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According to the census, there were seventeen elves named ‘Gil-galad’ in Laerdor, the republic of reborn Sindar to the south of Valinor. None of them were Tirnel’s son. He had not been taken in, it seemed, by his father’s kin. That was a relief, in a sense. If he had been here, it would have meant that Tirnel’s mother-in-law had lied and hidden her son from her. Estaran’s mother had been – and was again, reborn here – a horrid old crone who remembered leaving Cuiviénen, and was as set as stone in all her many prejudices, but she was not the sort to do that.
Unfortunately, Tirnel’s relief was not nearly a match to her sorrow. This was close to the last place Tirnel had to look, and with each day that passed, it grew more likely that she had managed to pass her son by without even seeing him.
Tirnel had criss-crossed continental Beleriand for a decade now, visiting every kingdom, town, vale and village of the Teleri, the Noldor, her own people, called green elves by the Valinorians, and now of her husband’s people. She had met many Gil-galads, named in love and honour of the second-age king, and not once has she encountered her own son, who died alone and frightened in Beleriand, during an orc raid decades or centuries before the ascendency of Gil-galad the King.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” Secretary Nimloth said. She had been nothing but kind to Tirnel, in her time as host and as head of the Family Reunification Office of Laerdor. Certainly, she was better than her counterparts in Alqualondë and Tirion, who had both been very frustrated by Tirnel asking them to count their own share of Gil-galads.
“It’s my husband’s fault,” Tirnel said, “not yours. He was called Estaran, in childhood, the namer of the king – a foresight-name that predicted this delightful bit of irony.”
“It’s a cruel thing,” Nimloth said, “to be sundered from your children. Even if, in another life, you might laugh at the coincidence.”
There was little Tirnel could do but nod. Nimloth, after all, knew sundering well.
“You are welcome to stay if you want,” Nimloth offered, kindly. “I always have room for guests.”
And of course she did. Nimloth lived in Laerdor alone. The empty halls were markedly sadder than even Tirnel’s own dust-gathering box of belongings in her great-aunt’s longhouse in Almënand.
There was a temptation to stay here, with a stranger who was kind and who shared in Tirnel’s loneliness. In time, in the unending summer of South Valinor, where fruit hung heavy from the branch and the disconcertingly elf-shaped animals the locals called ‘monkeys’ chattered eagerly at her from the trees, she might have forgotten herself. Except her mother-in-law, who avoided her, there was nobody here to remind her of Gil-galad, to look on her with pity the way they looked at Nimloth.
But there was no answers here, either. Tirnel had chosen to be reborn only because Mandos’s maia had mentioned, in passing, that her son had done the same. Until she found him, there would be no rest for her.
“I have to go to Tol Eressëa. I don’t know why Gil-galad would be there, among the sailed and half-damned, but it’s the last place to try.”
“Replete with Gil-galads.”
It was, at that. The highest incidence of the name per capita of anywhere in Valinor, thanks to the presence of the unfortunately-named Noldorin king.
“More chances.” More disappointments.
A monkey hurried overhead, and Tirnel no longer startled at the unfamiliar sound. She closed her eyes and dispelled again the vision of a life here.
“Will you remind me the name of your counterpart on Tol Eressëa? We corresponded briefly about the census data on people named Gil-galad, but I knew that there was little chance he’d be there, so it wasn’t a long conversation.”
Nimloth reminded her of the name. “She’ll be more helpful than her counterparts in Tirion and Alqualondë. Tol Eressëa is supposed to be a place for reunions and returnees, after all.”
“All Valinor was supposed to be, once.”
What bitter disappointment, to come to the land beyond the world, where not even death was supposed to sunder souls, and to be more lonely than ever. A part of her wondered if her parents had been right, refusing the call even in death. But Tirnel had not wanted to lose Estaran, and she had hoped that Gil-galad’s soul would follow hers, to escape the things that preyed on spirits in Beleriand.
“I have… a suggestion,” said Nimloth, tentatively. Tirnel motioned for her to continue. “You might skip the reunion office entirely and appeal to the king. Officers like me are all well and good for people who need to know the nearest Palantír to contact a long-lost uncle, but for your unique situation… perhaps something more drastic is needed. You could file an appeal with the President here, of course, but there is an election coming up and it might be lost in the shuffle. King Gil-galad is by all accounts a generous soul, and in a way he is responsible for your predicament. If you asked his aid, I think he would grant it.”
She had considered trying to find a powerful person to help her before, but that had never been the norm of Tirnel’s life. She had been lived in Beleriand as a trader, a dangerous life that led her, ultimately, to her death, and one which placed her outside structures like the kingdoms of the north and west, the Sindarin Republics of the south, and the tribes of her own people.
“I doubt King Gil-galad has time for my pleas.”
“He will if I have anything to say about it,” said Nimloth, with decided menace.
--
Nimloth’s granddaughter-in-law was a very beautiful girl, a few centuries younger than Tirnel’s son, but, having lived linearly through all the years of his death, likely far older by now. Her silver hair swept over her left shoulder in a graceful twist, serving as ornamentation for her plain, though beautifully made, indigo gown.
“I rarely call at court,” she advised Tirnel, but it did not stop her from donning golden bangles, which did not entirely disguise her scars, and selecting an ebony cane to support her on the walk to Gil-galad’s palace. The garb and the power suited her in a way that made Tirnel feel smaller than ever at her side, wearing a borrowed dress belonging to one of Celebrían’s companions, too long in the sleeves by half an inch and with an unusual pattern that turned the green cloth into a carpet of ivy. The same girl, who told Tirnel in a long-winded diatribe that she had served Celebrían on both shores, had insisted on braiding her gold hair to show off its length and beauty, though Tirnel had rebelled at the idea. She had always worn it short, before her death, out of practicality and a certain unconventional spirit. It was long now only because she had lost the drive to care about her appearance.
“Lady Celebrían Nerissë for Ereinion Gil-galad Artanáro, Emeritus King of the Noldor.”
The inclusion of the word ‘emeritus’ made little sense to Tirnel, when all on Tol Eressëa so clearly followed him still, but the Noldor were odd about these things. She had never fully understood why there had been kings at Nargothrond and Vinyamar both, but not at Himlad or Himring.
This Noldorin king had gentle eyes, a plain brown, though his colouring was made more unusual by lovely pale-gold hair that would have marked him out on the streets of Tirion. It was rather reminiscent of Celebrían, which made a certain amount of sense for kin, though they otherwise shared little in the way of features.
On the sight of Celebrían, he rose from his chair by the hearth, which was not a throne, and came to kiss her hands and cheeks.
“My dear friend,” he addressed her, “you never need to call on me formally. You would be just as welcome if you crept into my house like a thief. And have done so before, I recall.”
She smiled, for the first time Tirnel had seen, and it altered the sorrowful character of her countenance into a bright and lovely thing.
“Of course,” she said, “Celebrían of Rivendell would no more knock on your door than she would on her own. But today you are paying host to Lady Celebrían Nerissë, Princess of the Noldor and the Sindar, on the request of Nimloth, Emerita Queen of Destroyed Doriath.”
This formal Noldorin was hard to follow, and so it was a relief when Celebrían switched tongues to add in the more-familiar Sindarin, “Your real guest is Tirnel of the Nandor. Nimloth has sent her to beg a favour.”
“Tirnel,” he echoed, and it was a surprise to discover that he pronounced her name as she did, with the Nandorin vowels rather than the Sinda ones she had grown used to. He did not attempt to guess at a second name for her, as she had learned the Noldor and Vanyar were prone to doing.
Gil-galad the King placed a hand to his chest and drew a blessed star in greeting, though his hand was shaky and too far to the right to truly have captured the gesture. Taking it in the spirit in which it was intended, Tirnel deferred to his culture in turn and bowed at the waist Noldo-style.
This odd ritual, reminding her of her trading days, the awkward mixing of cultures taking place across Beleriand, gave Tirnel the confidence to say, “Majesty, I am begging your help.”
He invited them to his hearth, sat in his throne while Celebrían sprawled familiarly on a divan, and Tirnel perched on the edge of an armchair.
As servants served tea, she explained, “I came the short way from Beleriand, and was reborn just a few decades ago. I had not intended to choose rebirth. Not without my husband and son. But a Maia in Mandos’s service told me that my son had been reborn without us. He was a child when we died, but I have found no trace of him with any who might have cared for him. I have been searching Valinor, crawling through the census records for people with my son’s name, and there is none on the mainland who is him. And no one has ever heard of a child being reborn with neither parent nor kin.”
Celebrían, in the interests of time, said, “Nimloth suggested you might be able to help Tirnel uncover new methods of searching beyond the scope of what the family reunification agencies are capable of.”
Emotion was plain on Gil-galad’s face, “Of course, I’ll do what I can. It’s an issue of great personal significance to me, of course.”
Tirnel had thought Nimloth was joking about Gil-galad the King feeling sorry for how many people were named after him.
“Thank you.”
Gently, he hedged, “I fear, though, that it may not be much. I haven’t been able to reunite my own family, after all.”
She supposed that he would not have been a king here if his parents were alive again. “The separations of Mandos are cruel indeed.”
He nodded, and, with a too-false smile, said, “why don’t you tell me about your son?”
She had been forced to recount it so many times by now. “My Gil-galad was six when he died, fair of hair and complexion. More so than I am on both counts. His father was a Sinda of South Beleriand. No birth marks or childhood injuries.”
Celebrían, who had a surprising ability to slip into the background for one so lovely, asked, “what was his favourite food?”
“Rabbit porridge. Although he sometimes spent more time wearing it than eating it.”
“My daughter was just the same,” Celebrían said, with a fondness tinged with grief. “Had he started climbing trees yet?”
“No. We might have if we’d made it back south to visit his father’s family. In those days, the woods south of Doriath were still relatively safe. Enough for children to roam free, within reason.”
“This was before the Fall?”
“Before the Bragollach. He’s older than all the other Gil-galads, not being a namesake.”
She chanced a glance back to Gil-galad the King, and found him staring at her, pole-axed.
Celebrían, rather gently, said, “Ereinion, are you alright?”
“I…” He met her eyes with helpless distress in his expression, and said to Tirnel, “you…”
Inhaling sharply, Celebrían said, “Gil, is she…”
“I don’t know!” He covered his own mouth in horror at himself for yelling.
Feeling rather out of place, Tirnel said, “I can leave you if you-”
“No!” They both exclaimed at the same time, the King extending a hand towards Tirnel in protest before stopping himself as if the air had burned him.
Celebrían, sitting up, tentatively inquired, “Tirnel… I hate to ask this, but how certain are you that your son died?”
“He could hardly have left Mandos without dying.”
“But are you certain he died then?”
How could Celebrían look upon her so kindly and then drag her back to that moment? “What child of six could do anything other than die, when a trading caravan is attacked by a party of Morgoth’s own orcs. Do you imagine him fighting free with hammer or bow? I hid him, made him promise to stay quiet and swore to come back, but I never did. None of us did. Every fighting soul died, and I’m sure they found and slaughtered him after. And if they didn’t, so what? There was no town for miles, in that putrid wasteland called Dimbar. Do not ask me to imagine the other thing, where they found him and decided death was too good.”
She rubbed furiously at her eyes with the back of her hand, trying to stem her angry tears.
Gil-galad King, hands clasped on his upper arms, addressed his own feet. “But there were other travelling parties. Noldorin scouts and messengers.” Tirnel made to interrupt him, but the king continued, “the smell from the latrine was enough to cover orcish noses for a time. And the road from Himlad to Dor-Lómin was a well-trodden one in those days, for the Fëanorions were not so thoroughly estranged from their kin as they might now have you believe.”
Her heart accelerated, vibrating in her chest like a mouse’s. “I didn’t mention the latrine.”
Gil-galad, High King of the Noldor, son of Tirnel and Estaran, confessed, “I stayed so still. I didn’t know what else to do. I think I would have stayed there forever. But Maedhros came.” Celebrían inhaled sharply at the name, which was to her no doubt an ancestral enemy, but to Tirnel had only ever indicated fair trade in grain and weapons. “He killed them all, with his warriors, and found me hiding there. I still don’t know how he knew to look. He was so tall, with his eyes tree-bright beneath his helm, and as he drew it from his head and crouched to meet my eyes, I could have taken him for a god. He asked my parents’ names, where we’d come from, but I didn’t know. I asked for you – for Nana and Ada – but he didn’t know who you were. And so in the end he did the kindest thing he could for me: he shielded my eyes with Fëanarian crimson, and carried me with him to Fingon, the crown prince, who he knew more than any other to be courageous and gentle. In time, love grew between us. Forgive me. I did not mean to be faithless.”
When Tirnel was fifteen, a Sinda trader had met with her tribe while they fished on the banks of Duilwen. She had been beautiful, with thick, dark braids stretching nearly to her waist, and she had stayed with them five weeks to rest and fix her wagon, teaching Tirnel, who was too young to fish herself, the basics of Sindarin. That had been Tirnel’s first tongue other than her own, and since that moment, she had devoured two more dialects of Sindarin, then-banned Noldorin, and the guttural tongue of the men of the north.
Language had been her first love, but it failed her now. There were no words, in any of her coveted treasures, that she could say to her son, who sat here in front of her, a long-grown stranger bearing names given by others.
Celebrían broke the silence as she rose, and, cane and shoe-soles both sharp on the wooden floors, left them there together.
Estaran would not have known what to say either, but he would not have needed words to make himself known. In his absence, Tirnel brought herself to kneel at her son’s side, and took his trembling hands in her own. Reborn, they were unmarked by strife, bearing no callouses of labour or war, as innocent as a child’s save for the fact that the nails were painted silver after the Noldorin fashion for extravagant ornamentation.
He choked on a wretched sob, and fell from his throne to the ground beside her, where Tirnel clutched him to her breast and kissed his lovely hair, the golden crown far beyond any other which had graced his brow.
The words came, in the end, tripping ungainly from her tongue, as she whispered, “darling, darling,” and “Gil-galad, my star.”
His reply, “I’m sorry,” again and again, drew tears from her eyes.
“Not sorry, love. Never.”
“I forgot your face, your eyes, your name. I didn’t know-”
“You lived,” broke from Tirnel’s mouth, “I wanted nothing more. Oh starlight, you lived.”
“I betrayed you, I left you in death. You searched everywhere but I was right here.” His voice cracked, a glimpse of the weedy adolescent she had never seen.
It came to her, at last, what Gil-galad really needed from her. “I love you no matter who you grew up to be, darling. Farmer, trader, weaver, warrior, king, I don’t care. You grew up and you survived and I am so-” It was her turn for her emotion to betray her dignity. “It’s wonderful, baby. My little boy, chasing frogs like you wanted to put them in your mouth, a king.”
Whispering as if it was a confession, he told her, “I caught one, once, with Fingon. I wanted to keep it as a pet but he said it belonged back down by the pond.”
She could see, so clearly in her mind, the boy Gil-galad had been, a fat frog clutched between his hands.
“Did he love you well, this Noldo king?”
“As well as he would have loved a child of his body. Perhaps better, since I came from Maedhros. But he died, not so long after you did, in the scope of elven lives, and thereafter I lived with Círdan Shipwright, who kept to my side until the day I died.”
Unlike Fingon and Maedhros, who were in her mind only distinct trade policies and glimpses from a distance of glittering armour, Círdan was familiar. He had been a friend to the Sindarin Republics, outside the authority of Thingol, and out of respect, he negotiated personally with the traders who came his way. Tirnel knew his voice and manner, from many conversations, and knew his generosity as crates of salt fish to carry inland for the winter.
“He was kind,” Gil-galad reassured her. “All my- all my guardians have been kind to me. I was so lucky. I confess, in time, I called them my fathers too, even though I knew their names and I still don’t-”
“Estaran,” she told him. “You are the son of Tirnel, of the Singing Oak tribe, trader of Beleriand, speaker of many tongues, and her husband in the eyes of Eru, Estaran Aewenion, of the Republic of the Babbling Brook. And others besides. Speak your names and know yourself, my son.”
“I am Gil-galad Ereinion,” he said, voice starting tremulous and gaining vigour, “Rodnor, the noble fire. Estarion. Of Singing Oak and Babbling Brook, and of Hithlum, of the Falas and of Lindon. By the Grace of the Valar, High King of the Noldor in Middle Earth for an age of the sun.”
As she would have done in another life when her son had claimed a name for his own – as her mother had, when Tirnel renamed herself in the Sindarin tongue she loved so well – she kissed each of his hands, for the work of making yourself, each of his cheeks, for the joy of speaking a true name, and his forehead, for the knowledge of self.
“So you are and so shall you ever be.”
And so they were.