Searching and Searching by Elleth

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Chapter 1

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Mithrellas set her glass down, and averted her gaze from the window. Deep below the cliffs that held the keep of Dol Ernil, the sea stretched like a shimmering blue cloth into the west, that even after all the time she had lived there never failed to fill her with unease. The reflections of the sunlit water shuddering over walls and ceiling did aught to make her tense, as though the sea reached her fingers even into the high room. Since Amroth's loss, she had understood how all the names of the sea among her people were rooted in fear and terror.

“And Nimrodel did not return to Lindóri-- Lothlórien, I suppose I should say now? She never came among you again?”

Her visitors gave her gentle, if uneasy looks, as they had been doing for the duration of the conversation, and Mithrellas could not blame them. Gilthaith, the sister of Amroth who had erstwhile been a friend to both Mithrellas and Nimrodel, regarded her from under the constellation of freckles that graced her brow and had earned her her name, and eventually shook her head sadly. “To be true, I did not think that you had survived. Leaving you for dead the day we were scattered, and returning to find you a lady, married to a high lord of Men and having born his child...”

“... children, indeed, though they are twins,” she corrected softly. “But you do not think that it is possible for Nimrodel to have survived somewhere lost in the mountains?”

The visitors murmured among themselves, and Mithrellas felt a tremor run through her; they sat like a hedge of impenetrable trees designed to keep Mithrellas out. Even the kindliest understanding she could muster said that she was no longer part of them.

“You know that the road was evil, Mithrellas, and if your searches yielded no gain, then I do think the best you can yet hope to find are her bones. If you do, if you ever do - put her to rest in the bay. Amroth’s voice still comes up the rivers crying for her, and the south wind has become a token of unrest among us. Knowing her fate at last I think may give him the rest to pass into the Halls of the West.”

“I am sorr--” The word ended in a strangled cough when she swallowed the tea she had been sipping. “We abandoned the search four years ago. But the Lost Company has suffered enough grief, and if this is the least I can do, then I will do it.”

“Thank you,” said Gilthaith. “We will of course lend aid while we can, and we will be here some time before we sail.” She gestured to one of her companions sitting very straight, wrapped in sea-blue robes. Mithrellas could not place her; she was not an elf of Lindórinand. “Orthaear is one of Lord Celeborn’s people who came with him from Lindon to Lothlórien. She knows the craft of ship-building and says there is good wood in this land, if we may appeal to your lord husband to let us fell trees enough for another ship. We could have sailed from Mithlond, of course, but we thought to honour our lost by setting sail from Edhellond instead. It has always been the haven of our people.”

“Of course,” Mithrellas heard herself say over the ringing in her ears. Gilthaith’s tone made it clear that she was still counted among those they had lost. “But there is no need to appeal to Imrazôr. He would not deny you, but Edhellond has a timber-yard of its own, and it is an independent enclave. Since Captain Maidhel and her crew sailed, it has been abandoned, and there is no one to reject your desire.”

Gilthaith looked surprised, the hand holding her tea-glass freezing on its way to her mouth before she caught herself, drank, and nodded. “Thank you.”

“The houses are also at your disposal. They have been uninhabited, of course, but I trust you will find them well-preserved despite their abandonment.”

“You are very kind, Mithrellas,” said Gilthaith. “A true lady.”

Mithrellas swallowed a sigh that wanted out at the criticism weighing down her apparent praise, since neither the timber-yard nor Edhellond itself were hers to give, and her generosity was faulty at best. She could have offered them to stay at Dol Ernil, and perhaps Gilthaith had expected that, but after the distance they kept she could not bring herself to grant them that.

Their visit ended soon after, when it became clear that all remaining words they had to say were perfunctory, and Mithrellas struggled to keep her composure. An agreement was made that Imrazôr’s sister, Minalnitîr, would lead a search party into the hills at the Elves’ earliest convenience, then Mithrellas rang for a servant to show the company out, and as they filed from Mithrellas’ quarters, one after the other, none of them turned around.

Evening fell swiftly after that. The encounter with the Elves had sapped at her strength, and she sat on a cushion by the window with her head leaning against her glass. Imrazôr came in bringing her food and knelt by her waiting to see if she ate, but not even the neat arrangement of fish and mussels served to wake her appetite. Eventually he stretched out and laid his head on her lap.

“Do you remember our engagement?” she asked, running a hand over Imrazôr’s wild locks, where first silver threads glittered among the black. He was not yet old for a man of Númenorean descent, but it had only been two years since Imrazôr had returned from a lost campaign, and the terrors of the siege of Minas Ithil had left their marks on him, the physical least among them.

He rumbled something indefinite, and almost Mithrellas felt too tired to explain. It did not seem a fitting topic to bring up, but if she did not do it now she wondered if she ever might gather courage enough. “My people intend to seek for Nimrodel,” she said after silence had begun to settle heavy on her, and her hand on Imrazôr’s hair had stilled. “They do not believe she still lives, either --” her breath hitched -- “but if they find her bones, we will put her to rest at Amroth’s side in the sea.”

“Yes,” said Imrazôr, finally. “I would account her found then, and let you go where you will, as we agreed.” The words dragged heavy over his tongue, a little slurred as though he had had too much wine, but when Mithrellas moved to kiss him, his lips were dry and he tasted only like himself.

“I do love you,” she said softly. “More so because you understand my nature. More so because you took me to wife even knowing that Nimrodel was my first love, and remains first in my heart.”

Imrazôr did not answer, but he took her hand between his palms and kissed her fingers. “I would be a grand fool to believe that love will only come to us once in life.”

“More than only love comes twice,” Mithrellas answered. “I hope.”

* * *

With Nimrodel so on her mind, Mithrellas was not surprised to dream as she did - or rather, to remember.

The bread-cart rattled down the cobbles to the harbour district, and the high stacks of loaves in it threatened to spill onto the dirty street. Mithrellas slowed her step to steady the cart and accommodate the ache in her lower back, and almost immediately found herself surrounded by passersby. The sailors and fisher-families who lived by the wharfs were not beggars, precisely, but the houses they lived in were ramshackle and leaky, and everywhere, still, the storm of the past week had left its signs - roof tiles shattered at the edge of the street, broken windows boarded over, sailcloth stretched atop damage to keep out wind and rain, shattered cutters drawn into the dry docks for repairs.

“Take what you need,” she said to the people, trying to lift her voice above the noise of the hammers and saws, and wrap her tongue around the less-familiar Sindarin of the South with some hesitation. “A gift from Prince Adrahil and Princess Zôrzirân!”

A girl with wide, clear-grey eyes was traipsing along beside the cart and side-stepping the detritus and autumn leaves that littered the street, shrinking away when Mithrellas looked at her. “Take some to your family.” The girl shook her dark curls.

“You’re the Elf lady,” she muttered around the tip of the thumb that snuck into her mouth, though she must be several years past the age that she thought human children would do so. “The one the Young Prince rescued.”

“Yes indeed,” said Mithrellas, crouching so her eyes were on a height with the girl’s. “My name is Mithrellas, and your Young Prince Imrazôr was very kind in allowing me to stay as his guest while I heal, but now that I am beginning to recover enough to be about, favours like this are to repay him and his family for their hospitality.”

She said nothing of the fact that she had no other place now, other than to wait for an opportunity to return to Lindórinand. It did not diminish her gratitude to Imrazôr.

“Are you gonna marry him?” asked the girl, unaware of her thoughts. “Do you love him? Your eyes look all soft when you say his name. It’s pretty.”

Mithrellas rose, smiling. She took three of the loaves - all studded with nuts and dried fruit and drizzled with honey, rather than the plainer ones - and passed them to the girl, whose wide eyes grew even wider. She regarded them like treasure had suddenly been piled into her arms (and it might as well have been, Mithrellas thought, taking in her thin frame and patches over patches on her dress) before she spun on her heel and sped away.

She watched the girl’s retreating form slip through spaces in the crowd, past the men and women of the town until they hid her from view, and continued down a side-street to the city gate at the foot of the hill. Still the sea was visible, shifting and shimmering beyond the city down every road - deceptively, she knew now. It had been wild and grey and hungry only the past week, tearing Amroth into its depths when he had nearly gained the shore.

She felt like weeping again, although she had thought all her tears spent the past week - most over the final tether to Nimrodel that Amroth’s death had severed, about the loss of his obdurately hopeful waiting for Nimrodel even though Maidhel, lady of the Edhellondrim and captain of the last ship had chid him a sentimental fool for delaying the journey when he could do nothing but bring empty comforts to Mithrellas’ sickbed.

“Lady! Is that bread all for us?”

Mithrellas blinked, and the scene before her eyes resolved itself into the street, and a throng of people around her. An old woman with a head of white, woolly hair and the brown eyes of a native of the region stretched her papery lips into a grin and gestured at the cart. “The Princess sent down bread for us before, but I wasn’t sure - it was never that it was an Elf that brought it, and you were staring out at sea like they always used to, and like that other one that was by the gate just then. One of your lost ones, maybe?”

It was true, and by now well-known among the people, that an ambush in the mountains had driven Nimrodel’s company apart, and the only ones who had not scattered had been the dead and wounded. It had been Amroth himself, escaping to the coast, who had enlisted the help of Imrazôr and found the place again. There Mithrellas lay half-alive, and was promptly committed into the care of lady Gimîlhazid, healer of Dor-en-Ernil. Though lost, it was not impossible that some had survived, and finally made it to the coast themselves. Edhellond lay empty now, but Dol Ernil was within sight, and the most likely place to ask news.

But Mithrellas’ mind could not long be bothered with likelihoods.

“Tell me, what did the elf look like?” she said to the woman, who had by then crammed bread into her basket as high as she could carry, and piled more into her apron. Her throat felt tight with hope.

“Why, like what they say in the tales of the princesses of old - hair like gold, eyes like bright silver… fair she was, but sad she looked, that one, standing like a statue against the sea and staring out and away.” The old woman’s voice grew softer. “I wager she thinks they’ve left her behind, and they have in a way, haven’t they? Like you. And now the last ship’s gone sailing into the Old West, and all the swans you’ll find are birds, not boats…”

Mithrellas swallowed hard. She was only half-listening to the old woman now - few of the women in the company had been fair-haired, but none of them other than Nimrodel had golden hair. Mithrellas had begun walking, away from the cart and the loaves, and broke into a staggering run before the thought had finished.

The harbour gate loomed as a bright arch in the overgrown seaward wall at the foot of the promontory, and through it the sea. The sunlight glaring off the water caught Mithrellas at unawares, and for moment she stood blinded, the salt-breeze full in her face and stinging her nose, the screeches of gulls wheeling along the shore blending with the cacophony of noises from the town before her sight returned.

And there was no sign of Nimrodel, not the slightest. There was a blonde lobster-fisher who was unloading her traps, and at first sight of her Mithrellas’ heart leapt, but the old woman could hardly have mistaken her short, sturdy figure and the untidy knot of her hair for those of an Elf.

Mithrellas heaved a deep breath, although the air barely seemed to pass into her lungs; disappointment made her feel faint. The fisher turned to her with furrowed brow. “Another of you!” she said. “You don’t also want to hail my boat for passage west, do you?”

“No, I… no. But - where did she go?”

“She was half out of her mind, that one - take a rowing boat on the Straight Road, more like straight to the sea floor to that drowned king of yours! Told her as much, and she went down the south road back to the mainland, I think. At least that’s where she struck. From then on…” The woman rolled her shoulders. “You’ll need to figure that out yourself.”

Mithrellas was no longer sure whether she had even voiced her thanks as she sped down the way Nimrodel had allegedly taken. And still there was no sign - had she not heard from two people that Nimrodel had been there, she would have dismissed them as fancies or wishful thinking, the stuff of songs.

It was not until she had left the peninsula that she paused again, leaning against an olive tree off the path to draw breath in the shade, that she tried to seize on to her thoughts through the haze of despair and haste. Her wound throbbed like a second heartbeat, and when she returned she would need to ask Gimîlhazid for one of her draughts against the pain, but she would not go back until she had found at least a sign.

There was nothing on the road, which stretched level along the coast to the edge of Mithrellas’ sight. If Nimrodel was not upon it, she must have left it somewhere - most likely, she thought, thinking back, where there were trees, to shelter in and pass the time in safety. The arm of mountains that stretched down into central Belfalas, then.

If so, she must have left tracks. The hard-baked summer-soil had been softened into mud by the storm and the cooler temperatures that followed it. Already Mithrellas was further from the town than made her comfortable, and as she followed a trail breaking from the roadside, every ill-timed cloud shadow passing overhead made her jump with the thought of another ambush. The trail - clearly a woman’s, barefoot as Nimrodel was wont to go, light of step - led into the high grass and shrubland that stretched all the way to the mountain-slopes, where the scattered copses grew denser into a fragrant woodland of oaks, pines, wild myrtle, olive-trees and cypresses, and the soil more rocky.

After a while uphill that left Mithrellas light-headed with pain, there were no more tracks to be found, not the slightest bent blade of grass or overturned pebble that might have hinted at Nimrodel’s passing. Mithrellas stood panting, a hand pressed to her lower back where the barbed arrow had struck her, dark with poison, a finger’s breadth from her spine, and looked up into the trees for any sign of Nimrodel - for her tracks to vanish so suddenly, she must have taken to the branches, and long experience - when it had all been games and laughter in Lindórinand - told Mithrellas that she would never find her now, unless Nimrodel allowed it.

Mithrellas felt her beloved name bubble in her throat, but looking around - she dared not call for Nimrodel, for fear what she might stir. Evening was breaking through the forest, and the sun was setting low and red into the sea. The forest was quiet, and it ought to have been safe -- but in Amroth’s travelling company they had all thought the same, enough to relax their guard into fatal negligence.

She dared not.

In the wood a cricket sang, but when Mithrellas at last laid down with hot tears running over her cheeks to rest before she made her way back into the city, even that had fallen silent.

She began to sing softly to herself, with her face pressed into the ground and earth on her lips, barely louder than a whisper - a song that had been in the making since she had come to Belfalas, that she hoped might summon Nimrodel to her side.

Where now she wanders none can tell,
In sunlight or in shade
For lost of yore was Nimrodel
And in the mountains strayed.

* * *

When she woke, Imrazôr had already risen quietly. His part of the bed where he had slept pressed against her back was still warm underneath the covers, and Mithrellas found herself unwilling to rise, instruct Gimîlhazid about the childrens’ day, and go about her duties - today, hours by the oven to make bread, and then making her rounds by the harbour to deal it out, speak with her people, listen whether there were any tidings at all of Nimrodel or the same void of news that stretched through the past two decades. She did not expect it to be any different; the arrival of the Lost Company had been an unexpected blessing already, and for Nimrodel to reappear at the same time... even if she yet lived the possibility was minuscule - or more than that, so small as to be invisible.

The Lost Company. She cringed, remembering that Gilthaith would expect a meeting with Minalnitîr, who knew nothing of the renewal of the search yet and was likely on patrol since before sunrise, to return only in the evening. With a sigh she rose from the bed and called for a servant to pen a note and deliver it to Edhellond - not without incurring raised eyebrows when she dictated the words to invite Gilthaith to dinner in the evening.

Hours later her arms were aching from kneading enough dough to feed the people, and a hot blast from the oven blew steadily in her face as she removed the last batch of loaves. The storm that had taken Amroth’s life and ravaged the town was long past, and much of the damage repaired, but the people by the wharf were still among the poorest in the city, and it had been this and a reduction of taxes for them that had at last overruled their distrust and won her the hearts and eyes of nigh to three-hundred people. She had not had the heart to give up the dealing-out of alms, and doubted that they would have accepted her as the Young Princess of Dol Ernil with as much support as they had otherwise; already the Young Prince and his Faerie Wife were the subject of popular stories, that once upon a time when Adrahil and Zorzirân passed, the city would be ruled by an Elven-Queen, which made her smile and shake her head.

Even if Nimrodel remained lost, Mithrellas could not bear staying. She loved Imrazôr, but he - as their children - remained mortal, and she remained a fool. Gilmith and Galador still were young enough to not remember her; blessed with the slow growth of mortal children they had not yet begun babbling as an elf-child at the same age might, and Mithrellas was quietly glad of it, if it allowed her to prolong her time a little yet - if there was one thing she wanted to spare her children it was the burden of remembering their mother and her immortality, and the questions arising from it - why they lacked it, or why, unlike the old stories, they would not be given a choice, and why the deeds to earn it were beyond their reach in this Age of the world.

“M’lady?” Sedil, head of the kitchens, patted her shoulder and left a handprint of white flour on the dark-blue of her dress, hastily brushing away at it. “So sorry, m’lady, should that go to the washers?”

“No, leave it, it is fine,” she said softly. “What was it, Sedil?”

“Oh, nothing - just that you were in your thoughts again, and you said to rouse you if that happened.”

“Yes,” Mithrellas said. “Thank you. Is the bread ready to be delivered?”

“All done, and the cart is loaded up, m’lady. You don’t look so well, shouldn’t someone else go in your ste-- oh, you’re not with child again, are you?”

“No. No,” Mithrellas said, looking up in sudden surprise. “And I do not think I shall be again - the heirs of Dor-en-Ernil have been born,” she added. “It is harder for us than for you to bear children, and I fear I have exhausted my strength for a long time. Longer, perhaps, than Imrazôr will live.”

Longer than I shall be here, at the very least, she added in her mind. Sedil looked at her for a good long moment before drawing a strong arm over her forehead and shrugging as she turned back to her work, and Mithrellas made her way into town on a now-familiar path, softly singing a familiar song as she went.

It deserved, she thought, at least a final verse, but not quite yet. She might be able to stay while the Lost Company built the final ship, maybe even through winter, and then beg passage west of them.

* * *

It seemed, at their encounter at the table, that Gilthaith and Minalnitîr were kindred spirits of a sort. Almost immediately they began talking together over the dinner table, forgetting their food except for the occasional morsel, much to Mithrellas’ bewilderment. She remembered Gilthaith as serious, sometimes outright taciturn, if soft-spoken, and to see her bloom into conversation was a new sight - but she welcomed it. And she had to admit that Minalnitîr had a disarming personality, at odds with her apparent serious looks in a face that could only with goodwill be described as fair, duskier even than her brother’s, with wide-set eyes and lips that were too full to flatter her. Unless she grinned - or scowled - and the placid features became alive with joy or wrath. Mithrellas had seen both.

Before long, the conversation turned, prompted briefly by Mithrellas, to the search for Nimrodel, and Minalnitîr began to sum up what she recalled.

“... struck into the mountains up the Morthond until the place of your ambush - your brother led us then, before his loss, we buried the dead - and we found my sister and brought her here to save her life.” Minalnitîr lifted her glass to Mithrellas and drank; Mithrellas returned the gesture and looked up in time to briefly see Gilthaith’s eyes darken.

Minalnitîr seemed not to have seen. “There was a great confusion of tracks that made it impossible to follow,” she explained, “so we made for the most likely path first, the road down Tarlang’s Neck that you would have come had all gone well, and from then on out all the way to the sources of the Ringló , and…”

“I am afraid my knowledge of Gondor’s geography is poor - none of this tells me much, without meaning offense to you or your efforts. It must have been perilous seeking for her,” Gilthaith said.

“Well, somewhat less than you’d expect,” Minalnitîr laughed. “There aren’t many evils that will be happy to face a Gondorian force at arms, but we picked up orc-trails aplenty and routed most - as well as the ones that got at you, going by their weaponry and the arrow we took from Mithrellas’ back.”

“So some justice was dealt them, at least,” Gilthaith agreed. “It lifts my heart.”

There was something odd in the way she phrased it, and turned to her plate rather than to continue the conversation. Minalnitîr gave Mithrellas a bewildered look, and she shook her head in turn. “It was a dark time for all of us, and to be confronted again with these matters… must be unpleasant to you,” she said. “Lothlórien must have had its own sorrows after Amroth’s loss became known.”

“Indeed. Hearing his voice upriver, crying Nimrodel’s name… it was not until the Lady Galadriel came to us that she was able to placate him for a while - how, I do not know, and only for a while. And that was the least of the sorrows that came upon Lothlórien.”

Minalnitîr nodded in understanding. “It may indeed lighten your heart to know that we had tidings of Nimrodel once. She was seen by the folk of the town not too long after the storm; some say that she was woken by his cry from some sleep that she had fallen into, and came too late. But until then at least she lived, even if evil befell her afterward.”

Gilthaith made an indignant noise deep in her throat and turned the glare of her eyes on Mithrellas. “And that you thought to keep secret?” she cried. “I lost a friend as well that day, as well as a brother!”

“I also loved her! It is the last I heard of her, other than the scream when her horse carried her away! Forgive me that I had hoped to hold on to some futile hope that she might yet live, or might have made her way back to you - had I not thought that, I would not have asked tidings about her from you when you came!”

Minalnitîr cleared her throat when Gilthaith opened her mouth to retaliate. “Twenty years - more than that - may appear short to the Elves, but living among us here I know Mithrellas felt the time pass dearly. The blame does not lie with her and her feelings; it lies with the circumstances she lives in, and had we found any more of Nimrodel, we might have sent to Lórien, but -- perhaps we scared her, if she was as afraid of us as she was of the Dúnedhil coming into her land and our search only drove her away. Mithrellas suspected Nimrodel might feel so. For what are the people of Númenor other than Incomers into Middle-earth themselves? And we only continued because we had no better hope of finding her.”

All three of them fell silent; Gilthaith breathed heavily and blinked her eyes against the tears that were threatening to spill. Mithrellas reached across the table and laid a hand on her arm, feeling Gilthaith’s muscles tighten under her touch.

“Whether or not she still lives, with you returned, resuming the search may yield fruit more than ours did. Please, let us work together in this, Gilthaith.”

“For Nimrodel’s sake, and my brother’s.”

Mithrellas nodded. She did not expect to be included in Gilthaith’s considerations, now even less than at their first meeting.

* * *

Gilthaith’s ship-builder estimated that with the hands at their disposal and the delay incurred by searching, they might nonetheless sail in five months’ time. Mithrellas smiled hearing that she would indeed be able to stay the winter - not least because she had not yet convinced Gilthaith to take her west as well, and she would dearly need the time to move her to grant her passage.

“The beginning of spring,” said Mithrellas to Imrazôr one night in late autumn, as though she were certain she would be allowed to leave, and he sighed and ran the brush through her hair again. Mithrellas closed her eyes against the sorrow on his face showing clearly in the rain-speckled window glass.

“So soon?”

“So soon,” she said. “Please… do not seek to hold me here.”

“I promised that I would not, and I will hold to that promise until my heart’s breaking.” When he leaned forward to kiss her, she turned her head away, her throat suddenly too tight for words.

“You are thinking of her again, are you not?” he asked, and Mithrellas nodded, leaning back against his chest, pillowing her head against his shoulder and staying his movement..

“I am. How could I not? And I think… there is a tradition among the Elves.”

“What do your people say?”

“Our dead - those who hold with the old beliefs that arose before the Lindi ever left the Waters, much less crossed the Misty Mountains - as Nimrodel did - they did not often heed the Judge’s summons because they did not know him, and instead hid themselves away in fear lest the Enemy ensnare them… in woods, in hidden places, by springs or rivers. Nimrodel loved the river in Lindórinand she dwelled by - so much that its old name was forgotten, and it received her name. So much that the waterfalls spoke with her voice. Had she died, I think she would have returned there now that the Enemy has long been gone beyond the world, and had she done so, Amroth would no longer be crying her name.”

Imrazôr was silent, at last simply saying, “you truly believe this?”

“No. I know it is true; in Lindórinand there were many hidden places of that kind where the spirits of our loved ones dwell, many who died far from their own land.”

“Sometimes,” Imrazôr said, “I forget what you are - not merely my wife, never merely. But you are also an Elf, and in ways forever beyond my understanding. Do not tell me when you leave, never even announce to me when the ship is ready. It may be beyond my heart’s breaking after all.”

* * *

They had progressed further than ever before in their search, crossing the Ringló south and searching up the following river. Still the yellow leaves of autumn clung to some trees through a mild winter without storms, and the sunlight filtered low through them. It was warm for spring even so far south, and the peaks of the White Mountains lifted blue and snowless in the distance.

Gilthaith knelt by the stream they had begun to seek along, and cupped her hand for a drink of water. “It reminds me of home,” she said. “Does it not make you think of Nimrodel’s river?” Engaged in searching together, Gilthaith’s stern behaviour had thawed toward Mithrellas again - it had not yet returned to their old friendship, and sometimes Mithrellas still found herself treated with distance, as though something mortal clung to her, but she was grateful for every kindness.

“Mithrellas?”

Something in her did not want to admit the truth of it in the hearing of everyone - there, a cluster of bushes growing at the roots of a silver-barked beech that might be a mallorn if she did not look too closely, or a hillock upslope that the light glanced on in a peculiar way - the pang of longing for Lindórinand left her nearly breathless. The air felt wholesome and soft on her skin, and even the cool water of the stream tasted familiar when she followed Gilthaith’s example to take a drink, and the mineral taste prickled gently on her lips. Mithrellas swallowed hard and let the remainder of the water in her cupped hand plunge back into the stream.

“A little,” she conceded eventually. “But I dare not hope that she strayed far enough to find it. And I wish Minalnitîr were here.”

“She is where she ought to be,” Gilthait said. “Unless you would rather we drew forces from the conflict and left her defenseless. With all the attention of the mountain tribes concentrated on the fighting, we can move about without danger.”

Mithrellas did not contradict her, closing her eyes to listen to the singing of a cricket somewhere in the underbrush; the same song that she had often listened to in Lindórinand in the evenings, lying with Nimrodel on the sun-warmed rocks until well after nightfall, or stretching out on the platform of her talan while they watched the moon silver the edges of the mallorn leaves. The memories ran as clear as the water, clear enough that she thought she might open her eyes and see Nimrodel stand waiting for her with the half-amused expression she had so often worn.

When she opened her eyes it was only Gilthaith, who regarded her with a half-scowl instead. “We will make camp here for the evening and strike up the river at first light tomorrow. We will need firewood; will you help me gather while the others set up camp?”

“Of course.”

Gilthaith left Mithrellas the lead of the party, and there was no lack of dead wood cast upon the banks of the river further upstream, left behind by some long-ago thaw or rainfall. Mithrellas could not say why, but she expected, almost, to find a woman’s bones bleached white among the branches they gathered - not so, though some of the wood was bleached nearly as white.

A loud crack sounded through the forest, and Mithrellas whirled around, coming face to face with Gilthaith, who stared into the denser portions of the wood, seemingly with seeing anything of note by the way her eyes roved.

“Who goes there?” Mithrellas called. Her voice shook more than she would have liked, and her hand shot out around Gilthaith’s wrist, relaxing only at a flicker of brown and white between the trees vanishing upriver into the shadow of the forest - a deer in the underbrush stepping on a branch and startling itself.

But deer did not cry out in speakers’ voices, wordless though it had been.

The wood clattered into a heap at her feet when the realization came, and she sprang after the figure, dashing through brambles heedlessly in chase, details whipping past her - a flower in a shady patch of moss, a white upright rock-spire protruding from the forest floor, an emerald lizard skittering before her feet, a tuft of golden hair caught on a branch, a steep slope with a singing waterfall and the prints of bare feet pressed into the spray-soaked ground.

The slope opened into a level greensward, and finally Mithrellas caught clear sight of Nimrodel, dropped to her knees beside the lake that fed into the falls.

She sat heaving panting breath after breath, bent forward after the long run, the golden hair falling over her face as it had when Nimrodel had bent to kiss her in Lindórinand long ago when they had laughed and darted among the trees in chase.

She wore a deer’s coat that she had fashioned into a garment over the torn shirt and riding breeches she had worn on the day of her loss, her hair unbound -- she had never so much looked a wild thing.

“Please,” she murmured, and paused as though startled by the sound of her own voice. And then again, “please”.

Mithrellas was certain her heart had ceased its beating and force of will and love alone kept her alive. Her legs had long since given out at the edge of the sward; every bone in her body might have vanished for all the strength to rise she would have had.

It was Nimrodel who came to her instead at last. “I… I know you.” Warm, gentle fingers tipped Mithrellas’ head up, and Nimrodel studied her intently.

“Mithrellas?” she finally asked, her voice thin with disbelief. “Why are you here?”

“To finally bring you home,” she said. “To the land of peace you wished for. Do you not recall?”

Nimrodel smiled even when her tears began to fall. “No... but I remember you.”

* * *

Tirith Aear, the seaward tower upon Dol Ernil, dropped away beyond the curve of the world, leaving only a sheen of its beacon on the horizon behind them where the stars paled a fraction. Nimrodel was unable to avert her eyes, still, sitting with her slight form against Mithrellas, who had wound her arms around her - indeed, it seemed that since finding her, she had spent barely a moment without Nimrodel shadowing her - or the opposite, her following Nimrodel as though she might suddenly vanish again. But it was growing late in the night, and Mithrellas allowed herself at last to drowse, giving herself over to her thoughts.

She had not said farewell to Imrazôr, as he had asked - nor to Minalnitîr or her children, or anyone at the keep, but she had written them and seen the letter delivered safely where it would be found in due time, explaining why she had vanished even before the ship had sailed: Nimrodel’s woods had grown summer-bright and warm after Mithrellas had found her, as though the Ancient West was reaching out and curling its fingers around the stretch of river through the dell.

“I could be perfectly happy here,” Mithrellas, had said, “with the mere and the falls, and if we built a house in those trees - we might simply stay. You healed here. It cannot be an ill place.”

“No, I suppose not.” Nimrodel’s face had closed and grown clouded, and she had turned westward, where down the long slope the sea lay, and from it, the wind was coming up the river.

“Can you hear him call for you again?” Mithrellas laid a hand on Nimrodel’s hip, cool to the touch and beaded with water from swimming, to at least turn her away from the sight, and perhaps the thought, to no avail. Although Nimrodel had remembered little of the attack at first - she had fallen and hurt herself, she thought - names and images that scattered through her mind seemingly at random and had come throughout the years in fits and starts, as they had when she had come to Dol Ernil so long ago. Mithrellas had taken it upon herself to tell the whole story, and a night of spring winds howling with Amroth’s voice had brought, at last, full remembrance. Nimrodel had cried back with her river’s voice so that the words must find the sea.

“No,” she had said after her anxious listening. “He is gone. He has peace now, knowing I am well, that you found me… that I will take your hand and go into the West not long hence now.”

The ship rocked over a wave, and Mithrellas blinked her eyes open. The light of the beacon and the last sight of the coast had vanished, but Nimrodel still rested against her, sleeping peacefully.

 

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Chapter End Notes

Dol Ernil - Hill of the Prince. Canon leaves open when Dol Amroth was named Dol Amroth, but since either Imrazôr or Galador are named at the first lord of Dol Amroth while the city existed long before, I chose to model the original name of the town after Dor-en-Ernil, which this part of Belfalas was also called.