A Web of Stars by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 10

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The ride back to Thranduil’s stronghold was swifter than their coming. At Erferil’s command the marchwardens whisked them north with military efficiency, with fresh horses at regular intervals. 

Even so, the news of Amon Lanc’s destruction ran through the woods on swifter legs. A crowd of celebrating Silvans wearing their feast-day best had gathered before Thranduil’s doors to welcome their triumphant prince with flutes and drums. 

Arwen had expected Thranduil and Celeborn, but it was Galion who awaited them among the drunken revellers. Thranduil’s seneschal stuck out like a sore thumb, wearing formal court robes and a face like a month of rain. 

Haldir stood beside him, somehow looking even dourer with his arms crossed and one raised eyebrow. 

“So glad that the pair of you could make it to our feast!” Haldir’s cutting sarcasm was the terror of Lórien’s armed forces. “The king, too, will be ecstatic. Your grandfather and he are waiting inside. For quite some time, actually. They have been such a delight to us all.”

Legolas swallowed audibly. The reckoning had come.

The great hall was shadowed, swathed in heavy silence when Arwen and Legolas entered, a sharp rebuke after the merriment outside. 

Legolas’ back straightened, his face pale and sober, and Arwen realised he was afraid. She linked her arm with his unhurt one, and together they advanced to the dais. 

Thranduil once more sat in state upon his throne, and that formality in itself was a reprimand. The Woodland king’s gaze revealed nothing, but his expression was as heavy as his robes — a drape of storm-dark velvet lined with ermine, his bright blond hair crowned with white gems that flickered like lightning. He seemed all sharp edges, anger glinting from him like starlight upon steel. 

All ancient dissent between Lórien and the Greenwood appeared wholly resolved: Celeborn sat beside Thranduil on the dais, in the chair where a counsellor might sit, and he, too, was dressed in robes of state, his circlet on his brow. His expression was unfathomable. 

Legolas wavered, but then, brusquely, Thranduil gestured for Legolas and Arwen to approach. 

Legolas offered his arm, a warm and solid comfort, and in silence they began the long walk to the dais, dread mounting with every step. Thank the Valar that the hall was empty - at least Thranduil had spared them the humiliation of a dressing-down before all his court. Only now did Arwen realise how they must look — road-stained and bedraggled, spider silk in their hair, Legolas’ arm in its makeshift bandage. At last, after a small eternity of mounting terror, they stood before the King of the Greenwood.

"Greetings, sire!" Legolas stepped in front of Arwen, making himself first to bear the onslaught. 

Thranduil leant back on his carven throne, arms crossed and face like a thundercloud, watching his son for an endless, unbearable moment.  

“Reckless you have been, son, in meddling with matters far beyond your authority! Thranduil’s voice boomed through the silent hall, sending a lone wood pigeon flapping from the rafters. “An ill deed it was to involve an outsider in the affairs of the Greenwood!” 

He gave Legolas a withering look. “Of late you have often asked me for advancement, for a place among my warriors and a voice in my council, and I believed you were ready for it. Today you proved me wrong. The fault is mine — I should have kept you on a tighter leash.”

Legolas was a brave man indeed. He stood up straight, saluted his father formally, like a warrior, and presented a spider’s mandible. The hall’s muted light glinted off the razor-sharp edge that had drunk the blood of Elves.

“I present to you my warrior’s mark,” he replied in formal, archaic Silvan. “The spiders of Amon Lanc are dead.”

Thranduil’s tone cut like a knife. “And your Grandfather’s hall is burned to the ground,” he replied, in Sindarin.

“It only served to shelter our enemies!” Queen Síloril’s approach had been utterly silent, but now the door at the end of the hall fell closed behind her with a metallic clang . 

Síloril strode the length of the hall to stand beside Legolas before the dais, tall and majestic in her cape of iridescent feathers. Her woad-blue loremistress’ tattoo was dark against her pale skin, and Arwen was reminded that here stood, not a foreign ruler but one who was deemed wise and worthy by her own people. 

“Legolas is a son of the Silvans, husband,” she spoke, “and he has his ear to the forest. Even without a seat on your council, he knows that we Silvans have pleaded for years that the keep should be destroyed, lest it be manned against us. He has taken the matter from your hands.”

She turned to Legolas. “You have become a warrior,” she said in the Silvan of the Greenwood, and saluted her son in the way of the Wood-elves.

“If you must punish him, then as an adult!” she said to Thranduil, her voice sharp as a knife. “Shall you have your captains court-martial him?”

Thranduil’s look would have cowed a lesser woman, but Síloril stood unmoved before him. 

“Are you suggesting these two should be congratulated for their insubordination!?” Thranduil demanded.

“A Sindarin concept, husband, but even so the term does not apply,” Síloril smiled, “Legolas cannot have disobeyed your orders, for he never received any.”

Thranduil breathed in through his nose, nostrils flaring. “Lady of mine, once more I am reminded that you and I are of different kin.” 

Síloril did not answer her husband, clearly unwilling to stoke up marital disputes before their foreign guests, but she turned a fierce look upon Thranduil, and for all her simple buckskin, the pierced pebbles around her neck where a Sindar Queen might have worn diamonds, she was royal in strength and dignity. 

Thranduil knew it, because his gaze was sharp as his words when he turned to Arwen. 

Blood filled Arwen’s face beneath those deep-seeing eyes. Surely Thranduil must know what had passed between his son and her. He sent her a strange little smile, and she blushed hot as the midday sun. Yes. Thranduil definitely knew.

“But we have two miscreants here!” he proclaimed, his voice filling the hall as if this were a well-rehearsed play. “Celeborn, what say you?”

A telling look passed between Thranduil and Celeborn, and Arwen’s stomach sank. She had not expected to find these two in league against her. 

Celeborn rose to stand upon the dais with a rustle of grey silk. His mithril circlet was a flash of light in the shadowed hall as he nodded to Síloril, and for a moment Arwen saw Elu Thingol’s general, a vision of ancient Doriath. 

“The Queen's words have been spoken also in Lórien’s Silvan councils,” Celeborn said, and motioned towards the doors, where Silvan drums and flutes continued unabated. “Caras Galadhon will sound much the same right now. I expect that Nimrodel and her people will give my granddaughter a hero’s welcome.” 

His eyes gave away nothing when he turned to face Arwen. “It will not detract from your punishment. Folly must have consequences, so you will unlearn it.”

The girl who rode out from Lórien mere days ago would have dropped her eyes to the flagstones and mumbled an apology, but that girl was no more. Today’s Arwen stood up straighter, shoulders squared and arms clasped behind her back, and met her grandfather’s eyes. 

She had whispered these words to herself over and over during the long ride from Amon Lanc, in preparation for this very moment. They now came to her lips with ease. “Will you build a treehouse in a beech, Grandfather, for me to languish in until I improve my ways?”    

Both Celeborn and Thranduil blanched.  

Síloril alone was unimpressed. The merry chime of her laughter broke the leaden silence blanketing the hall. “A tongue as sharp as a Dwarvish blade!” she chuckled, smiling as if all this were but fireside banter. “Ai Celeborn, surely you will not make her Sing a cloak from her hair to get away from you?”

“I shall not repeat the errors of the past.” Celeborn’s tone was glacial. “But you risked too much, child.”

Celeborn had that particular brooding look Arwen knew well enough from childhood mischief, so she did not provoke him further. All she did was nod.  

Thranduil saw it, and scoffed. “So we cannot punish one without creating a martyr for the Silvan cause; nor the other lest we repeat the Lay of Leithian.” His nostrils flared again. “So be it.” 

He drew a deep breath. “Legolas! From now on I shall keep you too busy for such follies.” He leant forward on the throne to skewer his son with his gaze. “Report to the barracks tomorrow at dawn. They should have useful work for you, even with that arm. And rest assured that you will remain under orders from now on.”

“Yes, sir!” Despite his injury Legolas saluted with military perfection, his shoulders ramrod-straight. He somehow managed to look smug doing it. 

Thranduil ignored it, and instead turned to contemplate Celeborn with an air of pity. “Kinsman,” he said, and Celeborn’s face lit up at the word. “I have no idea what the Golodhrim do with wayward daughters, but tell that father of hers that this one needs something better to do with herself than embroidery, lest she demolish his valley!”

Thranduil’s gaze met Arwen’s, and for the first time since they set foot in his halls, the king’s smile reached his eyes. 

 

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Later, in Celeborn’s room, he embraced her, and Arwen could have wept for sheer relief. The room bathed in golden light from many candles, with thick walls of stone between her and the strangeness of this perilous forest.

Thranduil’s cooks had prepared proper Sindarin food, mulled wine and spiced hazelnut pasties. Arwen bit into one, flaky pastry and honey-sweet filling bursting into her mouth, and the familiar taste almost brought her to tears. 

Then, small and worried, she dared ask. “Will you tell Father? And Elladan and Elrohir?”

Celeborn poured himself some wine in one of Thranduil’s ostentatious silver goblets. He drank deep, then nodded. “In great detail. Elrohir, in particular, must be reminded that he is your brother and not your guardian. He needs to slacken his grip.” 

For an instant his eyes glazed over with memory. A painful one, it seemed from his white-knuckled clench about the stem of his cup. “We made a similar mistake with him, long ago.” 

Arwen drew back, astonished. “Why would you do that for me? I thought you had the beech for my treehouse picked out!”

Celeborn smiled, and raised his hand to stroke her hair back from her face. She tried her best not to recall Legolas doing the same - Celeborn was frighteningly good at seeing minds when he wanted to. 

Even if Celeborn saw, he did not seem angry, and said only, “I, too, was young once.”

He cast her a clever glance. “You came back in one piece, having executed a strategic manoeuvre that kept Lórien’s captains quibbling for half an age. You should tell Elrohir that you have bested him, and watch him seethe. It should be entertaining.“ 

At that, she embraced her marvel of a grandfather once more, resting her head on his shoulder like she did countless times as a child. Without a moment’s hesitation he laid his hand on the crown of her head, warm and gentle, a benediction.  

Her gratitude must warm his mind like a ray of sunlight, because his voice went soft and he whispered, “hunt a Warg-fur for me, will you?”

 

 

This mighty beech was named Hírilorn, and it had three trunks, equal in girth, smooth in rind, and exceeding tall; no branches grew from them for a great height above the ground. Far aloft between the shafts of Hírilorn a wooden house was built, and there Lúthien was made to dwell; and ladders were taken away and guarded, save only when the servants of Thingol brought her such things as she needed.

It is told in the The Lay of Leithian how she escaped from the house in Hírilorn; for she put forth her arts of enchantment, and caused her hair to grow to great length, and of it she wove a dark robe that wrapped her beauty like a shadow, and it was laden with a spell of sleep. Of the strands that remained she twined a rope, and she let it down from her window; and as the end swayed above the guards that sat beneath the house they fell into a deep slumber. Then Lúthien climbed from her prison, and shrouded in her shadowy cloak she escaped from all eyes, and vanished out of Doriath.

 

The Silmarillion, Quenta Silmarillion, Ch 19, Of Beren and Lúthien