Work Text:
Now
The gifts start to arrive when the long days of summer warm the earth. By then Celebrían is already walking, unsteady feet padding on soft lawns, flocks of adoring attendants helping her up from grass-stained knees.
For the elf-witch’s child, the messages say, perfectly neat tengwar lettering in rich blue ink. The parcels hold silver bracelets, fine lambswool blankets, tiny dresses embroidered in purple and gold.
Galadriel crumples the paper into her fist. “Burn it.”
Then
He had presented it as another gift, of course. A messenger, a freed prisoner, bloodied and desperate, bringing her words from Lord Sauron himself: would Galadriel like news of her lost husband?
She had come to the old guard tower alone, as requested; unarmed, as requested; and furious and defiant and proud, as he had not quite requested but made a point of saying he looked forward to. “Tell me what you did to him.”
He rolled his eyes and said “everything bad in this world is my work, is it?” He was alone, too, his horse left to graze on the grasses far below as they faced each other on the high stone lookout, but it hardly mattered. Even if she’d managed to keep a weapon with her concealed beyond his sight he had proved well enough she was little threat to him that way.
“You claimed news of my husband’s fate,” she said.
“News to me that you had a husband. You kept that quiet.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing.” He was enjoying it, taunting her like a mouse between the paws of a cat, as she’d known he would. “I have an offer. If you’ll stop snarling at me long enough to hear it.” Head tipped to the side, smirking at her. “Will you? Or do you only want to spar with me?”
She swallowed back her fury not because it would anger him, but because it would please him. She should not even be here, she was not authorised to treat with the enemy, but his message had been too great a temptation and she needed to know what had become of Celeborn. More than that - she needed to know for certain that it had been Sauron who caused his death so that it would be simple again, so she could remember how it was to feel nothing but hate for her enemy. “Set out your terms.”
“My terms are here.” He unrolled a map between them, weighting it down with a stone on one corner and his knee on another, leaning closer over her than he needed as he pointed out one area of woodland cradled by mountains. Nothing significant, nowhere important, as far as she could gather. “This. I need this.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Nothing, I’m taking it anyway. Too many elves there. But you, you like elves better than I do, so. Out of kindness I’ll give you three weeks’ start on me. They can move or they can surrender, I don’t care which. I’ll not shed a drop of blood if they don’t fight.”
She touched the map again, as if its ink could soak into her fingers and in doing so tell her what he was planning. He was genuine enough, she sensed, but there was always more with him, always more. “What does this have to do with my husband?”
He grinned. “Ask them yourself.”
“Tell me -”
“There are elves there who fought alongside him in the war. Who saw him after you did. So, you can go there and you can ask them. They’re not like to talk to me.”
He was not even pretending to hide that there was more to this than he said. But she had imagined every fate that might have befallen Celeborn, again and again for long years until she managed to make them all stop. There was little left he could horrify her with if that was his intent and she let herself believe, just for a moment, that it wasn’t. “You know what happened to him in that battle.”
“I don’t.” He spread his hands wide and palms-up. “When have I ever lied to you?”
“Then what is this for?”
“I’m being kind, Galadriel. And I wanted to see you.” His hand on her arm and she was hollowed out with the knowledge that she should have wrenched it away and did not. “There will come a time when we only face each other on battlefields. I’ll miss you then.”
“I’ll defeat you. I’ll see you destroyed at my hands, my army -”
“Mmm, of course.” His thumb stroked soft lines over her elbow. “Sometimes I think I’d welcome it if you did.”
She should have left then. She did not.
He seemed stunned for a moment, struck down from confidence that she would be the one reaching for him hungry and keen with her hands snarled into his hair. He was frozen still at first and she knew he had thought always to be the one that moved first; he thought she would only react to him, and whichever of his tricks and pleas and charms he chose to cast before her.
But it had never been like this for them and it would not be now.
It was wordless and fast and maybe that was best, that it should be beyond speech, that it should be beyond explaining, only his voice in her mind singing her name over and over. If she could look at him and let herself feel for a moment all she wished to then that in itself was enough to be victory or defeat; either way, something that would change all and everything and shake the world apart. If she had done that, then what more was this.
For she did want to face him on a battlefield with the weight of a sword in her hand, to strike at his armoured body and break it, to kneel on his chest as she looked down into his eyes and named those she killed him for. (And his hands were warm beneath her dress, palms curled at her waist, and he kissed the tears from her eyes, and she dragged his hand down between her legs because she didn’t want it like this, she wanted fire and blood and ruin.)
And she did want to be his queen, to rule at his side, to believe if only for a time that they could heal Middle-earth together, to walk with him through grand palaces as vast kingdoms unfolded before them in beauty and wonder. (And he turned her, his hand splayed between her shoulder-blades winding into her hair, and he groaned as he pushed hard and deep into her, and she arched up her neck so he could kiss her light and gentle as rain.)
They were alone, and there would not be another time. It mattered more than anything. It didn’t matter at all.
Now:
The gifts keep coming. Silver rattles and wooden toys and little swan-boats carved from bone. For Galadriel’s daughter. For the elf princess. Made himself, she is sure, by hands she knows are soaked in blood and darkness and conquest. He kept his promise for the woods to the north, three weeks exactly before his forces came; and beside that, he kept his word on what he was. Lands are ruined, now, and blood is shed, elsewhere if not there, and Middle-earth lurches under his anger, and the elves scatter and mourn. Still: he sends gifts.
She finds herself forever on guard as though she can weave strong enough enchantments through her pacing footsteps. Celebrían fights against sleep herself, too enthralled by the possibilities of movement and babbled speech for her mind and body to rest; even in her hard-fought dreams she kicks and whimpers and mumbles to herself in baby-babble. There are many long nights that summer, one or other or both of them constantly awake as though sleep would mean surrender.
“He knows we are here,” she says to Celeborn, knowing she’s walking in the grooves of a well-worn argument and not caring.
Celeborn laces his hands behind his head and stretches his spine in a long curve. “He knows how to find people who can reach other people who can get close enough to the edge of our lands to leave parcels for our sentries to find. That’s all.”
“It is not all.” What’s all now is in a neat pile between them: a little fur-lined cape, a tiny pair of embroidered mittens, although it’s summer now and the heat is relentless even here in the darkest span of the night. “He is tormenting me.”
“And you are tormenting yourself.”
“What else am I to do when -”
“Stop looking at it.” He gets to his feet in one smooth, easy movement.
It won’t help - it never helps - but she goes with him anyway.
Then:
It took longer than she hoped to find the elves. For days she sought them in endless forests, over stone ruins and rotting fallen trees. A curlew’s cry low and mournful echoed back and forth either side of her path, and she knew there were no curlews in this land. The elves here were warning each other of her: danger, danger, danger.
Four days, it took her. Four days wasted when they could have been gathering to fight or flee. And then when they finally came to greet her, emerging almost invisible out of the trees, it was only to learn her name and tell her to wait. Their prince decided who was welcomed in his lands, and their prince would decide if she would have a hearing.
Tiresome, but perhaps understandable. She gave her name, and her family, and her rank in Gil-galad’s army, and that she had important news concerning the safety of their land and their people, news she would entrust to their prince when he granted her an audience.
It was several hours before their messengers returned with word from their prince: No. Leave.
She refused.
The first time she saw her husband in eight centuries, then, she was half-dragged in front of him by his own armed guards, her confiscated sword on another’s belt.
She was so used to seeing Celeborn in every silver-haired Sindar elf she saw - a momentary glimpse, vanishing into a crowd, flickering away from her sight and into her memory - that she looked him full in the face and for a moment was not even surprised to see him. Then it struck her like a blow to her chest.
He watched impassive from a throne of living beech, the soft half-light of dusk shading gradients into his silver hair. “You should not have come here,” he said.
“You would send me away?” Fury fast replaced her shock, a cold, surging flood. “I was your wife. I am your wife.”
One of the guards murmured something that Celeborn ignored as he came down from his throne to face her. “My wife was lost to war long ago.”
“How long ago,” in a growl that even to her sounded like a wolf at bay. “How many years, did you count them? I have counted every single one. Every spring I mourned when the leaves returned and you did not. I thought you dead.”
He looked a little older, a little more worn. Too familiar and at the same time not familiar at all. “I thought the world dead, Galadriel,” he said.
But he had listened when she explained they were found, these lands were claimed by the new spreading darkness, they had to run or they had to fight and they had to choose now. All else could wait.
“All else can wait, can it?” he said quietly once she had finished explaining this, neither challenge nor apology in his voice. His guards he had sent too distant to hear them (although, she noted, still keeping her sword); there was no more reason to conceal anything. And yet, she still couldn’t decipher him. He seemed both the young prince she had known in Doriath and some stranger more Avari than Sindar, both overlapping in a way that she could not bear to look at too closely.
She focused instead on smaller things. A silver torc around his neck, a carved wooden leaf pinned to the shoulder of his cloak. “Where were you?” she said, and he bowed his head and made a strange noise that was not quite a laugh.
“North,” he said. “And then here. I have tried to protect them. It’s all I had left. For a time, quite a long time, I thought I might be dead myself and not know it.”
“That’s hardly an explanation.”
“You wouldn’t understand, I think.” He pressed his lips neat between his teeth. “Will you help me save them even so? There won’t be enough of us to fight and win and I won’t fight just to lose. I built this as a place of healing, not a battleground. Will you help?”
She nodded. All else could wait; and perhaps she would prefer that it did.
They worked without rest to gather together his people and plan routes for an evacuation, she contributing what she knew of Sauron’s movements already and his likely paths of attack. She had never known Celeborn as a leader, and indeed he didn’t seem to lead these people in a way she recognised: not like a commander, not like a king, not like her brothers and cousins, not like her. Still, his people followed him and trusted him, and came through that to follow her, too, seeing in him more trust in her than seemed evident to her own eyes. And so they gathered up this small refuge of a realm and fled.
There was little time for any discussion with him on the journey. There was too much to do: always a path to find, half-starved hunting bears to avoid, the weak and the injured to assist - more of those than she had expected, but he seemed to have gathered them, somehow, or they to have gathered themselves to this place. Then after three weeks, just as Sauron had promised, there were orcs with blades and arrows. First in scouting parties; after that, in greater numbers.
Celeborn fought well, thoughtful and fast. He was not a warrior by nature but it fitted him far better than when she had known him centuries before as the prince setting off for a war he insisted on fighting in. For most of the journey, though, they avoided battle and he was good at guiding them quiet and unseen through endless twisting rock-filled valleys.
(She should have noticed by this point. She was tiring a little faster, she felt oddly lightheaded sometimes. She dismissed it as nothing.)
There was little opportunity to speak with Celeborn and perhaps that was best. As they drew further and further from the threat of the orcs he started to leave for a while in the evening, sometimes, coming back without her notice in the middle of a meal or a song. Once and only once she followed him, thinking perhaps they could talk, perhaps it was time; but when she found him he was sitting alone with his head pressed in folded hands, and she felt oddly out of place and let him be.
Sometimes, the others would make a point to leave the two of them alone together as if an absence of eight hundred years was itself only a mistake, a tear, a mendable thing. They would sit in silence, thinking of what strangers they were not only to each other but to their younger selves who had been so much in love.
At least, she thought this. He never said what he was thinking.
They found safety in the end after weeks of travel. A new realm, a new place to hide in deep forests, empty but for overgrown ruins from ancient kingdoms long since gone. On the second night there they celebrated with a great feast, a long makeshift table set out in the woods with the Lord and Lady given a place at its head although neither of them had asked for it.
It was at that feast when she realised. Or perhaps, when she allowed herself to realise. She was a soldier and used to knowing her body so well that any change in it should have sparked alarm. Carelessness, then, or denial, both the conception of the child and her inability to see it, until someone she didn’t know looked at her concerned and said “Lady Galadriel, are you well ?” and part of her mind turned on her in a terrible, howling understanding.
She had barely spoken a word to Celeborn through the whole evening, not through hostility but through whatever it was they had instead: the practice of centuries of absence. She leaned close to whisper to him “I must speak with you, alone,” and slipped away.
When he came to her she was knelt by the water, her knees pressed into soft, muddy earth. A small lake, peaceful and calm, refreshed by mountain streams. This was a good place. She had done what she could for the people they had brought here.
“I will leave,” she said when he came to her, not looking at him. In the water her reflection was broken by the lines of lily pads. “Tomorrow, tomorrow morning.”
He settled beside her and said “Must you?”
It was the first time he had given any indication that he might want anything else. She took his hand - the first time she had touched him since coming here - and placed it light on her stomach. “A child,” she said.
He tensed, a moment, and she knew he would pull away but she was wrong. His hand was warm in hers and disconcertingly familiar.
“His child,” she said. “Sauron’s child.”
“Oh,” he said, very quietly, and still didn’t take his hand away.
A long silence passed. “He did not force me,” she said, because he must know that, she owed him that at least.
“Good,” he said almost absently. And then, “Where will you go, then? Back to the Noldor? Back into battle with a child in your arms? Back to him?”
No. Or perhaps, yes. She hadn’t thought of any of it beyond this but it didn’t seem like there was any company she could keep, now. She might go back to the Noldor and let them cast her into exile. She might go back to Sauron and - surrender? No, not that, not even in her cruellest, harshest imaginations. “I don’t know. Far away for a while. He can’t know.”
And then he did take his hand away, gently untangling it from hers, and although she made no protest she was struck by how much of an absence it suddenly felt. On the few occasions when she had dreamed of seeing him again she had thought it would be like finding Doriath, finding peace, finding youth. It had not; and she wondered how many hopes of his he might have been harbouring that she had also shattered.
“I need to think,” he said. He stood and looked down at her and for a moment seemed so young again. Then he walked away, and she watched him leave until the grey of his cloak dissolved into the shadows of trees and he was gone.
She was not sure if he would return. Perhaps not. Perhaps none of them would, and she might rise herself to find all his people gone, hidden beyond her searching. It would not be the worst thing. It might even be a kindness, of its own sort. She stayed by the lake and watched the little frogs crowd to the surface to call in strange chirping choruses as the night drew in.
Celeborn came back in the soft half-light of dusk. “Here,” he said, and pressed a feather into her hand: soft brown turning to sharp bright bars of blue and white and black.
“You gave me this,” she said. “You gave me a jay’s feather just like this. In Doriath, when I first knew you.”
“Yes.” He sat down beside her again gathered together in something like calm. “You should stay here.”
“How can I? You know I can’t.”
“I don’t know that,” he said. “It seems to me you can do whatever you please.”
She had already determined that she would not allow herself the luxury of shame until she was alone. “I don’t ask for your pity, husband, but it lessens you to mock me.”
“I’m not. No. I…” She thought for one strange moment that he would reach for her hand but he didn’t. “I meant it. Isn’t that what the Noldor wanted from Middle-earth? To make your own customs without consulting the Valar for every new thing? There is no law for this. You could stay or you could go. You could do anything.”
There was nothing awful in his face yet she found she could not look any longer all the same. “And you would have me bring a child of his to your place of healing? It might be a monster.”
“It might be another Lúthien.”
She felt hope, ridiculous fragile hope, for the first time since she had left that table. A truce of a kind, perhaps. But whatever his true intent she could not allow herself to fall into the comfort of delusion. “They would all assume the child yours.”
He laughed a little. “What better place to hide it?”
“I wouldn’t ask that of you.”
“You haven’t asked anything of me.”
“I won’t accept -”
“Maybe it’s selfishness on my part,” he said. “How would you know?”
He had never been selfish and she didn’t see any way this could be now, but he was almost a stranger to her. “You must understand that I have no intention of giving up my fight,” she said.
A flicker of a smile. “I would never think that of you, Galadriel."
She put her hand down on the soft earth and he placed his own over it and she tried not to think about the past or the future, not even a minute in either direction of now.
Now:
They sit quietly on the floor of the room where Celebrían sleeps, finally, tucked into the top of her bed with one chubby hand pressed into the willow leaves of the tree that grows around it. She’s covered only in a light linen sheet but even this she has kicked off so that it’s tangled around her feet. She is sprawled as though she fell in the middle of some great feat of endurance, sweat plastering her silver curls to her face.
Galadriel kneels beside her daughter and then rests a hand light, so light, on her chest so that she can feel the rise and fall and rise and fall of breath. Celeborn shakes his head with a chiding smile and then whispers hush, hush, hush over the child as she stirs at the touch. Celebrían settles again without waking.
A brief reassurance, a brief picture of calm and beauty, but it is not enough.
“He must know,” Galadriel says once they are settled themselves against the opposite wall, a familiar pattern by now. “He must know.”
Celeborn holds her closer, softer, liquid against her tensed angles and sharpness. “If he knew he had a child, do you truly believe he would be content to stay quiet about it?”
“He must know when she was born. He can count.”
“Still,” Celeborn says.
The little room is open to the night air but it’s still too much, the evening pressing in on her with a thousand hammering hands. “I have to know,” she says. “I can’t stand this.”
“Galadriel -”
But Celebrían cries and wakes herself, one long wail as she rolls onto her stomach and up onto her forearms. A nightmare again perhaps although nothing should trouble her here.
“Go,” Celeborn says. “If you’re doing this, go somewhere she can’t distract you. If you hear her you’ll break.”
He pulls her close and she lets herself sink against his shoulder for one breath, two, before she gets to her feet. She lingers long enough to watch him swing their daughter up against his shoulder, baby-fat arms settling around his neck, swayed to a soft lulling song. And then she turns away while she is still able to.
Then:
The nightmares came as the child grew, sparks lit by the taps of tiny feet and fists turning within her. She dreamed of drowning, again and again; she dreamed of a child’s hands around the hilt of a sword; she dreamed of the trees of Doriath burning, her cousins’ laughing voices crackling like the flames, come out, little forest-elves!
There were more of them now, bands of Silvan elves driven from their homes further east finding refuge here. It felt like all the elves of Middle-earth were retreating into small fearful enclaves but there was nowhere on Middle-earth they would be hidden forever. So she taught their soldiers to fight, and to face worse things than bears; and Celeborn drilled them, too, organised training rotas and defences, set up guideposts and quiet Avari wardens to watch from the trees.
He was not the young prince she had known in Doriath. There he had grown up protected and safe, given all he could want, shielded from the sharpness of the world outside, but he had never been content with it. He had always wanted more: what was beyond, what was outside, what was unspoken. Who had Galadriel been before she came there. Now he had all those answers and more than he surely ever had wanted to face, and it had changed him.
She felt at first that she could not ask any more of him. She had no right to anything he kept to himself, and he kept everything to himself. She watched him instead and gathered what she could. She learned that he resented the sword he wore at his side. She learned that there was something beneath his silence, although she could not quite see what it was. She learned that he was most comfortable at twilight and in the first cool rays of morning; that he belonged to dusk now, the softness of moths and owl-feathers, when neither light nor dark fell in sharp lines, when the world was something else.
The child grew. She learned to shift her balance against its growing weight and kept fighting, hour after hour, drill after drill, until she was so exhausted she had no time to think: of the future, of the past, of what might lie under Celeborn’s unreadable, still gaze. It was better this way.
Then sometimes when she lay down to rest exhausted afterwards it was Sauron’s voice that called to her: Galadriel. Galadriel. Where are you, elf? I miss you.
He couldn’t reach her fully. He couldn’t pull her in and sift through her mind as he had done on the banks of the Glanduin, when he had betrayed her and deceived her, promised her a crown and swore he sought peace and left her in the water to drown. He could only whisper and threaten and beg. If he could do more, he would no doubt sense the child was his; its spirit would call to its father in the same way these elves must believe it called to Celeborn.
Celeborn, for his part, said nothing of any of it and acted as though there was nothing at all unusual in their strange new situation. She had expected that he might prefer to avoid her but he never did; he even slept beside her, as would have been expected of them, although the careful distance between them was both a handspan and an eternity.
To the child, though, he was closer. Sometimes he would lie beside Galadriel as she dozed in the daytime with his hand resting lightly on her stomach over the whirl of kicks and spins and jumps, whispering to it shush, shush, let your mother rest. It did seem to calm for him but he must feel it even so: the absence, the link that should have been there and was not.
In the day there was little escape from it either. Children were rare and precious here and this child was seen, whether Galadriel liked it or not, as a hope for their future. Wherever she went there were quick glances at the curve of her belly and pleased shy smiles even from those too intimidated to speak to her. And for Celeborn it was more; for Celeborn it was unceasing congratulations and talk of it, of how happy he must be, of how the child might have his silver hair.
She had missed him. Had she? Yes, she had; but it had been so long, and they had lived through so much, and now while he was kind and had given her sanctuary she could learn no more from him than that. He did not seem angry or resentful as her belly grew, but then he did not seem anything else either, not that she could determine. Something, though. Surely something. It began to trouble her until she could keep it to herself no longer.
“How can you stand this?” she hissed at him one evening, in the comfortable, pleasant bedchamber they shared, as he lay beside her reading a book of bound leather and marbled pages that Elrond had sent them from Imladris. “Don’t you care?”
He closed the book neatly and set it down beside him. “Don’t I care.”
“The way they talk to you, the way you have to pretend. I would have thought it mattered to you.” She didn’t understand why it felt so important to shake him like this but it did, suddenly, and it irritated her beyond measure that it seemed not even to work. He had been restless when he was younger but now there was a stillness in him like unbreakable ice and she could barely tell what lay beneath it. “You should be angry.”
“Certainly,” he said, “more anger, that would help.”
“Don’t mock me.”
A slight flicker of a smile. “Don’t tell me I am pretending. I don’t pretend anything about you.”
“You have to pretend that you are pleased about the child -”
“I am pleased about the child.”
“You sleep beside me so that everyone will believe we are what we used to be. Is that not pretending? Aren’t you angry?”
“Are you?” He scooped her hand up to his mouth and she thought for a moment he was going to kiss it, but instead kept it held just shy of his lips. “Is that what this is? You want more of me than chaste companionship?”
“No. I’m…” Although it was, ridiculous though it seemed. She carried another’s child, the enemy’s child, and they had been centuries apart. “I will not demand anything of you. I owe you -”
“No,” he said, and it was the first time she’d heard that tone to his voice outside battle drills. He rolled her fast onto her back and held her hand down beside her face, both of them turned to look at their twisted-together fingers, and said “This is not you. My wife was never shy. Tell me what you want. Not what you think you owe me, what you want.”
“I want to forget,” she said, and he nodded. “I want to feel - I want to know if you remember how to touch me. I want you to prove to me you mean any of this. I want you to prove you mean something.”
“In that case,” he said, pulling down the neck of her gown, biting a line of staccato kisses down the length of her collarbone. “You - could just - have asked.”
Now:
She holds Nenya in the palm of her hand, rolling it back and forth as it catches the starlight. There are trees around her but nothing remarkable; silver birch, bracken growing in piles of bounding green over the ground. He likely will not be able to see anything of where she is but if he can - if she’s wrong - there will be nothing to guess.
Nenya will protect her. It will whisper of water and shield her against the worst that he could lash at her with, shield her with ice, hide her in fog. It is powerful and it is hard to keep that power hidden this way, harder with every season that passes, harder every time Celebrían wakes from dreams either delighted or afraid. Nenya is not corrupt and will not tar her heart like his other enchantments, but always, always it will pull towards the plain gold ring on that other hand.
Tonight, this is precisely what she seeks.
She slips the ring onto her finger and feels at first the weight of it like endless snow, like tides. She has missed it and missed it. She closes her eyes and calls him: Halbrand.
It is sufficient to find him as she knew it would be. He is always searching, always restless, never still. The name she chose seems to jolt him off balance a little and when he appears walking towards her his form is blurred and uncertain. A great wolf with hulking shoulders; a winged creature; a vast armoured and crowned warrior: a beautiful, dazzling being in bright robes. These overlap and blur and then he is Halbrand, wearing the clothes of a smith in Armenelos.
“Finally,” he says. “Thought you’d forgotten me.”
She has created the image around them to be simple enough to remember, vague enough to conceal. Trees and mist, and beneath their feet the shimmer of water. He looks down at it and frowns as if it displeases him, but he doesn’t attempt to change it.
She stands. “You are searching for me.”
“You spent centuries searching for me. Is this not what we do?” He seems more solid, now, more certain, and there’s an easy confidence to him that she recognises too well.
This seems all like a waste, an exhausting expense of hope. He knows all this, and she knows he does, and what is there left to do for them but dance around each other in an endless duel of word and will. “Why do you send gifts to my daughter?”
“Hmm,” he says, and leans back against a tree, his arms folded. “You know for a time I thought she might be mine?”
She was expecting this, or similar to this, and she will show neither fear nor weakness nor defeat. She has faced down unnumbered horrors in her life. She will meet his eyes level and proud and say, as she does now, “Do you still?”
He grins, an oddly familiar thing. “Oh,” he says, “you wanted me to. That was your purpose, was it? Did you think you’d be safe from me if you carried my child?”
This she was not expecting, but his pride is like the fingers of a closing fist and it’s easy enough to turn and slip between them. “I thought she might be safe from you.”
He considers this, and then looks around them both again and it’s as if the scenery is pulled into him and turned inside-out and they’re in Numenor again.
Then:
“I was afraid,” Celeborn said to her once in the half-light of dawn, as the birds began to sing for the new day. His arm around her held her a little tighter than usual. “After Doriath and the war. I feared what the Noldor could bring to us, and you perhaps most of all.”
She wondered how long he had been lying awake waiting to tell her this. She found herself sleeping more now as the child grew, tiring easier and settling in deeper dreams. It annoyed her some of the time but at others she woke feeling rested in a way she had not for years. Now, still drowsy with dreams clinging to her like cobwebs, she did not turn to look at him. “Another war and his child. Perhaps you were right.”
“The war would have come for us anyway,” he said. “And a child is a good thing, whatever else we may fear. I will not be so lost I forget that.”
The two of them and Mithrandir were the only ones who knew that the child had another father, a dread and terrifying thing, a monster, a nightmare. She planned to tell Elrond but only when he could be there himself. She did not trust such a secret to messengers and letters, too easily discovered; she did not trust even Elrond to hear it that way, not until she could say it with her own lips.
The elves in their little kingdom did not question that the child was Celeborn’s. There was, after all, no reason to. Elves did not bear children in wartime by custom, but customs change. The pregnancy lasted longer than an elf child’s would have done, also: perhaps the child’s heritage, perhaps the absence of a Maia father for its spirit to draw from, or perhaps because it listened in some way to its mother’s pleas, not yet, not yet, as the birth drew nearer.
Not yet because she wasn’t ready - not to lose her child from the protection of her own body, not to hold his child in her arms and see its face. Not yet , because while the child was cradled under her heart then all the secrets and shame could be held there with it hidden and safe.
Not yet, until she woke early one morning before the spring sun was up, a strange pulling tension across her back, and knew it was too late to plead any more.
She dressed rapidly before Celeborn or any of the others woke, pulling on in haste one of the beautiful gowns they had made her. The child kicked and shoved and wriggled in a storm of elbows and knees. “Not yet,” she whispered as soft as she could as she slipped away from their dwellings, through the beech and bracken, far enough away they wouldn’t find her, until she finally huddled into the hollow at the base of a tree that reminded her a little of the great beech trees in Doriath.
“Not yet,” she said. “Please, not yet.” And the child stirred under her hand like a creature moving in dark water, unknowable.
It was not greatly painful, but it was long and exhausting. The sun was already settling down again into the edge of the woods when Celeborn found her.
He sank down to his knees beside her and his breath was cold clouds in the air. “You can’t have the child here,” he said. “Not alone , not like this, let me -”
“No.” She seized his forearm and did not let go. “Only you.”
“Galadriel, you can’t.”
“Don’t let them see it. Only you.”
He shook his head, but: “all right,” he said, “all right, as you want it,” and the pressure came back again in waves that pulled her under and pressed the light into darkness, and she was lost.
The child’s first cry was sharp and fierce. Galadriel turned away and looked at the fallen leaves on the ground, the grey-brown bracken edged with frost. She had wanted the child to come later and not so early in spring that it still felt like winter. She had wanted it born surrounded by flowers.
“Look at her,” Celeborn said, his voice shaken and delighted and almost laughing.
She must, she thought. She must at least know what this child was. She closed her eyes so tightly she pressed tears from them.
“It’s all right,” Celeborn said over the sound of the child still crying now quieter and uneven as though it was settling into this world. She could hear him speaking soft in Sindarin to soothe it: mell gwinig, avo nino. And when more time passed: “Galadriel, will you look at her. She is a child. She is just a child.”
He was holding the child close against him, wrapped in a cloak that like his hands was dark with blood. She pulled herself up to look and saw - not a monster, not a dark and broken thing, not a trick of Sauron’s, but only a child. A child with a face new to Middle-earth, a child as beautiful as Lúthien.
Now:
They are in the forge in Armenelos, it seems. She can smell charred straw and sweat and metal like blood. He often seeks to bring her here. Perhaps he considers it a weakness on her part; perhaps he considers it something unfinished on his.
She has Nenya, though, and she is stronger now with its voice calling to her in the sharp cry of gulls, the soft hush of waves. She pulls back and away and changes it, and there they are still in Armenelos but outdoors where the air is lighter. The side of a canal in the evening. It’s warm here, too, as she sits in a blue dress with her boots neat beside her, bare feet trailing in the water. It is a memory, not imagination. She breathes in sharp.
“Oh,” he says, “well. I like this too.” He leans down and trails his own hand in the water. “Your child will be safe,” he says. “Come back to me and I will not harm her. Nor you. I have sent gifts as a token of my kindness.”
“Why would you show any kindness to Celeborn’s child?”
He lifts a cupped hand of water and lets it trail down between his fingers. “It is my intention that she will have brothers and sisters one day. Kings and queens. Powerful beings to rule the kingdoms of Middle-earth. Your little elf princess may envy them. So to show you that I wish her no harm, I send her fine things to entertain and comfort her. It’s hardly a great trouble for me.”
He isn’t lying, she is reasonably sure. He rarely does; his deceptions are more ornate than that.
“Do you remember this?” he says. “This canal, this day. I told you that you should be careful of the sun on your fair skin, and I wanted to kiss you - here , it was, your neck - I’ll not forget -”
“It hardly matters now,” she says, flinching away from him, the annoyed twist of her foot in the cold water a perfect mirror of the way Celebrían’s turns in her sleep.
“You do remember and you’d rather not, I see. A shame.” He leans close and she thinks he might kiss her again, but instead he scoops another handful of water and pours it onto the same point on her neck his lips had just touched. She gasps at the cold shock; it feels real, very much real, as it pours down her shoulder and spine and soaks into her dress.
Then:
Celebrían grew like any elf child would. There was nothing about her to indicate her true parentage; even her hair was Celeborn’s silver, a gift of her Teleri grandmother long left behind in Valinor.
She learned to smile, and then to laugh. She learned to recognise all those around her as friends. She was greatly adored.
Galadriel might have felt guiltier for the deceit over her parentage, for surely the elves would not accept her if they knew, but Celeborn adored the child, too. He cared for her and spoke and sang to her as if she truly was his own. When she would not sleep, he carried her through the woods and showed her a world of trees and birds and small timid creatures, showed her the moon-yellow moths he called to light on his hand with their great trailing wings dragging over his wrist.
It was, nevertheless, hard. If Galadriel had ever truly imagined the first months with her child to be a time of blissful peace - and while she could not remember ever thinking so, it felt like the sort of thing her younger self would have believed so easily it had no need for words - the reality was different.
It was only on one otherwise unremarkable morning when Galadriel sat out on the hillside with her daughter lying beside her, small hands patting at clover flowers, that she realised with a start that she loved this child now. It was like ice finally breaking in running water and carried away downstream.
“You loved her before,” Celeborn said as she explained it later. “You loved her always.”
“It wasn’t the same. I would have died for her, I would have gathered armies to fight for her. I wanted to guard her against anything bad in the world. But that was all I had.”
“That’s love. What is that if not love?”
“It’s not the same…” She’d meant to say, it’s not the same as the way you’ve always known how to love her. But the words lay heavy and bitter on her lips and would not come.
Now:
She looks down at Nenya on her hand and thinks of it shining like a star reflected in water. She could pull away from this now if she chooses, but she is not finished.
“I wanted more from you then,” he says.
“You want more from everything, always.”
“True enough. Why have you come to me, elf? I don’t think you’ve changed your mind.”
“Will you leave me in peace?”
He almost seems to consider it for a moment. “No,” he says.
“Will you leave my daughter in peace?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“Grant me a kiss and I might for a while.”
She kisses him once, quickly, chastely, at the corner of his mouth. It won’t be enough and she doesn’t expect it to be. Letting him think he’s won won’t fool him unless he thinks he’s tricked her, teased her willingness out of her despite herself, and she needs him that much off-balance again. He is too confident here.
He scoffs. “No,” he says. “A kiss, come on. This isn’t how you were with me the time we lay together.” He pulls her fast against him, spilled sideways onto his lap. She can see the pleased, hungry jut of his jaw and then his mouth is against her neck, lips and tongue and teeth.
“That was not here,” she says, as his hand kneads at the small of her back.
“It should have been.” His words judder through her, the vibration deep in her skin a shaking, shivering traitor to her better judgement. “It could have been. Instead it was after you knew who I was. Why was that, hmm?”
“It is not -”
His hand is on her hip and his fingers are suddenly digging into her flesh, hard enough to bruise if this were real. “The truth, now.”
“If you’ll give me the same.”
“Always,” he says, and his hand is soft again, running over her thigh smooth under the silk of her dress. His teeth brush the point of her ear.
“I thought you might not have taken the path you chose,” she says.
“And that was your convincing, was it?” He seems to grow tired of caressing her back and pulls her full onto his lap, pressed against him so that she can feel how hard he is. “Or a goodbye once you’d given up on me?”
“Maybe. No. I thought -” She had thought of the sorrow of a thing unfinished, of how he always seemed to be balancing on the edge of horror. How he’d held her hands in his after and said again “I’d not be dark with you at my side,” and she’d not known whether to believe it and then realised with a dull inevitability that it didn’t matter if she believed it, didn’t even matter even if he did. She had wanted him; she had wanted there to be hope; she had wanted, most of all, a world that did not shape itself in dull inevitabilities, that could still bring joy and beauty and bliss, that could at least give bright things before they too were eroded to ruin. “I thought it could be different,” she said, and realises this is not true.
He stills for a moment. It’s a trick on his part, but perhaps even he doesn’t realise it yet. He has always been able to fool himself with a greater skill than he can fool her, and then to rage and resent his inability to do so well enough that he can’t see through it once he tries.
“How did you know my daughter was not yours?” she says, careful to modulate her voice and her manner enough to mimic defeat.
“Apart from you having to explain it to your husband if she was? Bet he wouldn’t be so sweet to you then, would he?” His hand traces up from hip to shoulder; she shivers, and he laughs. “If Maiar get children we can’t change forms, little elf. We’re bound to the body that creates the child. You can thank Melian and your elves who wrote down all those volumes of lore about her after she left Middle-earth. But me, I can change still. Not as I could when I was strong but it’s getting easier. I’ll keep this form for you, though, since you like it.” He smirks at her. “A kiss, now. Properly.”
She kisses him, full and strong and keen, and he groans under her. “Does your husband know you’re here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“So no.” He traces the underside of her jaw with his lips barely brushing her skin, and she leans back to let him, her back curved under his broad hands. It’s like fire, like burning, her trailing foot feels more shackled than held by the water, and - and he bites her, his teeth bruising the soft flesh of her neck. She pulls back with a cry and he’s grinning. “He’ll know now, won’t he?”
“Envy and spite,” she says, still held firm across his lap. “You wish to rule all of Middle-earth and here you are, driven to such small jealousies by one elf.”
“This elf.” He kisses her chin, then the hollow at the base of her throat. “I don’t care about your pretty little Sindar prince. Keep him, for all I care, have something to warm our bed while I’m away. Or even while you’re away if you’d share. But I think you owe me your thanks for giving him back to you. I could have sent you his head.”
This thought had struck her, more than once. “Why didn’t you?”
“Waste of soldiers to get him. No, wait, you stay here.” One hand kneads at her thigh, then higher, until his thumb grazes the crease at its top through the layers of silk and linen. “You could have this dress gone, you know. Everything here is the way you want it.”
“Why didn’t you.”
His fingers keep on working at her and she can feel herself soften like melting ice. “Maybe I wanted you to see how kind I could be,” he says. “Maybe I wanted you to know what it was like to find something you’d lost for so long and have it hate you. I don’t know, Galadriel. Why does anyone do anything?”
She rests her forehead against his shoulder and it feels like everything is heavy, closing in on her like water, like drowning.
“He’ll never have all of you,” he says, a whisper against her ear.
“He won’t,” she says. “And nor will you.”
His smile turns into a snarl and she calls to Nenya and breaks away from him, the canal, the city, the island, all of it - and she’s gone. She is back beneath the silver birch trees wrenching the ring off her hand.
Then:
Celebrían’s first birthday was a great celebration, a feast and dancing through the night and then into the next day. Celebrían herself crawled among them, oblivious, laughing, delighted. She had newly learned to stand and could manage only a few short moments before toppling to the ground again but she refused to let anyone help her and howled in fury if anyone took her hand, set in grim determination.
“Your daughter,” Celeborn said, weaving primroses into long strands of winter grass. “She is so very much your daughter.”
Galadriel leaned back against him as he finished making the tiny crown. It was not safe - nothing was safe - but it felt, for a moment, like they had built something new.
The gifts started arriving not long after that.
Now:
She finds Celeborn sitting with his back to a beech tree and Celebrían sleeping exhausted on his chest, her bare foot braced against his hip and one small fist still twisted into his hair. In one hand he is holding a small creature from the forest, the size of his palm, a furred thing of huge dark eyes and round ears. She deduces that the child is newly asleep for she loves these creatures and Celeborn shows them to her to make her laugh, holding out his hand and calling them to glide out of the trees and cling to his fingers.
He sees Galadriel and mouths wait as he places the little creature in the tree-shoots near his head, then lifts up Celebrían’s hand, and lets it fall heavy and unresisted to flop back onto his chest. “Safe,” he says. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She can hear the lightness in her own voice and knows he must, too.
He smiles. He is leaning back, Celebrían’s head tucked under his chin in the way she has done since she was a newborn, now pushing his head up awkwardly into a position Galadriel knows he won’t move from. “It’s taken me two hours to settle her. She senses it when you’re troubled.”
“Or she sensed him .” She sits down curled into him, pressed against the warmth of him and the child both. “He thinks her yours,” she says.
He closes his eyes for a moment, breathes something gentle and quiet into Celebrían’s hair. “So do I.”
“He thinks you would not accept her.”
He laughs quietly at that, and they don’t say anything more about it.
She will tell him later about Melian. She knows what Sauron would have learned; she has read the stories herself. They are clear that Melian could not change her physical form after Luthien’s birth. They are clear that Melian said this herself. But she also knew Melian and she remembers sitting with her under the great trees near Menegroth, shoulder-high roots curled around in calm sheltering crescents, when she had asked the very same question herself.
“How could I change this form now?” Melian had said. Her dark hair was a shimmer against her evening-blue robes, her bracelets shone like spun stars on her arms. “This body formed my child. This heart was the first sound she knew. There are scars like silver rivers left on my skin as she grew. I made her not from magic but from blood and breath. I might change form tomorrow if I wished, but how could I love this much and ever wish it?”
For now, though, it doesn’t matter. They are safe at least a while longer. She wants only to sit there as Celebrían sleeps, knowing nothing of any of this, in the soft shadows of twilight.
She pulls her hair aside so he can see the mark Sauron left below her ear. He touches the edge of it, soft and careful. He does not say anything.
“I think there is still light in him,” she says. “Even after everything. But I think there is more darkness in me.”
He doesn’t answer for a while, and moves only when Celebrían shifts in her sleep to adjust the curve of the arm that cradles her. “My people were afraid of yours,” he says eventually. “Before all this. In Beleriand. We called ourselves celbin, people of light. But you called us sindar, the grey people. You called us elves of the twilight. We were never light to you. The only light the Noldor saw was your own. We feared you and what you brought.”
“Did you fear me?”
“No.” He strokes Celebrían’s head, soft as moonlight. “But I thought afterwards that I should have done. After the war, thinking of you felt like looking full into the sun. I couldn’t bear it.”
There is more to it, she is sure there is more. There are centuries gone of more . She doesn’t know when he learned she was alive or whether he had ever considered searching for her then. She doesn’t know if he regrets the Noldor coming to Middle-earth at all in their blaze of hope and golden vengeance. She doesn’t know if he wished anything had been different in Doriath, or if he has kept it a treasured memory in his mind preserved in perfect shining amber.
What she says instead of any of this is “I can never tell what you are thinking.”
“Now? I’m thinking… oh. I don’t know how to say it well.” He switches to Sindarin and she realises they’d been speaking in Quenya without thinking about it. Once this had been a forbidden language in Doriath at the king’s orders; once he’d sought her anyway out to teach him, the grinning defiance in his approach so pleasing to her. But he could speak both languages as easy as thinking and two dozen more beside. “I think I will never see the world the way you do,” he said. “Nor you me. Maybe that’s best. For both of us, and for her.”
“Most of all,” Galadriel says, “for her.”
There is no more need for words after that. There is only the sound of the three of them breathing, soft in the grey light of dawn.