Chapter Text
Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.
- T. H. White, The Ill-Made Knight
“I was thinking,” he says. “This is meant to be our story, the one they’ll tell of us.”
“The truth.”
“An irrelevant distinction, but if you insist. My point – It was so long before I saw you again. Truly saw you. And so this part’s not our story, is it? It’s other things.”
“Other things.”
“You’re being pointlessly difficult. Come here. Stand with me.”
She does, which he didn’t expect. She rests her hands on the sill and looks out at the distant trees and he remembers her long centuries before, on a ship from Númenor in the bright armour he’d made her, looking out at the sea and refusing to turn to him. How confident he’d been, then.
“You would rather I ignored all you did,” she says. “Still.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what would you prefer, to miss out everything until I returned? Or after? Everything before Nára was born?”
“Obviously not.” Even the thought of their daughter, of that daughter, casts a strange light on everything he might want to say. He feels so exhausted again. Perhaps they don’t need this, any of this; perhaps he can just lie down with Galadriel now, curled up against her light, and let the future care for itself.
But she will not have it, not with that smirk in the corner of her mouth he loves so much. “Perhaps you would rather ignore how I returned at all?”
“Perhaps no-one will even remember.”
“I think they will remember you dragging Elrond here as a prisoner.”
“I didn’t drag him.”
“I think he will remember it.”
“He was barely even in a cell. He had the freedom of the city or as good as. I came back once from – it doesn’t matter, I came back – and he was telling stories about Pelargir to a whole crowd. He was the most pampered, well-treated prisoner I have ever held.”
“Other than me.”
“I don’t like you saying that.”
“Those first seven years in Pelargir -”
“I didn’t treat you like a prisoner. You weren’t a prisoner. I loved you so much.”
“And you didn’t know how to love a thing without breaking it.”
He thinks of dead apple trees, of visions of Middle-earth blistered and cratered below his feet. Of Galadriel left lying on the floor of his tower room as peaceful as if she were sleeping as he kissed her soft on the lips, and took her dagger.
He has ways to justify this. That she was warned. That he would have come back to her. That he had told her not to betray him, he had told her again and again she would regret it if she did, what did she expect might happen? It would all be so easy; it would be like falling into an old familiar song.
She is right, all the same. She is right and he is glad beyond telling that he never broke her.
“All right,” he says. “All right. Tell as much of the rest of it as you think matters.”
It took longer than Galadriel would have liked before her soldiers were ready to leave. Many were serving as wardens at the borders of Eregion, and others were out on a scouting party into the mountains following reports of orcs. Other than the few she had from the entourage Gil-galad had brought from Lindon she was forced by necessity to wait for them to arrive in a slow trickle, day after day.
But even with all this, it felt less frustrating to her than it would have done even a few short weeks ago. There was, at least, a plan; there was an enemy front to investigate and intelligence to gather. She knew more than she had and even though the knowledge sickened her it was better than to be sickened than ignorant.
In the meantime she talked with the soldiers she had gathered, learning as much of them as she could, and held endless conversations with armourers about what equipment would be needed and when. Gil-galad was content to let her make all the decisions for this campaign as she wished and to authorise whatever she asked for in terms of supplies and support here in Ost-in-Edhil. They were more in accord than they had been for many years, and she found she could even enjoy his company at dinner. Above all, it was a relief to be a respected commander again rather than a relic of a bygone war.
Elrond left for Khazad-dûm and returned again with reassurances: there was no indication that Sauron had tried to work with the dwarves directly, or that he had tried to obtain mithril through any routes at all. “But we wouldn’t know, would we,” Curumo had grumbled, “that’s the very point of how he works,” and the Istari had argued between themselves about it for the better part of a day, and Elrond had excused himself from the discussions and gone to prepare for his journey south to the Númenorean colony.
Galadriel’s ring remained in Celebrimbor’s workshops where his jewel-smiths studied it night and day in ways she found interminable, not least because they seemed to discover so little about it that was of use. Every time she saw it, it was somewhere different: once resting on white silk on an otherwise empty bench, once held in a tray of glowing coals. Whatever they might be learning from this, though, seemed to prove as little use to them as it was to her. She felt herself growing impatient.
The day after Elrond returned she found her ring suspended in water in a strange glass container whose faceted sides shone shards of light through its centre. Two of the gwaith-i-mírdain were observing it at a distance, one of them writing careful notes from the other’s commentary – a long list of measurements. Their voices were hushed as though in reverence.
She could simply take it, of course. She wondered if they would try to stop her if she did.
“Where is Celebrimbor?” she said, and they turned towards her in perfect unison as though they were on two sides of a mirror.
“I don’t intend to leave Eregion without it,” she said.
They sat together in a little plant-filled room above the arching vaults of the main workshops, where there was barely room for two stools between a writing-desk and a telescope. Celebrimbor’s own office was occupied with more of his assistants working on something else relating to rings. Their work seemed to expand to fill all the space and all the time available and even so she could tell Celebrimbor had barely slept, a deep weariness ground into him like dust on a traveller who had been too long on the road. The promise of her ring, and the uncertainty of how long she would allow it to remain with them, were too great to neglect for anything else.
“We are making progress,” he said. “I appreciate it might not seem that way -”
“Can you tell me whether Pelargir is any less protected with me and the ring gone?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Can you tell me the limits of its powers? Can you tell me how I can use it against him?”
An apologetic excuse for a smile. He had known she would ask this; he had known he would not have what she sought. “Incomplete answers would be less use to you than none at all.”
“Then what is the point of you even holding it? I did not lend it to your jewel-smiths for their entertainment.”
“We are trying, Galadriel.”
“Try harder.”
“Do you think I’m not doing all I can?” His voice had become brittle and sharp at the edges.
Galadriel had never been particularly close to her cousin. As a child he had been Fëanor’s beloved grandson in Mahtan’s forges, given his own workbench with a stepstool and a pair of gloves too big for him, fussed over by a flock of adoring uncles, of an age with her and some of the others but rarely joining their games. Later in Beleriand he had seemingly followed his father in a quiet and awestruck devotion until Finrod was betrayed; and then he had turned from all of the Fëanorians and gone, so she presumed, somewhere else. She had never known him without the heavy weight of his family borne on his shoulders. Even now with all of them gone, he barely seemed freed from it.
But now there were only the two of them left. Gil-galad and Elrond were generations removed, and Maglor, if he even still lived, was long lost and would not want to be found. However foolish Celebrimbor’s decisions they were unlikely the worst their ill-fated family had managed, and she had made enough poor decisions of her own. She could afford to be kinder.
“Surely you saw Sauron make that ring,” she said. “It was only a bare few years ago. Surely you know it.”
But Celebrimbor was shaking his head. “When he made that pair of rings here he told us they were a small thing. A trial, a little project to try his own hand. Not of a kind with the three we made. He worked on them mainly alone and we – Well, we let him, which I won’t excuse now. What matters is that we’re starting from close to nothing with this. All I can tell you with certainty are things you must already know. I can tell you that your ring is linked to his in a way that distance won’t affect. I can tell you that its powers probably are less than the three made for the elves, but they’re more loosely contained and this makes them harder to define. It’s more sophisticated than I believed and at the same time it feels unfinished in some ways. Made in haste.”
She remembered years before on their first journey to Pelargir, Sauron fallen to his knees in the wake of a storm their rings had made together and staring at her in – awe? Horror? It was hard to tell but oh, she had liked to see him so shocked by what she could do with his creation. She had remembered wanting him drowned and knowing she would willingly drown herself with him, and how reassuring the swell of water had felt as it crashed over them both. But here, in this little tower room in Ost-in-Edhil, that morning on a far-away hillside seemed closer than ever before.
“You helped him,” she said. “After that. He spoke to you through the palantír. Didn’t you even discuss it? Did he say nothing?” She could feel a familiar anger beginning to warm her again, comforting as a fire in winter.
“About the two he made here – no. Well, little. Nothing useful to us now. He was so focused on learning more, making more. Making Middle-earth mended and beautiful again. He even had me doubting the Istari to begin with. I was so sure he was telling the truth about what he wanted to do.”
And how many times had Sauron told her this same thing, all but begging her to believe him.
“He deceives himself,” she said, swallowing down the bitterness in her mouth, thinking of her soldiers even now being fitted for armour that could hold off orc blades.
Celebrimbor’s smile was brief and spare, but it was there. “At least there is hope now,” he said. “We have learned so much more about the ring-craft and now that we are working with the Istari things are progressing even faster. With Sauron required to work alone I have a reasonable hope we’ll learn all he knows and more before too much longer. If you’d leave the ring here for a few more months -”
“Months?”
“Will you consider it, at least?”
The room was too small, suddenly, its walls seeming to press the air in around her.
“You can’t ask me this,” she said, getting to her feet a little more rapidly than she intended.
Elrond was already preparing to leave the day the messenger arrived. She had hoped he might stay a little longer – she had missed him more than she expected when he went to Khazad-dûm, his absence far sharper than it should have been when she was long used to not seeing him for many years at a time. But the negotiations with Numenor could not wait any longer.
They were walking by the Glanduin and she was telling him that she hated the thought of him riding so close to Sauron’s lands – it was dangerous, Sauron would have no qualms in seizing an emissary and particularly not one close to Gil-Galadriel and dear to Galadriel, he should at least consider more soldiers as escort – when someone she vaguely recognised as a gate guard out of uniform came down to meet them with a paper in her hand. Galadriel was so lost in Elrond’s imminent journey that for a moment she assumed it was somehow related to that, but it was handed it to her instead. A letter, folded and sealed, bearing her name in a too-familiar hand.
“I take it that’s from him,” Elrond said once they were alone again, the gate guard dismissed with too-abrupt thanks.
She nodded without looking up from the letter she held. Its wax seal was still the one she was familiar with, the sigil of the king of the Southlands. She had almost expected he might choose something else. “He knows I’m here,” she said.
“Or it’s a guess. Or he sent messages to every elven settlement he could think of.”
Possible, yes, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. She broke the seal and unfolded the letter where they stood.
My lady Galadriel, my queen, my wife, the brightest jewel of Pelargir.
Elf, you have removed your ring. I am sure this was at the insistence of others. Your elf-lords still wear theirs, I do not doubt – remember that if you are ashamed to wear any gift of mine. For now, since I cannot speak to you as I would like and since I cannot bear to be without any way to reach you at all, I resort to pen and ink.
I do not plan to stop, Galadriel. I will mend the harms I have caused and I will bring beauty and order back to Middle-earth. You have a part in this – a part which I have insufficiently explained to you, and, in truth, have only recently been able to fully understand myself. You are needed for this work and I will not be denied you. I would tell you more but for that you must come to me. If they will allow you, of course. If they will not, perhaps I will come and get you myself.
I know you dislike orcs and you dislike that my current plans require them. I rather dislike orcs myself. As I promised, you may kill them yourself when I am done. I sometimes cannot abide thinking of this and sometimes like it very much indeed, but at any rate I’ll have no more use for them and I did offer. They are a tool to achieve an end, and you may tell your friends that I might never have needed to resort to it without the constant threat of my jealous, small-minded brothers intent on stopping me. My orcs will be temporary, Galadriel, but what they intend for Middle-earth will not.
I do not plan to stop, and nothing you can promise or threaten will make me. But if you come back I will let you choose how you wish it to be. All of our lands will be kept in beauty and glory as your elf kingdoms are now – at my gift, I remind you. I will build you castles even more beautiful than the tower I designed for you. I will let you rule any lands you like. I have been careless and thoughtless with you and I will make up for it. I will. I am not accustomed to loving anything as I have loved you.
I miss you so dearly. I am sure you must know this but I will say it all the same, and if it is my pride you wish me to sacrifice then consider it laid at your feet.
I am afraid for you, Galadriel. There are other forces at work in Middle-earth who would use you for their purposes as you fear I have used you for mine. I have never lied to you. Can your other allies say the same? Your elves who gave you to me? My own kind? Olórin seems harmless to you but he is not. They have their own aims in this. You may be in more danger than you realise, and I too far away to help. I doubt they would be so foolish as to imprison you but I am sure they will have lied to you and misled you and done all they can to make you weak and small. Tell them to give you back your ring and see what they say.
You have punished me enough, elf. Come home.
It was signed Tar-Mairon in his neat, looping script, and below that a postscript:
Your horse is back in Pelargir. I found her near Linhir while I was searching for you. Don’t fear, she is well cared for; no others are permitted to ride her and I would not dream of her being harnessed to a plough, so for the most part she does little except grow well-fed on sweet hay and allow children to braid flowers into her mane. She has bitten me twice, though. I am sure you will be proud.
She handed it to Elrond without a word.
He said nothing himself as he read through it, only his slightly widened eyes indicating any reaction at all until he reached the looping signature at the end. “He still calls himself Tar-Mairon, I see.”
It was the name he had used those years ago when he came to Lindon to demand her as his bride, when Elrond had pleaded with her not to go, when all the hope she’d had seemed to be crumbling in her hands – but since her return she had not heard a single one of them use it. He was only Sauron now. The elves would not be deceived again.
“He places great value in names,” she said. “But it makes little difference really. He is the same creature whatever he calls himself.”
“Mmm. And he begins by calling you elf? Charming.” He folded the letter back up neatly until the broken edges of the wax seal touched again, and returned it to her hand. “This is a threat, I think.”
“Not only that. But yes.” She wanted to say more but it felt impossible to encompass with words. There was so much of him in this letter, the disconnected, unpredictable way he had about him when he was unsure what he wanted to be – it would be like trying to describe the precise constraints of a storm. “We will go to Gil-galad immediately.”
Gil-galad proved easy enough to find, although the Istari he insisted on summoning to the discussion took longer. Curumo and Rómestámo were with Celebrimbor in his workshops, and Mithrandir appeared from seemingly nowhere only after they had been located, joining them for the last part of their walk down the wide, busy street to where Gil-galad awaited them.
Her letter was passed around, read, re-read, frowned over and discussed. They disagreed on whether he was planning to attack, whether the threat was immediate or not, whether this was a distraction, whether it should change any of the plans made for the various companies due to depart at the same time as Galadriel’s. Gil-galad was confident that the lack of any references to Eregion directly meant that Sauron did not know where she was and had sent the same letter to other places too, but he was the only one of them who shared that view. Curumo reminded them of Sauron’s earlier wish for Galadriel to come with him to Eregion and, presumably, persuade Celebrimbor to resume their earlier work. Rómestámo was concerned about the reference to orcs above all. Mithrandir said that Sauron always had been excessively petty.
Galadriel sat through this in silence for the better part of half an hour, listening, but feeling all the same as though their conversation was happening far away and their voices carried to her on the wind.
“I will speak with him myself,” she said.
“No,” Gil-galad said in the same quiet, tense tone he had used for the whole discussion, and Curumo and Elrond immediately agreed: no, it was unwise, it would gain them nothing and potentially lose them more. He could not be trusted anyway. It was pointless to attempt any sort of parley with him.
“This is pointless,” she said, raising her voice enough to silence them all. “This is achieving nothing. I will not risk him coming here after me. He has to hear from me that I am leaving and that none of you control what I do. So long as he believes he can still persuade me, he might refrain from doing anything to jeopardise that.”
“Anything such as the orcs he already told you about?” Elrond said, sounding more annoyed than anything else, and Rómestámo was shaking his head. But Galadriel was thinking of orcs marching on Eregion, of beautiful Ost-in-Edhil burned and ruined. An awful, metal taste came to her, a fear she had known for centuries but rarely felt so immediately as now.
Gil-galad tipped his head back a little. “He makes a fair point, Galadriel. But I’ll hear you on this. You know him better than we do.”
“She does not,” Curumo said.
Mithrandir waved a dismissive hand in his direction. “She may know what he is now better. Your information is a little outdated.”
“We are not here to command the elves,” Rómestámo said, his deeper voice cutting across both of them. “High King, please continue.”
Gil-galad waited a moment longer than necessary before speaking, a pointed silence that Galadriel was more accustomed to having aimed at her than others. “Do you plan to convince him you’ll return?”
“No. He wouldn’t believe it if I did.”
“Then you risk making him angrier.”
“He’ll still try.”
“And when he fails?”
“He’ll tell himself he has years still, he won’t give up. But I think he is growing impatient. That’s why he spoke of coming here to get me himself. He wants an excuse to bring his armies here and attack and he is convincing himself I might even thank him for it.”
Gil-galad acknowledged this with the briefest of nods, his expression unreadable. “And what about what we risk if you speak with him again? Celebrimbor says we still do not understand your ring particularly well. We know he has grown stronger – what if he can hear your thoughts as well as your words?”
“Then -” He can’t, she had intended to say, but could she even say that much with confidence? “I will have three of the Maiar here with me. Surely they can prevent him.”
“I still dislike it,” Mithrandir said. “We can. Yes, I’m sure we can, but I dislike this and I dislike that he’s convinced you. That ring is his creation and any gift of his will serve his purposes more than anyone else’s.”
Gil-galad’s jewelled ring was still on his hand and for a moment she thought to point this out to them, that no-one here questioned his right to wear it, or Celebrimbor’s to wear his. But no. She knew already what they would say - that Gil-galad’s and Celebrimbor’s rings, and Cirdan’s to a degree, had been the subject of much careful study here in Eregion. That hers was less known. That hers was made by his own hand, was linked in some way to the one he wore himself. That it was not safe and could not be trusted and nor could any plans that involved it.
She knew then, with absolute certainty, that she would take her own ring back and that they would allow it. She would not allow Sauron to put such thoughts of mistrust in her head. She would prove him wrong.
“Mithrandir was able to pull me out of his enchantment before,” she said, speaking to Gil-galad but for the ears of all of them. “I will speak with Sauron once.”
There was a long, heavy silence. She wondered what she would do if they forbade her entirely to take her ring back and realised that she did not know.
But Gil-galad only nodded, as if deferring to her.
The smith did not have grand workshops, nor flocks of jewelsmiths to serve at his command.
“I will not feel sorry for you.”
“I wouldn’t expect it. Not even with you off in your elf city in peace and comfort while I -”
“Peace and comfort?”
“While I had to be content with what I could make from Pelargir.”
She sighs, but it’s more in irritation than anger. He can be happy enough with that. He can stretch out here beside her and be content that her anger is reserved for parts of this story, not the whole.
But he can remember all the same how those days felt: all of it crumbling in his hands.
The smith had his library, still, and the neighbouring room now his warrior had no use for it. His desk was still there and the tapestries but her chair, her books, her crafts, these he had removed. The floor now held a number of low tables, upon each of which was a different part of what had once been a tree. Here, leaves and blossoms still on branches; here, thinly-sliced cross-sections of branches. Here, the fruit. Here, sawdust. Here, a line of leaves neatly set out, segmented, dyed, arranged and pinned in pieces. On each table were sheafs of his own notes, all in careful order.
It was morning, although he could not say which morning. The limitations of his body had begun to anger him, pulling at him with the distractions of exhaustion and hunger. In his past the smith had been able to lose himself in his work for as long as he wished. Such days, it seemed, were some way distant now.
He did not hear his steward until she was all but shouting his name, her hand in a tight grip on his arm.
“Bronwyn.” He set down the measuring weights he held, the rounded bronze warmed by his hands. “What is it? I told you to take care of things.”
She drew back a little at the tone of his voice but the better part of her attention remained on the work tables around them. “This was Galadriel’s tree.”
“Galadriel has other trees.”
She lifted a sprig of leaves from the pile before her, now dry and starting to curl at the edges. “Why have you cut it down?”
“Tell Arondir I’ll do as I choose in my own city.”
“Arondir is not the one asking you.”
“Well, then.” Anger came to him all too easily in those days, but for now, at least, he could bite it back. It would do him little good to have his steward turn against him at a time when he had so few allies. So he smiled. “My work with this one failed. I’ll learn why and then I’ll succeed with the rest. We’ll plant more trees. We’ll have whole orchards.”
She didn’t seem to find this compelling – he knew her well enough and he was growing all too familiar with that strange set in her voice, a clarity in her turned opaque - but she at least left him be at his work after that. And she would be convinced, in time. Mortals most of all found it hard to see beyond the immediate and understand what small things sacrifices were in the greater picture, more shining and glorious than any they had ever seen. Elves at least understood a little more when there were no wizards whispering in their ear.
He did not look up from his work again until it was near dark and the candles needed lighting.
All of this, then, meant that he was unclear how long had passed until he sensed his warrior once again. He was measuring time only in the progress of his work at this point and there was still little enough of that. Already he could feel despair like an ache growing greater and greater within him. All of this, all his work, dragging himself up from nothing to try again and again and again, only to be betrayed by those he had trusted.
And then as if she had been sent to him again – his hope, his light – he felt his ring echo with the tone of hers, and her voice calling his name.
He wanted to pull her close. He almost could. Although she’d learned well with the ring he’d made for her, and she’d listened with care to all he’d taught her of how to use it – and he doubted she’d mentioned that to her cousin -
“I did.”
“You didn’t mention that.”
“Should I tell you every conversation I had? You can assume I told them everything I had learned about your ring and what it could do.”
“Did you, now? Everything?”
She ducks her head a little, hiding something from him – amusement or embarrassment or perhaps both. “Broadly.”
- she was not as strong as he was, nor as skilled. Still, when he felt her resist he did not pull too strongly against that. The thought of losing her now when he had her so close was intolerable.
Instead he let her bring him into the place she had made. It was a wood of some kind, pathless and unrecognisable as anywhere in particular. There was nothing to be seen but trees and leaves and wet grasses underfoot – not a building, not a stream, not a mountain, not a coastline. The sun was invisible behind a blanket of grey cloud. There was a definite elvishness about it all the same and he had little doubt that if he wanted to he would be able to pull this illusion to pieces and see what she might be hiding beneath it.
No. Not now.
Now, what mattered was simply that she was there. She was wearing a dress he didn’t recognise, soft greys and silvers, tiny blue flowers embroidered on curling vines across her shoulder. Unlike their last meeting, she had bound up her hair as though to keep it from his touch. She seemed crafted from something unyielding – steel, perhaps, or marble – and he remembered how she had been in her first months in Pelargir, how determined she had been to keep fighting him even when she had found herself with no ways left to do that except in the tension of her body and the blaze of her eyes.
“Galadriel,” he said, his hands folded over the curves of her shoulders, his cheek pressed to hers, leaning into her as a drowning man might embrace land. “Galadriel.”
“Don’t touch me.”
He lifted his hands away, palms up facing her, his head cocked to the side, and stepped back. Let her have what she wished. “Are you safe?”
“Safe?” Shock was fast replaced with dismissal – she turned her head away from him the way she always did when she felt his words did not deserve her response. (And even this, he missed.)
“Come back,” he said. “Come home.”
At least this made her look at him once again. “I will not return,” she said. “And I will not be anywhere you might search for me. I have made sure of that. Do you hear me, deceiver?”
“I hear your words, elf. Now hear mine.” He could move faster than she expected, and his hand closed around her wrist before she could pull it away. “It is not for you to punish me.” The growl in his voice was like a crackling flame. “It is not for you, do you understand? I will not bow to my own kind, I will not bow to the Valar, why should I kneel for you? But I will. I will if you wish it. I cannot do this without your light. Everything I try turns to ash.”
He had startled her, he could tell that much. She tried to free her hand and couldn’t and he could see the flicker of fear in her eyes. But where he had expected her to lose at least a little control of their surroundings she held firm – nothing changed at all in the endless forest around them.
He should have been more cautious around this and seen in it a power greater than she could hold (at least yet, at least yet – he still intended to give her this and more once she finally stopped being so needlessly stubborn). But he was distracted and grieving, for her, for his plans now and long past, for all the promise he’d lost.
“Come back to me,” he said. “I have suffered greatly. Does that please you to know?”
“Not enough.”
“I’ve served a crueller master than you, Galadriel. Do you think to frighten me? Here.” He released her wrist and pressed her brother’s dagger into her hands, noticing the perfect little gasp she made as she realised what she held. “Here, take it. Punish me if you will but at least do it fast.”
She laid the blade of the dagger sharp and snug against his throat. With the turn of her wrist she could have drawn all the blood she wanted but she kept it flat, her cold, hard eyes inches from his. “Harming you here would achieve nothing.”
“You’d enjoy it.”
“I will not play your games.” She let go of him and stared down at the knife. “This is mine, you took it from me.”
“Then come and get it. Your city waits for you. I wait for you. What is it you want of me? Tell me what I must do before you will return to me.”
She would not answer; she would not even look at him. She would only stare down at her dagger, as solid in her hands as if it were really here.
“Tell me,” he said, but there was only silence.
He knew better than to trust her and so he was ready when she tried to sever the connection between them, stopping her before she could truly begin. “No,” he said. “No, you look at me, you look at me. I need your light. I need you. I will not let you do this.”
But there was something else, something stronger, something taking her out of his grasp, he couldn’t -
He pulled on all the strength he could manage, drawing from the Seen and the Unseen worlds both, roaring his rage at Olórin and the others, You will not take her, you will not take her -
She seized his hand. “Disband your armies,” she said. “Burn your ships. Put out the volcano and have the Southlands return to green once again.”
And then she was gone and he was left alone - cast back to his dark room and his stacks of wood and leaves and apples and endless, pointless notes.
Ost-in-Edhil was full of noise the next morning, crowds already gathering along the streets to watch Galadriel and her company pass. Departures always took far longer than they should – there were goodbyes and last-minute checks, questions shouted back and forth between the soldiers, a sudden decision to replace a bow, a delay while someone was sent running back to the armoury. And yet they always seemed to come too soon all the same.
At least, she thought, she need not bid farewell to Elrond just yet. It had been agreed that the two groups would depart together, passing through Khazad-dûm thanks to Elrond’s friendship with the dwarves before separating: he to head south down the Anduin and hopefully reach the Numenorean colony before Sauron heard word of his journey, and she and her party to go east, across the river and to Oropher’s city upon Amon Lanc before leaving again for the lands east of the Greenwood. It was unlikely she would return to Eregion before the summer, and by that point Elrond may well have returned to Lindon. Years might pass before she saw him again.
And she could not yet bid farewell to Elrond, not with so much left unsaid.
There had been plenty of discussions since her encounter with Sauron the day before. Elrond was there for all of them, suggesting a joint departure through Khazad-dûm, supporting Mithrandir in his arguments that they should focus as much on the coast as on the land and send word to Círdan immediately. Every time she had tried to speak with him privately, though, he had been otherwise engaged. It was always in an appropriately polite and reasonable way – he needed to speak with Gil-galad, he had borrowed a book from someone and must return it before the evening – but she knew him well enough to understand his evasion for what it was, and the knowledge of it gnawed at her.
As the time for their departure grew unavoidably closer and Elrond had still not arrived, she went searching for him herself and found him outside Celebrimbor’s forge. He was sitting on one of the stone benches, alone, looking out at the statue of Fëanor.
“You told me once it was bad luck to leave on an unfinished argument,” she said as she sat down beside him.
“I wouldn’t call it an argument.” The briefest twitch of a smile. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
“I would prefer you argued with me than avoided me.”
His smile broadened a little at that and she thought he might say something about her fondness for argument in general, but instead he gestured towards the statue before them. “Do you think he looks like Maedhros there? A little, around the eyes.”
It gave her no great pleasure to look upon a statue of her uncle, but look she did all the same. “More like Curufin.”
“I thought Celebrimbor looked like Curufin.”
“Not greatly. When he was younger, a little.”
“Sometimes I wonder what our world would be like if all of them still lived.”
He said it with such a casual, absent tone that her first impulse was to correct him: clearly he could not have thought of it, not truly. But after all she had not come here to argue with him. And so she tried herself for a moment to imagine a Middle-earth where her cousins and her uncle had survived, had divided up all of it into realms between them, were perhaps even now gathering forces against Sauron for surely none of them would have allowed him to gather strength in the way he had.
The closer she attempted to picture it, though, the more it fell apart in a mess of logical inconsistencies beneath her thought. If they all lived they must not have ruined Doriath, and Elrond would not have been born, and there would have been no Silmaril held by the elves of Doriath to fight over, and so perhaps Lúthien had never held it, and Sauron had never lost Tol Sirion to her, and then he would – be greater? Or lesser, and never have been able to hold Finrod and Beren and the others in the first place. She remembered the memory he had shown her of Angband, and the time before that when she had seen without his intending it his capture by Morgoth, the hissed failure, coward, traitor in his ear. What would have happened without this? He would have fought at Morgoth’s side in the final battles, surely; and then maybe he would have been defeated then, and the world they lived in now would be one of peace.
A peace ruled over by seven Fëanorians and their father. Hard to picture.
No, it made no sense. She could not separate her cousins from the fabric of the world and its sorrows as it was. Surely, neither could Elrond.
“You dislike that I spoke to Sauron,” she said. “I know that.”
“I dislike that you are trying to fight a war by yourself. And I dislike that he knows it and he knows what to say to make you respond to him, and you do, you still do. You can’t fight him on your own.”
It might have been an argument, another time. But now she leant back where she sat and felt the sun on her face. “It was not so long ago, my friend, that you were concerned I was too willing to obey Gil-galad.”
A laugh at that. “True. I worry about you in multiple ways.”
He always had, although to her he still seemed barely removed from the child she’d found on that burning beach. He had always seemed too wise for his age and too young for his wisdom.
“Come with me to say farewell to Celebrimbor,” she said.
Inside, Celebrimbor’s forge was as busy as ever. Those working here – hurrying through the corridors, or standing in twos and threes to talk in the vine-filled alcoves – nodded at them in greeting as they passed. She was sure she was not imagining the way that some of them looked at the silver ring on her hand, subtly in an attempt to to avoid her notice.
Celebrimbor they found alone, sitting at a desk stacked high with old books she did not recognise. He looked a little startled to see them both in their travelling cloaks. “You’re leaving already? I had planned to say goodbye.”
“We’ve spared you the journey,” Elrond said.
Galadriel wrenched the silver ring from her finger and placed it down before Celebrimbor, on the page he was currently reading. “Keep this,” she said. “As many months as you need. Find a way we can use it against him.”
They left Ost-in-Edhil in good spirits later that morning, with she and Elrond together at the head of her soldiers. It was a clear, cold day, perfect weather for travelling, and her armour shone bright under the sun.