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The first time she hears that name there is a fire behind her and smoke in her eyes. She is a child, then, carried in another’s arms at a run, staring back over a shoulder at the glow of red flames.
The snap of branches beneath feet, a strange sharp sound of metal in the distance. Then a clearing and she is bundled into another’s arms still wrapped in the oversized cloak. “Take her.”
A hand lifts back her hood and she recognises the face of her uncle, his silver hair spattered with blood. “Elwing,” he says, smoothing a hand over her forehead. Then, above her head: “Where are the others?”
“We weren’t -” Some words are bitten away and fall unspoken to the ground. “Go south, keep hidden, you know the roads out.”
She is lifted onto a horse – too high, there has been little use for horses in her life until this point – and the man tries to press her hands into its mane but she will not release her hold on the cord around her neck. “You need to hold on,” he says, soft at first, trying to ease her fingers loose. Then: “Galadriel, what is she carrying?”
The fire has a sound, a roar mixed with voices. It is growing louder and yet she is bitterly cold. She hears names called through the dark.
“Take her,” the woman says. “Go.”
Her uncle holds her fenced within his arms before him on the horse. “One hand, then,” he says to her quietly. “Elwing, little bird. Hold on with just one hand. We need to go so fast and it’s a long way down if you fall.” And she does, reluctantly, twisting one hand’s fingers into the horse’s wiry mane while the other holds tight to the treasure she carries safe and wrapped tight against her skin.
As they race away she hears the sound of a drawn sword and the woman’s voice roaring back at those coming after them. A name; one of the few things Elwing will remember.
Elwing grows to womanhood in a haven by the sea. They are not the first to find their way here after some other home was ruined and they will not be the last. By the time she arrives, after months travelling out of sight as hidden as her uncle was able to keep her, what remains of her people have already been welcomed by the Falathrim who now dwell on Balar, who help them to build a home again, a small town rather than a great city. She is the last to arrive; there are no more from Doriath after her.
They call her little queen and no-one objects for what does it matter, here. They are not a people and a kingdom; they are the scraps of what’s left from ruin after ruin. If the Iathrim want a queen here by the sea then who is left to challenge them? In her fourth year she’s crowned with sea lavender and the Nauglamír around her neck, and the Silmaril shines as bright as the stars.
She is in her eighth year when the refugees from Gondolin arrive. She teaches Eärendil how to gather driftwood, where to hide in the reed beds, how to run on the sand. They understand each other in ways that many of the rest do not.
She is always waiting for the day they are found (she is found, the jewel is found). She is always waiting for smoke and screams and flame. But the rest of her childhood passes with peace and calm, and a jewel she holds in her lap that sings to her of distant forests.
She is gathering flag-irises the day she first sees the stranger. She is alone, something already the subject of much concern to her people; but she likes to walk alone and will not let fear plague her steps. This land is hers and she will not flinch from that.
He is tall, evidently an elf, and certainly unfamiliar to her. He bows in greeting, for all intents sincere. “The lady Elwing of Doriath?”
“There is no Doriath,” she says.
They are kind to guests, usually. There are not many travellers but there are some – Gil-galad and Círdan’s people to the west, other scattered bands left of what once were the great realms of Beleriand. They are a city of refugees and this means they are a city of fear, but they also know hope, and home, and what it is to find refuge and welcome. They are kind to guests. But something crawls at the back of her neck and she extends no welcome to this one.
“Perhaps you are not Elwing,” he says. “I was searching for her.”
She feels her heart thump, once, twice. But she will not run. She will not pretend herself dead or absent; she will not cower away in fear for what does that bring you, you die anyway. “My name is not yours to know,” she says.
He smiles, a little thinly. He sits down on a fallen log and gestures for her to join him but she will not move an inch. “I brought food,” he says. “Would you join me? We could break bread together.”
She considers her options. She could run, of course. He might be able to catch her but she would have the advantage of surprise and she knows the pathways through the salt marshes that he won’t, and she’s fast, she’s been winning races against the girls of Gondolin all her youth. But this would begin something: a flight, a chase. How long can anyone keep running, when you’ve already run all the way to the sea?
She sits down beside him and accepts the bread he gives.
They eat in silence at first. Strange, and so ordinary, and then even stranger for that, even the water-fowl flying overhead seeming to laugh at them. She imagines the strange tableau they would make if anyone should come to find her there.
The food he carries is good; it’s clear that he’s been travelling for a time, but clear also that he has come from somewhere that feeds its people well. He has fine currant-cakes, dark rye bread he gives her with a sharp, salty butter, cheese he cuts with his knife for them both, a rich red wine that’s barely been watered at all. She notices that in serving all this he uses only his left hand with the forearm of his right serving to hold the loaf still or steady a goblet.
“Word has reached my people,” he says eventually, a careful and practised and slow thing, “that there is something held here which does not belong.”
She tears at the rye crust with her teeth. “Nothing belongs here, really,” she says. “We all came from somewhere we lost.”
“A wise approach, I’m sure.” He clinks his goblet against hers where it sits beside her on the log. “But this, this one thing I seek. A jewel. It was stolen long ago and it belongs to my family.” A careful look at her, a too-long hesitation. He is not, she thinks, someone who hesitates often. “I presume it is not here.”
The bread is rich and slightly sweet, a fine thing for a final meal. “An odd thing to presume,” she says.
His eyebrows raise slightly. “Is it?”
“If your jewel means so much to you that you come searching for it, why would you stop before you even reach the city? Surely you would have your soldiers burn down all our homes so you could sift through the ashes to see for yourself.”
He does not challenge her on that. He gathers up what’s left of the food, packing it away with little care, and says “I’ve seen enough ashes.”
That night she holds the Silmaril in her hands and it calms her racing breath, her beating heart.
It’s near on a year before she sees him again. The same place, the same time of year, and again she is holding an armful of yellow flag-irises. She wonders how long he has been waiting here.
“There are things I neglected to say, the last time we met,” he tells her. His accent is strange, unlike those here from Gondolin.
She places the flowers down carefully. He must know, she’s sure, of the town itself; he wouldn’t be here otherwise. But it is well hidden against the shoulder of the cliffs behind the dunes and the reed-beds and the path isn’t obvious, and so she does not turn to look in its direction. “Then you should say them.”
A slight, twisted smile. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Why should I be afraid of one lone traveller who has nothing better to do than wander the reed-beds?”
“Why indeed,” he says. “Why indeed.”
He has brought food again. It seems expected that she will accept, and so she does. She pays more attention to his right arm this time; he wears his sleeve long but she can see the healed stump beneath it. They eat in silence for a while, looking out towards the distant sea.
“The Falathrim built ships, I hear,” he says.
She shrugs. He’s right but it matters less against whatever else this might be. “Falathrim are sailors. They always build ships.”
“They might give you ships if you asked.”
“To sail where?”
“I don’t know.”
More silence, and more. She can hear gulls call in the distance.
“You must have travelled some distance to reach this place,” she says when the tension of waiting for what he might say is beyond bearing.
He seems relieved, almost. “A fair journey,” he says. “My home is east of here.”
“A pleasant place?”
“I think so. Forests, and meadows. On a clear day we can see the mountains. It isn’t like this.”
She does not say, what brings you here? She lets nothing show as she watches him.
“When I was young,” he says, “very young, my parents took me to the sea once. I did not understand the waves, and the vastness of it – it was endless. It seemed so strange. I remember that.”
She can’t recall when she first saw the sea. It must have been the day she was brought here, but she was so young and her memories are few now, and she can’t tell what she truly remembers and what she only feels she should.
They talk a little more, although most of the talking is his. He describes drawing sigils in wet sand with his brother; of fish, fat and silver, caught in glistening nets; of great sand cities he had tried to build, until the waves came and washed them away. The sun starts to dip low over the horizon and the clouds take on a coat of copper-gold that blazes in the stranger’s red hair.
“What did you come to say to me?” she asks.
A sharp and sudden silence.
“How odd,” he says. “I can’t remember.”
This time she calls her people together. Those from Gondolin stand silent with them and watch, accepting this is for the Iathrim (and they still call themselves Iathrim, although there is no Land of the Fence now; no Fence; no forest kingdom, not any more, not in this expanse of reeds and sand and ocean). But they are all agreed in the end. They will not call for Gil-galad’s help for then the war would surely come. They will not run, for there is nowhere else to go. They will not send away the Silmaril. They cannot send away the Silmaril.
The third year she is not even surprised to see him there.
“You are young to be a queen,” he says, cutting an apple with a sharp, enamelled knife. “It must be a great burden.”
“If I was a queen.”
“If you were a queen. Yes.”
The apple tastes sweeter than those they have here. She must have had such things early in her childhood; she wanted for little, then. She lets herself savour it. “If I was a queen, it would be a duty, not a burden. There is a joy in duty.”
“Mmm,” he says. “I’d disagree, I think.”
“Then where is joy to be found outside it?”
“In lots of things. Not outside duty. No – perhaps you’re right, perhaps outside it. Perhaps I do mean that.” He leans back on his hand, the length of him a long, sinuous curve. “Pleasure. Dancing. Fine food. Skill, of whatever sort. Friendship. Love. Duty is something else.”
“A lesser thing?”
“No. But a harder one to carry.”
“And what is your life, then? Grim and without joy?”
He presses his lips between his teeth. “We have great libraries,” he says. “We have feasts and dances. We learn new crafts, we perfect the old. Like you, it wasn’t the home we chose but we have made it our own. Duty is the walls we build and the wars we fight.”
“Wars,” she says.
He looks down at the ground before them, scattered with fallen leaves.
She marries Eärendil in the spring. There is something of an inevitability about it, their two peoples come together as one. It might be thought an arranged match and she’s fairly sure Gil-galad and Círdan do think so, from the messages they receive of slightly detached congratulation. But they laugh about it later, she and her new husband, for it’s nothing of the sort. They grew up here together, catching shrimp in tide-pools, whispering stories they’ve been told of their homes, their kin. Unlike him, Elwing remembers almost nothing of her escape from her home: her uncle’s songs he sang to calm her, and the tears he didn’t want her to see, and the Silmaril whispering to her that there were still bright things, there were still joyous things. Unlike her, Eärendil never quite let go of the hope that there might be others from his still seeking to join them; that this might not be it; that this might not be all.
The Silmaril can’t protect them. She knows that, and she makes sure he knows that too, the first time she gives it to him to hold. It could not protect Doriath; it would not protect here, if those who seek it should come. Still, she believes – and he believes, and all their people believe – without it they would never have been able to build this place and keep the peace they have.
And it is peace, at least for them. Outside is a world of broken hopes and lost wars, and the darkness growing around them like a closing fist; but here, their ships bob on the calm waves, the sun bathes the roofs of their low houses. Here there is peace, for as long as it lasts.
“If you found Elwing,” she says, “I expect she would hate you.”
The stranger nods. “I expect she would.”
Her knowledge of Doriath is gathered in like driftwood, she a beachcomber along the long coast of other people’s memories. The great halls of Menegroth hung with Melian’s tapestries. The western corn growing golden-yellow in forest glades. Her father, calling her brothers down from the tree they had climbed. And the darker things to gather, when the sons of Fëanor came: the blood and the death and the cruelty, the things done that cannot be forgiven.
The stranger unfastens his cloak. The sun beats down on them today, a defiant resurgence of heat at the end of summer, and the sky is a vast and cloudless blue.
She does not name him, still. It feels like something would be broken if she did; a declaration made that could not be unmade. She does not name him and he does not name her, and both of them keep to this unspoken pact, but at some point in some year she gave up on pretending that she does not know who he is.
“We are made by duty,” he says. “Hammered out by it. I don’t ask for absolution.”
“I would not give it.”
She has noticed that sometimes he traces one finger over the scars on his face: the curve around his eye, the furrow down his cheek, the lattice of lines on his neck. It is as if he is rewriting something, over and over again.
“I thought once I was a crafted thing,” he says. “My father’s greatest work. Now. Now I see that I was made as a tool. All of us, but me the most.”
Elwing senses a space, the narrowest shard of light, through which something could be exchanged. But it is not something she can ever give, and it is not something he can ever take.
“If you found Elwing she would hate you,” she says.
“She would be right.”
The year she is with child she considers for the first time not going to gather flowers late in the summer. She is tired and her back aches, and one of the twins kicks incessantly at her lungs, and she could not run from him now if she tried. She spends long mornings down at the shore cross-legged at the water’s edge staring out in the distance, letting the tiny lapping waves pat at her feet.
The Silmaril still sings to her. She thinks it sings to the children, too, for it seems to calm them when she holds it. It does not sing to Eärendil in the same way and she wonders if this is because she was first given it as a child in need of lullabies, or because it recognises her as the queen who bears it, whose kin freed it, whose people died for it. She holds it and listens, and draws courage strand by strand. And in time she goes to find the yellow flag-irises.
He must know she is married and so this should come as no surprise, and yet he stares at her changed form as if he has never seen such a wonder before. “A child,” he says.
“Two.”
His oh is breathed more than spoken. He holds out his hand and she steels herself against an instinctive flinch, but he doesn’t touch her; he keeps it a space away from her belly and speaks something in Quenya, brief and chanted and stumbling as though he has had to retrieve it from some long-hidden memory: Nienna of weeping, soothe your tears. Tulkas of laughter, bring you joy. Varda of stars, light your path. Irmo of dreams, sweeten your sleep.
She cannot run. But she was not running anyway, and this changes little. She will not run, she will not hide, she will not even bow her head in modesty; any new child is seen as such a wondrous thing here. Let him know that the people of Doriath still live and will pass along its memories to children yet to be born. Let him know that while the rest of Middle-earth stumbles closer and closer to despair, this place has chosen another path.
There are more refugees who find them, little by little, scattered group by scattered group. People sad and broken, scarred and tired, thin starved faces and voices too quiet to hear. Some go on to Gil-galad and Círdan on the island and from there she hears some travel even further still, south-east to new havens on distant coasts.
Three days after the twins are born they take them down to the sea, one baby in each parent’s arms. There have not been enough children born here for Sirion to have traditions of its own, but she scoops a handful of clear water and places each twin’s hands into it and says each of their names three times. Eärendil sings them a strange song that he remembers from Gondolin and presses their feet into the sand.
“I can’t do nothing,” he says as they walk back, Elros fussing slightly and Elrond already asleep. “The Valar must help.”
She doesn’t think they will. She doesn’t think there is help, at this point. What’s left of the Eldar here have lost, against Morgoth, against each other. There are little pools of light in the darkness and this is all they have. Eärendil’s plan is desperate and pointless, and surely doomed, and surely his will be yet another ship that sails west and never comes back.
But the Silmaril sings hope, hope, hope.
She only brings the children once, the year they are born. They are so young and it feels like they are only briefly borrowed, only hers for this short time, and she cannot bear to be without the fat infant hands pressed into her neck, the sweet scent of their dark hair as they burrow their heads safe beneath her chin. And so she keeps them with her, tied snug in a shawl, one on each hip, and goes to show them the yellow irises.
The stranger bows his head low and solemn in greeting. The twins stare at him, unsmiling, uncertain.
She considers in that moment that this might be enough, this year. What else is there to say? But Elros kicks one foot free of the binding and tips forward, unbalanced, and as she steadies him Elrond is pushed aside by her arm and starts to whimper in the few sobbing breaths she knows are building to a loud cry.
“Here,” the stranger says. He steadies Elros with his forearm and pulls the cloth flat again, helping Elwing secure it tighter at her waist. Elrond stops crying and watches him.
“Thank you,” she says.
He smiles. “It’s been – some time, since I’ve done that. I remember though. You have to balance them. My brothers were always wriggling.”
He is too close and she doesn’t step away. Had one of her own family touched his scarred face before? Had they begged him for mercy, had they clawed at him in desperation? He seems so ordinary here; she can see how the skin puckers slightly at the edge of his jaw where a wound has not quite healed; she can see a tiny, faint pattern of white scars in a line down his cheek, as though someone has carved out a mockery of tears. She can see the furrows worn by smiles at the corner of his eyes.
“I never knew my brothers,” she says.
He does not move but something in him withdraws back into himself. “I searched for those children. I search for them still.”
“And what do you expect to find of them now?”
“There were stories some Laiquendi took them, out to the east. It’s possible.”
She doesn’t believe him. They’re dead. But he believes it, it seems; he believes not all hope is lost.
That is the year, she will think later, when he first starts truly trying to convince her.
“It isn’t about what should have happened,” he says, as the twins at their feet pull at handfuls of grass. “None of this should have happened. It’s knowing that they were taken.”
They is the jewels, of course. He is already growing a little – careless? distant? she doesn’t know – in the way he talks about them, as though she knows more than she does or shares more than she does of his mind.
“To think of something so beautiful and so loved in the hands of such darkness,” he says. “What that does to us. Did. Can you understand, even the least of it?”
His own hand is holding out fruit for her children, peaches cut into halves. She imagines it red with blood. “Yes,” she says.
The Silmaril sings their ships to sea and home again. It sings (they say, she believes) for calm weather and good rains and bountiful harvests. It sings of the memories she doesn’t have: beech-woods like burnished copper, a silver-haired brother turning laughing away from her.
When she is alone at night, her husband away at sea and her sons sleeping, she sits by the sea and holds the jewel cool against her cheek. It is a feeling impossible to describe. She could only say, perhaps, that with it the world still feels full of light and the shadow only a passing thing; and without it, it is the light that is passing, that will leave her, that will fade.
The stranger changes. Something in him sharpens, or perhaps grows more brittle. It is hard to describe but easy to feel in his voice and in his manner. He talks less and what he does say is shorter and more certain, and he no longer mentions his brothers, his parents, his past.
“No children this time,” he says in their second year (their third, their fourth) when she comes alone.
No, she says. No children this time.
And he talks of what it is like to live with an oath unfulfilled, to know that your life’s purpose has been torn from you. He talks of what it is like to wake sometimes with a blazing keen certainty and want to sob in joy for what it has replaced, and then to come slowly to your other senses over the course of the days that follow. He talks of what it is like to empty yourself of everything but fire.
The day Eärendil leaves, the twins are as old as Elwing was when she was brought away from Doriath. (At least, she thinks so; no-one here can remember exactly when she was born.) And so while she weeps and the children weep and Eärendil weeps too, she takes some comfort in this: that if he never returns, they will not remember.
“Because duty is greater than tears,” she tells the stranger. “Because grief will come anyway. All we can do is make it matter.”
“And doesn’t it matter?”
“You would have me make my family’s deaths worthless with the turn of my hand.”
He holds up the stump of his.
She was not inclined to tell him that the children’s father is not here but it seems he knows anyway, somehow. He knows anyway and yet his main concern seems to be that this was done for nothing. “You think the Valar will come?” he says. “For Fingolfin’s kin, you think they will save you? They have let Morgoth do as he would with Middle-earth and they have little care for your people and less for his.”
She does not doubt any of this, truly. She is sure, a dull and awful certainty, that she will not see her husband again outside the halls of Mandos. Ships that go west do not return; Sirion is the end of roads.
“And what care for you?” she asks him.
“None at all for me.”
“Others have hope,” she says.
He sighs, “Let them.”
“I have hope.”
“You don’t.”
“You don’t recognise it.”
The cool wind of the salt-marshes pulls at her dress like her children’s hands. The couch-grass is wiry beneath her feet. She remembers she had once thought of running, here. She does not think of it now.
“I think I do recognise it,” he says. “Hope of duty fulfilled, isn’t it? Hope that everything can somehow be made right.”
She hasn’t heard anyone name it before. For a moment and then another she only stares at him. A scatter of oystercatchers fly across the water in the distance, their sharp cry echoing over the empty grasses. “And you think it’s pointless.”
“No. I think we’re both delusional.”
“Peace is delusional?”
He laughs at that. “I gave up a crown once and it made no difference,” he said. “I watched my brothers die and for nothing. I begged for death itself in my captivity and here I am, alive anyway. I am a hollow thing now. I will tell myself duty is something I wield but it will fill me again, I know. It will wear me like armour. And I will tell myself that is well and that is right and that is a fulfilment of my oath, and maybe through it I will see peace. Is that delusion? I don’t know any more. I think I would have done once but it’s all burned away.”
He is tall but his bowed forehead rests against hers, so close they need not look at each other, so close they breathe in unison.
She thinks of what it would be like to be empty and replaced by duty. For her it’s water: to be washed away like the chalk of the cliffs, to have all her weakness and doubt swept from her and leave her clean and certain and pure. She longs for it so.
She can already sense it’s the last time they will meet this way, only two strangers alone near the sea. She can sense that within him the fate he so hates and so needs has already begun to seize him. He seems like autumn leaves turned crisp and brittle in the woods she can’t remember. She has been made what she is by the presence of a Silmaril and he by its absence, and here they are both of them alone under this immense sky.
When she kisses him it’s like she’s burning and drowning at once.
He gasps and she hears him say “Wait” at first, but by the time the word is fully spoken he’s already pulled her tight against him, his lips crushed against hers, his hand tangled in her hair. It’s fierce and fast and there’s something quietly desperate in it all, and she feels he’s enveloped her somehow, all the air around her turned to smoke.
“This is,” he says, as he sinks down on his knees to the couch-grass and cradles her with him. “This is – this -”
“It doesn’t matter what it is,” she says.
“It does.” He’s shaking and his hand trembles on her skin, his fingers not quite touching her collar.
She undresses him fast and sure and he arcs back in surrender under her touch, something unnameable in his eyes. His body is latticed with scars. She touches some of them with her hands, then her lips, wondering which were made by the knives and whips of the enemy, which by the swords of her own kin.
“Please,” he says.
“Why should I grant you anything?” But she straddles him anyway as she pulls away her clothes.
He holds her fast, his hand on her thigh and the stump of his wrist at the small of her back, and looks at her in what she can only describe as wonder. Her own body is unscarred except for the legacy of bearing the twins, the faint silver marks on her hips and stomach like running water. He touches these, softer than she imagined he ever could.
It is not, she thinks, all she has wanted. But he has taken so much from her.
She brings his hand down between her legs, feels as much from the shudder that strikes him as from her own body that she’s already wet. He seems unsure, hesitant on how to please her, and she has to show him with the turn of her own hand, rocking slightly against him. “More,” she says, “more, no – there -” and he nods, and does, and the feel of him touching her floods with warmth. She curves back against him and stares up at the sky, only half-seeing, lost in the sense of it.
They don’t move in harmony, not really, but there’s something about it that strikes true all the same – an echo or a resonance, or the turn of birds wheeling together in the air. He lies her down at her command and whispers questions into the soft flesh of her stomach, the curve of her breasts as he kisses them, like this? like this? And it isn’t right and it isn’t enough and she pushes his head down, her nails scraping through red hair against his scalp, she isn’t gentle and why should she be, and he shapes himself into what she wants all the same.
“Please,” he says, “please,” gasped against her, “here, for you, let me -” and she lets go of his hand and relaxes back into the grasses of the salt marsh.
It feels so strange, she thinks. It feels like she is dissolving somehow at the edges, her hair and her fingertips turning to mist. It feels like she belongs to this land by the sea enough that she has become part of it.
“That’s good,” she says, “there, that’s good,” and her flat hand on his back soothes him, and she shows him how to touch her just the way she likes as he moves in her, with her, for her.
Show me strength, Kinslayer, she thinks. Show me hope. Give me all you can’t use that I deserve to take, you who have taken so much from me.
And when she cries out to the sky it’s with the sharpness of a hunting hawk.
He is not there at all the next year. She sensed that he wouldn’t be somehow; that what she had seized last time, she had seized because she knew it would be the only time she could; and yet she waits for him anyway, watches over the expanse of land that stretches west to the unquiet sea.
He is not there.
The next year a messenger comes in his stead.
The letter is longer than she would have expected. It addresses her by name (and from that she knows even without reading the rest that all is lost, now). It promises friendship, alliance, soldiers to guard against orcs. It assures her that its senders have no wish to harm her people and that too much blood has been shed on all sides. It speaks of peace.
But, it says: you must return the Silmaril. You must return the Silmaril that was taken from us.
She calls together all her people, and by this time it’s all their people – it’s the Sindar who escaped Doriath and the Noldor who escaped Gondolin and others, too, who escaped other places, Eldar and Edain, all listening as one. She reads the letter out to all of them, and she says: we must make a choice.
The messenger gave them until sundown for their answer, and she ensures that they take all of that time for the beacon that will summon Gil-galad and Círdan will blaze brighter in the dusk. And there is some discussion, although there is not much. The people of Sirion will not part with the Silmaril, not with Eärendil gone, not to the murderers of Doriath.
She sends back a single word: No. And as the messenger turns to leave, the beacon goes up blazing against the sky.
They burn the ships first. She should have guessed they would – it’s too obvious an escape and their armies have come over land. The ships are lost in flame and smoke and she thinks perhaps this is the one good thing that will come from Eärendil not returning, that he never had to watch his beautiful ships burn.
What happens is as terrible as she feared it would be (as all the survivors of Doriath feared it would be, and as she suspected the others could never quite believe). She has prepared herself for this through tales she has insisted on hearing since her childhood, but the horror of truly experiencing it is so great that it shatters into pieces and she cannot hold it whole.
A friend dead on the quayside with dark blood running down her face.
The sound of glass windows shattering in the heat of a burning building.
A basket of apples spilled over a path, half crushed to pulp beneath the tread of boots.
Elwing cannot permit despair and yet she feels it wrap around her like a shroud. Her people fight so bravely and it doesn’t matter at all and there are no ships coming in time to save them. Still, she does what she can. She calls encouragement to her archers, she reminds them why they fight and what they face; she calls for Doriath! and they call back for Elwing!
Her children are sheltered as best anything in this world can be sheltered, hidden away in a nondescript stone hut near the docks. She wraps the sobbing twins’ hands together and places them on the Silmaril she holds and tells them to stay together, stay together, and she doesn’t want to leave them and she must and she lingers too long and when she finally allows herself one last look back at her sons from the road to the burning screaming city, she sees him already there watching them. A dark presence now; a thing wrapped in flame.
She screams "Maedhros!" and holds up the jewel, and when he turns to face her, she runs.
She runs through the streets of their city, slipping on blood. She runs past the Feanorian armies turning on each other in the wake of horrors too great to bear, the cry of for Elwing, for Elwing coming from some of the enemy now too. She runs out through the salt marshes with the grasses whipping at her calves, dodging pools and inlets he does not know to expect, always staying ahead of him. She hears him call to her again and again but she never turns back.
She runs and he cannot catch her. It seems to her she is close to flying as she races on up the path that winds higher and higher towards the cliffs. She remembers Galadriel running with her held tight in her arms, the roar of fire behind them. She remembers the Silmaril singing to her then as it sings to her now, hope, hope, hope.
But at the top are soldiers already waiting, stationed for those trying to escape. The Feanorians have learned from Doriath.
To her right the beacon is burning still. She heads towards it escaping by a hand’s breadth the sword that flashes down at her from one of her assailants. Closer, and closer still, and the fire is hot against her face, but she doesn’t care about the beacon itself – she needs to see beyond it.
Out on the sea there are other beacons burning in the distance, the chain of fire across the small scattered islands that will bring Gil-galad and Círdan. But it is too late. There are no ships visible at all on the vast ocean, not theirs, not Eärendil’s. The light of the Silmaril she holds blazes out over the sea and there are no ships to save them.
The stone platform gives her only a little space between the beacon’s fire and the fall. The heat of it warms her face when she turns back.
There are at least twenty of them, perhaps as many as thirty. All armed, all advancing upon her, and he at their head. She will not flinch but she finds her feet taking another step back almost without her will – behind his eyes is something dead.
“Elwing,” he says. “Elwing, give back the jewel.” His voice is no longer his own.
Another step back and she’s right at the edge, nothing behind her but the long, steep fall down into the plunging sea. But the Silmaril’s song becomes so pure and so bright she can hear little else, and although she sees his mouth move again, his words never reach her. The fire, the fear, the sorrow, none of it can touch her. There is only the song, woven through with a lullaby she somehow knows that her father once sang to her.
Maedhros’s sword falls from his hand. His outstretched fingers almost reach her. And in a moment of perfect clarity she hears “Elwing don’t please” – but she has already leapt with the speed and grace of a diving gull, down towards the water and whatever hope might mean.