Red Leaves by

Red Leaves

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I. Tawariel

There had been a time before, when she had been known by a different name, and she remembers it with the same hazy recollection as one recalls a dream, the details twisting and warping even as she dwells upon them, changing, until she is no longer sure what is remembered and what is invented—indeed, if there is a difference.

Tawariel. The wind bends the boughs of the trees and whispers her name, and the memories of the former name—if there had even been one—are caught upon it and torn away, like a dream dissipating upon the first breath of wakefulness. Tawariel. That is her name now.

She is a guard of the forest, but how did she come here? Was she sent or did she choose her profession, stealing away from her family in the dark night of the new moon? She remembers bits from this past life as one might remember illustrations in a book long lost: a girl with wiry arms aiming an arrow at a target; embroidering the hemline of a dress with a writhing vine of leaves; a heavy hand upon her sun-warmed hair and deep laughter—father?—at the strange little girl that defied the expectations of femininity but masculinity also, for it might be pardoned for her to behave as a “tomboy” and play at hunting and horse-riding. But even as she loved to embroider, her bread would never rise; even as she bested her older brothers in archery, she harbored an unnatural terror of horses and was sick at the sight of blood. When her mother would call for her to help with the baking, she would scramble high into the trees and pretend not to hear, letting the whispering leaves fill her consciousness until her mother was standing right beneath her, shouting up into the tree, her face growing redder: “I can see you up there! Tawariel! Come down this instant!”

There, the memory becomes fiction because she was not Tawariel then. Or—fingers embracing the branches like vines—was she?

She does not remember coming here, near to the dangerous edges of the forest. She does not remember climbing into the trees with her bow upon her back, leaping from branch to branch when enemies came but, at all other times, sitting as would a leaf, high among the branches. So she sits now—in the capricious time between summer and autumn, when the leaves darken unto death and an innocent breeze carries a stinging slap of cold—a leaf high among the trees, in her raiment of green but with a red cloak spread across her shoulders, preparing for autumn. She sways with the wind, sleeping upon the branch without fear of falling. For why should she fear? Her fingers curl around the branches, their undersides callused and nearly as tough as bark, until she cannot tell where the tree ends and she begins: It is a perfect, slipping transition from branch to leaf. The wind tosses the branches, and she bends and sways with it, unaware, for she is asleep.

Asleep and dreaming. Of him.

Asleep and swaying, like a leaf: one of a mass, bowing with the breeze, rustling when the wind speaks the command to do so. Like a leaf.

Yet not. For leaves know always that they are capable of

Falling.

She is jarred awake by the force of the ground colliding with her body. Or her body colliding with the ground? Gasping, disoriented, she does not know which it is. Her body is insensate, momentarily inanimate. Where are her hands? Her head can swivel, and she sees them pressing the ground, dried leaves poking between her fingers and scattered twigs scratching her flesh. She should feel that; she does not. Something red is spread across the ground beneath her, and there is a thought like a flash of pain—I am dying—but no, it is just her autumn cloak.

Overhead, the sky and leaves form a vivid, shimmering patchwork: earth and possibility. The leaves have begun to change for autumn and like costumed acrobats, they twist and dance and laugh as she lies spread on the ground beneath them.

There is a faded memory of Elves who had fought in the Last Alliance and had been wounded but not died: their spines, sometimes, severed by blades or well-placed arrows that robbed them of all but life, caught eternally amid bedclothes like the shrouded victims of spiders, unable to move or to feel. Her father—a healer—cared for these men, and she would go along with him sometimes, always made to wait outside the door but peeking through the keyhole as her father sponged and massaged legs as gnarled and naked as the roots of ancient trees that were not supposed to be exposed like that. Heart pounding, mouth dry, she could not look away.

No longer a leaf and never truly an Elf, she floats atop the earth that she cannot feel and lets her eyes fall closed, waiting for the slow wastes of time to leech her slowly into the ground, to nourish the tree rocking and chattering overhead that has already forgotten her. The wind snatches her name from her memory—the name given to her by the trees—and she wonders if it ever existed.

II. Legolas

It is the first day of autumn, and his people are at a festival, but Legolas is not among them: He is far away, drawing his cloak tightly around his shoulders, denying the onset of winter rushing at him. The trees that reel overhead are still green but threaded with color, donning their own festival raiment, the leaves whispering joyfully against each other as though naïve to the fact that such beauty portends the arrival of death.

He is not here on the blessing of his father. No, his father does not even know where he is, else he would have sent riders by now to retrieve the errant son who left before dawn’s light this morning, leaving only an archaic note that—Legolas realizes now—must have been mostly incomprehensible. Something about escaping delusions of inevitability set beside something about the peace of the forest—Legolas blushes a bit at the recollection. The spiritual cleansing he seeks in the forest apparently has not erased his desire to appear thoughtful and logical amid the chaos of his family, his pride in being able to untangle his father’s rhetoric into something of at least limited sense. Thranduil has been acting strange in recent years: pulling his three sons and single daughter close, into fevered embraces, even as he shoved blades and bows into their seeking hands; preparing even last-born Legolas and his young sister for the rigors of ruling. “You do not know,” he’d say, his gaze fixed upon something left long ago in the past, before Legolas’ birth. “You do not know what circumstances will prevail.” Legolas had pointed out that—for him to be king—his two brothers and their five children and one grandchild would have to perish, as well as his sister, and Thranduil had seized his son’s face and said, “You do not know.”

And so here he is: his arguments long run dry against the bleak unknowns of possibility, left with the choice of despair or escape, however momentary. As long as he stays here, in the dark, untrodden reaches of the forest, he need not know. He need not mourn his brothers even as they live, swinging their children high into the air and laughing. He need not prepare the speech for the death of his sister, as his father had asked him to do: “You will be in no state to be coherent when it happens. But you must assume it will. You do not know.”

He need not ponder who would make the speech following his demise, need not imagine what would be said.

Of course, it would be his heir who would make such a speech, and of course, he would have one. He even has a girl to whom he is betrothed, and they both like each other in the same way that one may like a food simply because he can eat it without tasting it and think on other things while chewing. She has the same banal love for babies and motherhood as most girls her age, and he has the swaggering, back-clapping confidence that he will one day “become a father,” as though through no fault or act of his own. As for the space between this time—their betrothal—and the arrival of their children, that is a blank. A blank that is not considered, even as he succumbs to the jostling teases of his brothers on the matter, even as he dutifully kisses his betrothed good night on the corner of the mouth, never wondering at the desire he does not feel.

He has desires, yes, as might be expected of any young male of his age, and he does not have to feign understanding when his brothers teased him about provocative dreams forcing him to rise early and change the bedclothes before their mother sees. But his dreams are not bound to a person or even the concrete sensations that his brothers have suggested. In his dreams, he is upon his back, amid the leaves, with the wind caressing him and wrapping him with the intimacy of a second skin, whispering with the same ferocity as his hissing nerves, the wind stealing the breath from his mouth as though afraid that he will cry out and ruin it—heels digging the earth in unbearable ecstasy—the harmony of body and earth.

III. Tawariel

She is dreaming. In her dreams—or memory? perhaps?—her brothers are shoveling leaves over her; it is an autumn day, and the three of them have been charged with cleaning their mother’s garden of the fallen leaves. She is small and her brothers are bigger and stronger, and she cannot push through the leaves before more have been heaped on top of her. A glissando of laughter, edged with tears; as in dreams, her limbs are too weighty and will not lift or move. Her blood is laced with steel, perhaps; her limbs strain against themselves and the mounting pile of leaves and pain arrows along her bones in bright bolts. She is thrashing but doing so slowly, as though submersed in cold water, drowning in the thick mildew smell of the leaves. She cannot hear her brothers’ laughter any longer.

Then, suddenly, she is yanked to the surface and into the dusty autumn light filtering through the trees, her body blazing with pain. Her back arches as though with passion—coaxed forth by her own fingers, eyes shut tightly and imagining a faceless, nameless lover—and as she used to moan from deep in her throat, wordless, so she screams now in pain, a sound with its source deep in her spirit, choking the fragile light within her.

Now she thrashes violently, hurting herself even as she struggles to kick free of dream/memory, and she is surprised to feel warm, gentle hands restraining her: “No, no, you will make it worse. Relax. Lie still.” Golden hair whispers against her cheeks; catches in the swatches of tears. She gives into the hands and lets them hold her still, and the pain bleeds from her and flows into the ground from whence it came.

She remembers vaguely a paralysis, but that must have been a dream for her fingertips are trembling now, hands rising to follow the path of the Other’s hands that are shyly inspecting her body for injuries. He pauses on her knee, which is swollen and hot, having been twisted during her fall, and her hand catches his and slides atop it.

His. He is male, golden-haired, but she cannot see much else. The light is fading to night: She lets her head loll to the side and sees his belongs scattered around the clearing, having been dropped in haste. A luxurious cloak unsuitable for travel lies snared in briars; his quiver has spilled arrows like scattered twigs, sketching a trail to her. He is young, foolish, unwise to the ways of the forest, but his hand beneath hers is soft and very warm.

She squeezes it. He jerks away, and she cannot see his face in the growing darkness but imagines him to be blushing.

She imagines him as fair as the statues she once saw in the king’s court, on a visit there that might have been a drawing in a picture book, one enclosed by elaborate borders colored with gold ink. The statues were made of wood and polished, seeming to rise from the earth as Elves of beautiful proportions, each feature in harmony with the next. Had she been there? In her memory, she smells the dusty page of a book and pungent ink and her fingers rasp when they brush the statues.

Still, she imagines him as one of those statues. She reaches for his hand, and he shies away. “I think you are well,” he says. “It seems that your knee is twisted and naught else.”

The leaves on the ground around her—brilliantly colored and dying—smell of sweet death. Overhead, the branches creak and bow and do not miss her. Perhaps, even, they are grateful to lose the burden of her weight. With her knee twisted and swollen, she cannot climb back into her tree, so she closes her eyes and resigns herself to death among the leaves.

IV. Legolas

She has drifted back to sleep—her eyelids mapped by faint, bluish veins, twitching as she dreams—and he is left to ponder her, this strange woman who has said naught to him but touched him, pressed his hand hard against her flesh, so that he could feel the intimacy of her pulse, so that his skin began to warm hers long grown cold.

He kneels beside her on the ground, until his legs grow cold and numb and dampness soaks into the knees of his breeches. He cannot leave her. She appears to be one of the forest guards of renown, although his father had never spoken of a woman among their numbers and Legolas had only ever seen men, men with squarish, hard-set jaws and eyes that saw out but not in. Legolas was reminded of being a child, of crouching beneath an afghan, trembling and angry with his father but frightened too, wishing to avoid punishment; through the weave of the blanket, he could see Thranduil march into the room, mouth set in a displeased line, but his father could not see him, could not see the tears on his face and his runny nose making a mess of his upper lip.

Until he tore away the afghan, of course.

Those were the eyes of the forest guards, when they came to his father’s court to be honored for their service. They saw Legolas, but Legolas could not see them. Their eyes might have been the bright marbles that Lady Galadriel had given him as a secret gift one year, in his youth, that had become lost one by one until none remained.

He knew she was a guard by her cloak. The guards changed the colors of their cloaks by the season: yellow-green for spring, dark green for summer, gray for winter. And for autumn: red. They were rumored to run as light as cats, unseen, in the trees, moving with the rhythm of the wind; wielding bows, they could hit a knot in a tree from two hundred paces away—then release a second arrow and split the first.

They did not speak, it was said. Legolas had certainly never heard them speak, had only seen them bow to his father the way a tree will bend under the weight of snow. They are stoics; they will not scream, even under duress, or call for help; their silent pleas are born on the wind—leaves in a storm—and are heard by those meant to find them.

But this woman, she’d screamed. She’d screamed upon awakening, her body trying to right itself. But like a leaf dropped to the forest floor cannot return to the branch from which it fell, so her battered body must lie on the ground.

He ponders her as she lies, sleeping, beside him: a silken swatch of midnight hair; an ageless face that might hide no memories; charcoal smudges of dark eyelashes on her cheeks. He sees a hand stealing toward her, to touch her…but no. He snaps his hand back. That would be wrong.

She is injured, and he is a prince and above such shameless desires.

He wants to lie down beside her.

The hour is growing late: He is sleepy. It would not hurt, would it? He wouldn’t even touch her, just lie there. Surely, there is no reason to fear this part of the forest? Looking overhead, he imagines that he sees something moving among the branches of the trees, a flash of a scarlet cloak…then nothing.

He wants to dream beside her. Would their dreams converge: hers born on the wind, freeing his caught within the confines of obligation? The burden of possibility?

He tries to remember his betrothed but finds that he cannot. When he imagines her walking towards him, she has tangled black hair and wears a red cloak.

He tries to remember his father, but he sees only the trees, strong against the wind but bowing slightly, weeping leaves and whispering of secrets that they hide.

V. Tawariel

There had been many mirrors in the house, for her mother was a beautiful woman and her father—a healer not an artist—complained of never being able to capture her likeness on parchment. I burned all of my attempts. Feeble ghosts. Laughing with patients whose beauty had been robbed in battles.

“Living portraits,” he called them, the mirrors. He would capture his wife and bring her before them, kissing her neck, making her laugh, her hair hiding her face like a curtain and his nimble fingers brushing it away as fast as it fell. Tawariel, perched upon the low branch outside the window, would watch.

Her “living portrait” was one of fleeting haste, of a snarled rope of hair and bright, impatient eyes, the manic energy of a creature caught in a jar and dashing itself to pieces in its desperation to free itself. She saw herself only in profile, in these moments, a flash of darkness across the mirror, then gone.

She viewed her body from above, with pride, for it was hard and without the delicate softness of her mother, straight and narrow as a tree. Waist, hips, legs, all the same size; feet splayed large and strong against the ground. In the secret height of the trees, she would caress herself, her hardened muscles. She could outrun her brothers who—panting, lolling onto the ground—managed to gasp, “Girl runs like the wind.”

She paused in front of her mother’s mirror once, on the day that her father took her to the King’s court, and her body—clad in a gown, cinched small at the waist—looked different. She pressed her hands to her chest, slipped them down over the soft swells, beginnings of breasts, of a body growing cumbersome with femininity.

Soon, she could no longer outrun her brothers.

She would awaken at night, pleasure stabbing her loins, caught between a dream and wakefulness where the branches of the trees were still sketched across her ceiling and the nameless, faceless man still wrung ecstasy from her reluctant body. His hair like water through her fingers; his name on the wind…but it was her clumsy, callused fingers that pushed her over the brink of release as her heels dug into the bedclothes.

When she climbed into the trees for the last time and left behind that which had been labeled as “home,” she let the slow, soughing wind erase her memories. But he remained, a shameful relic of her past. He remained with her at night, pressed atop her even among the unreachable tops of the trees, and he tormented her thoughts by day, when she should have been vigilant.

She met other guards on occasion but always men, although it was hard to tell. Hair neglected, long and snarled by the wind, and lean bodies as graceful as women and hard as men, defining features atrophied to make room for the muscles needed for survival. They looked upon her with unfeeling eyes, and she hid her face, fearful that they would see the guilt in her eyes.

To avoid them, she climbed higher than even the bravest of them dared, to places where the trees would cradle her slight female body even as it cast theirs to the ground. She had a pact with the trees: Let me be a leaf among you, and you shall never go unguarded. I will not even rest to dream of him.

That promise, of course, was broken.

Lying on the hard ground with her red cloak spread bright as blood beneath her, she waits to die. What happens to the spirits of the forest guards is not known; it is said that they guard the trees, become the trees, that when the trees bow and groan, seemingly in displeasure, or when the wind seems to wring rustling laughter from their boughs, it is the voices of those who guarded over them, now passed beyond corporeal existence.

To a place where one cannot fall.

Only there is something holding her back, something that keeps her body from allowing her spirit to tug free in a spurt of pain—the flash of her father’s axe bringing merciful death to a chicken—then nothing, a scattering on the breeze, carried on the wind high into the trees, where she can no longer fall.

There is something pressed against her, putting warmth and life into blood that wants to go cold; there is an arm circling her and a sleepy murmur of dreams. She closes her eyes; imagines she is dreaming the dream of long ago. She lets her head fall to the side, lips slack and cold but seeking his in a searing kiss that burns with life, that courses molten hot down her body and makes her body arch with it, as though—after hundreds of years of life—drawing a breath for the first time.

And he awakens.

VI. Legolas

He awakens to her lips on hers and the length of his body pressing hers—shoulders, breast, hips—and legs raveled. This is but a dream…a delicious dream, yes, but a dream. He cannot remember the year or the place: Is he at home in bed, alone, or has he married? Is he sleeping back to back with the woman who is his wife, with enough space between their bodies to allow their skins to grow cold? He shifts away from her, into the heat of the dream, into the body of the woman pressed beside him.

Overhead, the trees are thrashing and the dead leaves on the ground chatter and whirl in dizzying spirals around them, and Legolas buries his hands into the damp heat of her hair and claims her mouth with his own.

She tastes of autumn, of the capricious wind, of the lingering summer and the last fireflies exploding against the cobalt sky. Her tongue twines his; her mouth is suddenly warm and he thinks, I have made it so!

She is pushing at his tunic, exposing his abdomen taut, muscles quivering, cool hands on burning flesh, shoving the burden of cloth around his neck and over his head, hands exploring the contours of his chest, pausing over nipples that pucker at her touch. She moves her mouth to his throat and he gasps, unaware that he hadn’t breathed—that he was drowning in her—and traces the throbbing vein in his throat, the delicate ridge of his collarbone, the hollow of his throat.

In his dreams, he is not chaste; he is not afraid. In his dreams, he cups her breasts and lets her moan against his throat, making the hairs on his arms prickle. In his dreams, he tears the red cloak from where it is fastened at her throat and casts it aside, where the wind catches it and it tumbles like an autumn leaf until it becomes snagged by a tree branch. Her clothing is close-fitted and of no great quality; it is easily torn away, exposing her breasts and small, erect nipples and shadowy ripple of ribs, the left side of which quiver with her heartbeat. She falls onto her back and he rolls with her, on top of her, kissing her breasts and belly and undoing the ties on her breeches to move lower into the secret heat that he knows only in dreams.

He is loosening his breeches, hardness springing forth and already damp and throbbing. He waits for the shame, for the breathless furtiveness that comes in the night upon him, a hand slipping into his sleeping trousers to grasp himself, trying not to breathe too loudly or stop breathing entirely, listening for his brothers’ snoring to subside and clue him that they know. Her eyes are roving shamelessly down the length of his body, and he waits for the shame of his naked arousal, but it does not come, and she takes him in hand and guides him to her entrance where—with a single thrust practiced in secret fantasies—they claim each other.

Her body is thrumming beneath him, as taut as a stretched wire; she digs his buttocks with her fingers, insubstantial fingernails leaving red marks, pushing him deeper inside of her, a single keen cry carried on the wind and lost to all others but him.

Deep within her, he comes undone into ecstasy, the cold wind raw against his back, the ground dark and torn by their passions, a frame for her face and eyes as bright as the stars between the trees.

VII. Epilogue

He awakens.

He awakens, shivering naked beneath his cloak. His clothes are hung in neatly the branches of the trees around him; overhead, the bone-bright sky is shattered by branches.

He sits up, heart racing, wondering at his dream. Beneath the cloak, his body is sticky with the memory of heat and passion, sweat and fluid cooling upon his skin. He waits for the shame to come but it cannot, not here, where he is alone beneath the trees and sky.

Rising to dress, he pushes his hair from his face and his fingers snare something caught there: a red leaf, strong and bright inside his hand but already withering, dying, crumbling at the edges.

The wind catches it then and tears it from his hand, a devilish child stealing a favorite toy, winding through the branches and howling with laughter. He watches it until it is too faint against the bright sky; he blinks and discovers that it is a spot of color left staining his vision.

He’d left yesterday, and his father will be worried by now, but Legolas is not afraid. He knows what he will say: Lost, he was found by a ranger of the forest who pointed him home.

He steps in the direction of home, lost, yes, but confident in finding his way, and behind him, there is an explosion of red leaves bright as confetti against the bland autumn sky, triggered by a gust of wind--or something else?