Blood and Fire

10. A dozen people

Everyone gets things wrong.

The camp was pitifully small. Beneath the skeletal branches loaded with snow, those who had come alive from Menegroth clustered around a few small fires. Oropher sat propped against a tree in a borrowed cloak, watching the flames dance and flinching from time to time as shards of bloody memory broke through his exhausted haze. A face, a burning tapestry, a shriek of pain. The crimson fountains. Dior’s death. Too tired to sleep, the icy world seemed almost dreamlike, an aching place retreating bit by bit from his weary grasp. The ground had frozen stone-hard and far overhead the stars glittered in the black night.

At some slight remove, his companions were talking.

“We should go back.” That was Melinna, not for the first time. “Someone should go back. I’ll go back. The boys –”

On the edge of Oropher’s attention, Celeborn shook his head. “We can do nothing for them now.”

“He’s right,” said Erestor and tapped her splinted wrist. “You certainly can’t.”

The glance she gave him was angry. “But what if –”

“There’s nothing we can do. Galadriel’s cousin swore to see them safe.”

“If you believe that.”

“We don’t have any choice, hm?”

“We do not,” said Celeborn soberly and stirred the fire with a twig. His lame leg was stretched out before the flames. “Those who stand victor there forbid it. We lack the strength or numbers to renew the fight. All we can do now is safeguard Dior’s daughter.”

Dior’s daughter. Oropher in his sleepless haze found his thoughts drifting down a different path. They had stumbled through the twilit trees into the lady Galadriel’s camp, a gaggle of women and children guarded by those who still remained of the woodland Sindar and Oropher’s patrols after the fighting by the bridge. Others were there who had fought with Dior in the caves and somehow broken free of Menegroth’s fall. More than Oropher had expected. He had been too battered and exhausted to be surprised. There Celeborn’s golden wife had arisen and come through the snow to meet them, holding the child tightly in her arms.

“The safest place,” she had burst out incomprehensibly. “He hid it in the safest place –”

Later they learned that Dior had clasped the Nauglamír around his daughter’s neck before entrusting the child to Galadriel’s safekeeping. It had gone unnoticed beneath Elwing’s cocoon of blankets and shawls. Galadriel had only found out herself long after her cousins had sent her and her followers out into the icy woods of fallen Doriath. The Noldor could spend as long as they pleased hunting for the Silmaril in the ruins of Menegroth’s shattered beauty. The more time they wasted on searching the caves, the more likely it was that those who fled the battle would get safely away.

Where they were going was less clear. Away from here. The city had fallen. Dior was dead. It was time to leave the woods of beech and elm where Thingol and Melian had held their court and Lúthien had danced beside the enchanted Esgalduin. There would be no return to Menegroth’s stone forests, blood-smeared and battle-scarred, Dior Eluchíl’s tomb where Nimloth’s screams still echoed through the sculpted boughs. No more descent into the ruined and smoke-filled caves hacked from the stone beneath the stars. Nor would Oropher and his weary followers journey eastwards into Ossiriand and their old familiar haunts. One day, perhaps. For now they were needed by this remnant of Elu Thingol’s people, cast into the wilderness to wander like wolves. And Dior’s daughter, the child who bore the jewel for which her home and family had fallen. Little Elwing asleep beneath a veil of shimmering golden hair. The half-remembered image held Oropher’s fraying attention momentarily. It had seemed as though Galadriel would never let the child go.

“We ought to safeguard Dior’s sons,” he heard Melinna say bitterly. She rose abruptly and took a couple of steps into the shadows. The bone-handled knife gleamed in her unsplinted hand. “Someone has to.”

Erestor was staring into the fire. “Even the Noldor won’t kill children.”

“But what if –”

“Sit down,” he said. “It’s going to be a long walk.”

You learn to live with it.