Cranesbill by Chestnut_pod

Cranesbill

Read Cranesbill

Ulloth took no notice of the first black ship in the harbor, nor the second, as they arrived in the pearly pre-dawn haze before her maid Carinzel came in to wake her. The gondolas swarmed around the third and fourth ships, as was customary, offering sweet water from the cisterns, sugared fritters, bitter almond biscuits, and golden Pelargirian raisins for sale. There was nothing strange about it to catch her attention as she dressed in clothes suitable for working at home.

Had she raised her head from her breakfast, she might have been aware of the commotion the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth ships stirred, for they came all at once, as ships seldom did, and their arrival coincided with the gondoliers’ realization that the rowers on the first through fourth ships did not call out to buy lemons and oranges because they were shackled to their benches. The slow-building uproar drifted to Ulloth’s window, but, because the March day glowed with that pretty, deceptive glow of false springtime that brought the painters from Minas Tirith and Dol Amroth to Pelargir to mutter about the beautiful light, Ulloth’s window served her only as a frame through which to watch the first brave pelargoloth umbel sway in the warm breeze. 

It was an early-blooming cultivar brought back by her father from his last voyage to Far Harad, where a thousand varieties grew in their – and his – native soil. There, at the great terminal cape of the continent, certain pelargelyth grew only in a single swale between two specific summits, while others nodded their heads along a unique stretch of shore, and still others sunk delicate roots into the scant soil of one face of a great palisade above the shrubland.

 As the ninth and tenth ships proceeded into the harbor, Ulloth thought only of a voyage where she might accompany her father, freed from the cloistering confines of a merchant Dúnedain’s daughter’s room. She sighed and bent her head to her work. Beneath her brush, sepals and anthers glowed Pelargirian red. These were pelargoloth petals of a more antique stamp, the five-hundred-forty-eighth variety painstakingly illustrated and described by her hand, in the pigments which built her family’s fortune. 

Later in the day, she would turn her attention to the account-books: great ledgers tracking the motions of her far-flung family in castars, tharnis, and silver pennies; raw ochres and earths, and finest prepared dyes and pigments. In this way she would learn of sudden bounty in Umbar, where her mother’s great-uncles still lived, or poor harvests along the Sea of Ringil in Harad, or saber-rattling in Dorwinion to plug the wine-flow. This much travel – on the page, from afar – was appropriate for a wealthy woman of the trading class whose blood and holdings, when tallied up with many fractions and carryings-over, added up to enough like a Dúnedain lady of quality to forbid any voyages in her father’s swift caravels, or her father-brother’s mule trains, or her mother-sister’s sloops. Not if she were to attract and wed an indisputably Gondorian youth of good – Númenorean – family, such that her children would be of standing to be presented before the Steward’s throne in Minas Tirith, or the halls of the Princes of Dol Amroth, their pedigrees and money washed clean enough of Umbar and Far Harad to be received. 

Such was Ulloth’s responsibility in her home just off the Anduin’s great final loop through Pelargir, which was also the base of a small trading empire whose pigments graced the study of even Faramir, second son of the Steward. She attended to it assiduously and well. However, as the bells began to ring alarms at another five black-sailed Corsair ships hoving into view, Ulloth’s mind and pen alighted upon the pelargoloth, her namesake, the common and beloved flower of the city’s balconies and courtyards, just opening its scarlet petals with the dawn of the the Second Siege of Pelargir. 

 

–

 

Every house in Pelargir caught as much rainwater as they could in pots and cisterns, and each subsidiary island of the canal-riven city stored more in great metal-roofed butts. Ulloth’s family home was grand enough for a patch of courtyard hardly larger than a handkerchief, so they supplemented their roof-catchments with a deep cistern. All this meant that Ulloth, as the senior family member at home — and did not her uncles’ long absences to the East, her father’s difficulties in returning from the cape of Harad, all take on a more sinister cast with a great fleet of Corsair-drumonds in the harbor? — decided to keep the servingwomen and her maid in the house. 

Many of them, newcomers from Umbar and their daughters, with letters of introduction from distant relatives and clients of Ulloth’s grandmother, lived in the narrow alleys of the Foundry neighborhood. No one, however, was poling the gondolas across the Anduin when every bridge was now a beachhead and Corsairs prowled the canals. There was space enough for them to bed down in the receiving room, and after the first night, Ulloth came down from her bedroom to join them. The roll and lilt of their voices, the rustle of their blankets, helped drown out the screams and clashes that filled the canals, drawing closer, then farther away. 

They were six: Ulloth, Ulloth’s maid Carinzel, the scullery, the housekeeper, and the woman who kept the artists’ shop next door. Unlike Ulloth, all were full Umbarim. Like Ulloth, they did not stir from the sitting room on the first day of siege, flinching at the sounds of battle and the thought of either side entering the house: the Corsairs to rob Gondorians, the Gondorians to revenge themselves upon Umbarim, soldiers of any stripe bursting upon a huddle of commoner women. 

That first day passed in silence, tangled fear-roots emanating from each and tangling together until their whole trembling assembly choked. They all feared the Corsairs, even though the rest called them privateers; they all feared the Gondorian soldiers, although Ulloth called them the Steward’s men. The scullery feared the housekeeper, and the housekeeper feared Carinzel, and Carinzel feared Ulloth. And here they all were, at awkward distances in the finely appointed room where Ulloth and her mother received guests, hoping to hear no knock on the door. 

In truth, Ulloth also feared them all, with a kind of fear she found distasteful in herself, the more so for being a fear she had looked at sidelong for many years. Her mother — and, when her mother was away, she herself — hired Umbarim as servants, as all the grand houses did. 

The polite fiction of Gondor was that it was the country of Gondorians, who were the people of Tar-Minyatur, gray-eyed loyalists to the end. The polite fiction of Pelargir was that it had forgotten Castamir and paid no mind to its aunties and cousins in Umbar, unless they had a nimble-fingered natural daughter who might serve as a companion, or at least a maid of the better sort.

Such was Carinzel, though Ulloth thought she was no relation. Certainly they did not look alike; Ulloth’s father’s curls and complexion outweighing her mother’s strong arched nose and Númenórean height in the eyes of many. Yet she had always found herself comparing her dress, her voice, her walk to Carinzel, and treating her now as an intimate, now as a grand lady of Minas Tirith would treat her maid. Ulloth’s was a house as ambitious as it was new, and the daughter of an ambitious new house of Gondor did not make fast friends with the get of Castamir, especially if she herself was of dubious descent. The get of Elendil did not clamor to be friends with her, however, at least not the sort of friends to invite over for a week of garden parties and sleeping three to a bed and hiring boats to take them leisurely through the canals sipping lemon cordial. 

And so, even waiting in the dark to see if they would be accosted by soldiers who would treat her as no more Gondorian than Carinzel – worse, perhaps, for the clear stamp of Harad on her – Ulloth found herself minding her vowels when she spoke, and felt grateful when they spoke little. 

She spent the day writing the captions for three of her pelargelyth, all natives of Harad: a lovely early-blooming salmon-colored one with variegated leaves that she kept in her own collection, a so-called thousand-flowered variety from her father’s hometown she knew only from her grandmother’s drawings, and a delightfully fuzzy variety with sweet flower-faces like bears, which she had once kept, but which turned out to be only annual. Carinzel and the scullery maid watched her write for a while, then went over to the housekeeper, who was telling fairy stories in a quiet voice. There was time – nothing but time! – to write another, but Ulloth found herself lulled by the housekeeper’s voice. 

There was no sense in lighting candles, so they set themselves down to sleep at twilight. She lay on the long couch, denuded of its cushions so Carinzel might mound them into a mattress on the floor. Ulloth’s pillow was her book.

 

–

 

She woke on the second day to sounds of fighting very nearby, the scullery and the housekeeper already awake and wide-eyed. Looking down, Carinzel still slept, her lashes fanned on her cheeks. Ulloth reached down, gently placing a hand on her shoulder. Carinzel started awake, but remained rigid and still, eyes darting around the room, then fixing on Ulloth. 

Ulloth squeezed her shoulder and looked about the room herself. The scullery maid had woken the shopkeeper, who rested her forehead on her bent knees. Outside, the clangor of steel broke through the dawn. All the hairs on Ulloth’s arms stretched and wavered.

“Come,” she said — her voice wavering too, unsuitable for the lady of the house —  “Let us go to the courtyard. We should draw water.” 

All the women nodded, and Ulloth found herself unconsciously nodding along. She picked up her book and her pen, while the scullery surreptitiously stuffed a rag doll inside her shift, and the housekeeper neatly folded an Umbarian missal into her handkerchief. 

Walking out into the damp morning air, into the silence afforded by the encircling house, was a balm, however false. It even smelled of balm — for Ulloth’s courtyard was the envy of any grand lady’s precious border. Every windowsill, every drainpipe, every eave boasted a pelargoloth, in trays and hanging baskets and elegant pots. The scarlet lavished the eye so that if one looked up at the square of sky above, it seemed bluer than blue. The scent was that of a sweet dream. 

Elsewhere in Pelargir, where the nobles had eked out a strip of garden from the marsh, dearer than an acre of wheat or a mine of opals, the unusual species bloomed for Ulloth’s pleasure and pen. White Mountains Orange. Scarlet cranesbill. Tiny, fruity, pale-pink Apple Pelargoloth. Nonesuch Pelargoloth, procured at great expense from a Harad trader and sold at even greater expense – Ulloth’s first commercial success. Great shrubby Royal Oaks, with their fragrance of balsam and almond and handsome oakleaf fronds. The Peppermint-Scented Pelargoloth, its small white umbels less apparent than the sharp, cooling scent that marked their presence in a rich matron’s herb garden against sprains and bruises. 

All these were the privilege of those whose blood and wealth secured them the land upon which such shrubby varieties could grow. Like the city-dwellers, though, pelargelyth were too giving — or too aggressive, or too curious — to permit such restraint entirely.

At all times, rising over the dank water-stink of the river and canals, floated the aroma of pelargoloth in its rose-semblance. The Scented-Leaf or Rose Pelargoloth, all shrub and little flower, was the darling of the perfumers’ nose, an endless font of fragrant gold for the city. These abounded in the guild’s precious courtyards, and on the hard-fought island gardens out in the Lagoon of Belfalas, where bushels and bushels of leaves gave up tiny, precious phials of rosy oil to perfume the smooth necks of great ladies even as far afield as Rohan and Rhûn. Some dried leaves, mixed with spices and rosebuds, traveled in little sachets between folds of samite and linen, in smooth arcs to the east and north and south that Ulloth traced on the maps that charted her father’s trading expeditions. Perhaps a very Elf of the Havens might open such a chest to cut a dress and smell Pelargir’s summer bounty. Closer to home, the leaves of varietals named for lemon and rose, cinnamon and peppermint, might infuse ices and creams and jellies in the summer and provide winter teas with a memory of sunny Cerveth. 

And of course, everyone knew the great favorite, the Garden Pelargoloth, Pelargoloth × santi, in its many guises. What balcony in Pelargir did not glow red with its stocky inflorescences, and what hanging basket did not benefit from a peep of pink in its center? From the first footsteps of spring to the fall of autumn’s veil, Pelargir rejoiced in its pelargelyth: pink, white, and, above all, scarlet blooms billowing over iron balconies and springing from pots in every unattended corner.

Ulloth loved them all, from the garden pelargelyth in their fiery, cascading habit, to the shy, ribbon-petaled rarities glimpsed inside the nobles’ cloisters from the canals when she went out with Carinzel to do her purchasing and take account of newly arrived ships.  

So, her courtyard, small as it was, was the equal of any of those cloisters, crimson as the sun or a blown horse’s nostril, full to the brim of the flower of the city. 

The shopkeeper, who had never been so far into the house before, let out a breathless, “Oh,” and the scullery, who went back and forth from the cistern at least five times daily, giggled at her. For half a perfumed minute, the battle outside was drowned out by flowers. 

A man screamed thinly, a bell clashed, and battle returned. 

“Let’s bathe,” said Carinzel, rather desperately.

Ulloth looked at her in surprise. 

The housekeeper protested: “The men—” 

Carinzel said, “As if it would make any difference if–” and Ulloth reached out and jostled her elbow before she said anything in front of the scullery. 

As if it would make any difference if.  

“Let’s bathe!” Ulloth repeated brightly, and kept hold of Carinzel’s elbow as she towed her towards the cistern. 

The scoops and pails that cluttered the lip of the cistern made acceptable ewers and basins, and the scullery made quick work of hauling up water, looking out of the corners of her eyes at the rest of them as if to say, “See how much stronger and faster I am than you fine ladies at this?” 

In a fit of fancy, Ulloth pinched off a few leaves from the potted pelargelyth bracketed to the walls and crushed them in the water so it smelled faintly of spicy roses. 

Her own hair she had washed, with Carinzel’s help, only three days ago, when Umbarian ships had only meant new goods in the market, and maybe new maids looking for work. Somehow, despite the battle-clamor outside, she hesitated to ruin her braids by washing them again too soon. With her mother gone, nobody but Carinzel knew how to treat her hair, anyway. Such were two-thirds of her girlhood visits to the ladies of – Númenórean – quality of Pelargir, though. Ulloth was well-used to dressing Dúnedain hair while she charmingly kept her own head out of others’ hands. 

It was harder to convince Carinzel to let her wash her hair than it was to convince young Lady Mídhwinn. Lady Mídhwinn was probably well used to letting young women who looked like Ulloth bathe her, while the whole point of her mother hiring Carinzel was to accustom Ulloth to being treated as if she were Lady Mídhwinn, at least at home.

But her home — this house and Pelargir both — were under siege, and not so homelike at all. Ulloth made a pleading face, and, reluctantly cracking a smile, Carinzel sat down on the steps of the cistern and undid her braids. Trying to be as much like Carinzel as possible, Ulloth laid a hand on Carinzel’s brow and tilted her head back to let her wavy, braid-crinkled hair fan out in the water. 

Beside her, the shopkeeper worked her fingers in the scullery’s hair, revealed to be almost as long as Ulloth’s mother’s. The housekeeper exclaimed over it, and the scullery blushed. Ulloth poured more water over Carinzel’s hair to rinse out the little leaf bits, and decided that if she was seeing everyone with their hair down, she could at least call them by their names in her own head.

The little scullery — Lennel — chattered to the housekeeper, of whom she had been afraid only that morning, that she kept it long because it required less washing that way, and because her mother in Umbar always said long braids were the best way to find a husband. The housekeeper — the morally named Missus Meiniel –  nodded at her sagely and told her that she should wait to wed until she went back to Umbar, as the boys who traveled to Pelargir to make their fortunes never had two silver pennies to rub together. 

Ulloth caught Carinzel’s eye upside-down, and both forebore to comment on the relative likeliness of any young girl sent out to Gondor to earn a living returning to Umbar again — with or without a siege. 

Everyone clanged and clattered the water vessels loudly to drown out the clanging of far worse implements outside, and wrung their rose-smelling hair into the pelargoloth pots to save the water. 

Little Lennel’s hair, which reached down to her knees with the classic Umbarian wave stretched out of it by the weight of the water, was irresistible, and they all converged on her to braid it up, while the girl smiled bashfully at the attention. Missus Meiniel provided her own comb, and Ulloth pinched off the reddest pelargoloth umbels to stud the elaborate crown Carinzel was deftly weaving atop Lennel’s head. 

When they were done, Lennel looked like the sea-bride who threw the ring into the mouth of the Anduin during the Lothron festivals, to ensure that Pelargir stayed in Ulmo’s good graces. They always wore Pelargir’s beloved flower in their hair, and came from the best families. Lennel might have been any of those gentlewomen’s little sisters, until she opened her mouth and everyone heard purest Umbar, that funny mix of Sindarin and Westron and the archaic language of Westernesse of which they were so proud. 

Ulloth quietly plaited Carinzel’s hair as she requested, plain and tight and even. Somehow, however, it felt wrong to leave it at that, and Ulloth tucked just one small pelargoloth at the nape of her neck, where it wouldn’t draw attention or get in the way. Carinzel patted her head once Ulloth was done. She must have felt the little red blossom there, but she said nothing. 

They stayed out in the courtyard until well past noon, when the smell of smoke drove them inside. In the haze, the pelargelyth flamed like rubies.  

 

–

 

The third day passed indoors while some grand building, or some score of smaller ones somewhere out in the lagoon, burned. At least the choking air kept the fighters down too. 

It being only March, the house did not stifle with its windows shut, but Missus Meiniel roamed restlessly through the shuttered rooms and hallways straightening hangings that did not need to be straightened, while Carinzel stabbed her fingers more often than the ribbon she was embroidering, and the shopkeeper, whom Ulloth was almost always remembering to call Feiris now, lay on the sofa with a damp cloth over her eyes, tense as a treble string.   

Ulloth made attempts at more captions, until she came to a particularly bloody-red garden varietal of Pelargoloth × santi named “Castamir’s blood,” and went to pretend to be useful in the kitchen until the rusty sunset gave them all an excuse to sleep. 

This time, she insisted Lennel take the couch, and she and Carinzel lay shoulder-to-shoulder in the gloom, coughing gently every now and then.

 

–

 

On the fourth day, absolutely nothing happened, except that the smoke lifted, leaving behind it dirtied windows that Ulloth forbade anyone from looking out of. Early in the morning, she had glanced out of the window beside the canal-door, twitching the heavy curtain aside to see what was toward. Across the canal stood an armed man, his back turned to her. He was no wealthy knight. His jerkin was of boiled leather, his only pieces of metal armor a helmet and greaves. As he faced away, the long shield he leaned upon gave no hint as to his allegiances. He could have been a middling sort serving his tax-time in the armies of Gondor, or he could have been a journeyman Corsair. Calling out to him to ask what was toward would be nothing short of suicide, perhaps either way. 

The man shifted, and Ulloth sprang back from the window before she could decide if it would be worse for a fighter — of Gondor or of Umbar — to think the house unoccupied, or occupied only by women of a foreign stamp. 

That day, she meant to illustrate a page for the jauntily pink monkey-face pelargoloth, which had been briefly the rage the year before after it sported up in a chandler’s balcony, but the soldier had been standing beside a row of wall-bracketed pots full of their blowsy faces, and the tip of his long spear kept inserting itself into the leaves she sketched and erased, while Carinzel ground red ink with Feiris, and Lennel tried to sleep the day away.

 

–

 

Something broke on the fifth day. 

Specifically, the pretty pot in which Ulloth dipped her brushes broke, for no apparent reason, when she set it down too hard on the flags in the courtyard, and splashed paint and water over her current drawing, the monkey-face pelargoloth tame at last. Ulloth thought hysterically of blood, though the water was rosy at best, and let out a little cry of frustration that made Carinzel, wringing out a sheet beside her, look at her out of the corner of her eye.

Ulloth closed her eyes and strove to master herself. With her eyes shut, all the sounds of her new, constrained world grated on her all the more: the dripping of the sheet on the flags, the clang of distant fighting, the unheeding cry of a yellow-legged gull perched on the roof. 

“It’s ruined!” she exclaimed. “My whole sketch — and I cannot go out to look for a new model. There is one only across the canal, but there was a spearman beside it yesterday!” Her face and eyes felt hot, and a lump clogged her throat. 

Carinzel set down the sheet, but did not move to comfort her. 

“Why are you so calm?” Ulloth demanded, hearing the feverish petulance in her own voice. 

“It’s a drawing, miss,” Carinzel replied. 

“We are calling one another by our names,” Ulloth said stiffly. It hurt, however irrationally, to hear Carinzel dismiss the loss of her sketch, all the bright slatternly Pelargirian pink running into the cracks between the stones, the clever monkey faces smeared. 

Carinzel’s lips tightened. She plucked a pelargoloth from one of the pots below the cistern and offered it to Ulloth. 

“It’s fragrant, miss. Maybe it will be calming.” 

Ulloth stared from the red blossom to Carinzel’s shuttered, proud-nosed face. 

A friend would not offer a flower as though it were smelling salts. Carinzel was not her friend; she was her maid. The natural daughter of someone whose blood flowed direct from Elenna, with no detours through Harad — that is, an embarrassment of a traitor house, and someone who would never enter a grand manse on the Anduin with aspirations of a coat of arms, unless employed there. There was swordfighting outside their doors; Pelargir was under siege. Carinzel still called her “miss.”

“Do you not know that if the Corsairs win, we are each as ill-starred as the other?” Ulloth asked. 

Carinzel’s nostrils flared. She set the flower down on the cistern beside the sheet. “I was washing your sheets, miss. They will not dry if I do not finish wringing them out.” 

“Umbar is in Pelargir! Do you not hear them on the water?” 

Carinzel turned away from her entirely and picked the sheet back up. Twisting and squeezing it, she said, “Umbar is in your house.” 

There were meanings there to parse, but before Ulloth could work them all out, Carinzel gave the sheet a vicious press, spattering the flagstones, and went on: “Umbar and a hundred pelargelyth that will not prove anything to anyone or avail us ought, whoever finally breaks down the door. Miss.” 

A grand lady might slap her maid, whether in Umbar or Gondor. Ulloth’s palm itched. 

She clenched her fist instead and turned on her heel to go inside, where the shopkeeper, and the housekeeper, and the scullery all scurried about for the rest of the day, mindful of her mood, just in case Gondor won and money spoke louder than blood.

 

–

 

 The sixth day saw a slight easing of tensions within the house. This could not be attributed to a thawing of relations between Ulloth or Carinzel, but to the return of pitched fighting outside. 

It was the twelfth of March, and for no reason the women in the house could decipher, the canals were once again alive with death, as loud with screams and the clash of arms as on the first day of siege. 

“Perhaps they were defeated upriver,” proposed Feiris, worrying at her skirts. 

“But what if they are new privateers?” asked Lennel. 

Quellingly, but for the white-knuckled grip she held on her chatelaine, Missus Meniel replied, “How would we know if they are privateers or Gondorians?” 

Carinzel, who had been almost silent all the previous day, spoke up. “We could go to the attic window to look towards the harbor.” 

That united everyone in dismay: what if she should be seen? 

The attic was, essentially, a loft for the pallid swifts of summer, a raftered space where Ulloth had been unable to stand straight since age thirteen, given over to the storing of spare sacks and suchlike robust goods not yet transferred to the warehouse. The window, which was a generous term for a narrow vent, did have a sliver of a view of the Anduin-mouth. As a young girl, Ulloth would stand on a box in front of it, ducking when the swifts flew in, keeping watch for the first signs of her father’s ship returning. 

The latticework shutters, she recalled, opened inwards. 

With some difficulty, Ulloth caught Carinzel’s eye. Holding her gaze, she walked towards the kitchen, as though for water or a crust of their board-stale bread. She passed Carinzel by, and heard her feet following her through the kitchen and out into the courtyard by the connecting door. 

By that door stood a rough table the cook used to pluck capons and scale fish. Ulloth spared a moment to hope the cook was safe in her out-lagoon home. While not in use, the table housed an earthenware pot of pelargelyth, the classic red. Ulloth took it up and doubled back past Carinzel, who frowned but said nothing, then back through the kitchen, the scullery, and onto the servants’ stair that led to the attic. 

At the top of the house, Ulloth held her finger to her lips, crouched to avoid the attic rafters, and crept to the window. Unlatching the shutters, she swung them carefully inwards, then knelt and placed the potted pelargoloth on the sill. Then she beckoned Carinzel forward, and they peered through the screen of fragrant leaves.

There seemed to be as many black ships in the visible slice of harbor as there had been from the start. Ulloth squinted, determinedly not looking down to see what was toward on the canalside, and found nothing to enlighten her further. 

Beside her, Carinzel stiffened. She looked down into the canal, and unwillingly, Ulloth followed her gaze.

Silence rang in the canal below. Gondorian infantry wore plate armor — perhaps that was why they did not float on the green surface of the canal making red flowers around their necks and middles like the others. They littered the canalside, though, and stained the pavement. Waterlogged, tattered, black against the glaucous water, the remnants of the Corsairs swayed in the tide. 

Carinzel made a small retching sound. Almost dropping the pelargoloth — though there were none in left the canal with eyes to see them if she did —  Ulloth tugged Carinzel back, and they both tumbled onto their haunches under the low rafters. They stared at one another. Ulloth could not tell what her face showed; Carinzel looked at her with a profound blankness, the whites showing all around her irises. 

Perhaps it was worse for her, Ulloth thought, to see the Corsairs. Perhaps that was uncharitable. As she watched. Carinzel swallowed again, hard,  then again. 

Swiftly, Ulloth tore off a leaf of the pelargoloth and let its spice and rose mix with the attic dust and the suddenly suspicious scent of the canal. She held it close to Carinzel’s proud nose, pinched and pale at the corners with fear, or nausea. Carinzel closed her eyes and breathed carefully. 

For long minutes, they sat and matched each other’s breath. Then they rose, and, taking the flowerpot with them, went to tell the others not to stir outside. 

For the rest of the day, Ulloth kept them gathered around her, united in an effort to make all the colors she needed for a page describing a variegated pelargoloth, grinding and straining and distilling. The encyclopedia to which Ulloth had dedicated all her free hours, in lieu of a dowry or a trader’s first stock of goods, seemed fit now only to provide a false sense of purpose. 

But Linnel loved to trace the letters Ulloth marked out for her, inking them carefully with black. Missus Meniel and Feiris spoke in low voices in colloquial Umbaran Westron that Ulloth struggled to make out from across the room, pounding and pounding the rosin for mixing paint, and finding some solace in it, Ulloth hoped. 

Carinzel simply sat over her shoulder and watched, and Ulloth hoped she was seeing flower petals, and nothing else. 

 

–

 

No one slept well that night. If the fighting had intensified yesterday such that the Gondorian soldiers who had been holding Pelargir bridge by bridge, district by district, had been so outnumbered, perhaps it meant the end was in sight, and Pelargir would soon become again independent — rather, some other Númenórean vassal. 

Ulloth slept in fits. The boundary between waking and dreaming was thin, and all the air seemed pervaded by dreadful premonitions. She dreamt of Corsairs breaking down the door and dragging her away to a tall black ship, then she dreamt of Gondor’s soldiers knocking in a window and dragging out Linnel. Waking, she trembled to think of how near to reality her dreams might be. 

The dawn of the seventh day broke like a plate, jagged and dismaying. Around the room, Ulloth and the rest of the women blinked red eyes at the sticky morning without rising from their makeshift beds. Ulloth felt the air pressing down on her, a smothering blanket. What was the use of rising to another day of siege? What was the use in all her fine ambitions, to marry well, to immortalize the flower of a city about to fall?

Across the room, Lennel gave a muffled sob. 

It galvanized everyone somewhat. She was, after all, only a little chit of a thing. All in their shifts, they crawled — it was a day for crawling — over to her, to provide what scant comfort they could. Lennel buried her head in Missus Meiniel’s shoulder, though before all this had started, she could hardly look her in the eye for nerves. Ulloth could not find it in herself to be glad for it. Lennel and Missus Meiniel both had come to Gondor for lives they could not live in Umbar, but how sorely they must regret it now. 

Eventually, Lennel stopped crying, but only, it seemed, through tiredness, not from any lessening of fear. Carinzel suggested they wash their faces, as though removing a layer of salt and nighttime grime would remove whatever fearful veil hung over the world. 

In the courtyard, the sky hung leaden above them. Only the pelargelyth seemed unaffected by the gloom, blazing bright spots of red along the walls and by the sides of the cistern. As had become everyone’s habit over the week of confinement, Feiris broke off a leaf, and the warm scent enveloped them — but only for a moment, before the fine fragrance fell beneath the weight of the dismal sky. 

Washed, but somehow feeling no cleaner, they wandered as a group back inside. It felt safer together, somehow, though safer did not feel very safe at all. Ulloth could not bring herself to pick up her brush. Carinzel’s mending stayed in her lap. Missus Meiniel brought out some rock-hard bread and the last of the stock from the cellar to soak it in, and otherwise did not set foot in the kitchen. Feiris simply sat, looking at her hands. 

For all that Carinzel had remained cool to her since their argument in the courtyard, despite their moment in the attic, Ulloth felt best by her side. She edged closer to her on the couch, until their shoulders touched. Carinzel looked at her, but seemingly could not find the energy to protest in some subtle way. 

There they sat, some scant warmth passing between their pressed-together arms, while the day dragged on and the fear that pressed upon their lungs and limbs grew heavier, and heavier, like dirty water pouring through a split hull. 

Around noon – although it was hard to tell, with the sunlight as trapped as they were – they began once more to hear shrieks and screams outside the house. This time, there was no sound of metal or battle, only cries of terror and the sound of running feet, punctuated by occasional splashes. 

Ulloth wished she could scream too, but the fear had reached a fever pitch, freezing her where she sat, her heart beating sideways like a dagger. 

Feiris, who of all of them was the most quiet, cried out, “No! No!” although none could tell against what she protested. 

Then the worst was done. Carinzel let out a ragged gasp and doubled over where she sat, and Ulloth followed her, burying her face in the nape of her neck. 

Missus Meiniel muttered a prayer of the sort that Umbarian staff usually kept from their employers’ ears, but Ulloth could not care a whit about anything but the warm solidity of Carinzel’s back and the blessed lessening of the terror. 

There they sat for a timeless period, stunned and numb with the passing of some horror they did not understand. 

At last, Carinzel twitched. She pushed her shoulderblades together to dislodge Ulloth, then sat straight, head cocked to listen. Then Ulloth heard it. Banging, like someone pounding on doors — like many someones pounding on many doors. 

Her heart began to pound again. 

“We must look,” she whispered, and the whole room turned to her with alarm. None gainsaid her. 

She and Carinzel climbed once again to the attic. This time, they brought no potted pelargoloth. The knocking on doors had begun. The knocking down of doors would surely not be so far behind, if things had gone ill — and what could that terrible tide of dread have been, if not an ill omen? If they were seen, so be it.

The canal was less full of bodies than it had been, though some still floated like grotesque figures on green porcelain. Along the pavement, though, strode live warriors, neither Corsairs nor Gondor’s soldiers.  

They were tall and rangy and dressed in gray raiment, with only some plate glinting at necks, and here and there a full harness. Most wore mail under their gray, and long swords and long knives at their side. Their helmets bore no crest and their surcoats no patches. 

But they pounded at the doors, moving house by house through Pelargir’s narrow streets, crying for the inhabitants to lift their bars and undo their latches, for the Corsairs were driven back, and all men were needed to deal with the prisoners, and food was needed for themselves, for they had ridden hard to free the city. 

Ulloth almost fell back from the window, an echo of the day before. As before, Carinzel stared at her with wide eyes. Ulloth recovered herself first. She was the lady in this house, and it was her duty to foresee what would keep it together. 

“Spoils,” she said, then, louder, “Spoils! We must prepare something.” 

Ulloth scrambled to her feet, and without waiting for Carinzel to reply, took off at a run down the stairs, clattering and bouncing her shoulders off the landing walls, racing pell-mell through the receiving room, leaving Carinzel to explain what was toward. 

In the kitchen, she grabbed at their stores in a flurry of panic — the last, stonelike loaf of bread, a string of cured sausages, a bag of dried apricots. Stuffing it all into an old bag still dusty with flour, she ran back through the parlor, only for her arm to be caught in a tight grasp, jerking her backwards so she almost fell. 

“No!” Carinzel said. “We are going together with Missus Meinel, and Lennel is staying with Feiris right here.”  

Ulloth nodded, panting. The three of them hurried towards the front door, locked, barred, and barricaded with heavy furniture from the hallway, which they scrabbled at and shoved aside until they could open the two leaves and stand in the portico, watching the gray warrior come towards them. 

“Wait,” Carinzel whispered again, and disappeared into the courtyard. Ulloth stifled the urge to cry out after her, and she was back after only a moment, with a handful of roughly torn pelargoloth umbels in her hands. Despite herself, Ulloth almost winced to see the jaggedly broken stems, but then she understood, and clasped Carinzel’s stap-sticky, fragrant hand in gratitude. Carinzel nodded to her, pressed the bouquet into her free hand, then straightened sharply, as a shadow fell across their little tableau. 

Hot and cold with fear, Ulloth straightened, and looked at the man in front of her. He was enormously tall, and his eyes beneath his helm were keen and hard. The rest of his face hid in shadow. 

Slowly, her very muscles resisting, Ulloth held out the flowers. The petals jerked and danced with the trembling of her hand, and noticing only made the shaking worse. 

“A star shines on our meeting,” she said, in her finest and most ostentatious Sindarin. “We are only women here, and we have but little food to offer. Please accept it nonetheless, in token of our welcome.” 

The eyes behind the helmet looked from the juddering posy in her hand, to Missus Meiniel, to Carinzel, to Ulloth’s face. Then the soldier reached up — Missus Meiniel flinched — and removed his helmet. 

All three women gasped. The tall warrior’s hair escaped his padded hood in sweaty tendrils, but it was long and pitch black, and clung to a face whose architecture was somehow, indescribably, other. He looked almost more Númenórean than was possible, like the painting of Tar-Minyatur in the great hall of the governor's palace. Was this the son of the Steward, whom all the rumors said was fey and strange, like a figure from a lay?

“It is a balm to find someone who speaks the Elven-tongue in this city,” the warrior said, in pure and ringing Sindarin. Missus Meiniel, who had only enough Sindarin to haggle with the market stall-keepers, pressed closer to Ulloth, as though it would help her understand. 

“I learned it in my cradle,” Ulloth replied shakily. “It is not uncommonly spoken here.”

The warrior reached out — Missus Meiniel flinched again — and took the bouquet. Ulloth had gripped it tightly enough to crush the stems further, but the warrior did not affect to notice. He only tucked the posy behind the fine brooch keeping his gray cloak closed, where it burned like a great ruby. Ulloth felt a rush of gratitude for Carinzel almost strong enough to make her dizzy.

“If it please you, honored sir,” she ventured, “Are the Corsairs gone from the city?” 

“They are bottled in the harbor on their ships,” said the warrior. “The man this city knew as Thorongil has driven them there, and he will soon dispatch them, one way or another. The streets and boat-ways are free from invaders, and will remain so.” 

Ulloth nodded, but wondered at “invaders.” Who were these men? The name Thorongil was common as dirt, after the hero of the naval war before she was born; their favorite butcher was named Thorongil. 

“We thank you,” she said, with a deep curtsy, and wondered how many questions she dared ask. “May I– may we know who…” 

If she was not mistaken, the grave warrior winced. He pulled off his hood and bowed to them, hand to his breast where the pelargoloth bouquet nodded. Through the sweat-stuck strands of hair, Ulloth saw that his ears came to points. 

“I am Elladan, son of Elrond Loremaster of Rivendell, Captain of the Grey Company,” he said. “We ride under the command of my own kinsman, the king-to-be, the true and rightful King of Gondor, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, scion of Isildur’s line, who has driven out Umbar from the fields and rivers of Pelargir.” 

The sentence contained so much that was strange and incredible that Ulloth wondered if her Sindarin had failed her after all, and she had not parsed it correctly. Her hand fell to her side, and Carinzel gripped it tightly. An Elf! A king! An army of which she had never heard tell— a rescue? A usurpation? A driving-out of Umbar? She squeezed Carinzel’s hand in return, so hard her knuckles creaked. 

The Elf’s eyes darted down to their clasped hands.

“My lord Aragorn means to prove his merit,” he said. “He has kept Pelargir safe once before, and he has rescued it again. He asks only for help with supplies and the management of the captured pirates, and then, if it is so willed, he will have the chance to show all of Gondor the quality of which he is made.” 

Ulloth supposed he meant that to be comforting. 

“Very well,” she said, feeling as though she floated behind her own eyes as behind a windowpane, watching herself speak to an Elf about kings. “Please take what small provision we can offer.” She held out the sack. 

The Elf —the Elf!--- took it, somehow diminishing his stature not at all. He bowed again, deeply, and said, “My thanks to you and your ladies here, for the food and the sweet-smelling flowers. It has been a grim ride, and the scents and colors of life ease me. May we leave peace in our wake for you to enjoy.” 

Ulloth managed a curtsy in reply, her hand still in Carinzel’s. The Elf nodded, then turned, and strode across the bridge to the next section of the city to pound on doors for provisions and to give news that made Ulloth feel as though she were dreaming. 

Missus Meiniel, who had been utterly silent throughout the whole exchange, inserted her arm into Ulloth’s field of view and closed the door in front of them with a careful click. Then she led them at a steady pace back to the parlor, where Feiris and Linnel waited, huddled together near the fireplace, pokers in their hands. 

“Put those down!” Missus Meiniel snapped, for an instant the no-nonsense housekeeper Ulloth had known before all this, but then she threw up her hands and turned to Ulloth, a torrent of questions on her lips. 

“What was that, miss? A character from a song? What did he say? Are we safe? What is happening?” 

Ulloth held her hands in front of her face as though she could ward off the rush. 

“An Elf!” she cried, for she could hardly believe it herself. “An Elf of the northlands, beyond Mirkwood or the Lonely Mountain or any place — a real Elf, come to Pelargir.” 

Feiris and Linnel exchanged glances, and Linnel tried to catch Carinzel’s eye, but caught Ulloth’s instead. She swallowed.

“Miss, was he… enchanting?” Linnel asked. “He did not come in — is he not…” She could not seem to decide what he might not be, out of all the lurid imaginings Umbarian children probably came up with about Elves, likely even more lurid than those Gondorian children did. 

Still shaken, Ulloth blurted, “He was sweaty.” 

Into the silence that produced, she went on. “He said. Well, he is not a Corsair. He is not a soldier of Pelargir. He said he captained a company under, under the command of the King returned, who has driven out the pirates. Like the old kings.” She went on, filling in the small details in something of a jumble, but tailed off, still unsettled. 

The silence her explanation generated was even more profound. 

“Gondor has no king, no more than Umbar does,” said Feiris. Missus Meiniel nodded. 

Carinzel stepped forward suddenly. “Thorongil,” she said, and the room changed at once. Ulloth looked from one to the other of her servants, bewildered. 

Feiris echoed, “Thorongil?” 

Carinzel nodded. “So the Elf said.” 

“I thought I heard that name,” Missus Meiniel said. “I thought I picked it out from that Elf-babble. You don’t think—” 

“A dozen people in the market alone are named Thorongil,” Ulloth cut in.

For the first time in her life, she had the strange experience of all her staff, as one, shaking their heads at her. 

“Thorongil of Gondor was true stock of Westernesse, as true as any sprout of that crooked branch could be,” Carinzel said. “Every child of Umbar knows it. No one names their sons Thorongil in Umbar. As much as we dislike the privateers, he destroyed more than their fleet. My mother remembers; she says everyone knew he was like a prince of the island come again with fire and sword. They lived long, those princes.” 

Ulloth considered this. She had thought just the same thing of the Elf-Captain, that he was true-minted as the portrait on a gold castar. 

“The Elf said he was Thorongil’s kinsman,” she said. “And he was an Elf. He had no idea how to speak to us — but he put all of Umbar’s men to flight. They are dealing with the captives now in the harbor…” 

She looked around the room, and at the women in it. If the man who had driven out the Corsairs was the rightful king of Gondor, so be it. If the man who had driven out the Corsairs was a renegade dreamer, another Castamir, he nonetheless pretended to a throne, and what would the Stewards do about it, stretched so thin in the war to the northeast, which already attenuated her mother’s caravans and harried her father’s ships? 

In this moment, she was the lady of this house, and while her father’s ambitions had been to make her a fine lady of Gondor, Ulloth’s own ambitions had always been to be a lady of green-and-scarlet, water-girt, rose-scented Pelargir, where her parents had met and conceived of her. And for now she was a merchant girl.

“We are going to hedge our bets,” she announced. “Feiris, go unlock the artists’ storeroom, and I will go with you and ready the gondola. We are going to go out to meet this Thorongil-Aragorn.

“Don’t stare at me,” she added, for the benefit of the incredulous glances that met this pronouncement. “I’ll say it: we have been trapped here like rats, because all of us look like the enemy to someone. The city is still full of Corsairs and soldiers who are only friendly when they think you’re a friend at first sight; goodness knows when they will leave. But now there is someone out in the harbor who might give us a fairer deal, if we can get in on it early.” 

Missis Meineil protested, “But we have nothing to deal with. And none of us can pole the gondola!” 

“We could row it, if we did it together,” said Carinzel, looking just the slightest bit surprised at herself. 

“Yes!” said Ulloth. “And we do have something to deal with, don’t we, Feiris?” 

Feiris blinked at her, wringing her skirt. “In the storeroom,” she said haltingly. “All the large stretchers, and the uncut bolts.”

Lennel, who had been looking back and forth between the speakers like a spectator at a fencing match afraid that one of the swordsmen might lunge at her next, spoke up. “I don’t understand.” 

Ulloth put a smile on her face. “Canvas,” she said. “All the canvas any pirate could ever dream of.” 

 

–

 

It took another precious half hour of arguing to bring them all around to a plot that even Ulloth could admit to herself was chancy in the extreme. It was, in its way, as great and risky a sea-voyage as her father had taken in launching himself from the Cape of Harad to make his fortune trading up and down the Western Ocean. 

Carinzel decided it in the end. She clapped her hands to still the argument and announced: “The next time a man comes knocking on our door demanding food, I want someone’s protection, even if he is but another pirate.”  

Ulloth may not have been permitted to go out on the caravans, but she saw them packed and stowed, and she saw how her mother sold their goods to all manner of people, from princes to starving artists whose grandfathers were princes. 

She seized Lennel and Carinzel by the hand and led them to the courtyard. 

“Lennel, take the quickest bath you can. Carinzel, do you recall when we went to see Lady Mídhwinn give the ring to the sea? Her hair?” 

Carinzel needed no further explanation. She reached out, and hesitating only for a moment, laid her hand on Ulloth’s arm and squeezed. Then she turned to Lennel and drew a comb from her pocket, and Ulloth drew out her chatelaine with its pretty scissors, and set to work denuding every pelargoloth in every pot in the courtyard. 

The air, still dark and heavy, brightened with rose, lemon, spice, and the whole perfume of Pelargir in summer. Ulloth’s skirt filled with crimson blossoms, until it looked like she carried a conflagration in her apron. Privately, she mourned the loss of the flowers — but the aim must be to keep the courtyard. The flowers of Pelargir were steadfast and stubborn: cut, they grew back and bloomed again. 

 “Ulloth,” Carinzel called, and Ulloth turned from her shearing to find Lennel dressed in an outgrown dress of Ulloth’s own, her long, beautiful hair in a high circlet of enlaced braids, looking for all the world like a princess of the city.

She saw at once what Carinzel meant, and she bore her apron of pelargelyth to the cistern-side. Carefully, she lowered the mass of flowers onto the ground, and Carinzel deftly removed the pins holding her apron to her skirt. Together, they pinched off the stems of the umbels and inserted them into Lennel’s hair, until she wore a blazing crown atop her head, the picture of the bride who presented Ulmo with his ring every May. 

Ulloth pressed her green-stained hands to her breast. “You look like the spirit of the city,” she told Lennel, and Carinzel nodded. 

Then Feiris rain into the courtyard to say she had removed all the canvas back onto bolts, but she and Missus Meiniel could not lift it and keep the gondola still at the same time. 

“Go and help them,” Ulloth said, and drew up buckets of water to plunge the remaining mountain of pelargelyth into before following them to the canalside door, sloshing water as she went. 

Inside, Feiris had indeed committed a feat of strength worthy of a stevedore, rolling and dragging the great wheels of tight hempen canvas meant for marriage portraits and religious triptychs to the canal door where the bargemen unloaded the goods of Ulloth’s family’s trade. There, Missus Meiniel kept the gondola steady against the door, the tide helpfully high. 

Together, Ulloth, Feiris, and Carinzel moved the largest of the canvas wheels to the door, and then, which much unladylike grunting, into the broad flat bottom of the gondola — which was, after all, a trader’s vessel, and so was elegantly lacquered and gilded, but flat-bottomed as a laundry barge and lagoon-worthy. 

A picture flashed into Ulloth’s mind — as though the starving princes’ grandsons had rubbed off on her — and she quickly sketched out her idea to Carinzel, who nodded eagerly. They stacked a smaller roll of canvas atop the first, and settled Lennel on it. Then they all got shakily into the boat, buckets of flowers and all, and stuffed them everywhere they would fit. 

Hair, buttonholes, oarlocks, buckets: the boat became a floating garden. More properly, it became a floating balcony, red and black atop a green canal, and full of women of Pelargir. 

Ulloth gave the rest of the flowers to Lennel to hold, and Carinzel placed her hand upon Lennel’s cheek and told her to keep her chin up. 

“Look at Ulloth,” she said. “Hold your head as she does.” 

Then Missus Meiniel, tight-lipped as ever, though bedecked with flowers, gave Ulloth the rudder, and Carinzel and Feiris oars, and they pushed off into the city’s waterways like a grim and desperate picnicking party. 

The desperation lent the rowers strength, perhaps, and the tide was with them. It must have been the late afternoon, for the lagoon lowered then, though the sun was still nowhere to be seen. Lennel’s crown of flowers was the brightest light in all the city as they approached the mouth of the Anduin, and then, at last, the harbor, still full of looming black ships. To the right, the source of the third day’s smoke was revealed: the Arsenal and shipyards reduced to charred stumps of wood and blackened stone, surely set alight in revenge by the Corsairs.

Ulloth’s heart, already pounding with exertion, began to beat so fast she wondered if she would faint. It pained her to see the pride of her home brought low — and it suggested shipbuilding supplies would be a scarce commodity.

A horn blew from one of the ships, and a small rowboat began to be winched down from its side. 

“Keep rowing,” Ulloth said, lips numb, clutching at the rudder to hold herself up as much as to hold their course. “Lennel — you are a picture. The first thing — remember the first thing – you must give them the flowers.” 

The rowboat drew closer. Without any glare on the water, Ulloth could see clearly that the man standing in its helm was the Elf-captain, and she blew out a half-conscious breath of relief. All around him, soldiers in gray leaned on the railings of the black ships, watching them row. Ulloth could see bows, though no glinting arrowheads. She glanced down at Carinzel, pulling at her oar with the veins standing out in her neck. Carinzel gave her half a grimace, half a grin, and then it was time to cease rowing, pitching in the lagoon’s small waves while the Elf-captain drew nearer. 

“Stand up,” she whispered to Lennel, and inconspicuously helped the girl keep her balance as she stood on the bottom bolt of canvas. 

The Elf-captain called out a greeting in a voice that seemed to carry farther and clearer than it ought. 

Ulloth managed a squawking hail, then gasped. It seemed her heart was beating in her throat, strangling her voice. She breathed in, hearing her breath squeak like a child in a fit of asthma. 

Then, to her very great surprise, Lennel called out, her sweet young voice quavering but audible, her accent thick enough to spread on bread. 

“We have gifts for the king-to-be,” Lennel said, and tossed her red posy onto the waves, where the flowers spread out and made a carpet of the water.

The Elf-captain looked stern. “We have little use for flowers now, little maid.”

“But sailors have much use for canvas,” cried Carinzel from behind Ulloth, her voice cracking. 

Their voices, reedy and shaking, and accented like her mother’s, went to Ulloth’s bones and wrapped themselves around her spine. 

In her best saleswoman’s tone, hoping her own voice was strong enough to be heard, she called, “If you come closer, you will see what we have to offer!”

With a gesture, the Elf-captain set his boat in motion again, drawing up smoothly alongside them. The rowers, Ulloth noticed, were dressed in clothes little better than rags, but Gondorian in style. Captives, certainly — but unchained, apparently uncoerced. 

“Are these rowers men of Pelargir?” she asked, wondering at her own daring. 

The Elf-captain looked to the man at the tiller. 

“I am Halfon of Seregones in Belfalas,” he said in a voice marked by either disuse or too much use. “I rowed the pirates’ ships a captive slave, but I row this boat willingly, for once my service is done, I will be returned to my home.” 

Could he go home now if he wished? Ulloth wondered to herself, and then thought of her own clever, experienced parents, trapped or delayed or— something— on their journeys. She sympathized with the very reasonable temptations of the balrog you knew, rather than the one you didn’t. 

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” she said, as though he were a customer coming to look at ochre pigments, and he nodded to her, seemingly as bemused as she felt. 

She chanced a glance at the Elf-captain, whose face bore no expression she could decipher. 

“I did not introduce myself earlier. I am Ulloth Wongamiel, currently mistress of our family mercantile, by the grace of the Corporation of Painters and the Duke of Pelargir. We thought that your sails must be damaged. We see also that Pelargir’s Arsenal is in no state to offer materiel. Perhaps we may help each other.”

There was a beat when only the waves made a sound. Then, sounding arch, the Elf-captain said, “The ships do not need painting, Miss Wongamiel. Nor do we need paintings of ships.” 

Ulloth took a small sip of air. He was haggling with her. An Elf out of fairy stories was going to haggle with her like a student at the market. This she could do. 

“I expect that you may wish for paintings of these ships in the future,” she said, “But I do see that you don’t need them now. However, I also see that many sails need patching. Our warehouse currently holds four hundred selvedge bolts of canvas, and while it is not sailcloth, it is certainly more than the Arsenal now holds. Moverover, a tall ship needs waterproofing, especially if it is sailing in… uncertain waters. Painters call them art supplies, and shipbuilders call them naval stores, but rosin and turpentine are rosin and turpentine. We keep enough on hand to supply a whole city’s worth of oil painters — I should think enough for whatever small emergencies might arise, um, wherever you are going.” 

It was a slightly weak finish, but beneath his helm, Ulloth could see the Elf-captain’s lips quirking in a smile. 

“We traveled hard and light with our enemy before us, Miss Wongamiel,” he said. “We do not carry specie with us on campaign.” 

“There is no shortage of good lenders in Pelargir,” she replied. “As your liege is familiar with the city, perhaps he has an institution he trusts to advance some small sum? We would of course offer a deep discount, given the circumstances.” 

The Elf-captain’s mouth twitched again, harder. 

“I have heard tell of the mercantile instincts of the City of Bridges,” he said. “If I were to tell you that the Duke had already come to us and offered his aid in making these ships river-worthy, what would you say then?”

Ulloth took a deep breath. “I would say that you would be using our canvas and turpentine in your new ships regardless, as the Duke’s efforts would surely require the goodwill and helpfulness of his people. Only, I would perhaps not feel so well-disposed to their use for this purpose.” 

Ulloth watched the Elf-captain open his mouth to respond, then almost fell into the lagoon when Carinzel stood up and set the boat to rocking. She glanced at Ulloth, a question on her face. 

One dreadful week in the house together could not overcome three years of carefully shoring up walls between them. Whatever the question was, Ulloth could not decipher it. But Carinzel had been a pillar to her in this week, truly. She could not do other than nod. 

Carinzel squared her shoulders. Playing up her accent, which had lost its hardest consonants and sharpest fricatives since Ulloth had known her, she said, “Moreover, the Duke will avoid the Foundry, and that will be no end of difficulty when he finds that not all the captives you say you’ve freed want to go on rowing your boats, and not all of them want to go back to Umbar.”

She took a deep breath. “But none of us in this boat are going back ourselves. Certainly not after this. We know where to direct newcomers, and places to live while getting on your feet. Canvas on and unwilling rowers off, with no harm to the Duke.” 

She sat down again, quite hard, and Lennel and Ulloth clung to each other to stay upright. 

There was a minute of silence. Behind his helm, the Elf-captain once again seemed grave and thoughtful. Ulloth, who had relaxed somewhat in the familiar rhythm of negotiation, began to feel lightheaded with nerves again. 

At last, he nodded. “A small sum, you say — and no doubt something additional for your trouble. Considering the circumstances, I think my liege will find these terms amenable. Will you stay here while we acquire a letter of writ for your accounts? We will be swift.” 

And indeed they were. Ulloth and her surprising crew did their best to stay in more or less the same place while the Elf-captain’s boat rowed back, then returned with several other small dinghies in tow — to carry the canvas, Ulloth presumed. 

She looked at each woman in the boat in turn. They all looked back, gazes steady and fearless — at least of her. Perhaps later she would ask Carinzel about her statement of intent to remain in Gondor, and all the rest. 

For now, they had made a spectacle of themselves already, and may as well play it to the hilt. 

“Let us lead them in,” Ulloth announced, and, unprompted, Lennel stood and braced herself against the canvas, so she stood like a scarlet-crowned figurehead as they rowed back into the city. 

This time, people watched them surreptitiously from behind their shutters and curtains. Ulloth was aware of their stares as she moored by boat beside the house, the storefront entrance. 

The Elf-captain pulled up beside them and swung with catlike grace onto the landing step, then lifted Lennel from the boat as though she weighed nothing at all. Ulloth scrambled up under her own volition, and helped Carinzel when she held out a hand. Missus Meiniel and Feiris allowed a pair of the gray-clad soldiers to pull them up, not without a certain air of suspicion. 

The letter of writ was good for all the canvas, and then some, but only twenty bolts were needed, all told. It seemed most of the Corsairs had fled, and the damage by fire and mischance was largely accidental and not severe. They did take all the rosin. 

As the members of the Grey Company loaded the fragrant jars and thick bolts into their boats, Ulloth dared to approach the Elf-captain again. 

He watched her come. “Do you now wish to bargain over your last term, Miss Wongamiel?”

Ulloth flushed, but stood her ground. This was her family’s home and their shop. “This house had much to fear from the soldiers of Pelargir, as well as from the Corsairs. It is not the only one. We have made this gift in earnest, and we are also aware that your liege is, at present, not the king of Gondor.” 

The Elf-captain looked down at her with those sharp gray eyes, saying nothing. Ulloth went on. 

“Some of your rowers can stay here,” she said. “Strong ones, from Gondor. If you can vouch for them, all the better. And I will look forward to word from Minas Tirith when their presence is no longer required.” 

Behind her, Feiris cried out for a man to be careful where he swung that canvas. Outside on the canal, which showed green and unblemished, yet would have to be dredged as soon as possible, a line of boats filled with material sold less for coin than for security — and perhaps for a different sort of Gondor, eventually. 

The Elf-captain looked at her, then around the shop, which despite its shuttered windows, still glowed with all the colors of her family’s trade. His gaze caught on a sketch next to the ochre pigments: pelargelyth, arranged in a wheel, in all shades of red and orange. It was Ulloth’s own work. She had the eerie feeling he knew that, somehow. 

“Very well,” he said, eventually. “They will arrive in the morning, or at least no later, for we mean to leave in haste.” 

He turned to face her fully, and she had the disconcerting sensation that he looked straight through her eyes into the swarm of thoughts that ran through her brain — the worry, the fear, the unhappy resentments, the tentative hope, the shrewd hope. 

Then he put his hand to his breast, where the posy she had given him earlier that day still rested behind his cloak pin, unwilted, and bowed to her. 

“I imagine that we will not see one another again,” he said. “But it is good to know there are such people in Gondor as live in this house. In my home, such things are sometimes forgotten; and I am glad to be reminded.”

The rest of the loading passed swiftly, and Ulloth, Carinzel, Lennel, and Missus Meiniel were once again alone before it was entirely dark, difficult as it was to tell in the general gloom. 

By general, though silent, agreement, they all returned to the receiving room and lay down together again as, one by one, the tall black ships patched their sails, rigged them up, and left from the harbor as swiftly as they had come, one week before. 

The next morning, they awoke to equal gloom and a pounding on their door. No one was there when Missus Meiniel pulled open the door, but the stoop was filled with baskets and baskets of pelargelyth, crimson and sweet in the dark morning. 

 

–

 

Elanor Gardner had previously supposed King Elessar’s court to be free of the sort of gossip that attended a meeting of the Gamgee cousins.  It took two hours to be thoroughly disabused of this notion, so much so that she would never quite recall her rosy imaginings of it again. 

Those two hours were spent in a small — by which was meant twice the size of Michel Delving — reception hall with the other young women being inducted into Queen Arwen’s service. The time seemed to go by quickly. Elanor would be in Gondor for only a year, and she meant to make the most of it. So, after she was sworn in first of all the ladies, she studied the paintings that hung in the hall, all new work commissioned by queen as a gesture towards Gondorian crafts of all sorts since the war. 

There were portraits, landscapes, and still lives, and a few grand scenes — classic subjects like Elwing’s Leap side-by-side with fresher topics. 

One of these caught her eye for its scintillating redness. It was not a topic she was familiar with, and she had thought her dad had taught her well in preparation. A girl — Elanor thought she might be about the same age — stood in the prow of a funny kind of rowboat, all gilded and black-painted, with her black hair up in a crown studded with brilliant scarlet flowers. She had more flowers in her arms and yet more around her feet, and she looked fearlessly up at a tall black ship looming against a pink-and-white city where, if Elanor squinted, she could see more dabs of red paint on the balconies. She looked rather like Queen Arwen, Elanor thought.

“That is her mother,” said the young lady next to her, whose name Elanor had entirely missed. 

“Oh?” she replied vaguely. 

“Oh yes. You see the resemblance?” Elanor’s interlocutor pointed to the person currently kneeling to Queen Arwen. 

Elanor did not see the resemblance. The other girl, apart from also looking about fifteen, was much taller, had darker skin, curlier and shorter hair, and an enormous book in her hands rather than flowers. 

She shook her head and looked inquiringly at the young lady. 

“Not her,” she said impatiently. “At the tiller.” 

Elanor looked again, and this time, she properly realized that there were other women in the boat with the flower-crowned girl, including one at the tiller, who did look quite a bit like Elanor’s most recent companion in handmaidening. 

“Who is she, then?” she whispered. She did not necessarily like that the court was abuzz with gossip, but the Gamgee cousins had taught her it was better to be on top of such things than always catching up. 

“That’s Ulloth, the merchant viscountess,” the lady pronounced with relish. “She probably sold every artist here the paint and the canvas for all these paintings, and the frames for good measure. Her grandmother was from Far Harad.” 

Elanor looked at the painting again with interest. She had not, to her knowledge, ever met someone from Far Harad, and dad rarely mentioned all the Haradrim and Easterlings and so on he’d met on his adventure. 

“Does she sell paints too?” she asked, nodding at the other girl, who was now rising to her feet and offering Queen Arwen the book with a bow. Elanor was not quite as enthusiastic about calligraphy as her dad, but she did love to illuminate the initial letters in the books, and thought she might like to know someone who could teach her some mixing. 

“No, no,” her co-gossiper said. “Her father’s the Duke of Pelargir’s third son. No title of her own, but her dad has one and her mother is as rich as Aulë, so here she is: she’ll marry well. That’s the idea of the whole thing, you know; I’m sure Ulloth and her husband both knew what they were getting married for.” 

Elanor’s own idea had been to see the world and have an adventure of her own like Dad and Uncle Frodo. She would have to stand on a box to be married to any of the squires or pages who bustled around the palace. She giggled at the image and drew Queen Arwen’s attention, which Elanor still felt was like being transfixed in a moonbeam while taking the most luxurious warm bath imaginable. 

Queen Arwen smiled gently at her, but the other girl hunched her shoulders, as though she felt that Elanor was laughing at her. Elanor tried to smile encouragingly, but it was already the next girl in line’s turn, and the merchant viscountess' daughter without a title was lost in the crowd. 

Beside her, the older girl was still chattering away. “Her mother was the very first person in Gondor to recognize King Elessar, you know, that’s what the painting’s of, and Queen Arwen’s brother put in a word for her, so she was one of the very first Queen’s Ladies.” She scowled. “But she apparently always wanted to go back to Pelargir. It’s a very beautiful city, but it does not quite show her to be conscious of the honor, you know? Her mother was Umbarian, and to be a handmaiden to the queen–! But, oh well, at least her daughter knows the right way of things.”  

Elanor had the distinct impression that she was back in Hobbiton listening to whose great-grandfather had been a Bree-Hobbit, and so not the best choice for Shirrif, wouldn’t you agree?

She had not ever particularly agreed, and, moreover, she had not come to Gondor to engage in village gossip, but to expand her horizons and have adventures. A girl whose mother went out on boats and sold paints and turned down appointments sounded far more likely to be adventuresome and horizon-expanding than her current companion.

Very politely, using skills honed on Grandgaffer Gamgee, Elanor edged her way out of that conversation, and went looking through the crowd for the lady merchant’s daughter.

It was not easy, she was coming to realize, to be quite so short-statured in a world of tall young ladies just having their final growth spurts, and certainly not when trying to find another person in a great bustle. Her dad had warned her, but she had not quite understood the closeness and irritation of being bumped and jostled because no one bothered to look below their eyeline to see if they were treating on someone's toes. 

She found herself pushed to the edges of the room, and decided to circumnavigate the room rather than push through it at random. As she did, she took note of the interesting artwork and Big Person-sized furniture to write down later in her journal with its red leather cover. 

Eventually, the painting of the woman in the boat with flowers loomed above her, and Elanor paused to examine it more closely. 

“Lothriel Lennel of Pelargir Offers Succor to the King,” read the frame. More of the same flowers were carved into the gilded wood, interspersed with patterned leaves. 

“Dad would know what these are,” she murmured to herself. 

“They’re pelargelyth,” came a voice from behind her. Elanor jumped, spun around, and looked up — quite a ways up — into the eyes of the daughter of the woman at the painted tiller. 

“Oh!” she squeaked. “Thank you! I wondered — you see, my dad, I mean, my father, was a gardener.” 

The girl, who had had her arms crossed, looked somewhat taken aback, and slowly lowered her hands to her sides. 

“I– am sorry,” she said, a little stiffly. “I thought you were—”

“Much younger?” Elanor asked, with some bitterness. She had grown used to that assumption by the second month out from Bree.  

If anything, the girl grew more uncomfortable. “No. I know who you are. You are the daughter of one of the Cónin i Periannath. I thought you must have been laughing at me, earlier.” 

“I wasn’t,” Elanor said simply. 

“Did they tell you she is my mother?” the other girl asked, tilting her head at the picture. 

One of the other things Elanor had grown accustomed to was how delicate the Big People seemed, however tall they were. 

She made sure to put extra enthusiasm into her reply. “Yes indeed!” she replied. “She sounds like a very fascinating woman. But, please–” she remembered one of the courtly phrases her Uncle Pippin had taught her “--- you have me at a disadvantage.”

“Please forgive me,” said the other girl. “I am Carallas, daughter of Lord Heledhir of Pelargir and Lady Ulloth of Pelargir. At your service.” 

They dipped very proper curtsies to one another. There the conversation idled, and might have continued to drift, except that Elanor was not named Gardner for nothing, and returned her attention to the glorious red flowers of the painting. 

“You said ‘pelargelyth,’” Elanor repeated. “What are they? Are they really so bright red?” 

Carallas looked at her with a bit of lingering suspicion, but nodded readily enough. “They really are. And they are everywhere in Pelargir.”

Her voice softened with longing. “Everyone grows them, even if they only have a windowsill to call their own. Almost all year long, all the balconies are red, and the air smells spicy, like roses and cinnamon from the East. They are the favorite flower of the city.”

Elanor gazed a while longer at the painting, where the red flowers stood out against the lowering sky. Pelargir did not look very welcoming, but then, she did not think it was supposed to in this scene, which must have been during the war. Carallas certainly spoke of it with longing in her voice. 

“Why are they wearing them here? They look very lovely, to be sure,” she hastened to add.

“My mother had the idea,” Carallas said, seeming to unbend a little in the face of Elanor’s genuine interest. “This was the end of the Second Siege of Pelargir, just after King Elessar routed the Corsairs of Umbar. My mother, as I am sure you know, is half Umbarian, and all her servants were full. It is not very patriotic to say it, but they had no idea if a Gondorian army would leave them alone, or if they would be mistaken for pirates. So, they draped themselves in the pelargelyth, like the bride of the city who goes out every spring to represent Pelargir to the sea. Except that they decided they had better ought to represent Pelargir to the new king.” She sighed, and her voice took on a sing-song quality. “Therefore, my mother met Captain Elladan, who recommended her to the Queen, who gave her a title, so my father could marry her for her connections and money — and here I am.”

Elanor had been thinking that it sounded like a rather wonderful story, until that last part. She looked sideways at Carallas, who looked more wistful than resentful.

“But she went back to Pelargir,” she said tentatively. 

Carallas huffed a little laugh. “I am being unfair,” she said. “My mother and my father each wanted something very particular, and they get along famously and sleep in separate wings of the house after drinking exactly one glass of wine together after supper every evening.” She looked again and the painting, and Elanor noted again the longing in the glance.

“Pelargir is simply very different from Minas Tirith,” Carallas went on. “You do not meet many Umbarians here, still less Haradrim, even if you can meet Halflings and Elves and Dwarves. And the weather is different, and the food is different, and all the flowers are different too. My mother loves Pelargir very much.” 

All through Carallas’ small speech, Elanor had felt with a pang her own distance from the Shire, where you never met anyone very tall, and the weather was altogether of a different sort, and the only mallorn west of the mountains grew very nearly in her own back garden. 

“I often feel homesick too,” she offered, with a small smile. 

Carallas did not quite smile back, but the last trace of stiffness fell from her shoulders. She thrust her hand into her pocket and drew out the book she had presented to Queen Arwen. 

“I was meant to give this to Her Majesty, but she wants me to present it to the King,” she said, with an air of suppressed excitement. “My own mother wrote and illustrated it with my nurse, Carinzel, my namesake. So I am going to show it to you first.” 

She opened the book, and Elanor gasped to see the red shining out of its pages. Carallas carefully flipped through a veritable garden of pelargelyth: crimson and brick, pink and orange, every warm shade that could be coaxed out of a brush.

“This is every species of pelargoloth there is, as far as we know,” Carallas boasted. “When my mother left Queen Arwen’s service, before she married my father, she took Carinzel and went to Far Harad and drew some from life that only exist on one mountain. She said she had always wanted to do that, more than anything. This is a copy I helped make. I think Queen Arwen thinks it will be funny for the King to be reminded how much he owes my mother by way of obsessive botanical illustration.” 

She chuckled. “Carinzel is less fanciful: she likes the flowers for their looks and scent. At least a hundred varieties grow in her and my mother’s garden, which is a grand thing in Pelargir, where there is not much land. They grow them in pots bolted to the walls, so it looks as though the buildings are made of flowers.” 

“That sounds lovely beyond the telling,” Elanor said, thinking once more of her father’s garden at Bag-End, where just now the hollyhocks would be growing tall, and the poppies bursting open in a riot of colors. She heard the longing in her own voice, and looked down at her feet. 

A hand came to rest tentatively on her shoulder. Elanor looked up, and to her surprise — though who else could it have been? – saw Carallas looking down at her with a look of awkward sympathy. 

“Since your father is a gardener, you must also like flowers very much, is that right?”  

Elanor nodded and managed a smile. “Even my name is for a flower.” 

Carallas bit her lip. “These days, the court goes to Dol Amroth in the high summer, but it is only a few days’ ride to Pelargir. I am sure the Queen would let us go — if you wanted to see my mother and Carinzel’s garden. To tell your father about.” 

Elanor Gardner had previously supposed King Elessar’s court to be a stern and polished sort of place where a girl from the Shire might feel rather lonely. She was very pleased to be proven wrong. 

“I would like that very much,” she said, smiling. “Will you show me in the book which pelargelyth are your favorite, so I can know what to look for? Then I will tell you about elanor, and all the other flowers in my garden.”