The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

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The Elf and His Cat

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Erebor was very far away, and Chalcedony knew this.  Even with the ways that the roads had grown much better and easier to traverse in the last twenty years, it would take a few weeks for a message to reach anyone, and if he did decide to travel to see them, it would take even longer for him to follow it back.  

She tried not to be impatient. She found Elanor and coaxed her to come and spend some time at Brandy Hall.  They were nearly of an age, and Elanor was one of the few people Chalcedony felt…quiet around.  They could spend together in silence, reading or sewing.  Chalcedony often wished she could do more of her schooling with Elanor, but they didn’t live close enough.  Now, though, it was summer, and the days were empty except for tending the gardens and the farms.

Days rolled by.  She went out on walks with Elanor, who seemed to have forgotten how to wear practical clothing unless coaxed.  This caused Chalcedony some frustration, but she had noticed that as they grew older, things seemed as if they became more complicated.  Not that she really understood why.  She had other things to worry about, mostly.

It was going to be a long summer.  She had resigned herself to this, so she was not at all prepared when, less than a month after her visit to Uncle Sam, a summons came for her and Elanor to return to Bag End and greet “the guest that Boromir wanted to meet.”

How could anyone have come from the mythical Lonely Mountain so quickly?  Even a Man, traveling by himself through the wilderness, long-legged and hardy, would have taken weeks—the letter might have gone faster, but it would not have been taken the whole way by one person.  

Chalcedony’s stomach tied itself into knots as they bumped along the road on their little ponies.  She had thought she would have more time, and what if she did have to give it up because it was dangerous?  How would she ever learn who Nimruzimir was?  Or whether his memories could help her, somehow?

When they arrived, there was an old Man sitting folded in a chair across from Uncle Sam, and the two of them were sharing a pipe.  The chair was one of the fancy too-big rocking chairs that was sometimes brought out when the King’s Rangers visited, as they did, occasionally.  It was normal to Chalcedony, though she knew some of her neighbors whispered amongst themselves about the visitors that the Gardners especially had.  You didn’t get much whispering about queerness among the Tooks and Brandybucks; it tended to be expected.

The old Man could not be the visitor, could he?  Uncle Sam had told her to expect an Elf, and this did not look anything like his stories of the ethereally beautiful Elves.  He was hunched over rather ungracefully, puffing on the pipe, and he wore an enormous black eye-patch on the left side of his face, which was the side presented to the two approaching Hobbits.  His ear was scarred raggedly, as if someone had sheared part of it off, and his face, or what she could see of it, looked lined and seamed, like any old Man.  Perhaps he was the Elf’s servant?

As they came closer, a rangy old cat that had apparently been sleeping at the old Man’s feet put its head up.  It, too, wore an eye-patch, and its tail lashed in warning as they approached.

“Stinky,” sighed the old man, and was rewarded with a warbling yowl of displeasure from the cat.

Chalcedony ran up the stairs to the porch, with Elanor following close behind her.  The old man turned towards her, and she stopped in her tracks, for about a quarter of the right side of his face was unblemished, and the eye that regarded her from beside his sharply pointed right ear shone silver like a predator’s in the night.

“Ah—oh, um,” stammered Chalcedony.

Uncle Sam waved them both over, and somehow she managed to go, although her cheeks were burning hot with embarrassment.  She probably looked frumpy, to this Elf; she probably looked—graceless.  Why wouldn’t she?  Boys weren’t supposed to look graceful, and the Elf wouldn’t expect it.  But that grey eye made her heart thump painfully, and she dropped her gaze away from his.

“Boromir, this is Celebrimbor,” Uncle Sam said, sounding joyful and gleeful at the same time.

“So you’re named after—”

“The dead hero.  Yes, that’s me.”  She shouldn’t have interrupted the guest, but it rankled.

The single untouched elegant eyebrow went up very slightly.  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, as if she’d been perfectly polite.  “This rascal is Stinky.”  Outraged noise from the cat.  Celebrimbor grinned, an expression that oddly synthesized the two disparate halves of his face.  “He prefers to be called Annamir, though.”

Elvish, Chalcedony knew, though she didn’t know what it meant.  “Pleased to meet you,” she said in turn, her voice wobbling slightly and then steadying.  She wished that she could curtsey, but she bowed instead, rather clumsily.  The cat was easier.  She crouched down and put out a hand. He sniffed curiously, then tiptoed closer and made a noise like prrrrp.

“Does he like to be petted?” Chalcedony asked.

“Sometimes.  He seems to like you well enough.  Don’t let him convince you into trying to rub his belly, though.”

She managed a hesitant smile.  “Oh, I know that trick.”

Annamir responded well to a cautious scritching behind his ear, rubbing up against her knees and purring.  But Chalcedony felt as if one of the oliphaunts from Uncle Sam’s tales was here in the room, leaning over her and breathing down her neck.  She didn’t know how to start the conversation, but her heart was beating so loud in her ears.

Either Celebrimbor knew, somehow, how she was feeling—Elves were supposed to be able to read your thoughts, weren’t they? Some of them, at least—or he had already been planning to speak of it quickly, because he said, “Sam tells me that you have an interesting necklace.”

She swallowed hard against the way her stomach knotted up.  “Yes,” she agreed.  “Well, Uncle Sam has it right now.  I don’t think it’s evil, but it—it made me see something?  It made me share someone’s memories, I think.”

There was a slight pause, and Celebrimbor leaned forward, that cat’s eye of his own glittering silver and wholly unearthly.  “It’s important to you, isn’t it?” he asked gently.

Her fingers caught in a knot in Annamir’s fur, and he protested, loudly.  She pulled them back carefully and apologetically smoothed his coat down again.  “Yes?” she tried, her voice coming out high and wobbly.  “I want to know—more about him and more about the things—the things he knew, I think.”  More about the man who wasn’t a woman just like I’m a woman who isn’t a man.  And whether he had ever done anything about the poisoned water.

“Well, I’m happy to look it over.  Between the two of us,” he gestured, for some reason, at Annamir, “it should be obvious if there’s something wrong with it.  We’ve had quite a lot of experience with jewelry, haven’t we, Annamirënya?”

The cat made a contemptuous noise and wandered back over to rub his knees.

“Will you need to—to do anything to it?” Chalcedony asked, in a slightly wobbly voice.  She didn’t like the idea of the poor necklace being pushed or prodded or tested as the water in the memory had been.  

“Not unless there is something very fearful about it indeed.  May I see it?”

She looked over at Uncle Sam, who had apparently been expecting this, because he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and produced from within it the wooden box with the white flower on it.  He handed it over to Celebrimbor, who took it and ran his fingers along one edge.

“This was sealed?” he asked, touching the broken remnants of the wax.  “Where did it come from?”

“My da brought it back from the war.  He says it came along the Greyflood and maybe further.”

“This looks—”

Annamir jumped into his lap, poked his nose at the box, then arched his back and hissed angrily.

“Is—is that bad?” Chalcedony asked hesitantly.

“No,” Celebrimbor said neutrally.  “Not necessarily, anyway.  He’s just grumpy.”  He opened the box, took out the second box, and turned it over in his hands before opening it as well.  “Oh, this is lovely.”

She nodded jerkily, clasping her hands behind her back to keep from even seeming as if she wanted to reach out and take it from him.  The glass beads glittered in the sunlight, dark and mysterious.  Celebrimbor raised the necklace up to the light, apparently squinting through one of the beads with his one good eye.  “Interesting.  Colored glass and gold beads.  But there was no spell woven into their creation.”

Maybe she had just imagined it, Chalcedony thought.  How stupid, if so, dragging such an important personage away from whatever work it was that he did, just to come here and make a pronouncement.  But she could still see Nimruzimir’s sharp gaze staring at her in distorted reflection.

Annamir settled in Celebrimbor’s lap, his little tongue flickering in and out.  He sniffed, his single golden eye glittering in a way that seemed as queer as the silver flash of his master’s.  

“There does seem to be something,” Celebrimbor said slowly.  “This is not a sort of enchantment with which I am familiar.  It’s a shame Galadriel has sailed West already.”

“Oh, I’d never dare to ask the great lady for such a favor,” said Uncle Sam, in his most wondering tone of voice.

Celebrimbor laughed.  “You’ve put me in my place, Master Gamgee!  Ah, Master Gardner, isn’t it, now.”

“Well now, sir, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”  Uncle Sam was turning slowly red across his cheeks and the tips of his ears, as he often did when he was embarrassed.

“No, no, it’s fine.”  Celebrimbor’s laughter was infectious; it was hard for Chalcedony not to chuckle as well.  He shook his head, and all of a sudden, she could almost see the lines of his face without his scars, and oh! but he must have been beautiful!  “I’m from the disreputable branch of the family, after all.”

Annamir sniffed, as if he were more offended than Celebrimbor.  He pushed his nose against the beads, put up a paw, swatted them, then settled down again with a rumbling, quizzical noise.

“It doesn’t feel as if it is dangerous,” Celebrimbor said slowly. “And I think Annamir agrees.”  He rubbed his fingers across the beads.  “It isn’t a deliberately woven enchantment, and it isn’t part of the creation, but I don’t feel any sort of—ill will, I suppose.”

What Chalcedony had not quite realized until this moment, staring at Celebrimbor with all his attention upon the necklace, was that she had been thrilled at the notion of a secret—not quite friend, she supposed, since you could not be friends with someone who would never know you existed—but someone just for her.  But she had not really thought that it could be possible.  She had assumed that anyone who touched the necklace would share the same memories—but there was no indication that this was happening.

“You don’t see anything?” she asked timidly.  “None of the…memories?”

Celebrimbor shook his head.  “That, I think, is not so surprising,” he said.  “Lest you be concerned, either of you.  Such things can be very specific in their resonance.  Perhaps it recognizes something about you that it does not recognize about me.”  He lifted his hand carefully up and down, as if he were weighing the necklace in it, and then he held it out.  “Here,” he said.  “It is yours.  I can find nothing in it that would give me pause in returning it to you.”

She found that she was smiling widely, almost ear to ear.  She put out her hand, and he let the necklace go, so that it fell into her palm, coiling up bead by bead.  The brush of it felt warm—hot—almost burning-hot, and they gleamed with that almost secretive brown-purple-red color in her palm, and

what she sees through the glass is not her own palm.  At first, she thinks she sees a woman in white, who lifts her face, and it is streaked with black, tarry tear-tracks that lead all the way down her white dress, turned purple-brown by the tint of the light.  She has a hand out-stretched, slightly luminous, and she is standing knee-high in brown water.

“Nimruzimir?”

“I do not have the materials to synthesize a proper testing apparatus.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

He blinked his eyes and staggered slightly, leaning sideways against Lilóteo.  “Fuck,” he spat.  “How long?”

“No more than a minute or two.  How do you feel?”

“Fine.  Fine.”  A minute or two did not indicate that the tonic was not working, at least, even if he hated it when such a thing happened.  “Slightly dizzy.  I’m all r-right.”

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.  The beads of his necklace clinked softly together, and he wondered what had possessed him to put it on again.  It hardly suited him.  A woman’s trinket—he had hated everything it stood for.  And yet—he could not quite claim so, for he had not hated the thought of his father’s love, if only his father could have seen him for who he really was.

“All right.  The testing apparatus.”

“Yes.”  He frowned down at the partial laboratory setup they had managed to put together in the basement of his father’s old house.  It had seemed like a convenient location when they traveled out here, since he still possessed the deed to the house, in case anyone cared.  It had been abandoned, in any case.  He was now beginning to doubt the wisdom of the notion, for every day he seemed to be walking into another half-forgotten memory.  Today, apparently, it was sitting with his chin on his hands halfway up the cellar stairs, while his parents shouted at one another a floor above.

No wonder his mother had left.

He ground his teeth together and shook off the persistent malaise, but some queer tightness in his throat forced him to cough out, “Stay with m-m-m-me?”

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” Lilóteo said, sounding puzzled.  “Unless you need me out of your hair, I guess.”

“No, I m-m-mean—never mind.  It was a—a f-foolish thought.”

There was a pause.  “Tell me about the damn apparatus already,” Lilóteo grunted, and Nimruzimir seized on the distraction.  Or had it been the original main topic?  Never mind.

He set out several different glass dishes, in each of which he had put a generous portion of his latest batch of growth medium.  It had been somewhat difficult to obtain the raw materials, in particular the jellification agent isolated from algae, but he had succeeded.  And he had been able to guess at the amounts of sugar, potato, and the algae-produced derivative well enough that he was relatively confident that this would work.

“Since I do not have the materials to be able to derive proper agents to identify everything that might be contaminating the water, I have decided to take a different tactic.”  He reached for another set of vials, carefully setting them out in front of him.  His hands were reasonably steady, which would likely help.  “Based upon my studies and previous reading, I have reason to believe that both plant and fungal life may prove efficacious in removing toxins from the water, even quicksilver and similar such devastating ones.”

“So you’re going to grow those—”

“And see which of them flourishes despite the taint.  The next step will be to introduce it into a controlled environment, along with some of the local wildlife.”

“And you’ll test to see if it really makes the water livable again?”

Nimruzimir nodded.  It was refreshing to be able to present the ideas to someone who understood him quickly—who tried to understand him.  Who had faith in him this way.

“It’s a good plan,” Lilóteo said, his thumb tapping against his bottom lip.  Probably the best you can do, but I’ll keep an eye out for some of the more obscure reagents on the market.  Might still be able to find a few things, even after the fall.”

“Thank you,” Nimruzimir said, then wondered if he had said it too sharply, but when he looked up Lilóteo was smiling at him, and he was helpless to keep from smiling back, an impossible warmth flooding his chest.

The glass fogs, and the vision shimmers.  The lady in white raises a single oil-stained finger to her lips.  “Shhhh.”

“Oh!”  Chalcedony staggered backward before catching herself.  For an instant, Uncle Sam’s porch seemed terribly far away and muddy, the sounds distant, as if she were watching it from underwater; after a single shuddering heartbeat, it snapped into focus, and all of a sudden everything was too bright and too loud. 

Annamir caterwauled, and Celebrimbor leaned forward. Uncle Sam stood up and moved over towards her.  “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine, I’m, I saw—”  The bright sunlight of the Shire afternoon was so different from the gloomy cellar where Nimruzimir had been growing his fungi.  The queerest part of the whole thing was that he had thought about making the thing he had called a growth medium—perhaps not in those words, because it occurred to Chalcedony suddenly that he did not appear to speak the same language.  She understood the words they spoke but when she tried to think back to the memory, the sounds did not add up to anything remotely familiar.  

In any case, Nimruzimir had thought about the growth medium, and now Chalcedony had a vague idea of how to make it herself.  You would need potatoes and sugar—easily come by—and a sort of spongy seaweed jelly, which she had no idea how to obtain.  But if you had that—well, if you boiled them in clean water, strained them, added sugar and the dried powder of this seaweed jelly and then boiled it again for long enough, you would get something you could use as a place to grow plants or mushrooms by themselves without unwelcome guests showing up.  If you were careful.

That meant you could try different sorts of plants and mushrooms along with the water from a poisoned place, and if they grew well, then you know they were probably doing it by cleaning up the little house you’d put them in.  And if they could do that, well, then more of them planted in the poisoned place could clean it up neatly too and make it safe.

She thought of the little pond, still and cool and lonely, hurting everything that came into contact with it.  What if you could heal it, the way Nimruzimir was trying to heal the waters outside the town where he was living?  (Where he had lived, perhaps very long ago?)

It wasn’t much—there were so many places in the Shire that had been burned and poisoned and despoiled during the War of the Ring—but it was a start.  And Chalcedony’s parents and her Uncle Sam were very clear that any little good thing was worth doing, even if it didn’t seem like so much.

She realized she had just been standing here, that Celebrimbor was leaning forward as if waiting for her to finish, that Uncle Sam looked puzzled and concerned, and that Annamir was winding himself about her legs.  “I saw another memory,” she said, finally.

“If I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed that to be foresight trance,” Celebrimbor murmured to Uncle Sam.  “They’re not dangerous, usually, though they can be uncomfortable.  But I’ve never heard of a hobbit with foresight, have you?”

Uncle Sam blew out his breath.  “That’s a question for a Took or a Brandybuck,” he said firmly.  “Not for someone like me.  Come on, Boromir, my lad, why don’t you come in and have some strawberries with cream?  You look right pale.”

Though Chalcedony flinched a little, again, at the mode of address, and though she was fascinated by what exactly a foresight trance might be, she had to confess that she did feel a little wobbly, and strawberries and cream would probably sort it out.  Uncle Sam was always good at reminding you to eat when you needed it.

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Chapter End Notes

Fungi really can do this! It’s called mycoremediation, and it’s one of some different ways of environmental remediation. There’s also phytoremediation, which is where plants do it, but basically the idea is they’re both capable of removing certain toxins from the environment, including heavy metals, which are both particularly horrifying and particularly difficult to deal with (and often end up in the environment as the side effects of careless disposal of chemical plant waste products—if you are feeling strong, reading up on Minamata disease may give you some context but serious content warnings for people dying in pretty horrible ways and other people being just genuinely awful about it.)

If you want more of Celebrimbor and Annamir-the-Cat, you can check out my series “Open Gates and Holly Trees;” I did not plan to have them in this fic but they invaded it anyway. Annamir is like that, I suppose.