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Lalwen was going to be sick.
Leaving Fingolfin and Maglor to their wrangling, she stalked with as much dignity as she could muster into the woods at the edge of the meadow, slipping through the underbrush until she was out of sight and sound of the two angry hosts. Once hidden, she crumpled, gagging on the bitterness of years and the new horror of such an unexpected loss.
Fëanor was dead.
Burnt. Scorched. Sublimated in his fury, all his yearning fire spent. That bright flame they had chased across the Ice was gone, gone, faded into night.
Her retching reshaped itself into a hacking laughter. What had they expected? Chagrin, from the brother who had ever lorded himself high and mighty above them? Apologies? Fear?
Not all their great host might have pried the crown from Fëanor’s furious fingers. The wild humor of their having planned to try it overwhelmed her, until her manic wheezing resolved, quite suddenly, into tears.
Lalwen wept until she was utterly drained – free, in the unfamiliar woods, of any need to be the laughing princess of their staggering, starving people. The jagged edges of the Ice that lingered in her softened, and with that easing, she found the breath, at last, to mourn. For all those lost and left behind, and for Fëanor: mad king and brilliant brother, who, when she was small, had once been kind.
She sighed to stillness, finally, and wiped her eyes.
“Are you well enough, sister? Grief is thirsty work. Here, settle yourself with a mouthful of fire.”
The woman who had sprung from nowhere, silent as a falling feather, should have been frightening. But Lalwen could not even muster the strength to startle – she only stared as the stranger crouched beside her, dappled with the forest’s living light.
She was slight and wiry, dressed to disappear amid the shadows. Easily missed and unremarkable – but for her eyes, which were ancient and sharp and a hundred shifting shades of green.
Those keen eyes softened, some, as she assessed the depth of Lalwen’s exhausted despair.
She settled on her heels and pressed a leather bottle into Lalwen’s cold hands, wrapping them in her own lean, warm ones and tutting. “Come, child. Drink and be eased. What’s past is past, and in these lands, there is no shortage of grieving.”
Lalwen drank, and felt the burn spreading in her chest. Like Fëanor, she thought, with a last weary cough and sniffle.
The stranger watched her, curiously.
“To whom do you belong, child? With whom did you come?”
“With my brother, the King,” Lalwen offered, and saw that thin mouth twitch.
“And who do you mourn?”
“My brother, the King that was.” It was true, for all that Fëanor had failed them, and she felt compelled to say it.
Unexpectedly, her companion laughed. “Such a surfeit of royalty across the Sea! It must be fairly crowded with princes. All ordering the world as they like, and everyone else bowing and scraping.”
Her eyes were bright with something more than mirth, as she leaned in close. “Hear this, little one: we’ve no truck with such ways, among my people. It will be better if yours leave us alone.”
Avar, Lalwen thought, struck to the core by the force of that refusal. Something fluttered in her throat: a longing. A possibility.
She gripped the lean wrist, felt the narrow bones turn under her touch. The green eyes gleamed.
“I cannot imagine it,” Lalwen whispered. “Will you tell me more?”
*****
The spring trickled past the mouth of the cave where they lay hidden, making its impartial music. Negeneth’s gasps were a bitter counterpoint, echoing crowlike in the damp. Lalwen shivered; she had not dared to make a fire. There were too many orcs, and far too close, to take that risk.
But Negeneth was shuddering with the cold, and with the blow where her skull had hit the stones. It had been hard work, hauling her out of the river and up the bank to the relative safety of the cave. She had been heavier than Lalwen had expected – all that birdlike strength gone suddenly limp and dull.
And she was not thankful, when she woke.
“Fool of a Noldë,” she hissed, batting Lalwen’s searching hands away from her head. “Trapping us in a hole with only one way out!”
But Lalwen was hardy, for all her laughter. Not out of tenderness had she survived the Ice. And they had traveled long enough together, now, for her to know when Negeneth truly meant to bite. Lalwen caught that sharp face in her hands, watched as the green eyes narrowed in symmetry.
“You scowl at me evenly, at any rate. There’ll be no lasting damage, I should think.”
She tugged Negeneth back against her, then, catching her arms as she thrashed and growled. The long legs that Negeneth mocked for their inconvenience in climbing trees wound stronger than vines, binding her, holding her down.
“Hush,” Lalwen breathed. “Lie still and get warm.”
Time slipped – trickling past with the stream, weaving through the singing water until Lalwen could not say how long they had huddled together. Such closeness was not a habit of theirs, although it had been decades now that they had traveled and worked together: Negeneth as her people’s intelligencer and Lalwen’s sometimes-reluctant guide, and Lalwen as Fingolfin’s nominal ambassador to the unaffiliated tribes. Rarely had they touched, beyond a hand across a gap in the tree-roads or the quick, light brushes needed to accomplish a shared task of mending or making.
Now Negeneth was warm in Lalwen’s arms, light and soft against her, all her ancient pride and distance melting into sleep. Lalwen listened to the easing of her troubled breath, felt the steady beat of her heart, and permitted herself, in the quiet of the rippling darkness, to yearn.
Oh, she had longed almost from the beginning – from Negeneth’s first scowl and the burn of her liquor, from the first scornful flash of those deep green eyes. Negeneth’s refusal of everything that made Lalwen who she was had struck deep and sparked. It was idiocy, impossibility, but that quick fire had never stopped burning.
Lalwen nosed gently into the soft space behind Negeneth’s ear and breathed in: she smelled of pine, of sweat, of the old growth of the forests and the chill of the stars. Enticing, to a child of Tirion. Enthralling. Lalwen’s mouth watered. Holding her breath, she pressed her lips gently, gently to Negeneth’s skin.
And heard her chuckle, with a wry warmth that thrummed in Lalwen’s bones.
“Fool of a Noldë. I was walking the woods before ever your grandfather opened his eyes.” But her hands held Lalwen’s close around her waist, and her voice was smiling.
She rolled to face Lalwen, hissing as her aching head shifted, sighing as Lalwen pillowed her close against her breast. Negeneth’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, not with Treelight, but with the older silver of the stars. She lifted a lean hand and traced Lalwen’s mouth with a tender finger. “Have a care, child. Would you have your people talk of your wandering spirit? They will scorn you if you give yourself over to me: such a wild thing, who rejected the Light for the singing of the trees.”
“Avarinya, arimeldanya,” Lalwen whispered, closing the remaining distance between their lips. Ah, delight! Intoxication!
“Teach me that music,” she gasped, between kisses and touches. “It is your true song - oh, how I wish to learn!”
*****
Lalwen knelt in the scorched ruins of what had been the great forests of Dorthonion, stroking the burned bones of a once-monumental pine. After the heat of the flames, it was cold. Cold in the air, cold in her heart. Like the wind in the great alleys of trees on the edges of Mandos.
So cold.
Negeneth would have laughed at her for wishing them both elsewhere. Fool of a Noldë! she had crowed, on learning of the dark gates of Namo’s fastness, and the promised Return Lalwen’s people had long held dear. How crowded it will be in Aman, when all those tired spirits come dragging back! Oh no, that is not for me!
And again and to the last she had refused, even as the flames caught her up in their embrace. No horn of Mandos would ever call her away from the woods – she would end in the blossoms, in the springing sap, in the green fronds that danced with every breeze.
Bitter truths for Lalwen, bowed to the ground, sick with her grief again where she had known such joy.
But the dead pine leaned into the wind, sheltering a patch of unburnt earth in its eastern wake. A lone sprout pushed bravely up – drawing strength and energy from the old tree’s root.
Mine, Lalwen thought. Oh, my beloved. Green-hearted star-singer. Mine!
Working carefully, she freed the fragile thing, winding it in a dampened bandage from the pack she carried, tucking it safely away. She would plant it somewhere far from the roiling cauldron of Beleriand's kingdoms. Let it drink the clean wind, and grow as it pleased.
Then she turned her back on the sinking sun, refusing its pull as Negeneth had, and passed East, out of memory – a dark song weaving through the whispering trees.