no other star by arriviste

Chapter 1

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Caranthir

Caranthir was the first Elf-lord she ever spoke to. Lord of Thargelion, he called himself, but Haleth knew a king when she saw one. Caranthir the Dark, his own people called him, although there was little to mark him out as darker than the other Elves around him. They were almost all alike, these Elves with their painfully bright eyes; fair-skinned as babies, but the hair caught high on their heads or flowing down their backs was, even at its lightest, still black in low light, and never warmer than brown at noon.

It was strange to her that the Sun only lent its light to these Elves, and never sank into them the way it did with Men. Her people took colour from it and kept it, in browning skin and red blisters and freckles that ranged from pinpoint dark to the sun-dappling of long grasses under the elms and oaks. The Sun stayed in their hair, bleaching brown to blond and blond to straw; it lingered with them past the point of gilding their youth, wrinkling skins and reappearing in spots on the old with more vehemence than any summer freckling ever had.

Caranthir’s hair stayed pitch black even at noon-day, and his brows were black, too, high contemptuous arches that made Haleth wary of him even before she was able to measure whether they slandered him or not. He had the kind of nose she wanted to see broken, so long and straight it was an incitation to violence, and its nostrils curled in small and precise scrolls to either side.

He soon verified the eyebrows, in any case. He was very proud that he had come in time to save her life; to rescue the Haladin who still lived from the axes and claws and daggers of the Orcs, or the slow starvation even of their success. He expected her to be grateful for it.

“If you’d come a week earlier, my gratitude would be that the much greater,” Haleth told him when he made it clear her thanks were pitifully inadequate to his feat. She was grateful, but she wasn’t going to kneel in the mud and blood to this Elf mounted on his horse high above her.

“I could scarcely come before I had heard of the attack,” said Lord Caranthir stiffly.

“I wonder at the blindness of your scouts, then,” said Haleth. “Or are these not your lands?”

His mouth opened and closed. “I owed you nothing, mortal! I came as a kindness, but there is no bond between us that would require me to do so. Your people live here without my leave.”

“There being no bond between us, we had no need to seek your leave.”

“You would be dead to a man if I had not come,” said Caranthir. “To a woman!”

“But being saved, we owe you not only thanks but obeisance?”

“I have never wanted your obeisance!”

That was clearly not in line with his desire to be thanked more profusely, and Haleth took a certain pleasure in pointing that out. Their row was nicely kindled when she became aware of their audience of exhausted Haladin and aghast Elves.

Caranthir’s white skin turned red like rolling clouds going pink at sunset. It was the most human thing she had seen him do, and welcome after the image of him that would persist with her: a god-like creature on a tall black horse with a long sharp sword and a sharper beauty, coming to her people’s aid just when their deaths seemed certain.

“You’ll forgive me,” Haleth said. It was an imperative, not a request. “I have had little sleep during the attack, and I have dead to bury.”

The Elves had taken care of the Orc dead already, heaping them into a great stack and then setting it ablaze; the air was full of acrid smoke now, oily and black. The human dead they had left, as though unsure what to do with them. They had turned them right-side up in the mud, at least, but made no attempt to lay them out as the Haladin would have. It seemed to Haleth a terrible insult, and whet the flame of her irritation. It was only in the long years after that she would realise that mourning was still a foreign art to these fair strangers.

Caranthir cleared his throat, as though the smoke had closed it. “We shall help, lady,” he said, and slid down from his saddle. He was still far too tall on his own two feet, and the star-shaped spikes on his heeled boots were ridiculous.

He could work, though. His hands weren’t too good to hold a spade, and his Elves followed him, and after several hours there were trenches enough to lay the bodies of their dead in. Now the work was personal; now the families and friends of the dead could take over, and close the eyes of their own, take what they needed from the bodies, and see them properly rested in the earth.

Haleth was laying out her father when Caranthir found her again. Haldad’s beard was full of blood and mud, and there was too little water spare for her to try combing it out, not when she was going to return him to the earth. There was a great split in his head, from ear to chin, and when she crossed his hands on his breast, several of his fingers were missing. He had been dead for days, and there had not been time to care for him. He had been dead for days, and she had had to leave him on the contested ground where he fell, among friends and foes alike, and the blood had dried black and hard into a mask on his face, and the death-stiffness had come and passed off again. There was little she could do for him now, and less still for Haldar beside him. Laying out Haldar was her law-sister’s work, but she was with her son and would not leave his side even for Haldar’s sake.

She was going to have to hit the Elf-lord if he said anything unkind.

“Your father,” he said. “And your brother?”

She nodded. Her voice was gone, from battle. That was all. “We shared the womb,” she said. “It is not common, among Men.”

“Nor among Elves,” Lord Caranthir said, and his tone had shifted. “Yet I had younger brothers who were twin-selves as well. I am sorry.”

Haleth wiped at some dirt on her cheek with the back of her hand. “They’re gone too?”

“One of them. He has been dead a long time now.”

There was a dreamy unreality to what she was doing, thanks to the difference between her dead now and her memories of them living, thanks to the long sleepless days of fighting and the shock of the quietness now. Lord Caranthir’s presence made it seem more unreal, even though he too was marked with blood and mud. He was strong enough to lift her dead in his arms from where they lay as though they weighed but little, and laid them in the earth like children, and everywhere his men were helping people to do the same.

When all the dead were in the ground and nothing remained but the work of covering their faces, he signalled to the Elves and they all stepped back, and let the Haladin take care of their own.

“Thank you,” Haleth said when it was done, and it was far more sincere than it had been before.

This time, Caranthir jerked his head in acknowledgement rather than rearing back in umbrage. The starry spurs at his heels were clogged with dirt. His white hands were marked from sword and spade-work, still beautiful in bone and shape through the grime. “I too have lost a father,” he said, and what she might have said to that, Haleth would never know.

Because then he said, “You’ll do,” abruptly. “I was wrong to think Men incapable of truly aiding us against the Shadow. Put a sword in your hands and you can kill Orcs as well as we can; I have seen how much use you might be. We were not bound to come to your aid, lady, but we might be; there is great virtue in your kind I did not recognise before. I will allow you to stay in these lands, and place you under my protection. When you have need I will come, and when I bid, you will come, and we will be bound together.”

That was where gratitude to Elves got you! Under his offer, there was such surprise at his own generosity, such surprise at his discovery of her people’s utility that Haleth bridled at it. She could hear what this proud Elf-lord wasn’t saying; you will be a shield between the East and my own people. He was thinking of her people not as partners, but as vassals, forever kneeling below him in the dirt, and looking at her as though he expected her to thank him yet again.

He was terribly surprised when she refused.

 

Finrod

When she met Finrod, he was attended by Men. They weren’t Elven-dark, but they were still dark of hair and grey of eye, less loved by the sun than Haleth’s own people. They were in the West, which suggested that they were clean-souled, at least; but they weren’t following the Sun to its furtherest rest any longer. They had stopped in the grasslands by Nargothrond and gone fallow, and at mid-day they didn’t look to the sky, they looked to Finrod the Elven-King.

Haleth could see why. His hair was bright even in the darkest light; in the sun, it was a torch. Yellow wasn’t the word for it. Yellow was the colour of celandine and daisies in the flower-meads, innocent heads turning upwards to the sky. They wore daisies in their hair at mid-summer among Haleth’s people; they followed the Sun alike. Yellow hair was special. There was young-gold, which you found in children, and sun-gold, from going about in the day; but they both faded back into dun with age or winter. True-gold was rare, and Finrod’s was the truest she had ever seen.

Yellow wasn’t the word for it; it was brighter, whiter, like metal in the forging at its hottest point. He was like that himself, painful to look upon, for all his kind words and warm interest. His skin was burning-white, and his eyes white-blue, like the heart of a flame.

Unlike Caranthir, he collected titles like beads. King of Nargothrond, Hewer of Caves, Beloved of Men. Nóm, the people of Beor called him. He was brightly dressed in blues and greens Haleth had only seen before in nature, radiant as a kingfisher, and there was gold on each of his fingers, and at his throat, and in his hair, and gems which glittered like sun on the water. When he came to visit their camp in the woods of Talath Dirnen, they could see him coming through the trees when he was still a thousand paces away.

Caranthir had seemed strange to her, but in his worn black armour and leathers, in the pride on his face, he had been graspable. Finrod was inhuman. He seemed closer to some silver-mailed fish or fierce-eyed bird than he did to her, and the way he tilted his head to the side and fixed his eyes on her only increased the resemblance.

“Lady Haleth,” he called her, and his voice was very beautiful, his interest in her people’s long journey over the mountains and through Thargelion in real earnest.

He wanted to know the history of her people, and the way he listened to everything she told him made her realise, uncomfortably, that what she said would stay with him long after she was dust. He wanted to know about her family, about her life, and his questions pressed on Haleth’s hurt places, his long and slender fingers gently probing her mind.

“Oh,” Finrod said, with genuine surprise when a question made tears spring to her eyes which Haleth angrily dashed away. “I did not mean to wake the grief!”

“Have you never heard of politeness,” said Haleth. “There are things that can be said, and things that cannot be said, at least until sufficient time has passed.”

“Time makes so great a difference?”

“The closer the death is, the less we can bear to speak of it,” Haleth said. It helped to think of him not as a god walking among them, but as a very ignorant child. “We remember our dead,” she said, “in the times and at the intervals we have marked for it; we cannot carry it with us every day.”

Finrod nodded, clearly taking notes. “And there are rituals for releasing it?”

The Men of the House of Beor smiled to see his pleasure in her explanation, and their joy in him made Haleth certain she had been right to leave Thargelion. Staying would have been very easy. There had been the pull of the dead they had left there to anchor them, and the ground they had won and defended with axe and sword and mace inch by precious inch, and Caranthir’s offer of protection cast over them like a cloak. They might have found themselves as snared in his net as the Beorians by Finrod, if only Caranthir had Finrod’s charm.

It made her like Caranthir better, although she did not think Finrod a liar. That was the problem. He did not need to insist upon his superiority; not when he sang in a clear pure voice like the dream of song that sounded only inside your head instead of that which sounded from your mouth, and he called his horse to him with no more effort than a glance over his shoulder. His painted-leather slippers would never bear spurs, and his Men smiled on him, and the yoking between them was not one of mutual aid and need, however uneven, but of love; they loved him, and had made themselves tame hounds to run at his heels.

Her people were coming to love him, too. They could not linger in his lands. Haleth would not let them linger. They would not rest; they would keep moving.

The children in their camp loved him, the children who had been penned into the straw and filth of the steading in Thargelion when the Orcs laid siege, and still woke screaming in the night. For Finrod, Haldan her brother’s son would smile again. They clustered about him, and tugged with their unclean hands on his robes as fine as spider-silk, and wound their sticky fingers in his gleaming hair, and Finrod only laughed.

He sang songs about the Sea in return for her people’s songs about the Mountains, and traded songs about sailing for their travelling-songs, and coaxed lullabies out of the women and drinking-songs out of the men, and bedding-songs, and wedding-songs; and it was hard to deny him when he sat cross-legged in the grass with a child in his lap, and asked his sharp questions with his cheek pressed to childish curls. He laughed immoderately to hear their new songs of the ride of bold Lord Caranthir to rescue them from the Orcs, and proud Lady Haleth’s refusal of his offer of vassalage, and had them sing the verses to him over and over again.

He had a young face; perhaps that was why the children loved him. He felt young, like the spring, and it was only in the dark by the fireside that Haleth could tell that he was old.

“Do you have children, Lord Finrod?” she asked. She had seen no Elf-children in Thargelion.

In the dark he was very quiet for a long time, as though she had at last touched a place in him that hurt in turn, or found a thing that might not be spoken of.

“It is not my fate.”

That was as clear as mud; perhaps it had a deeper meaning to Elves, but it meant very little to Haleth. It could mean he was unable, or had a wife who was; or that he had no wife, and was not of the nature that could take a women to bed and board; or merely that he despaired of ever marrying.

“Nor mine,” said Haleth, because offering information had proven the best way to pry it out of him already. “I am past the age of bearing. Mortal women have a set span of time in which to bring forth children, and then we may do so no longer.”

“We, too, have such a span,” Finrod said, “elf-men and elf-women alike. Although we are not incapable; only past that span, and the chance is likely gone, and the desire.”

“And you have missed your chance?”

“I am already past the age when my father had ceased to have children,” he said, which was not quite an answer, “and I will have none myself. My brother’s son will be my heir.”

“My brother’s son will be mine.”

“You see!” Finrod cried. “We are not so very different!”

He was ridiculous. The fire burned down, and the child asleep in his arms stirred and demanded a sleeping-song, and so it was not until the next night that he asked her where she planned to lead her people next.

“West,” she said.

“I do not know what you think you will find there,” Finrod said, “but I wish the Haladin peace, and a quiet place in which to build.”

If he offered her vassalage, she was going to have to be rude to him.

He was not. Instead, he offered her a name: Brethil, land of the silver-birch. The name was soft in her mouth; a whisper, something said softly, so as not to warn prey, or gently, to a child. Brethil, in the hand of Thingol the Grey-Mantled; land in Thingol’s gift, as Nargothrond had been his gift to Finrod. Finrod could not promise that Thingol would allow them to stay; but he offered to try, and having met Finrod, Haleth knew what weight that promise had. Finrod could talk salmon from their streams and flowers into bloom. Already she knew that wherever she led them next, some of her people would stay behind, to be close to him.

“And what would this Lord Grey-Cloak want in return?” she asked. “For surely he would not give a gift without some exchange.”

“I can see why Caranthir liked you!” said Finrod inconsequently.

“He thought he had a use for me. It is not the same thing.”

Finrod smiled. “If you knew Caranthir as well as I, you’d know what a rare compliment even that is.”

“And will Thingol have a use for me?”

“He would say no,” Finrod said. “Let us say, not yet!”

 

Thingol

Thingol sent to them a Marchwarden pale as moonlight, dark hair bound in tight braids which, unjewelled, bared his scalp in crazed white lines, and his cheeks were painted with dark lines that slashed up towards the points of his knife-like ears. He was all in grey, like a wraith, and there was a heavy black bow strapped to his back.

“Elu Thingol will allow you the freedom of Brethil,” said the Marchwarden, “for love of Finrod; yet he would lay terms upon you for the gift.”

“We shall hear them,” said Haleth, “but I will warn you now: we would not be beggars, but neither will we be slaves.”

“You may live free in Brethil,” said the Marchwarden, “and pay no price for it in goods or jewels. All Elu Thingol asks is that you guard the Crossings of Teiglin and allow no Orcs to come within these woods that are in his gift; do this, and you may live here untroubled by any tithe or other service.”

Haleth stood before the still and sere Marchwarden in her travel-stained tunic and leggings, the knife on her belt notched and painstakingly re-edged, the sword on her back oiled but forever imbued with black Orcish blood, and remembered the fall of earth which had hidden her father’s face from sight forever, the shirt she had used to wrap the ruin of her brother’s head. He had fallen close to where their father had died, so close to the body he had meant to recover; and recovering them both once the danger was past, Haleth had buried them together, brother and father.

Now this unseen Elven-King lay upon her a binding to fight Orcs, and keep them from her people’s new home; she, who had held them off for seven days with no hope of rescue, fighting in the mud, and known that behind the shields and swords of the Haladin she led, some of her people were throwing themselves into the river to drown rather than waiting for the stockade to break and the Orcs to burst through.

The Marchwarden raised one perfect dark eyebrow at her long silence. “What shall I tell my king?”

“You shall tell him,” said Haleth of the Haladin, “that I said ‘Where is Haldad my father, and Haldar my brother? If the King of Doriath fears a friendship between me and those who have devoured my kin, then the thoughts of the Elves are very strange to Men indeed.’”

A second eyebrow joined the first, and then the Marchwarden bowed to her from the waist, and vanished into the woods.

Finrod would be grieved if she had now offended King Thingol so gravely that her people would find no peace in these woods; Haleth would be grieved, if she had to take her weary people, battered by Orc-raid and long travail alike, and continue on towards the West where Finrod said they would find no peace, following only the Sun. She worried for the children, and she remembered that Haldad her father had stopped their journey in Thargelion and said that perhaps they had come far enough now to escape the Shadow, and might rest at last; but she could not have given any other answer and remained Haleth.

No Marchwarden returned to tell them what King Thingol thought of it, and they maintained their uneasy camp among the birch-trees.

Then one night, when all but the sentries were asleep, Elves came silently out of the woods and cast their own black-banded shadows on the silver grass, quiet as the night itself. There were Marchwardens, marked by their huge black bows, their shaven arrows, and the tight braids in their long falls of dark and silver hair; but there were warriors, too, in silver mail.

The cry of a sentry had stirred the sleepers into noise and commotion, but when nothing more happened, the strange silence of the Elves of Doriath spread from them to the Haladin they encircled like a contagion, and a hush fell over the camp once more.

The eyes of the children were wide and fearful, and Haleth’s sword was in her hand ready to see if Elf-blood would stain it as deeply as Orc-blood had, and then Thingol the Elven-King came forth.

He was robed all in grey, and his silver hair fell to his waist unbound, and in his hair was a crown of leaves while his warriors gleamed with beryl and pearl and opal. He was tall and slender, brother to the silver birches that filled the wood. Haleth had thought Caranthir was proud, but the Elven-King was the proudest creature she had ever seen.

She had never thought to meet him. Finrod had all but promised her, in fact, that she would never have to. Of all Elf-lords, he had promised her, Thingol Grey-Cloak had least desire to mingle with mortal Men; he was least likely ever to leave his underground halls, and he would never step beyond the Girdle of mist and confusion his goddess-wife had thrown around his land, which was a boundary through which Haleth and her people could never hope to pass.

It seemed in the night that the Girdle had encompassed them instead.

“I am Haleth of the Haladin,” said Haleth clearly, that his wrath might fall on her alone, and Elu Thingol’s eyes fixed upon her and drew her forward towards him.

She had known that Caranthir was hundreds of years old, and Finrod his cousin, but they seemed like saplings now she had met Thingol. He was old, old, as the beating heart of the earth; he was ashes in the hearth from the dawn of the world, still giving warmth and smouldering through to morning. He had seen Ages come and go, and he would endure. He had been here before the moon and the Sun, and he would be here when the lights of the world went out, Haleth thought, in his kingdom of shadow wreathed in its mazing mists. Compared to him Finrod was bright and brilliant like a fire that burned too fast, and could not be made to last the night; Caranthir was smouldering damp wood, unpredictable. But Thingol would last, on and on, until the moon fell and the Sun died.

He looked into her eyes, and she looked into his. Grey had never seemed to hold so many shades; charcoal and silver, pearl and cloud, dark and bright. He was judging her, as Caranthir had dared; weighting her and learning her, as Finrod had. There was wariness in his eyes, the echo of the echo of a long-held fear, and that Haleth could not understand. Why would he be wary of Men, when they could seem only a lace-winged mayfly on a summer’s day to his long life? What was a blade of grass to a beech-tree?

Slowly, slowly, as the gaze lengthened, the wariness lightened, and whatever Thingol sought to find in her eyes he did, or perhaps did not; Haleth would never know.

“We have an agreement,” said Elu Thingol, King of Doriath, and then there was no more speech, but a strange song of the Elves rose up around them, and it seemed to make the stars reel above and folded then all somehow back into sleep. There was no sign in the morning that the Elves had ever come at all, and the thick silent weight of the Girdle had lifted with them.

Haleth never saw the Elves of Doriath again, only gleams of silver in the dark woods which might be the hem of a Marchwarden’s cloak, or merely moonlight. Haleth and her people did not trouble them, and nor did the Elves trouble them in turn.

It was not the mule-harness Caranthir would have put on them, to hitch them together unevenly to his fine horse, nor the fine silken nets of obligation and cultural exchange Finrod spoke of, weaving their peoples inextricably closer and closer until they would die for the snap of his fingers. The Elven-King of the woods would allow her people to live in Brethil and ask nothing of them but what they would already have given, which was therefore no ask at all, and he would give them nothing in return. It was freedom, as much as this land in the West would allow.