Chapter Text
Ash. That is a word that feels as the thing it describes tastes on Haleth’s tongue: lifeless, disintegrating, half the word swallowed and scattered, a thousand aimless flakes that were once part of something that fought, something that survived. Odd, or fitting, perhaps, that even language fights to survive.
Haleth kneels. Her torn trousers meet the earth with a dusty clap, and then they stick there, unwilling to move. Whether it is the blood soaking through her clothes and into the ground or her own exhaustion that glues her in place she knows not. Nor does she care to know. If she has strength enough to bow before the fresh-dug graves of her fallen father and brother, it is enough. There is nothing else that calls her now.
The earth on their graves is yet dark and rich; there is life yet there, though death lies below. The earth is yet fragrant. That will have to do, in this harsh, darkened land with no incense to burn. There are no candles either, and only a stone cairn instead of two memorial tablets, but her family will forgive her this shortcoming.
Thrice, by two; full rites, or as full as she can manage with nothing more but her own hands and a makeshift shovel, for each, so she plans. Now that the fighting is over and her people safe—or as safe as they will be in the hands of a foreign lord they cannot resist—the battlefield is eerily silent. Eerily empty. Each clap of remembrance that precedes a bow echoes, sharp and unmistakable, seemingly endless, through the ashes of what once was a valley of tall, waving grasses. Her blistered, bloody hands sting, and she should clean and wrap her wounds before they develop an infection, but the pain feels right, somehow, it feels correct: she has nothing but her pain to offer the spirits of her dead.
Footsteps behind her. She does not know how much time has passed. She reaches for her sword, only to realize belatedly that she jammed it into the earth before her, a makeshift memorial of sorts. Her legs don’t seem to work.
“My lady!" someone calls, at a great distance or very near. It all blurs together, the faint half-light of dusk, the sound of this intruder behind her, the dizzy rush of pain when she tries to turn to see.
She gathers herself. She is Haleth of the house of Haldad, and if it is death she meets now, she will meet it with courage.
It is not death with the hood and the scythe, though, that greets her, but a fair young man, looking barely more than a youth. Dark hair, grey eyes, a sharp nose and thin mouth, freckles like a galaxy over his nose and cheeks—ah, supplies Haleth’s mind dimly, the late-coming Elf-lord.
She scrounges up enough strength to lift her hands and bring them together, makes the barest of greetings. She was raised, not dragged, and besides she knows better than to antagonize her people’s saviour. “My lord.”
He—Caranthir, Haleth remembers his name is—ignores her shadow of courtesy. “What are you doing here? The battle is over, but there is yet danger here. What are you doing that could possibly be more important than living?”
Something about him irritates her. “I thought you said that your troops killed all the Orcs. Is the word of Thargelion’s master not worth its test?”
Caranthir’s mouth twists. His eyes are alive, alive in this land of death and ash, with anger. “Are you foolish? The raiding party is dead, but who knows if they called for reinforcements before my guard came?”
Something resentful and ugly twists in Haleth’s stomach. So his troops were only a guard, and she is foolish, foolish enough to not notice her enemies sending for reinforcements?
(He is right, she knows, deep down. But she is grieving and she is angry, and he is intruding on her family’s rites, and there is no negotiating with a new commander minted by tragedy.)
“It has been seven days, and only now—” and gods and ancestors, Haleth hates herself for how her voice breaks, hates the moment of weakness exposed “—have I been able to bury my father and brother, and give them even a quarter of the honour they deserve. Wilt thou take too the right to mourn from me?”
“Is ‘t thine also the right to die?” They have both slipped into informal speech. Caranthir’s grey eyes flash, cold and forbidding. “Is ‘t thine also to squander the sacrifice of thy dead and wait as a dying rodent for the vultures to come?” He leans down and grabs Haleth by the elbow, heaves her up roughly. But when she winces for her shoulder, sways momentarily on her feet, the hard line of Caranthir’s mouth softens slightly, and he loops her arm around his shoulders, supporting her by the waist. “I’ll give to thee incense to burn, and a tablet to inscribe their names upon,” he says, brusque and kind enough all in one, and helps her back in the direction of the camp.
A raven flies above them, and at this time Haleth thinks nothing of it.
Now, wounds cleaned and bandaged, matted hair cut short and washed, Haleth sits cross-legged on the borrowed sleeping roll in her borrowed clean clothes in her borrowed tent. She feels different. Raw. Cold.
She leaves the burning brazier where it is, halfway across the tent.
Caranthir has directed that she be accorded the honour of a chief of her people. “It is something you will get used to,” he says, and she does not reply. He is Elven; he does not understand the difference between a peaceful death and violent one. He is callous; he does not care.
It does not matter, Haleth tells herself fiercely. He is not her liege-lord. They will part ways at dawn, and he will be but a footnote in her book of life.
He returns bearing incense in a black lacquered box and an inkwell and brush balanced on top. In his other hand he carries a plain wooden tablet, and Haleth feels her eyes widen of their own accord when Caranthir lays it down near her.
Sandalwood. It does not grow here in Thargelion, where the winters are harsh and the summers are rainy, as if the ice of midwinter refuses to relinquish its hold over even Beleriand’s commercial capital and is determined to make this port of trade a seaport in truth. And why he carries it with him, or with his guard is beyond Haleth, but none of that is the point. Caranthir must have traded for the sandalwood that must have cost him, that he hands off to Haleth as if he bought it with coin and not Valinor’s gems.
“I see you are refined,” he says at her surprise, an insult disguised as praise. A backhanded compliment, Haleth remembers is what they say in Sindarin—one of the rare times they bring imagery to speech. “Will these materials suffice?”
Haleth manages a short, jerky nod. There is no need to insult my dead when you have brought me these gifts, that I mourn them, she thinks, feeling the bitterness rise in her throat; but he has indeed given to her gifts of great worth, and she, as the new leader of her people—to call her their chief still rubs sand and salt in their collective gaping wound of emptiness—must be above returning kindness, however backhanded, with coldness. There is already enough of that in their lives.
Before Caranthir joins her sitting on her borrowed bedroll that is his—does that make it theirs, or no one’s?—he pokes at the glowing coals in the brazier with a fire iron, turning them over, not feeling the heat of the curling smoke the same way Haleth and her people do, until the flame burns high and bright. He is silent when he sits by her, a blank tablet and a hundred sweet torches waiting to be lit in memoriam between them.
Long moments pass. Haleth does not know what to make of him, this callous, merciful, foreign Elf-lord who insults her people with words and honours them with action. She knows even less what to make of him when he says, for her or for the fire to take his words to her departed, “They fought bravely.”
She looks to him; he looks away. She, the daughter of Haldad and sole scion of his house, does not relent. When at last Caranthir meets her eyes, his own are sincere. “There is no such thing as a good death, for my people,” he says, his voice quiet and his mouth twisting, sharp and wry, “but thy kin were true, and heroes to the end.”
Perhaps it is Haleth’s imagination, but she thinks that she hears his voice waver when he utters the word heroes. Even he knows loss, then, and more sharply than the songs say.
“Stay, if you would,” says Haleth, firm and immovable as always she has been after making a decision, as always she will have to be for her people. “Wilt thou honour my kin with me?” She can see in his eyes and the corner of his mouth that he is surprised; and she can see in his solemn nod that he is reverent; and she can feel in the way he picks up the tablet and leaves her the incense as they glide, together, to kneel before the brazier, that he is grateful for the right to mourn.
Haleth drops the first handful of incense sticks into the flame, and with the thick, earthy aroma of incense surrounding her, covering her as a veil, she inscribes on the sandalwood tablet the names of her father and her brother in ink as black as night, as dark and decisive and divisive as death. She finishes the last stroke and lays the brush aside. Tradition dictates that the second handful of incense be laid upon the flame now.
This honour she yields to the silent Elf-lord who keeps vigil with her. Then together they bow, to the altar for their departed: the first for the time spent together; the second for honour, in life and in death; and the third for farewell.
(Haleth has no time to think on how quickly it became their departed, not her departed.)
Thargelion’s lord settles her people in his city. For a week, a moon, a season or many—“You are in my lands, and under my protection,” he says when she demands to know his terms. “Those are the terms, for the law of guest-right remains holy in my halls. Till that law be overturned by some greater evil than the good we can do—” his eyes darken and Haleth knows that he speaks not in vague, shimmering visions of fate, as fleeting as a mirage of water in the deserts in the East; but as one who knows that the future, in broad strokes, at least, has already been painted, and how “—or you have no such need of my protection, you and your people will have refuge here. For the Shadow remains your enemy, and mine, whatever betide; and if nothing else, we are allies.”
It is the most Caranthir has said in one moment to her.
Haleth mulls it over. If nothing else, we are allies. What does he mean by that? What does he want from her that he will not ask for?
She is stubborn, and fiercely independent, but she is neither naïve nor foolish. And whom has this war not made lonely?
“Allies,” she says in answer, looking east from Thargelion’s highest turret to the haunted lands from which she came. She can see the mountains they crossed; with an icy breath, she imagines she can see the second pass they took, whose ridges narrowed to be foot’s-width thick. The wind whips her choppy curls, cut short for mourning. It does not escape her how Caranthir names her people allies instead of subjects. “At the very least.”
From the watchtower a hundred paces from the city gates comes the harsh caw of a raven, sealing their deal.