is the law that governs our life.

I have sought to slow – to halt? to reverse? – that change inasmuch as I have striven to restore the glory of the Two Kingdoms. But in seeking to slow it in my heirs, by marrying my son to one of our purer northern race, have I imprisoned him, debarring him from what the law of Men has decreed he must become? It will do us little good if we perish in our purity, even as the old line of Gondor did before the Stewards, with their eyes set on vigour and strength rather than purity of blood, stepped into the breach. And while their policies may have changed the race of Gondor and shortened men’s lives, it is thanks to them that Gondor has survived at all, with its memories of greater things.

I found myself at the top of the steps leading into Faramir’s beloved orchard, where he walks each evening with Firiel. Truly length of time is of little importance in the brief affairs of men! . From hearing Túrin’s protests to reaching the steps, my whole view of the matter had changed – or perhaps the change had happened already and had only crystallised in my mind. However that may be, I spoke with Faramir that very evening, and when I returned to the City next day I sent a messenger to Arnor telling Eldarion that for my part, I would no longer oppose his courtship.

The choice

Faramir

Not long ago I was talking with Master Samwise, and our talk turned, as it so often does, to our memories of Frodo.

‘You know what I always admired most about him?’ said Samwise (who is not half-wise, like his name, but entirely so). ‘Every time he had a choice – to give up or go on – he always went on. Perhaps that’s the most that can be said about any hero.’

On that scale I would have small claim to be accounted a hero, for I grew up in a world that offered me few choices. Between resisting the Enemy and cravenly submitting; between duty and dishonour; between obedience and treason, there was never any real choice. Even with the Ring within my grasp, I had no real choice. By taking it I knew I would un-make myself first, the world only second. It was not heroism, but self-preservation.

The new world we have made has more room for choices, even for those of high blood.  Seldom can it happen now that the choices, even of great men, threaten to un-make the world. Yet that makes it perhaps more likely that they will un-make the chooser.

My daughter’s choice was one such. Whether she chose rightly I still do not know. I only hope that I did not make the choice for her.

I remember the day she made it. For five years she had held out against Eldarion: no long time in the life of the great ones of Númenor, but bitter eternity in the heart of a lover. And all the time, through those five years, quietly, without bitterness and with no loss of love, she was drawing away from me: not towards Eldarion or any other man, not into the elven world whither she had once fled, but into some place of her own, where she was alone with her freedom: the freedom to choose which I would not, could not take away from her, though it became her torment and mine, because it was part of the world we had made.

And through all those five years, if I was at home, there was no day when I did not wait for her at the evening hour in the orchard, which had been our sacred hour ever since she was deemed to be too old for bedtime stories (and determinedly cried herself to sleep for weeks afterwards, I remember, until this alternative was devised). Here I had watched her grow, from child to girl to woman; here I had soothed her sorrows, calmed her anger and rejoiced in her happiness, my cherished other self. But during those five years she came more and more seldom, and eventually not at all – until the day (a summer’s day, treacherously bright) when she made her choice.

She was waiting for me beside Húrin’s green grave. When I arrived she smiled briefly in greeting, as if we had been parted but an hour, and said abruptly, ‘Father, is it wicked to be too happy?’

‘Too happy?’

She nodded. ‘I know you and Mother have always done everything in the world to make me happy. Everybody in Ithilien always strove to make me happy. I thought it was my right to be happy. When I felt my happiness was threatened, I ran away. When I came back, I clung on to my happiness like a dog to a bare bone, snarling at anyone I thought wanted to take it away.’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘I am ashamed of it now, so ashamed I could die of it.’

I sat down beside her, not touching her; the time when her small sorrows could be dismissed with a hug and a kiss was long gone by.  Presently she looked up at me, challenging, almost angry. ‘You never ran away from things, did you, Father?’

‘I tried not to.’

‘Mother ran away once, but she ran into danger, not out of it. Mother wasn’t a coward.’

‘Fíriel…’

She ignored my protest, and sat biting her lip and shivering a little, though the evening was warm.

It is hard to sit by and watch your own soul in torment, but there was nothing I could do except hear her out.

‘Father,’ she resumed, in a toneless voice, unlike herself. ‘Father, is there anything you would not do for the good of Gondor?’

I was faced again, as of old, with my own lack of choice. There could be only one answer.

‘Nothing that I judged to be right.’

‘You would give up the Stewardship?’

‘If necessary.’

‘You would give up Ithilien?’

‘If it were better out of my hands.’

‘You would give your own life?’

‘If I had to.’ That was no mastery; I had been doomed to it from the day of my birth.

‘You would sacrifice us? Mother and Elboron and Túrin and me?’

Her voice and face were desperate now, but I still had no choice.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I would not want to live after it, but I would do it.’

She nodded, seeming oddly relieved, and fell silent for a long while. At last she looked up, and her face was as pale as death, but calm.

‘And yet they ask so little of me, and that little I would not give. I’m not worthy to be your daughter, or Mother’s. I am ashamed – ashamed – ashamed!’ She beat her small white hand against the stone of the bench until I took and held it lest she do herself an injury. She was instantly still, and in another moment she was on her feet.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘will you tell Eldarion that if he comes and asks for speech with me, I will hear him?’

Then she asked my leave, and walked away, assured and graceful as a queen, and proud and despairing as a prisoner on his way to execution. It was thus that her choice was made. By her, or by me, or by Gondor? I still do not know.  

Moon-magic

Elboron

In the weeks that followed her acceptance of Eldarion Fíriel was much out and about in our little country, riding alone whenever possible: alone as, I was sure, she would never be again once she was married and had become the greatest lady in the land, after Queen Arwen. It was easy to guess what she was about: she was making her farewells, and they were many and grievous, for there was not a wood or hill, river, fountain or spring, homestead or farm that was not dear to her. Nor was there a house or farm where she was not known and, though received always with honour, also welcomed as a favourite daughter. Like me, she had accompanied Father on many visits as a child: it had been his way of making us one with our people.

It was a beautiful spring that year: exceptionally beautiful even for Ithilien, which could never fail in beauty at any time or season. On perhaps the loveliest evening of all, in early May before the gentle springtime warmth gave way to the summer heat, I was visited with sudden restlessness and went walking in the gardens, and something drew me to the old orchard where little Húrin lies buried under the white cloak of simbelmynë which grows thicker and fairer every year. I would have drawn back and left her to her thoughts, but she looked up and smiled, motioning me to join her, and we sat together in silence for a while, until the first nightingales began their tentative early evening song. Presently Fíriel, pale and tired, leaned a little against me, and I couldn’t help thinking how much Eldarion would envy me if he could see me; but in a few weeks’ time Eldarion would have no need to envy anyone where Fíriel was concerned.

‘It’s rather odd,’ she said softly, after a while. ‘I know that if Húrin had lived he would be grown up now, not much younger than you, but I always think of him as a baby who needs to be taken care of.’

I nodded; I had the same feeling myself, and I was sure Mother had, though she had never spoken of Húrin in my hearing. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll still be here to take care of him.’

Firiel smiled, but her face clouded again immediately. ‘Elboron, I heard a strange thing today.’

‘A strange thing? What do you mean?’

‘It was at Mablung’s farm. I went there because I knew there was to be a gathering there today for Heleth’s birthday and I could say many farewells and so save time, when there is so little time left.’  She paused and shivered a little. ‘Heleth wished me joy and so did the other women, but Mablung looked at me almost angrily and asked if I would be dancing the moon-dance this year. And I said yes, this year and then never again, since only a maiden can dance the moon-dance. And he said, “Aye, so I thought, and I tell you this, Moon-child: if it were not to the Prince Eldarion you were going then we would never let you go, and as it is we shall have to look to our crops and our herds next year, and it’s likely that it will all go awry.” And the other men muttered in agreement and even some of the women.   Wasn’t that strange?’

I hesitated. ‘Well, it was, but – well, it isn’t the first time I have heard something like that.’

She was amazed and a little indignant. ‘Where else have you heard it?’

‘Oh, here, there, and everywhere. Many of the bailiffs have heard it too.’

‘Does Father know?’

I found this question far stranger than the tale she had told me. As if Fíriel needed to ask me what Father knew or did not know! And yet, when I came to think of it, she had not been much in his company these past weeks – she had been more often with Mother – and if it had not been a rank impossibility I should have thought they had quarrelled.

‘He does know, but he thinks it is nonsense, and has told me and the bailiffs to say as much to anyone who comes out with the idea.’

Fíriel was silent for a while, and then said wonderingly, ‘Nonsense indeed, to look on the moon-dance as harvest magic! Haven’t there been bad years since I began to dance the moon-dance – enough anyway to show that my feet cannot command the weather?’

‘I dare say, but those who believe the story forget the bad years and remember only the good ones.’ 

She shook her head, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘And if next year, when I am gone, there is a bad harvest, what will happen then?’

We looked at each other and the laughter went from our faces. ‘We shall just have to hope the harvest is a good one,’ I said, and she nodded and squeezed my hand.

Emboldened by our accord, I ventured to ask her, ‘If the thing troubles you, why not talk it over with Father?’ I was asking more than the bare question implied, and she answered accordingly, with more than a touch of her old vehemence.

‘I can’t! Don’t you understand that every word we exchange now is a dagger in our hearts, because it brings the parting closer? Do you think I can bear to be with him, and think of a time coming closer and closer when I can’t be with him?’

Her distress bit me as it always did. I answered lamely: ‘He won’t be alone. He’ll still have Mother – and me, for what that’s worth.’

Her face was still vivid with anger; she looked very like the child who had charmed and terrified the household, not so long ago. ‘Do you think I’d dream of leaving him else? I tell you, Elboron, if Mother were not here, I’d let them hack me in pieces before I’d go away and leave Father alone!’

As always with Fíriel, I had an uneasy conviction that what in anyone else would have been exaggeration for effect, with her was the exact truth. I could find no answer.

‘And as for you, and “what that’s worth”’ – she half-turned and punched me in the chest with a small, angry fist, just as she used to do when we quarrelled as children –  ‘Oh, Elboron, you are a fool! Can’t you see how proud he is of you?’ 

And she scrambled to her feet and ran off, leaving me to puzzle things out in Húrin’s silent and sympathetic company.

The Wedding Gift

Túrin, Faramir's son, surgeon in the Houses of Healing

My sister is to be married at midsummer, and everyone in the City says it is a great match for her and there is much chatter and rejoicing, especially among the women, though in Ithilien I am told they take no great joy in it since it means Fíriel leaving them, and Fíriel is not greatly anxious to leave them either.

I think I shall be sorry to see her go. She never cared  much for me, but she is my sister and very beautiful to look upon and things will seem strange without her. And so as soon as I heard she was to be married I determined to give her a wedding gift that would be very splendid, better than anyone else’s, good enough for a queen.

I thought long about this and made my plans in secret. Normally I won’t take payment for my work. The King and Father see to it that I am provided with everything I need for my work, and outside my work there’s nothing worth the having.  I don’t even need  to be thanked. I do my work because it pleases me. But once I had made my plans, I took all the payment that was offered, and it was strange to see how pleased that made people. I suppose Father’s right: being courteous makes people pleased with themselves. 

Before long I had a good sum in gold. Then I sent word to Gimli at Aglarond and two days later, a Dwarf came to me who said he was called Haur and had the skills I needed. I told him what I wanted and he grunted and named a price that was more than I could pay. We argued for a while and neither of us would budge and his voice grew harsh as rock. Then I had an idea and told him it was for Lady Fíriel and he grunted again, and then made a sort of face that might have passed for a smile, and accepted the price I offered. There’s a kind of magic about Fíriel that works on everybody, except me perhaps. Or perhaps on me as well, or why was I taking all this trouble?

Haur went away and sent no word for so long that I grew impatient, and was about to complain to Gimli when Haur returned, late one night and unannounced, and with him another Dwarf who seemed younger (that is, his beard was shorter and he stooped a little less), and the second Dwarf was carrying a casket and opened it at Haur’s word and there it was, a very fair thing but not quite as I had wanted. So I told them exactly what was wrong and they both scowled, but I said not a penny would they have until the thing was exactly to my liking, and Haur grunted in his usual way and said in that case I should not have it at all, and the young Dwarf took up the casket again and they turned to go.

Then I noticed that the young Dwarf was dragging one foot.

‘I see your servant goes lame,’ I said to Haur.

He scowled. ‘This is my apprentice and my only son,’ he answered, ‘and he goes lame because of an accident in our mines. What of it?’

‘Can your son bear pain?’ I asked. Then the young dwarf spoke for the first time and said, ‘As well as any Man, and better.’

‘Do you wish to be healed of your lameness?’ I asked.

‘If it could be done, but it cannot,’ he answered.

‘I can do it,’ I said. ‘Come back tomorrow morning.’

So I made my preparations and summoned my assistants, and at dawn the younger Dwarf came alone and made good his boast, for all the time I was working on him he made no sound and scarcely flinched. And the morning after that, when Haur demanded that his son, whom he named Fal, return with him, I refused and said he must remain twenty days, which would give Haur ample time to perfect the work I had commanded of him. So Haur went away and Far remained, and after twenty days he was walking as straight as any dwarf could, though I would not permit him to walk far. On the twenty-first day Haur returned with the work and this time it was perfect, and I said, ‘One work of yours you have amended, and see! Another work of yours I have amended, and there need be no more talk of price.’ And I called and Fal came in, walking straight, and his father beheld him and made strange sounds which I think were a Dwarf’s way of weeping, and then he turned to me and bowed.

‘You are a man of stone, but the stone is good,’ he said. ‘For what you have done I thank you.’

‘Give me no thanks, but count yourself well paid,’ I answered.

‘I will do that,’ he said, and both Dwarves bowed to me again and went away.

* * *  

I took the gift to Fíriel in Emyn Arnen three days before she set out for the City to be married. I could have given it to her when she arrived, but I knew many other people would be waiting with gifts and although mine would be the best, I hate to be one of a crowd. So I went to Emyn Arnen in the evening and as usual they all pretended to be glad to see me, and I found Father and Fíriel sitting in the courtyard watching the sun set over the City, as they always used to do, except that things like that used to make them happy but from their faces now, you’d have thought they were both to be hanged in the morning.

Fíriel greeted me coolly and Father smiled as if he was truly glad to see me – and I think he really was, the only one who ever is – and I brought out the casket straight away and gave it to her. And when she was what was inside it she gasped and went even paler than before, and I could see she was fighting for words, though usually she has too many of them on her tongue, for my liking.

At my command Haur had made a girdle with links wrought in the shape of all the fairest flowers that grow in Ithilien, all different and yet by his art all marching well together, and set with gems to show the proper colours of the flowers, but tiny ones so that the effect was splendid and simple at the same time. And no other craftsman ever made a better work. To say that the skills of today are no match for the skills of the far past is nonsense. I know that in myself, and I could recognise it in Haur.

Fíriel examined the girdle closely and looked at me rather as Fal had looked at me when he found he could walk straight, except that Fíriel looked far more beautiful. Then still without a word she passed the girdle to Father, and he too examined it very closely, and then he looked up at me and said very quietly, ‘Turin, what is this beautiful thing made of?’

It was the one question I had feared but not expected. I had thought to keep the secret all to myself and laugh at the noisy admiration of the ignorant. But Father had a nose for truth and there was no gainsaying him, though I tried.

‘Why, just what it appears,’ I said, which was not exactly a lie, but not exactly true either,  because the girdle shone like the purest silver in the rays of the moon which was rising as the sun finally set behind the Mountains.

‘I am not talking of appearances,’ said Father, still very quietly. ‘What metal is this?’

For a long minute we looked at each other, but I could never endure Father’s glance when he meant to have the truth, and so I said, ‘You know. It is mithril.’

Fíriel gasped, and Father frowned. ‘Do you know what this thing is worth?’

I frowned back. ‘I paid for it. I paid a fair price. The maker was content with the price I paid.’

Father held my eyes again for a time, but he must have seen the truth in them because he relaxed and smiled, and said, ‘That is well. Take it, daughter; it is a noble gift.’

Fíriel looked at me and tried to smile. ‘It is a noble gift indeed. Túrin, I can only thank you and say that I shall always treasure it, though I am half afraid to own anything so splendid.’ And she smiled and made a small move toward me, and I knew that if I had been Father or Elboron or I suppose Eldarion, she would have kissed me, but at the last moment she drew back, and though I had never cared for her kisses or anyone else’s, there was a pain somewhere inside of me.

Then I bowed to her and to Father and went away. Father bade me stay for supper but I wasn’t hungry.

* * *  

Fíriel wore the girdle at her wedding and everyone marvelled at it, but nobody else guessed the secret and I knew that neither Father nor Fíriel nor Haur nor Fal would ever tell. And nobody else’s gift was half so fine, but after all that didn’t make me feel happy. I just felt very sorry that Fíriel was going away, so sorry that I could have cried if I had known how – even though Fíriel had never cared for me.

The rainbow

Fíriel

Another wet day. It almost always rains here – at least it seems to have done since I came – a grey rain that leaches all colour from the landscape and all joy from the heart. The waters of the lake are muddy grey and choppy; lashed by a vicious little wind. There are two swans on the lake; even their whiteness is dimmed. I don’t know how they can bear it.

It never rains like this at home. Usually our rains are gentle, feeding our streams and little rivers and greening the hills and woodlands. Sometimes we have sharp storms that bring the rain in great torrents, but they never last long, and after them comes a  freshness. Often, during a storm, we see the lightning leap up from the mountains behind the City, blue lightning on the white snow-peaks, and it is beautiful and terrifying to watch. The older people hate it; in the old days they believed thunder and lightning was work of the Enemy. Father never believed that, and because he was never frightened of storms, I wasn’t either.

I don’t think they can ever have such storms here in the North. There isn’t enough spirit in the air. It can only weep and drizzle. There’s no strength in the sun here, either; the summers are grey and chill, like the winters. The sun never deserts Ithilien altogether, even in the winter. Even when the days are shortest, he sets only slowly and leaves a long afterlight, and it’s seldom really cold. On clear winter evenings I used to walk with Father in our orchard, or sit in the courtyard, when he had the time, and we would read or talk, or he would teach me, until Mother came and chided us both for staying out in the chill air. Precious moments that seemed of no importance at the time.   

Sometimes it does turn cold at home, but never for long, and it’s a crisp, tingling cold, never the dull sleeting cold of the North. One night, I remember, an icy wind swept down from the mountains and froze everything, so that when the sun rose in the morning every tree and bush and even fountain looked as if it had been carved out of diamonds.

Cold evenings, when Father was at home and not too busy, were the best times of all. We would gather in Mother’s little sitting room, round the apple-wood fire (no other wood burns as sweetly), and Father or Mother would tell stories. Their stories were very different – even in different tongues, since Mother always spoke in the tongue of Rohan and Father in the elven-tongue – but always enthralling. Even Túrin listened, though he pretended not to. Sometimes Elboron would tell a story, but he always preferred the bloodthirsty ones about battles and wars and I didn’t like them. Mother did, because she has a warrior’s heart. And so did Father, even when Elboron tried to sing, although he has a voice like a crow with a sore throat (his own description). Father liked it because it reminded him of Uncle Boromir. I’m glad Father has Elboron with him now that I am so far away.

Sometimes we sat in silence, and that was best of all. You don’t need words to love people.

I would love Eldarion if I could, but you can’t love people by wanting to, or because they want you to, or because they love you. I give him what I can. My body above all, because I know how to go away from it while he is using it and be somewhere else. I don’t know if he knows that I do this. I have to do it, it’s the only way I can bear it. I dine with him and walk with him and ride with him. I even dance with him, and with other lords if the festivities require it, but it’s hard. Your feet can’t be light if your heart is heavy, and you can’t dance under the stars and the moon when the skies are always cloudy and grey.

Of course I sit beside Eldarion when he holds court, and smile and speak graciously to all comers; when he is away I do this alone. It’s easy to do because Father always insisted on courtesy until it became second nature to me. I can smile and be gracious even to people I don’t like – even all the ladies who think Elboron should have married one of their daughters and not a mixed-blooded upstart from the South. Not that they ever put it that way, of course, but I wouldn’t be Father’s daughter if I couldn’t read thoughts as transparent as theirs. It’s more difficult to be gracious and stately with people I do like, such as the dear hobbits. Sometimes, when they are with me, I laugh and chatter and feel that I am really here. The rest of the time it’s only a shell of me that is here. The real Fíriel is wandering about seeking the way home, and never finding it. I dream that almost every night, and wake up to find my face wet with tears. If Eldarion notices he never says anything. Perhaps he thinks the shell is the real me, but I don’t think he is so easily fooled.

I can still feel Father, of course. I know when he is well, and when he is tired or anxious or unhappy. And of course he knows the truth about how I feel. I would hide it from him if I could, because I know it grieves him almost past bearing, but I can’t.

The strangest thing of all is that he still thinks that I’ve done the right thing, and deep, deep down, I think so too. I don’t know why, because I am not happy and I’m sure Eldarion isn’t happy either. I try to think of it like a lesson, a very difficult lesson, so difficult that you give up trying to understand what your teacher is saying and just accept it, until a time comes, years later perhaps, when the whole thing comes back to you unexpectedly and you do understand. Until that happens, I just live from day to day and do my duty, as Father does.

***

I can hear footsteps approaching. Someone is coming to summon me. Eldarion must be back from his hunting. I must banish the real me and polish up the bright, smiling shell that everyone here except Eldarion thinks is the real me. I’m good at that; I’ve had plenty of practice this past year.

That’s odd; when I came in here it was quite dark, but now the sky is brightening, and I think the sun is struggling to show himself. Yes, here is a gleam of him, catching the swans’ plumage and turning it dazzling white, like the swans on the River at home. The clouds are turning to silver, and there’s an answering brightness on the water. And now, strange and wonderful for the end of a dark, northern winter’s day, there’s a scrap of rainbow in the sky over the lake, the colours so bright and pure you’d think they had only just been made. Perhaps it’s a sign – though of what, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s a sign of hope.