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Doves cluck and preen near the bed of leaves all around Arwen, one of them the milk-white of her grandmother’s feathers. She wonders whether her father’s heart ever fluttered between terror and courage, wondering which one of them was the final straw for her uncle. She’s still breathing, the breaths turn the leaves over her face into a small ecosystem, living and moving, and over it the sun, spraying over her the prismatic ectoplasm of Lúthien’s face, Lúthien’s future. Fire rages through Sirion, though in reverse. There are soldiers racing through the bowels of the city, there are flames in the sky. In the looming face of death, aloofness is impossible. Loneliness is murderous. What would Elrond have turned into, had Sirion not burned? What would Elros have chosen? What would they have been to one another if the world had permitted them the ordinary cruelty of brothers growing old together, instead of making their childhood into a question that history would spend centuries answering badly?
And then that past and its future too vanishes, sucked into the same incoherently formless fog that has ensnared all of Arwen’s recent days and nights. The past and present loop together, tangle and overlap like long blades of grass, her little girls wearing her father’s face, grinning like her uncle. She tries to inject herself back into the closer past, the heaving crowds of Gondor’s town square, her people, hers alone, who looked to her as queen. No matter how much she tries, the faces are all long blurs knitted into a disorienting flesh-maze that she can only float above, over and above, all the way to the balcony. Once she is on the balcony, everything is pointless. The world could end, and Arwen’s eyes would be on Aragorn still, Aragorn alone, her children alone, their toys, their games, all their little dramas on these dizzying parapets, high above the lowest circle of the whitest city. The crowd lurches.
And then suddenly, a sharp line of linseed oil and harpstring cuts through the smell of leaves and rot and earth. It takes tremendous effort for her to open her eyes, to grab the present by its throat and haul herself upon its shoulders, like she had once kicked her little legs on Celeborn’s chest.
But her final visitor is not Celeborn.
As she lay beneath the trees, the forest begins to wear a second face. Between the trunks, she sees Lúthien moving barefoot through the leaves, her hair catching briefly on branches, and farther off Elros stands at the nape of the sea, turning as though someone had called his name. She cannot tell whether she is remembering them or whether the dying mind simply grows generous with its dead. The paths between the trees seem to lengthen, and roots straighten into a thousand roads she could have taken, had she not taken this one. Moonlight becomes water. Everywhere she looks there are lives she inherited and can no longer return.
Someone is kneeling beside her.
It is Maglor.
Of course it is Maglor, and not some beautiful fabrication of the last hours, but Maglor with mud on his knees, hair tangled with leaves, his old-young-old face drawn sharply by in the forest light, she feels the heat of his hand around hers, and for a moment she is almost furious with the world for giving her this instead of what she wanted. Instead of Celebrían, taking her home, or Elrond, or even Estel hastening her passage. Then his thumb moves against her palm, only once and very awkwardly, as if to make certain she’s still inside her body and that he’s not watching another soul crumble into dust.
She would reach for Maglor, she knows, if her gifted body allowed her to do such a thing. She knows that it’s the instinct of the dying, to reach out for the nearest warm thing, the closest scrap of life. Was that not what Elrond did, when he first saw Maglor snoring by a campfire beside the ruins of his old nursery? Her hand dares, and manages it. She traces the planes of his lip, takes hold of his chin and watches his wide, sorrowful eyes. She wonders what Maglor must have thought, the moment he had awoken and found Elrond’s little fingers exploring his face like this. Was he heavy with remorse? Did he wish to play whatever game Elrond was playing with him? Did he wish to deserve such a thing?
He smiles at her, though the expression is so slight that she might have imagined it.
“You took your time,” she says at last, weakly. “I thought you were meant to be good at finding people.”
“I’m much better at finding people who are trying not to be found.”
She closes her eyes again, because the effort of looking at him has become considerable under the weight of the implication inherent in Maglor’s words, that Arwen wanted to be found, and because she knows that if she keeps them open she’ll have to watch his face changing as he understands that this woman will die regardless of his presence at her deathbed. The sudden twinge in his stomach at the memory of Maedhros, obsolete and empty handed. There are no children to be found in these woods. Arwen has spent the last few months watching people understand such things about her. She has watched her father spend a lifetime understanding this about her, and feeling humiliated, becoming cautious and lowering their voices and touching her as though she may break.
“Of all the things you could have chosen,” Maglor says lightly, settling himself down with his back against the tree. “Of all the things, Arwen.”
“I didn't choose to die,” says Arwen. “There came a moment when I stopped trying to imagine my life beyond its edges. I sat awake beneath the trees while the night spun around me, the cold entering my hands, and I felt my blood moving, lungs filling, warmth leaving me into the air. I found something so violently beautiful in the knowledge that I might be so spent by the world, through no action of my own. I was too in awe to make a conscious choice, too ensconced by delight. At that moment, I knew I would die.”
“Were you afraid?”
“Only a little, and only for a while. And it was peaceful.”
“Peaceful?”
“Like a swan spotting a great shadow in the water and beating itself bloody against the reeds in fright, frantic to escape and dive deep. The going still, the understanding that the shadow is not some great bird of prey you could never have avoided but a sea-serpent spinning beneath the water you had swum in all your life.”
She’s dying. She knows she’s dying. There is something so strangely familiar in the way Lothlorien starts to enter her as she starts to die, like the way Doriath entered her grandfather—not this one, god, no, not this one, this one’s role is unthinkable in th—when Doriath started to die. The damp is already gathering beneath her hair, the earth is cold through the leaves beneath her spine, and each breath takes less of the world into her and gives more of herself back to it: warmth into the air, salt into the soil, faint mineral blood seeping into the roots threading beneath her. She has spent all her life imagining the body, hers, as the boundary of the self, the thing that carried her from one place to another, that distinguished Arwen from the tree above her and dirt beneath her, and now that boundary is becoming more and more unable to navigate.
Does the chill in her fingers belong to her hand or to the air permeating them?
The leaves stir against her cheek, and she stirs with them.
This is an odd sequence of events, an extraordinary and aberrant permeability. This is also what her body, any body, had always been doing when she was too preoccupied with aliveness to notice. Taking in the world and returning it altered: flesh made air, air made rain, rain made fruit, fruit made flesh, flesh made breath, and breath bellowing through the lungs only to leave carrying something of the person who had breathed it. Pressing her lips to those of the world in the hopes of resuscitating even the smallest part of it.
Being a daughter of Elrond, much of Arwen’s years in Middle-earth had been spent in proximity to this very exchange, without once understanding its meaning. Now, as the distinction between herself and everything touching her begins to thin, she feels the curious astonishment of skinning your knees as a child just-too-old to be carried, and being held against your mother’s chest as she picks you up off the floor. She remembers being a child asleep against Celeborn's chest, hearing his heartbeat through the fabric of his robe, and the memory came to her without the calamitous wave of nostalgia she might once have granted it. There had been no need then to know where one body ended and another began. Someone else had held her, and she had simply been there.
Her grandfather had held her.
It could have been Maglor, though it was not.
The thought frightens her because it is so close to comfort, and comfort seems almost indecent while she was still capable of wanting her children, of wishing for Estel, still capable of feeling the prey-animal panic of a city of sanctuary. Yet beneath the fear is the peculiar recognition that dying might mean becoming incapable of maintaining all the little separations upon which a life depends: flesh made air, air made rain, rain made fruit, fruit made flesh, flesh made breath. The forest does not need her to remain Arwen, but tolerates her for wanting the warmth of her body for a little longer, the weight of her corpse sinking beneath the leaves, the minerals that would eventually pass elsewhere. She finds, to her surprise, and at last, that she does not resent it.
Maglor looks at her for a long time. “That sounds very much like choosing to die, girl. It sounds like you’d spotted the serpent, and decided your death would be by drowning, and that your death was absolute. You saw your father suffer through seven thousand years, and saw your end at the far end of his eyes. That’s what it sounds like.”
“It probably does.”
“Will you forgive me for saying so?”
“Probably not.”
He snorts. It is this, more than anything, that makes Arwen remember the first time she met this grandfather-creature of here.
The first thing Maglor Fëanorian ever told her was to never look for equality in death. It had been a classically Maglor utterance, Maglor being a creature who seldom answered any question put truly to him, choosing instead to go delving beneath and beside it, and finally choosing to answer a question that would only become relevant to the asker (in this case, Arwen) in another fifty years. In the fifty years she has known him, she has decided this is one of the things that she likes about Maglor, though it is also one of the things that make him most intolerable.
“In most feudal societies,” he’d informed her, busily peeling an apple he has plucked without permission from the Western orchard, sitting beneath an apricot tree threatening to split under the weight of its fruit, due to his love of pointless contrarianism, “a king must die thrice, and a queen twice. Note I say must, and not do. The ones who don’t, however, are remembered in history as either tyrannical or useless.”
“Only thrice?”
“Four, if he was unpopular.”
He grinned at her, and his nose twitched above it.
She was surprised to find herself entirely apathetic as to the question of whether or not this fellow was beautiful. Maglor possessed an odd, old face onto which beautiful, young features had crawled like a caterpillar, and there were slips of grey in his hair but scattered and conspicuous enough that they seemed to be making a point. His nails were often dirty, though the skin around them remained soft. He turned up at the palace of Minas Tirith after having lived in Gondor for twenty four years without telling anyone, and Arwen had to make Aragorn write him a formal invitation to stay after he’d already stayed in the fourth guest wing for six weeks straight. He was quite difficult to get rid of. When she went to die, she didn’t take his leave, and told herself it was because she hadn’t found the right moment to say goodbye.
“In Tirion,” he had told her that first time, “the first death was the death of the body, and the second is the washing of the same. The third is the pyre, at which point the body ceases to belong to the family, and becomes part of a people. Often, it takes a little push for such things to happen. My father had to give a speech, you know, for such things to happen.”
“And the fourth?”
“If there is a fourth, it is when the children he had known forget his voice. It is the cruellest death, and the most pointless of them all.”
It was impossible, Arwen had swiftly discovered, to know whether Maglor was joking about the dead. He had lived too long among them to treat death with the reverence expected of a man who had killed so many people and lost so many more, and his irreverence was the only way he could touch a thing without allowing it to become sacred enough to possess him.
There are death customs throughout Gondor, though no single Gondorian way of dying has ever existed in the manner people later liked to pretend. The Númenórean inheritance survives most visibly in stone cut to outlast those who mourn, though even this changed as stone becomes expensive, cities become crowded, and the distinction between the mausoleum of a nobleman and the grave of a labourer becomes increasingly useful to people who wish to preserve hierarchy as tradition. In the mountain settlements, the first rain of the season is sometimes collected and used to wash the dead, because the rain is understood to have travelled over the peaks before touching the body and therefore carried the country with it. Along the Anduin, families tie white cloth around the wrists of the dead and do not remove it until the seventh morning, by which time the cloth usually acquires the colour of the household: flour, soot, blood, river mud, yellowing kitchen grease. In Lossarnach, a little soil is sometimes placed beneath the tongue, a reminder that speech belonged finally to the earth from which the speaker had come. In Pelargir, salt might be placed beneath the eyelids, a custom whose origin had become sufficiently obscure that three different families would confidently attribute it to Númenor, to Umbar, and to some fisherman's wife who had lived before either city possessed its present name.
Minas Tirith has its own habits, most of them domestic and therefore more enduring than any decree. The dead are washed in their own homes when possible. Their hair is combed and their best clothes are put upon them, though in poor houses the best might simply mean the least patched. Children are taught that the body must be spoken to while it is being washed because only hearing children would allow the corpse into the future.
Kings are another matter. A monarch of Gondor is traditionally washed by twelve people, though the number has changed often enough that no one without a footlong beard can agree whether twelve has any original significance. The twelve are supposed to represent the breadth of the realm: household, army, city, field, river, mountain, guild, temple, and the various territories that had once been incorporated into the kingdom by treaty or force. By Arwen's time, the symbolism had become increasingly elastic. Some places were represented by people who had never visited them; others by people who had been born in them and were forever condemned to speak for them.
Zohyr and Zuharah had been among the twelve when Aragorn died, and they were fourteen. Arwen remembers seeing them through tears at the far end of the washing room, two children standing beside the other attendants in clothes too fine for servants and too plain for court. Their fathers had sent them north, as the renewed tribute arrangements required, because Gondor had learned to describe the old hostage system in terms of education, and the future. They were wards, the court said, who were being educated, whose presence was an honour granted to their families, an opportunity for the children, a bond between kingdoms conquered and the conquereing kingdom.
Aragorn's body lay between the three of them and the nine others, pale and grey, like spoiled milk. Even after all the years she had spent beside him, Arwen could not understand how death had made him so recognisably himself and yet so entirely unreachable, with his open-facing hands and washed-and-combed hair, and a face that was his, yet no longer belonged to him.
“Think of it this way,” she looked up then, unsurprised to see that Maglor had turned up uninvited during the washing with a forged invitation, and had noted the reluctant look on the children’s face as they washed the king’s feet. “Think of it like this, young Zohr and Zuharah of Umbar. When you go home, and you will go home—imagine the story you can tell. I was there when Elessar, the Usurper of Umbar, drew his last rattling breath.”
“And then I washed his corpse,” said the boy, his lip stuck out beneath the faint, dark fuzz of his adolescent moustache. He turned to Maglor, and continued in a plaintive whisper, in the sibilant Umbari. “They’re making me join them, washing his corpse.”
“It’s an honour,” Eldarion said, kindly chiding the ward, his cheeks flushed with sorrow. “He is the king, Zohyr. And my father. That’s my father’s feet you’re washing. Alongside me, and his own wife. It is no dishonour we are forcing upon you. You are free to retire to your chambers as and when you wish. Perhaps you should.”
“I’m sorry, lord,” apologised Zohyr, turning his eyes back to Aragorn’s feet. “I never meant to cause offence.”
Maglor gave them all a long, searching look, before winking at the two. “Think of it this way, Zohyr-Zuharah, he said pleasantly in Umbari. “Imagine what a story you can tell your friends.”
“About this honour?" asked the unsettlingly beautiful Zuharah, wrinkling her nose slightly. “Lord, decades before the final war, this king put fire to the Corsair ships. To my grandfather’s ship, and he had only just—“
“—made it!” Zohyr piped up, not wanting to be outshone by not only his sister, but a girl. “And he lost everything!”
“I know, boy. I have watched fleets burn too, both yours and others. It is a cruel image, but I can assure you this. The cruel image of a burning fleet does not stop the man who burned it from being King Eldarion’s father, and a beloved one to boot. In order for this kingdom to persist as it does, Elessar must be Eldarion’s father in the books. And so, you wash the ashes from his deathbed in order for history to unfold without creases. Though that doesn’t mean you don’t have a funny story to tell, regardless.”
“What could possibly be so funny about this?” Zuharah raised her eyebrows.
“How many of your peers in the City of the Corsairs can say they’ve seen the Gondorian king’s anus, up-close and personal?”
And though Arwen had no idea about what on earth Maglor was jabbering about and had a sneaking suspicion he was insulting his technical son in law, the face he pulled was so elastically grotesque that she could not help laughing, even as she was washing her dead husband’s body, having to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.
Later, when they were alone, he told her about Elrond and Elros at last, something he had avoided bringing to her doorstep for all those vague years she had spent in his presence, though Elrond had told her a hundred stories, a thousand stories.
“I loved them dearly,” said Maglor. “They loved me dearly. I know that makes people uncomfortable. And I love them still, as dearly, as ever. I have forgotten their faces, but remember that I loved them, and should love them still. Which makes the whole mess much uglier. And alas, in the eyes of Arda and even the most benevolent of the Valar cabal, ugly is the worst thing anything can be. You would know that, wouldn’t you? You, cut from the cloth of Lùthien herself.”
“I should know, shouldn’t I?” Arwen shrugged, wrinkling her nose. “And yet it troubles my heart, the thought that such genuine love can be so riddled through with ugliness. You raised them, and loved them, did you not? How can there be an ugliness to it?”
“I raised them and loved them. My raising them and loving them does not make the circumstances of their childhood better just because love grew between us, even though the love is so real it turns my ribs into harpstring. Children are capable of loving people who have hurt them. Adults are capable of loving children they have no right to love. We loved each other, but such love would never have happened, had I not catastrophically ruined their lives.”
“I have spent seven thousand years,” Maglor continued, leaning back against his plush chair, “being told that I am a father because I once became responsible for two children. I don't mind being called that, and I do not think it untrue. I mind the idea that the word erases everything else. I was not a father in the way Elrond deserved a father. I was a father who ran his own lieutenant through with a sword because he refused to burn down the market square of Sirion. But I loved him, Arwen. I loved him as he loved you.”
“And me?” she had asked at that, her cheeks flushing with humiliation at blurting out something so childish.”What of me?”
“You were never mine.”
Her breath caught in her throat.
“I don't mean that cruelly.”
“I know. Though I’m not sure how exactly you mean it, or whether you mean it at all.”
“I never knew you as a child. I knew stories about you. I knew Elrond had daughters, I knew your mother was Celebrían, I knew you were beautiful and stubborn and had chosen mortality, which seemed to me an astonishing thing for somebody who had never met you. But I could not love you as I loved him because I had not been there. You had never been mine, and for all I know, you could have an intolerable attitude.”
Arwen considered this.
“And now?”
Maglor smiled.
“Now I know you have an intolerable attitude. And I just might begin to love you for it.”
She laughed again, and that was the beginning of it.
There was always much laughter between Arwen and Maglor. This surprised Arwen more than affection had. Affection could be inherited, imposed upon you by blood or history or the long habit of having survived beside somebody; laughter required invention. Maglor would take some solemnity of the Eldar and turn it sideways until it became ridiculous. She would answer by finding the absurdity in one of his old Fëanorian certainties. They began to make these small collisions deliberately: a word altered by one syllable, an ancient grievance placed beside some entirely unsuitable observation about weather, the sacred made briefly ridiculous and therefore, somehow, less brittle. Each joke joined two things that had never previously touched. Something passed between them in that instant which neither had brought alone.
This was the real strangeness of their friendship, the production of a thing neither had possessed before. Arwen could give Maglor a way of seeing the present which did not require him to abandon the past; Maglor could return to her some older, stranger version of her own inheritance, loosened from nostalgic reverence. Their conversations became little acts of ecology: symbiotic cross-pollination, one history entering another and coming away altered. They learned each other's silences, then learned to interrupt them. They laughed at things that would have horrified their younger selves. It was not forgiveness, and it was not absolution. It was two souls, having been evicted from their potential, pooling their coins to lease a small cottage in the corner of their minds.
Another thing Arwen noticed throughout the years had been the way in which Maglor seemingly distrusted the wisdom in his veins. Arwen had certainly noticed this before he admitted it himself. He would sometimes speak with the confidence of a prince and then recoil from his own conclusion as though he had discovered someone else's hand inside his sleeve. He had spent so long imagining inheritance as a chain that he could not initially understand how a person might receive something without being obliged to repeat it.
His relationship with Maedhros remained the deepest wound in him, though he rarely spoke of it directly. There were habits between them that had once seemed indistinguishable from love: obedience mistaken for intimacy, suffering mistaken for loyalty, the conviction that because they had endured the same catastrophe they therefore possessed one another. Maglor had spent centuries wandering partly because he had believed movement was the only available form of refusal. He had not understood that one could refuse someone without giving away the ground beneath one’s feet.
When Arwen once asked him whether he would stay if she asked him to, he told her no.
She was offended, justifiably so, and made it clear.
“Good,” he said. “Good, that’s good.”
“That is an appalling answer.”
“You asked me whether I would stay because you asked. I would rather stay because I wanted to. It’s quite in character, you know. I didn’t exactly take in your father and Elros just because they asked. In fact, they didn’t ask. The little fellows came kicking and screaming, and Elros had even kicked Maedhros right in the balls. Can you imagine his scarred face in that moment? A creature that had survived decades of literal torture and came out of it relatively well, being brought to his knees by a soft-shoed kick in the balls? From a descendent of Thingol? It was like watching a baby blow out a wildfire. Had our other brothers been alive, I tell you that Celegorm would have killed him in his sleep out of secondhand embarrassment."
“How on earth am I meant to parse whatever you’ve just said?” Arwen had laughed then. “You make everything so difficult.”
“I have had practice.”
He had. She loved him, and her compassion seemed to have no bottom, but her disappointment in him could still find the tenderest flesh. She believed him strong, and measured him by the inner strength she remembered, the strength of her father who had carried impossible things without bending for so long, and so every failure arrived to her as a choice before she understood it was an injury. She had not yet learned that Maglor was lost, with no road inside him by which to find his way back. He could follow the light of Eärendil. But how could he? How could he? What right did he—
Mesnwhile, he had begun to know the children of the court, heirs and spares and minor aristocrats. This was an accident, and he had never intended to become a fixture in the nursery, and the first time he was found there, he claimed that he had been looking for the kitchens. The second time he said he was returning a book. By the third, nobody believed him and the children had started waiting for him after lessons, though it was with Eldarion he played the most.
Arwen watched him with her son and, for one treacherous moment, saw Elrond there instead. Not truly him; the mind is a poor necromancer, and its dead are always wearing the wrong face. But there was something in the elf’s bent shoulders as he corrected Eldarion's fingers over lyre strings, or the sudden exasperated laugh when the boy missed a note, which made the phantom seem solid. She supplied the rest without meaning to: Elrond seated beside him, older than she had ever known him, listening with a grave attention which made childish nonsense feel worth preserving. The two of them belonged together in the little domestic scenario her mind had manufactured, and she hated herself for how beautiful it was.
She would stand at the threshold of the playroom a long while after Eldarion had run ahead, watching Maglor pack away the instruments and clear away the blocks, shooing away the nursery maids (though he would call upon them anytime one of the younger ones had an accident, because Maglor was Maglor and Maglor was a prince). Nothing had happened in those hours he played with Eldarion, not a thing had been restored to Arwen, because it was only an image, and therefore crueler for its perfection.
She knew that she had never seen Elrond and Maglor as she had seen this: no war nor oath nor flight, no child caught between histories, only the small world of a small boy who was loved by the big men who had become, in different ways, his inheritance and his legacy. Arwen wanted to step inside that phantom and shudder in its delightful coolness and remain there until it became ordinary and lukewarm. She wanted there to be no incorrigible nostalgia to it, for Arwen was no longer of the Eldar. It was oddly natural, the figure she cut, the longings she nursed. Some of the things we mourn are not the things we lost, but things that never had the chance to occur.
And failure. How often we mourn failure, how often we flog the skin off our own backs. There were days when she wondered whether a kingdom could love its king. Or its queen. Yes. Could a kingdom ever love a queen? The question had seemed childish when she first entertained it, and then increasingly difficult the longer she remained in Gondor. Arwen had been raised among people who believed themselves capable of remembering the silhouette of a thing after the thing could no longer fill its own shadow-lines. It was one of the more dangerous privileges of the Eldar: the mistaking of proximity for permeability. She knew the histories of Númenor, the names of its kings, the grievances carried westward in the ships, both unjust and just; she knew the stories Men had made of themselves and of the Eldar, and the stories the Eldar had made of them. None of this told her how a woman of Gondor should stand in a room where men had been fighting for a thousand years over what the room meant, what it hadn’t succeeded in meaning, and what it should never mean. She could not arrive with Doriath in her mouth, the Doriath she learned from Lothlorien, and expect it to become Gondor merely because she had loved Doriath.
There had been Gondorian customs she found barbarous, some distasteful and others merely unfamiliar; things she would want to change because they wounded her, and things she would initially mistake for wounds because she had never needed them. Arwen began to understand that being a queen could not mean importing a perfected ideal of herself into a country and asking the country to accommodate her self-image.
This was more difficult than power. Power had always seemed simple enough to Arwen, due to her proximity to the same, a thing possessed, exercised, resisted. She was the daughter of one of the ringbearers, the grandchild of another. What frightened Arwen was the possibility that she might become a useful person with a triumphant legacy without becoming the author of everything around her. Because Gondor was not waiting for Arwen Undómiel. Gondor was a living system already crowded with rulers, gods, histories, schools, rivers, fields, guilds, graves, children, arguments, toilets. Arwen could only ever enter it as an organism enters an ecosystem: carrying something, altering something, displacing everything. There was a humility in that which did not feel as much like diminishment as she had thought, because after all, she would still have a voice; would still make decisions; would still sometimes be wrong with all the force available to a queen. She would go through the grueling gauntlet of discovering where, within a kingdom’s innumerable dependencies, one's own weight could be borne without crushing the network of roots.
The Gondorian queen would be written by the people of Gondor. The Gondorian queen would be written by the people of Harad. But the people of Gondor did not know her well enough, and the people of Gondor-occupied Harad did not care to know such silly things. That became more difficult to ignore as the years passed.
Maglor had travelled south often. He returned from Harad with dust in the seams of his clothes and an increasingly hostile relationship with Gondorian maps. Some tittered behind his back, for heightening his horse by passive-aggressively chiding others for things had had once happily both endorsed and partook in. Which was fair enough, because that was quite literally what he was doing in the Harad.
He had enjoyed the desert. There were villages whose names had changed three times in two generations, rivers that had been diverted for plantations, wells that had become military property, roads built for armies and later described as trade routes. There were people who spoke of Gondor with exhaustion, and people who spoke of it with reverence, and people who hated its very existence. His very favourite had been the Havens of Umbar, one of the most contested pieces of territory in Arda, where Aragorn had burned a fleet of Corsair ships before the war, a prize of war, now under Gondorian control. Maglor had watched chieftain after chieftain send their firstborns to the Gondorian courts, heard mother after mother keening into shoulders.
Being surrounded so closely by the sea and surrounding the sea itself, it had been a city concerned with weather warnings and tidelines, steamers, flatboats, timber, pierwood: the primary traffic was oceanic, as was the primary industry. The sea stretched and curved alongside a perfunctory white strip of sand after which it yawned all the way out to the horizon, flattened beneath the weight of the sky. Small ships peppered the harbour, sails drooping when the winds are quiet, resting like a pack of greyhounds after a race.
And the Umbarin coast did not only boast greyhound rowboats but every manner of shipping vessel Maglor had ever seen, and many he had never set eyes upon. Heavily laden freightships hauling cargo from deeper Harad, looming barges with flats lashed on their flatter sides, laden with chests of gold and bundles of jute. Then there were small country boats, longboats with deep paddles and carvings upon the side, tiny black crescent vessels of the individual fishermen and the high-sterned galleons of the Corsairs, now cargo vessels under the command of the Gondorian administration. A majestic sight they seemed to make to him, drifting half-asleep in the wind, leaving less than a ripple in the water, brass studdings glittering beneath the sun.
It was a lively city, that of the Corsairs, shuddering with life: rafts of seaweed that spread in floating green platforms, hyperactive porpoises somersaulting in the far reaches of the bay, grey and blue and suncoloured, crabs and egrets waging war in the shallows, pious seagulls preening on buoys. The waves lapped against the piers, the salt spread on the dock, and young, brown-skinned Umbarin boys dared each other to ‘tombstone’ off the highest beach-cliff into the deepest point of the bay, avoiding the scrags of rock.
One caught Maglor’s eye on his first visit, a boy not even eight, who gave him a glare of deepest resentment. His eyes widened as the boy reached into his pocket, drawing out a rudimentary slingshot—but he needn’t have worried. A small brown dog began yapping at his feet, and the boy’s attention left Maglor as he pulled out a twig from his pocket and tossed it into the distance. The dog had been his father’s, and he was keeping his father alive the only way he knew how, and the dog was keeping his master alive the only way it knew how. It was the glorious fourth age of Arda, where mausoleums lived in every gesture: the catching of a badly thrown twig, the aiming of a trembling slingshot. It was what he would one day have to reconcile with his love for his granddaughter.
He got angry thinking about it, often, and never would he be angrier than the time he was playing with Eldarion and was struck with a sudden memory of the aftermath of a ship-burning in the first few days of peacetime after the Ring War, in response to a Haradrim boycott and dockworker strike. His eyes had widened when day dawned and the wreckage revealed itself, realising he could not distinguish this ship-burning from that ship-burning, were he to consider the aesthetics alone.
He sat there on the beach for a full day as the anger had left him in drips, sloshes, leaks, due to being displaced by disgust. His chest had tightened as he watched the fishing boats return, picking their way through the carnage, like greyhounds upon a battlefield: it had dusk, and the vessels were confused by the slow-spreading gleam of oil, their slim bows not hiding their devastation at this new meeting. The film covered their little hulls like rope nooses around the necks of field mice, the speckled barnacles around their sterns drinking the fluid thirstily. A single, sticky gull lay mired in the mess, shimmering as if with lacquer, the plump sunset belatedly bestowing upon it a pale grapefruit hue.
Was this the Gift of Men? Maglor had wondered. Has it come to this? He looked across at a youth, now almost a man, who was staring at the ships as well, the ships someone’s father wrought, his revulsion writ clearer than ever. The shadow of the orc, thought Maglor. The shadow of Mordor. The shadow of Gondor. For a moment, a swift and furious impulse swept over him: a sudden desire he’d thought he’d mastered centuries ago, the urge to light a torch, hold it over her head and walk into the glittering sea. He was not shy of letting Arwen know exactly what he thought.
“Maglor, there is no chance of any desert not requiring intervention to blo—“
“Desert this, desert that,” said Maglor, cheerfully clip-clopping around her on his high horse. “Everyone speaks of the desert as though it were the residue of some natural catastrophe, a punishment the earth inflicted upon itself. But salt and sea are so often the final landscape in the story of war and conquest. Remember Sirion. Remember Beleriand. Remember Maglor Fëanorian.”
Arwen’s lips tightened at how Maglor of all people had the audacity to speak so casually of Sirion. “Sirion and Umbar are incomparable,” she snapped. “Sirion was not a desert, and Beleriand had been a thousand times more fertile than this land beneath our feet.”
“I did not say it was a desert. I only said nobody came to Beleriand, and nobody in Beleriand went to each other, without a desire to extract more than we came to extract. Which is, I’m afraid, precisely what is happening to this little desert your lord husband is aiming to unite. First the biota is taken, then the topsoil, then the water; what remains is assigned as barren, even though barrenness is little but the aftermath of appetite. Gondor calls Harad arid because it is easier than calling it drained. Minas Tirith must tell itself it is a closed system which must consume in order to grow, and then discovers that consumption produces waste. So it pushes the waste outward, into rivers, into seized territories and spoils of war, into the lungs of conquered children.”
Arwen sighed, leaning back in her seat and taking her grandfather’s hand. “Ada used to say that the border between any two territories was the distance between cause and consequence.”
“And dearest Elrond is absolutely correct. That is the trick of this kind of war, this kind of extraction,” he said. “The winners draw maps to turn its own detritus into geography. The ruin becomes the nature of the ruined place. Then, centuries later, someone stands among the dunes and says: look how inhospitable this place is. Look how hostile these people are—“ here, he shook his head and winked. “—you know, Ulfang was one of the most miserable cunts I have ever had the misfortune of encountering and I remain perpetually delighted about my moment of running his son through with my sword, but unlike what your history books say, I don’t think his treachery was transmitted through the umbilical cord.”
Arwen disliked hearing it, at first. She disliked it because he was sometimes right, because he was sometimes wrong, and because the distinction was difficult to maintain when the thing being discussed was her husband's kingdom and therefore, by extension, her own complicity. Gondor had done terrible things, yet had rebuilt roads, restored wells, reopened schools, ended wars, fed cities and buried its own victims by the thousands. That the same institution could perform all these things without becoming morally legible made Arwen begin to suspect that this was one of the peculiar difficulties of queenship that Elrond had forgotten to warn her about. How every clean decision produced dirty consequences somewhere beyond the edge of one's vision.
When Estel died, Arwen had given him all the rites his station deserved, all the mourning her heart could bear. She then walked to the square, blessed Aragorn II’s departure and scattered a handful of his hairs across his favourite orchard. On the day of his state funeral, she kissed history into his brow before his people, and accommodated his death into her story.
By this point, she knew that royal history was primarily a series of accommodations. The work of a ruler was not to prevent the falling but to keep making arrangements among the fallen, and decide where the roots may take hold after the wall has come down. Doriath was gone because it could not remain Doriath. Lothlórien will go because once Celeborn leaves, heartsick and lovelorn, it cannot remain Lothlórien. Arwen will fail because she cannot remain Arwen. The thought was a relief. There was no throne upon which a body could sit indefinitely without becoming a monument, and she was the daughter of Elrond and knew that the average monument, for all its apparent endurance, was just another kind of corpse.
And of course Doriath returns to Arwen in Lothlorien, that series of accommodations and arrangement of absences with the silvered trees and sheltered paths, the attempt to keep the world at bay through vigilance. All her life, Arwen has been promised that some things are beyond the reach of time, all her life, she has watched her father age agelessly and make a fool of such a promise. Men have died and the elves have left, kingdoms of old have become new stories, only stories. So much of the world she knew is now irretrievable.
Her eyes beg to close. Arwen of Imladris, dying in Lothlorien, queen of a life she fears Lúthien of Doriath would have spurned. An elf who had allowed the future of Men to be written upon the surface of her skin. The dark-haired boy-tributes still trickle north to the courts of Minas Tirith in her name. And that tattered sieve of a Fëanorian, warning her against it. Telling her that the longer those boys were reared in Gondorian palaces, the more cause Gondor would have to weep blood. Because he had been what such things did to such boys. He had seen what such things did to such boys. What being the price of war did to a person. What her father knew. What Estel knew, and closed his eyes to.
Beyond the mellyrn, a deer moves through the undergrowth and breaks a twig; water gasps helplessly through a brook near her. Arwen listens to these minute permissions of the living world and for the first time in years, my god, so many years alive, she is glad to be dying once more. How terrifying it is, inaction, how breathlessly paralysing is the unmoving life, to do nothing whilst the world acts regardless. The river eats the city and the seed splits the earth and the fallen tree becomes Gondolin for termites and then it too turns white and turns to dust, then a dark seam of fungus, then unbroken soil, all without the expectation to explain itself, the choice to disappear. What is there to explain about the desire to die? There will never be another Doriath. There should never be another Doriath. And Sirion. Only the cruellest of worlds would sculpt another Sirion. Both, only wavefroth and compost for the worlds to come. What a wonderful thing that is, for a life to become, for a death to become: an alteration of conditions through which something else is made possible.
She asks Maglor about Elros.
She has always been curious about him, though curiosity has never been a simple thing where Elros is concerned. He is the other famous person who chose mortality, another comparison placed upon her before she was old enough to understand what comparisons did to children. Elros had chosen the Gift and become a king; she would chooee the Gift and become a queen. Elros had founded a kingdom; she had entered one. Elros had died; she would die.
“What did he think?” she asks.
“About dying?”
“Yes.”
“I was not there. I had seen Elrond before he left, and we had dined together, and the word atonement was not brought up once. I never saw Elros after Beleriand. But I know him,” Maglor looks towards the brook. “He was afraid, Arwen.”
The answer comforts her more than anything else could have. She had imagined that Elros, having made the decision first, must have understood something she did not. She had imagined his mortality as a kind of confidence, the famous courage of a man who knew what he was choosing and where that leap of faithlessness in all he had known would take him. But he was not such a man. He was his mother’s son.
“He was ungrateful,” Maglor says. “For the Gift, when it came at last. I think he was ungrateful.”
This is why she had wanted Maglor here. He does not make the Gift beautiful merely because it is called a gift. Elros is Elwing’s son, and Elwing had chosen to die, and then chose to live. She is glad for his illustration of Elros’ fear. Because Arwen is frightened. Her fear comes in waves, physical and stupid. Sometimes she wants to crawl out from under the trees and wail for her children. Sometimes she wants Aragorn with such intensity that her body seems to bend around the absence of him. Sometimes she thinks of Aman and is horrified by the possibility that it might actually be as beautiful as she was told it would be, because beauty would make the separation worse. Sometimes she thinks of Lúthien and hates the woman she has never met for having made her mortality into a tree so bent under its full canopy of fruit that everyone after her must now live beneath its shadow.
“Will you sail?” Arwen asks. “After this, I mean. Will you sail with my brothers?”
Maglor says nothing, but she can see from her prone position that he is shaking his head.
“Then that makes two of us who will never see Aman again,” she smiles. “Just imagine that. The kinslayer and the evenstar, barred from paradise.”
“Who both chose to be barred. Well, stay barred, in my case.”
“Will we miss it?” Arwen asks faintly. “I have never seen it, you know. What do you think we’ll miss?”
“Of course we’ll miss it. The feral foxes of Tirion’s Old Quarter first, I think, though I cannot say why. We will only ever hear of them from those scant seabirds who return: the little crabs clinging to driftwood, the green weed lying in long ribbons beneath the shallows, the gulls making such an ungodly noise at dusk that no one can hear oneself think. Someone will tell us about the taste of the fruit there, and we will try to imagine it, having already decided that our imagination is sufficient. And it will be sufficient.”
“We will never know which trees hold their flowers through the night,” continues Arwen, a tear sliding down her temple though she remains smiling. She hears it fall onto fabric, and realises her head is on Maglor’s lap, and she does not know when he placed her head on his lap. “We will not know what the chalk hills visible from Númenor look like after rain. We will not sit beside a stream and watch fish who have never known a net. There will be evenings when the light comes down through the leaves and everyone beside us falls silent, because it is beautiful. We will picture our loved ones over-sea, and will understand from their faces that we have missed something. We will have missed it completely. There will be no return.”
“That will be the worst of it for us, you a descendant of Lúthien and me a relic of Fëanor. Aman’s beauty does not compel us, we spurn it and seek solace elsewhere. But we will find it so unbearable, the thought that Aman might go on being beautiful without us,” he picks small leaves and twigs out of her hair. “A child will put his hand into my favourite pond and feel a fish turn beneath his fingers. The rain will drum softly upon a roof we have never seen, and someone will open the harbour door because the air smells of the sea. We will have no claim upon any of it. We will not even know what we have missed. And still, here beneath the mallorn, with the night insects ticking in the grass and the leaves moving above us, you and I find that we do not want to exchange this ignorance for knowledge. For different reasons entirely, we have chosen the unbearable proximity of a single world, not the most beautiful one, but the ones whose losses we know most deeply, having had a hand in them ourselves.”
With neither premeditation nor purpose, Arwen turns her face towards Maglor, craning her aching neck.
“I need you to do something.”
His expression changes, and is the first time since he found her that she sees fear in him.
“Zohyr and Zuharah.”
The twins. Always, always, it is twins. He knows.
“They must go home immediately, and you must take them,” she demands in little more than a whisper, her face as imperious as any queen. “It must be you, for your sake and theirs, not least because you know the road. Cut the girl’s hair, dress her up as a boy for the road: it’ll likely be dangerous to travel as a woman—my mother...”
“They are only fourteen, Arwen,” he tries to explain. “Eldarion will arrange for them to be sent back in a royal convoy when they come of age in six years, I cannot take them alone. The road is long and treacherous, and they are very recognisable. Not as the young amir and amira of the Umbarin court, but as adolescent Haradrim boys. How can I get them through Ithilien without Gondorian arrows sprouting from their necks?”
“That’s your problem,” Arwen says snippily, adjusting her head on Maglor’s knee. “They must go. They have done nothing to deserve being kept in the court. I want you to abduct those twins, and smuggle them out of the palace. You have experience in such matters, lest we forget.”
Maglor looks down at their joined hands, his aggravating granddaughter. “Why?”
“Because they are children of the Gondorian court, in a Gondor ravaged by peacetime strife of its own making. A Gondor which, if you forget our councils, will inevitably see attacks from the Haradrim rise in the coming decade, and a Gondor that will deserve them!” her eyes blaze from her prone position and Maglor is now certain she is at death’s door, exhibiting the sudden wildfire that grips the almost-dead. “When supplies of timber and jute stop trickling through the border, what will become of a Haradrim child in a Gondorian court? Tell me, Maglor. What happens? What happens to the children of the court in a kingdom at war?”
Two sets of twins. Two great tragedies.
“Then let me take the boy alone,” Maglor protests. “The girl—she is unlikely to be slain or imprisoned, not at that age—“
“With the girl, I am not worried about her being slain. My people are not so heartless. No, I am worried about her beauty,” she laughs through her nose. “I know such things, you see, being cut from Lúthien’s cloth. And this girl… I know the whirlwind of other people’s lusts and hatred she had to navigate. Do you see what I mean? She is one of the most beautiful children I have ever been, apparently the spitting image of her mother, the former queen… and she is of a race subjugated and trodden upon. Lust, power and envy come together in deadly combinations, made worse by kingdoms at war. Morwen, Maglor. Do you not remember Morwen of Dol-lómin?”
Maglor feels his stomach do a somersault. He tries his hardest not to think of Celegorm.
“And not only that,” she continues. “Even if it does not come to that… there would be the small things too, would they not? Even from her peers. It has already begun, these small comments, made out of childish envy. I would not have Zuharah grow up weeping before mirrors and clawing at her cheeks, convinced that beneath the splendour of her mother’s visage lay the grimace of the orc.”
Her breathing has begun to rattle. Maglor clears his throat.
“Oh, Arwen,” his voice cracks. “Trust you to spend your last few hours with me arguing about politics.”
“I’m not arguing about politics, Maglor. I’m asking the kidnapper and foster-father of Elrond to help me leave the legacy that the daughter of Elrond must leave. This you can do, and this I can do, and this will be my legacy.”
Maglor shakes his head. “Legacy? Arwen, this may be a good deed, but in the eyes of Gondor, this is tantamount to treason. They will remember you as a traitor.”
“Must my legacy be constrained to Gondor alone? So many years, Maglor. So many years I have spent climbing spiral staircases to benevolent queenship, for the right to be remembered as good, and just, these compulsively passive, soothing reflexes. I cannot do it. I have never understood how best to rule a people whose generational family trees amounted to mere minutes of my life. Take them home to their mother. The third set of twins, Maglor. The third choice for us both. Think of it as a Gift.”
Finally, Maglor nods. Her body is colder now, so he pulls her closer to him. She feels the cold beginning in her toes and moving inward, and for one briefly absurd moment she is angry because she had expected death to begin somewhere more important than her little tor, the one with the hangnail to boot. She thinks of all the songs written about the final breath of mortals and wonders why nobody has ever written about the feet.
“I hope her hair grows back soon,” she murmurs. “She is so beautiful, Maglor. Lúthien. It always, always comes to Lúthien, in my life.
“She is very beautiful,” Maglor whispers, his eyes blurring. He presses a kiss to her rapidly cooling forehead. “Did you know what her name means in her language?”
Arwen closes her eyes, shakes her head. “No, I never learnt…”
“No matter. I have,” says Maglor. “It is interchangeable, actually, with the Sindarin word for the same. Zuharah, in Sindarin, is Undómiel.”
Her eyes widen, and though they never close again, there is a soft, perpetually unchanging smile upon her face. What a thing it is, to leave this world, having come to turns with your place in it. To die, having just learned something new and wonderful.
When Maglor returns to Minas Tirith, the city is already beginning to make Arwen into a dead queen.
There are arrangements, messengers, sealed letters, and arguments over where she should be buried and who should speak at the state memorial and which garments she should wear. People want to know what happened in Lothlórien, and Maglor gives them very little, brusquely telling them she died, and she was not alone, and refuses to share what the forest looked like when her breathing stopped.
And then, he takes the children home, and he does what Arwen says and stages a kidnapping, having spent enough time in Gondorian courts to know that they tend to become most eloquent when they are frightened of losing something they have never actually owned. So he kidnaps them and tells them to play along, though Zuharah point-blank refuses to cut her hair even an inch, so don’t you bloody dare! And so, they have to improvise. Maglor and Zohyr, who is very tall and pale enough of skin that a dusting of lemon juice on his hair across a few days makes him resemble a young Gondorian man enough to get guards to leave them alone, steal two sets of soldier apparel and walk in this militaristic disguise as they pass through Ithilien.
Zuharah, who obviously refuses to put anything on her waist-length hair, let alone a lemon her brother has half-eaten, is a bit more of a problem. At the end, they resort to messing her hair up and loosely tying her hands behind her back, deciding to explain, when someone inevitably asks why two male soldiers were dragging around a beautiful Haradrim girl in chains, that she had jumped the border into Gondor and that they were sending her back. However, nobody in Ithilien asks why two male soldiers were dragging around a beautiful Haradrim girl in chains.
It is that which stays with Maglor, even after he takes the twins back to their mother, even after they offer him a wing of their household to stay in, which he gladly accepts. Arwen was right, he finds himself thinking. Oh, Arwen, how right you were. Lúthien on her horse, Zuharah in her chains, Arwen upon her throne, turned heads and muffled gasps, the desire of others as a great black cloud swirling around them. Not one person. Not one person in Ithilien had stopped them, and the fact that Arwen had known that breaks Maglor’s heart.
He is sitting on the pier that evening, when he decides that now that Arwen is gone, he will never again step foot in Minas Tirith. That there is little left for him in Gondor. Little left for him anywhere. He finds peace in the knowledge, his eyes affixed on another gull trapped in grease, this not from a ship-burning but a complete, enormous barge, meant to transport shipments of coir from Umbar to Rohan. The tide carries the gull across the pristine lagoon and into the main harbour, where nobody pays it any mind until it starts smacking lightly against the pier. A dockworker clicks his teeth at the sound, sighing irritably, and picks the iridescent bird up, flinging it back into the ocean. He gives his hands a quick rinse in seawater, rubs his palms with a length of coir, and returns to his work.
Maglor sits quietly on the pier, and set his mind loose upon the world. It wanders ahead of him through the heat-hazed Harad, sinks into the sand, flies with the carrion birds turning slowly above the road, then comes racing back to the weathered body that bears it. The bellowing sea wind seems to take him bodily, scattering him over dunes and salt-marshes, carrying some part of him beyond the horizon before returning it, changed and restless, to his own skin. He hears a bird cry from somewhere beyond the hills and feels the old inward hunger answer, the heart leaning suddenly towards that sound, towards long migratory sweeps across the earth, as though there is still some enormous animal moving beneath it and he had only to follow.
The other dockworkers do not blink. None notice Maglor, and even fewer notice the gull. By the Fourth Age, everyone in Umbar is used to resplendent corpses being washed in to shore beneath the evenstar, purple-black with twilight and splayed squarely against the shore.