Come Round Right by sallysavestheday

Come Round Right

Read Come Round Right

Sometimes Glorfindel thought people had forgotten Elenwë.

It had been so long since the Ice took her, and they had lost so many others since. What was one Vanya amid the great wave of the fallen Noldor, the flood of the Sindar who had been washed away?

They had not known each other well as children, in Valimar, but the Helcaraxë bred strange companions, and as they two were all there were of their people it was no surprise that they grew close. Her light heart was a gift in the darkness – a touch of home, where everything else was strange.

They had laughed about dancing, wondering when it would be warm enough again to put off their furs and spin in the ancient figures. Elenwë craved that freedom of movement: sealskin and wool and leather were warming, but they lent the wearer no grace. Even Turgon was pulled into the teasing, threatening to strip and caper right there on the frozen surface if they did not stop whistling the old songs so deliberately out of tune. Elenwë grinned wickedly, challenging him.

Then: the crack of her fall; her fingertips scrabbling against the underside of the clear ice sheet as the current swept her past them; the glint of her hair in the dark water. Turgon’s howls.

It was a very long time before Glorfindel could dance again without regret, without the sense that some essential part of the great pattern had been thrown awry. Movement became memory, which surfaced pain. Still, he whirled at the appointed times, using the drag of his body in the air to shape his grief: for Elenwë, for the golden city of his childhood, for all the faces he would never see again.

He danced by himself on Tarnin Austa, tucked into a corner of the great square where his Vanyarin improvisation would not tangle with the formal figures of the Noldor or the drumming Sindar’s leaps. There should have been a circle of dancers to call the light with him, to turn and turn in the great gyres until their fingers sparked and their hair stood on end and the Powers danced with them, thrumming. He felt the gap, the open circuit; he mourned the loss. But it did not stop his spinning, his body forming the shape of passing and return.

The sun climbed and still he spun, head back, eyes closed, palms up in worship, in longing. It was only when he collided with Idril, cool and solid in his path, that he came back to himself, stumbling over an apology and staggering to an awkward halt.

The light caught on her hair, so like Elenwë’s. But her deep eyes were Turgon’s, and they pinned him with her glance.

“My mother used to dance like that. When no one was looking.”

Idril was frowning, casting a wry eye over the Noldor in their grand pavane and the stamping lines of Sindar, each on their own side of the great square. “They should have looked. They should have danced along. What is the point of any of this, if we do not dance together?”

Idril shrugged Elenwë’s shrug, her mouth set in Turgon’s line of firm intent. As if peeling off unnecessary furs, she shed her cape, her stole, her shoes, her formal overskirt, stood light and limber in front of him, with a challenge in her smile.

“Glorfindel. Show me how.”

He could only laugh at the wonder of her, and set her whirling, and let her go.