In the Bleak and Early Morn by Elleth

Chapter 1

To elaborate on the archive warnings: the story contains non-graphic mentions of sex and nudity, hints at possible domestic violence, alcoholism, and mentions of general violence of the kinslaying variety.

Read Chapter 1

"What was it like to drive your sword into my kinsmen's bodies?"

His wife's voice pulled Makalaurë out of a shallow sleep. He felt wide awake, and sitting, pushed the covers away to reach for the lightstone and unclose it. Lasbaneth winced against the sudden glare, a twitch of bare shoulder, and turned her head away. She was sitting curled against the headboard of the bed with her back to him, but he did not need to see her face – her voice, thick and unlovely and choking on phlegm, told him that she must have been crying for a while - or muffling it - while he slept.

He knew better than to try and touch her at this point, although the curve of her shoulder and her mussed hair invited an attempt to comfort her, and knew also that she would not accept lies - nothing but the brutal truth would do. If he lied to her, she had her own ways of recognizing it.

"It was no different from killing anything else," he said at last, with his forehead on his drawn-up knees. Lasbaneth rose, wrapping both arms around herself over her bedsheet, which trailed after her like a dress and concealed her nakedness. Makalaurë looked away, and forced out an explanation, or something like it.

"Elves are no different from the celvar... the, the..." he scrabbled for the Sindarin word, failed to find it, and lunged onward. "It was... not any different from hunting. It was hunting, in a way," he said. "Anyone who would oppose us taking the ships."

The words hung between them like a cloud of black miasma.

"I need air," she said, and took her flat drum from its place on the shelf. "You goelydh, sometimes...! Do not follow me."

Makalaurë knew better than to deny her this, and heeded her warning. The night was unusually warm for Mithrim even at the cusp of summer; they had slept with the windows wide open and the curtains thrust aside. She would likely stay outside until the hour before sunrise, when the camp's activity picked up, to try and reconcile what she had learned tonight with the things she knew already. Then she might vanish with her guardian, back into the mountains to her people, and he might never see her again.

Despite the bleak prospect, Makalaurë willed himself to rise. His limbs felt sluggish, uncertain and unsteady, and he barely made it to the dresser in the corner before half stumbling, half sagging onto the stool before it. The water in the washing bowl had grown tepid when he dipped his hands in, but he splashed it into his face anyway, hoping that the droplets might cool and lift his mind out of the fog that threatened to cloud it, a remnant of the past day's sour wine, which, he suspected, had still not entirely left his system. Briefly he considered seeking out Estelindë or whichever healer was on call, but she would likely be there either way, and refuse to give him anything to stave off the aftereffects, other than a scolding for being a useless drunkard who failed his people, while his wife - who was not even a Noldo (although the people had begun calling her Noldóranis) - was struggling to keep some order despite her youth.

And that he should let go of the thought of Maitimo, who would not return from captivity, or if so, then so irrevocably changed that the word brother would no longer apply to him. The thought sent bile rising. Maitimo yet lived, he had to believe it or go entirely mad, and lose what vestiges of sanity he still made the effort to cling to.

He began massaging his temples after sitting motionless for a while. "They are not even truly your kinsmen, nor as close as your family claimed," he said, picking up the thread of the conversation to give sound to the thoughts he could never speak in Lasbaneth's presence without losing her entirely. "You forfeited any claim to kinship in the eyes of Doriath when your grandmother and her followers passed over the mountains to live among the Mithrim. You told me the folk of Doriath considered you to have mingled with Avari, and none of you ever knew Olwë."

But - he and his brothers had murdered the Teleri nonetheless. He suspected that Lasbaneth would tell him so as well, and the fact remained, despite whatever false premises had begun the negotiations that led to their marriage, that he was a murderer. Lasbaneth had merely, and out of need for her people, consented to a deception - not even that. An exaggeration to ensure alliance with the Noldor that, as they had hoped then, might likewise buy them alliance with other peoples of the land.

And he had never spoken of the kinslaying openly. Forbidden under, ironically, pain of death by his father, such a threat carried dire weight now that they knew what they were all capable of, if shame and grief would not ensure silence. When Makalaurë had been thrust into power he had done nothing to lift the ban. He did not know if Lasbaneth had, or if she even knew of it. If so, she probably resented them even more than she had made clear, after learning of Alqualondë the day before.

At first, overhearing the muffled conversation of visitors from the other shore, she had been too shaken even for outright anger or disgust; she had wept in his arms and he had, in the darkened seclusion of their chambers sung her the whole slaughter. Only after, the more she had thought and meditated on it, even using her outlandish, but apparently precious agarics to gain deeper insight, the more her anger had crystallized into a hard, sharp-edged shell around her. Now, he thought, if he touched her, he might not merely earn a slap to the face, he would cut himself even trying to console her, and another attempt at the frenzied love-making of the evening to reassure themselves that, yes, they still felt the same, they still were the same, was out of the question.

Not that it had helped any.

His head had begun to throb in a steady pulse quicker than his heartbeat, and he rubbed his eyes. They shone at him from the rippling reflection of the washbowl, like his father's in their brightness, confirming what he thought: Somewhere underneath the mental numbness churned enormous anger, guilt, perhaps even fear, grief, like the darkling sea they had crossed, and suddenly he understood why there had been storm, then, though now the causes were different: Maitimo. Lasbaneth. If she left him, it was not merely their marriage that would break. The alliance with the Mithrim, already shaken by his father's death, would be worth less than a pile of broken crockery. For all their common goals and the fact that they had already ridden and died side by side when Moringotto had sent his orc host swarming over the mountains, there was, beyond a first few laughing meetings and feasts of boiled meat, very little that connected them.

His brothers (excepting perhaps Ambarussa, who had begged some time to go hunting with the Mithrim on his own, even hinting that there was a young woman he might consent to marrying), would laugh and turn their backs on the Dark Elves. Already, Makalaurë was astonished that they paid Lasbaneth respect rather than - which especially Curufinwë and Tyelkormo could easily have done - supplant her, or make her a mere puppet ruler. Perhaps her part in the treaty between the Mithrim and the Noldor that their and her father had orchestrated had something to do with it. Until now he had been glad for the relative peace but never remarked, or indeed thought upon it very much. It was hard to believe that they acted in commonplace decency, in fact it was hard to believe that they could gentle themselves into it, but he would rather not know of their plots. Most likely it involved ousting him, too, in some way, seizing power over the Fëanárrim and slogging from the mire of war-weary idleness that had seized the camp.

He sighed and glanced out at the lake, through the gauze that protected the room from the swarms of stinging midges. The throbbing in his head had not abated; it steadily grew worse, matched now by the rhythm of a drum by the shore. Lasbaneth was likely drumming herself into another state of consciousness to think more on the matter, and then it was indeed best to not interrupt her, quite aside from her initial request.

Makalaurë returned to bed, and let the steady sound lull him to sleep. Perhaps, he thought dimly, he and Lasbaneth might enter into some shared dream to speak further, but the darkness dragged his mind into oblivion before he could reach for any threads and tendrils that might lure him into one. For a while it seemed the dark of his dream was final, filled with the infernal wailing of gulls and the screams of the Teleri. He woke again to glaring morning sunlight stabbing at his eyes and a hand splayed over his stomach, and glanced down expecting to see blood: Something had come out of the dark at him and sent him hurtling into wakefulness.

His fingers were clean, and that was a relief, but there was hectic activity in the room: Lasbaneth had returned and had exchanged her bedsheet for a kid leather tunic and the painted, tasseled cloak that marked her status among her people.

"You are leaving, then. Will you return?" Makalaurë asked as she rolled up yet another piece of clothing – this one a rich, embroidered, Noldorin gown, the one she had worn the day of their troth, and stuffed that into the saddle bag before her, and then reached for the next garment.

"I must speak with my parents and my grandmother before I decide whether I stay with you, or consider our union dissolved and take the steps to do so."

"Dissolved?" he asked. "A marriage cannot be dissolved."

"Of course it can."

"It is a union of the spirits, do you not consider it that?"

"You never thought to ask me my understanding of our marriage when it began, now that it is in danger of ending you think to whine at me?" Her voice was hard. Her eyes were clouded with grief, more grey than blue, and narrowed in anger.

"But very well. A bodily union is one thing, but it needs intent to make it one of the spirit, and make it permanently so. Making the will to enter into it permanent is not accounted as a single night's labour, not even the labour of our handful of years, at least not among my people, and I have never understood how, by exercising your own free will, you do in exercising it negate it and put it into some supposed greater hand of Eru that will then put you in unbreakable bonds for the lifetime of Arda!"

Her voice rose. "Rather, my people want to - need to, to live well and ensure that we survive our wanderings! - continue a striving to keep a marriage a well-kept one, rather than a sad and neglected thing that has no more function once the children have left the house and the spouses are permitted to grow apart, and yet remain bound by force. If they separate, let it be permanent and give them new chances at joy! Our wills are our own, and if I end mine, that severs my bond to you. The rest is your doing, and if I decide this, then - if you want it - I will at least teach you such rituals as to help you end your will for our marriage. Even if my ill thoughts toward you will not abate - I cannot say yet, Maglor, do not look at me like a dog! - I will come to you for a last time and allow you to set yourself free so you can take a woman among your own people who will share in the blood on your hands! Do not ask me to stay among a people of murderers and be glad about it, too!"

The words he had meant to speak in response vanished in a flash of consternation, but more than that, fear and the pang of undue loss. He felt a whine rising in his throat, and bit down onto his tongue to stifle it. That at the very least would be more than undignified.

"Very well," he said at last, over the flapping of clothes while Lasbaneth continued shaking them out and rolling them up to stuff in her bag. It had grown quite full already.

"If you are going to leave me, are you going to jeopardize the peace and success we can have here? If Doriath learns, all of your Mithrim, or the wandering Sindar, the Falmalinnar, the Laiquendi, the Avari that crept in, we will have no peaceful moment here, and no allies whatsoever in our attempt to bring peace to Hecelmar!"

"You should have considered that before you came marching into the land of the people whose kin you slew. They may not all have been blood kin to me, but they were kin in spirit that we still lament as departed, for if not for mischance, we would all have gone across the sea. That you wronged a different people made your wrongs no better! Would you have driven your sword into me as well?"

"Your question is hypothetical, Lasbaneth. I will not - "

"Answer me!"

"How can I answer you? If you had been born among the Teleri of Alqualondë, would I have even known you, other than as - a distant relative of Olwë? Would you even be yourself? Your mother's father is an Avar! He would not have been there. You would not have been you!"

She spat on the ground. "Pretend I had been myself, would you? Would you kill one you loved?"

Makalaurë scrambled out of the bed and to his feet, shaking off the blanket tangling half around him. He felt his hands curl into fists, took steps toward her, and saw Lasbaneth, staunch and unafraid, glare up at him. Any intent that he might have had to - act on whatever impulse had possessed him - , vanished. He sank onto the bed, sitting carelessly on the clothes she was packing.

He would not have struck her. He would not strike her. His parents had never outright struck one another, for all their brutal arguments, for his mother pummeling her fists against his father's breast in anger and perhaps not entirely without intent to hurt, and him bearing it without rebuke. He would not have struck Lasbaneth now, nor ever else.

She stood waiting, a linen shirt dangling from her hands.

"No," Makalaurë said.

"Then do not ask me to make myself an accomplice to your curse, either. The jealous Valar, indeed, I see now how that was intended to conceal your deeds! If I had not learned the truth I might have entered into this belief, their being unable to cope with your greatness – but if you were indeed exiled for murder rather than merely for an Oath that may lead to evil but must not be so if you act kindly - do not ask me that. I love you - but - I cannot say yet!"

Lasbaneth stuffed the shirt into her bag, tugged on a leggings Makalaurë was sitting on, and then with a huff let go. "Put clothes on before you run after me and spare your people the sight of you naked," she said, seized the bag and her drum, and marched from the door, shutting it behind her.

"I do not regret it," he said to the door, and suddenly felt like a child stomping his foot, although he was speaking softly, muffling the words between his lips. "Without that, and without the burning of the ships, your people would never have come to find us, and I would not have you." But of course she could not hear that – nor should, and whether he still had Lasbaneth was doubtful at best. His head sank down onto his crossed arms.

The thought made his stomach clench. Of course he regretted it. The killing at least.

There was a bottle of liquor hidden on his side of the bed, in the angle of bedpost and wall. He reached for it, turned it over in his hands and watched the clear liquid slosh around in it. Nearly Makalaurë dashed it against the wall, but then thought better – or worse – of it, and set it down on the nightstand. He forced himself into the leggings that she had abandoned, finding to his surprise that they were his, and went after her.

He came too late to convince her to stay. Already the stable that housed her little yellow pony was empty, Lasbaneth had left the compound, and the gates had been shut behind her. The people milling about in the early morning heat gave Makalaurë strange looks while he stood and let his eyes adjust to the outside brightness. Then with brisk steps he crossed the hard-baked mud of the courtyard and climbed up the ladder to the tower, shouldering past the guard woman and her spear - Hrávanis, he remembered distantly, one of Maitimo's people, now wearing the blue and crimson badge of his alliance. She was already sweating profusely under the ringing chainmail shirt, a technique newly adapted from the Naucalië, but with the look she gave him he scoffed away any rising pity for the hair plastered to her temples.

From the outlook, Makalaurë could see Lasbaneth - her and Tatharim, the surly Avar her father had sent as her guardian - speed away up the slope to the north. In between the dappled cloud-shadows on the bleak, bleached land their figures grew smaller swiftly. There was little chance that, even if he wasted no time and chose a fast horse, he might still catch them and plead with her to reconsider - but he abandoned the thought, turned abruptly, and climbed down from the tower to march back into the comforting darkness of the house.

There was a bottle of drink waiting for him. It was easier, and he squashed down any lingering questions on whether it was also right.