By the Iris Mere by Elleth

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Chapter 1

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The bargewoman who had agreed to stake her peat barge to one of the many small freshwater meres off Sirion’s estuary laughed softly when Nellas loaded another armful of bright yellow buttercups into the boat. They grew abundantly in the salt marshes around Sirion’s mouth, and she had spent half the night harvesting them so they lay like a shimmering blanket over the deck, hung in garlands over mast and sail, and some she had plaited two wreaths that were waiting to be worn.

“Do you not think that that is enough, unless you want her to sneeze herself into the river?”

Nellas nodded her head, grinning. “I will plight myself only once in life, but this may be enough. Let me fetch Ninglor.”

Soon after, they reached the mere that Nellas had chosen. She had found it on one of her expeditions into the surrounds of the Havens, when a fight had driven her out of their small house, but since then the little mere had become a retreat for the both of them, its banks overgrown so thick with yellow ninglyr stands that it was hard to see where the land ended and the water began.

They waited until they were alone to begin the ceremony, and while they spoke the pledge, both of them released the seeds that they had taken from the small stand of ninglyr in Teiglin from near the cave where Niënor had taken her first halting steps back toward life.

* * *

The glad months did not last, and grew bleaker and bleaker the closer winter came.

Despite the screeching gulls that greeted the homecoming of the cutters at dawn and their gracious share of the by-catch, and Nellas slipping from under the covers, Niënor remained curled into a tight snarl of limbs under the feather-bed they had hardly been able to afford. Only her right hand was flung out into Lalien’s cradle beside the bed, the only way she was able to fall and remain asleep at all.

Motherhood and recovery combined, Nellas thought, were hard on Niënor, and while she bound up her hair into braids before the mirror and readied herself for going outside, she couldn’t help but glance at the sleeping figure under the covers with fear and more than a little regret.

Although it was nearing a year and a half since the death of Glaurung and Túrin, and nearly Niënor’s own, she had still not recovered, and at times even seemed to be growing worse yet. Niënor often woke bathed in sweat from some nightmare, and slept too much when she could, looking pale and drawn with dark circles under her eyes even so.

On the days she left the bed at at all she tried and often succeeded to stay jovial, and it would have been heartening if not for the facade Nellas could tell it was. Niënor sang to Lalien and played with her, busied herself around the one room of their small house, spun, cooked, and carved the driftwood that Nellas carried home from her forays on the shore, but there were holes in the wooden floor that fit the carving knife as exactly as though Niënor had tossed it there, blade out, and in seemingly unobserved moments her eyes often brimmed with tears for reasons she did not share. She picked at her food, needed reminding that she ought to bathe (when she did she scrubbed at the skin of her thighs until it pinked and scabbed), and it was Nellas who, as often as she was able to convince Niënor to let her, brushed Niënor’s hair back into its bright blonde shine.

But her love, as much as she twisted herself to provide it through the bond they had knit, changed little.

Niënor barely left the house. When she did, she hid her bright hair under a dark wool scarf, fearful to be recognized by any fugitive out of Dor-lómin, even to draw any attention at all, and looking northward often.

So it came to Nellas to sell Niënor’s - Ninglor’s, the name they had agreed to use - work on the market beneath the tall white-stone lighthouse for a little money. She disliked the sea, still, its stink of brine and the mud-grey vastness stretching on into nothing, she disliked the press of houses and the mud in the streets. The multitude of people, most of them refugees from across Beleriand bent with cares of their own, put her on edge. But while Niënor struggled to heal, Nellas took on any work that her hands could do: Fish was easy to gut, whether caught from Sirion or the sea, and she waded the mudflats at low tide, learned to harvest the algae fields and mussel beds, and how to catch the brown crabs that lived among the breakwater stone piles. At high tide she walked through the marshy fields above the watermark gathering samphire for the glass-makers and soap-boilers, in the dunes to the north of the town she collected crowberries, eiderdowns and eggs, and sometimes she mounted one of the peat barges inland to help dig up the precious heating material when there was nothing else to be done.

Her hands were hardly at rest. The work was miserable and the salt cracked her hands into rough red things, but together with Niënor’s carvings it ensured that they could at least eat, pay a modest upkeep to Sílachil, whom Nellas remembered from her first foray to the Havens and who was glad to harbour her again. And often she was glad for the work, regardless. It kept her from thinking, and from missing the trees of her homeland and roaming among them at will or with the Marchwardens. She missed the sun and the starlight through the boughs of the beech she had built her talan in. The tiredness after her work kept her from hurting that Niënor, lost in her own thoughts, often barely acknowledged her, and if they kissed at all, Niënor flinched from any further touch, sleeping with her back to Nellas and her shoulders rigid.

Nellas was tempted to try and convince her to return to Doriath. At least behind the Girdle of Melian Niënor would be sheltered again, and might recover from the shadows upon her mind. They might even return to their way of life they had had before everything had changed with Niënor’s loss to the dragon, but Niënor staunchly refused, digging her fingernails into the window-frame she was standing near to watch the sun dip into the sea at evening and tint a golden path westward across the water.

There was a longing on her face that filled Nellas with cold terror that Niënor would one day simply leave the house and begin swimming down that path until strength left her and she drowned as she would have in Teiglin, had some current not swept her into a shallow part of the ravine. The point had come when she - they both - were questioning whether her rescue had indeed been a kindness, if not for their daughter.

In her cradle, Lalien gurgled and reached for the windchimes that were hung above her. She, at least, was happy and carefree, having never known anything but the narrow world of the house, the cradle she slept in and the screech of gulls outside the window. Nellas kissed Lalien’s forehead and whispered morning greetings to her, and returned to stoking the fire, brewing tea, and toasting bread on the bakestone. If Lalien was awake, then Niënor wouldn’t take long to follow suit, and to ensure that she ate at all, Nellas always made certain to have something ready.

She set the tray of the finished food on her side of the narrow bed, kissed Niënor’s hair, and left to secure the morning portion of her work.

* * *

Peace remained, but it remained a thin, ungracious, uncertain thing. The next two winters were fell, and floes of ice drifting down the river choked the coastlines; even this far south the land was frozen hard. Nellas wondered, stomping her boots free of snow, what her family in Doriath would be doing - whether Melian’s Girdle kept the worst of the snows at bay, or whether her family had abandoned their usual wintering cave and gone into Menegroth. Her dreams of the towering pillars and stone-hewn trees suggested they had, Gellorn darting among them with his head thrown back to the high blue vault of the ceiling. She’d done the same when she had gone into Menegroth - but waking, she missed instead the sight of snow-covered trees, and would have given much to be rid of the empty grey blanket of the sky and the mist that crept in from the sea.

In that weather, Lalien, then nearly two years of age and laughing like a young brook, took sick.

Nellas attempted argument after futile argument with Niënor that she should claim her inheritance as the head of the Houses of Hador and Bëor and send to Círdan on Balar and the King of the Noldor who - by name at least - ruled the Havens of Sirion. They would be treated with honour there, they would be provided healers other than old Tuluthel, the midwife who had pulled Lalien into the world and now sought to keep her there with the powers that her failing mind still allowed her. The old woman slept in Nellas’ place in the bed for the time being; Nellas wrapping into a spare blanket near the fire, and if Nellas shivered, then at least she had little risk of falling ill.

Lalien lapsed from fever to wheezing cough to fever.

Still, Niënor refused time and again to seek help from the king. “This way at least we will remain undiscovered. If -- if the North finds us here, then Lalien stands no chance to survive at all. We cannot claim my past. It is gone, Teiglin washed it off me.”

The arrangement continued, and Lalien’s health neither worsened nor improved, but Tuluthel, worn threadbare with care for the girl, became exhausted quickly and her mind worsened. Spooning broth into Lalien’s mouth one evening, she talked in a singsong of nonsense rhymes to the child as she always did, and something slipped from her lips then that made Nellas freeze in fear over the net she was mending - and Niënor, once again standing by the window, gazing at the faded pink of the clouds past sunset went still, before her shoulders began to shake with silent tears.

The word again. Lalaith.

There was much in Niënor of Morwen, Nellas thought - the stony endurance of her grief and the composure that she attempted to bear it with - and she took the time to force back her emotions before turning, with an angry light still in her eyes.

“Never call my daughter by that name again. Lalaith is dead. Lalien lives. No -- never even talk to my daughter again.” She took Lalien into her arms, and the girl wailed. “Leave us, Tuluthel. Go home, you are no longer welcome here.”

Tuluthel did not seem to understand, but she left all the same. Afterwards Niënor, soaking Nellas’s shirt with tears, wept herself into exhaustion and on into sleep. Before she slipped into some dream, she murmured, “I cannot go on like this. I cannot, not if Tuluthel brought it on her now to suffer my sister’s curse.”

Nellas stroked her hair and did not know what to say, burying her face into the blanket that still smelled of Tuluthel, and tried not to think of the time when she would lose them both.

* * *

Against both their expectations, Lalien struggled on into spring. She continued to labour with the same wheezing cough and at times the fever returned, but the new-come sunshine seemed to help her, and Nellas began taking the girl with her at times when she delivered a mended net, sat in her market stall, or waited in the sun by the harbour for some other opportunity to work. She liked, with her eyes half-closed and Lalien dozing on her knee, to listen to the conversations of the passersby without taking part in them, and to try to get used to the peculiarities of the Sindarin of the shore, other dialects she could not place, and most of all the northern accent that still slipped into Niënor’s speech every so often.

“... a few here, lord, but not many made it out of the Eastrons’ leaguer on the homeland,” a woman’s voice said. Saelheril, holding her son Dírhavel by the hand and like Tuluthel a fugitive from Dor-lómin, was a well-known gossip in the small mannish community that had formed at the Havens. It was to her that newcomers were often first directed, and she had reunited more than one family separated in the confusions of Beleriand.

“Hador’s house is all but routed, even the ones they sent to Doriath, the lady Morwen and her son and daughter, they’re all gone, so says the girl Ninglor - she’s blonde as any of us, but claims she came out of Brethil, and if that’s her story, well by me, but I’ll not believe a tall tale any more than I have to.”

Nellas held her breath, and abandoning her net scooped up Lalien to wander closer.

The man Saelheril was talking to was a stranger to the Havens. He looked like he had been crafted painstakingly from weather-worn leather, and he walked with a black staff without leaning on it, although his hair and beard were white. For a moment Nellas thought that it might have been the Lord Círdan, and relaxed, but only until his eyes - a startling, familiar blue - lit on her and Lalien, and he strode through the crowd toward them, leaving Saelheril behind, who huffed an insult and left.

Almost Nellas was tempted to turn and run, but something rooted her feet into the ground. Perhaps the crinkle of a smile at the edges of the man’s previously hard eyes, perhaps some recognition in his face from a far recollection of Túrin’s face in his boyhood, although he had always resembled Morwen more… but there was, suddenly, little doubt who the man was.

Impossible as it seemed, Húrin was coming toward her and Lalien. His shadow fell upon them before he stopped, less than an arm’s length from her, close enough to reach out and touch Lalien’s heated little face. She gaped at her grandfather wordless and wide-eyed, then coughed and burrowed her head against Nellas’ shoulder.

“She looks much like my daughter at that age. And Melian spoke of you to me, Nellas of Doriath,” he said. Húrin’s voice was hoarse with disuse, and he strung the words together in the way of someone who had not spoken to others for a long while - and, Nellas supposed, that was true, and the rumors and vanishing hope of Morwen and Niënor that he might one day be released from the Enemy’s captivity had all been founded.

“Then it is over?” she asked. “The curse is lifted. Or… I think you would not carry it here.”

“The curse is lifted,” Húrin said. “It is done, and all is fulfilled to what He thought the utmost woe. But I will not burden my daughter with the griefs of an old stranger when she was the one who lived them through the old fool’s pride.” His eyes were brimming with tears, suddenly.

Nellas shook her head, and over the pounding in her ears said, “The world had enough weeping, that is what Niënor said after she gave birth. This is Lalien.”

Húrin smiled through his tears. “A good name for the Heir of the House of Hador to overcome dark times. She is a joy. I wish her grandmother were able to see her, but she lies sleeping at the Stone of the Hapless.”

Nellas nodded quietly. “At least she will hear about her mother’s fate from her father.”

Húrin shook his head. “I will not go to her. I would rather spare her the grief of knowing and then losing me again.” He ran his gnarled hand through Lalien’s golden curls again. “She is in loving hands, and when I stand before the Judge I will entreat for her. A father’s love may also sway him.”

“Or a mother’s,” Nellas added. “I have no doubt that Morwen said such a prayer, too. But I think it will not hurt if you add your voice.”

Húrin, who had already been turning to go, paused, and glanced over his shoulder at Nellas. He seemed almost heartened by the prospect, in the same way that Niënor sometimes contemplated the sea, and Nellas watched him part the crowd and vanish on the path that led northward out of town.

Her light steps seemed, at that moment, a fair price to pay for the silence.

* * *

Wake wake wake wake wake wake, Nellas, wake wake wake wake, the bird trilled.

It was no mournful seagull’s cry that hastened Nellas from sleep not long after Húrin had come and gone, but half-forgotten, a nightingale’s song, and its gentle tapping against the pane of the window. In the half-dark before dawn, Nellas slipped from the bed, giving Niënor only a brief glance. She slept on.

Nellas opened the window and the bird hushed and scurried inside like a mouse in the grey twilight. Even Nellas barely recognized the shimmer of the air, and before her stood Melian, wreathed in a feather-cape, her hair undone, uncrowned and trembling.

“Doriath has fallen,” she said, her voice still the sweet fluting of the nightingale, but thick with tears and hardly that of the queen of Nellas’ homeland. She seemed smaller, too, no longer the imposing presence sitting enthroned in Menegroth. “Thingol my husband lies dead.”

Nellas fell back onto the bed, her fingers groping for purchase and eventually finding her pillow that she clutched to her chest. She had not allowed herself, in the past few years, to think much of her family, although she dreamed of them sometimes. “My parents, Gellorn?” she asked tonelessly, and her blood turned to ice.

Melian shook her head. “They live. Many fled before the Dwarves; your family did not lie among the dead. I expect that if they do not go into the great forests of the east they shall come downriver - but Middle-earth holds nothing more for me. I will return to my homeland. Only this - the reason for my coming here that I could not speak before this time lest I reveal this purpose to Morgoth… the Children of Húrin have a role to play yet, and it may be that very soon you will learn what it is. It is grief and mourning that was woven into the Music before the world began and lives in its very essence - I told you once, there are powers on Niënor greater than mine, and even now and I do not think Niënor will have an ordinary fate. Guard her well, Nellas, still. Remember what I said to you when this began: Love lived and given freely ever is the truest weapon against the Dark. There is much that the Children of Húrin deserve healing and recompense for. I may come to you again if the Powers permit me to be the messenger of their tidings, but I cannot say if this is so.”

Nellas could not bring herself to answer; her mind reeled with the thought of Niënor, and of ruin, of Doriath as she knew it vanished beyond recall. Melian was walking the room, still speaking, peering into the cradle that still served as Lalien’s bed, and Nellas heard such words as “very frail”, “infection”, and others that her mind refused to assign meaning to, then a murmured, “be healthy and whole.” She saw Melian bend over the cradle to kiss the child, and looked away, staring at her feet.

When she looked up again, Melian had gone, and only the window, a crack open, and a nightingale’s feather on the sill hinted that anyone had been there at all.

Nellas still sat on the bed in her nightgown, dangling her bare feet above the floorboards, when day had dawned and Niënor was waking. It seemed to be one of her kindlier days, because she leaned across the bed and wound her arms around Nellas, holding her, for the moment without question.

* * *

“It is my fate!” Niënor let herself fall among the high stands of the ninglyr leaves that stood like swords by the edge of the mere. It was too early in the year for blooms, and their retreat looked pale and lacklustre, with only the dried seed-pods of the past year still clinging brown and withered to the stems. “All my life I have been a plaything for the Powers, between one who wished - and gave! - me the ills of the entire world, and the other who meant me well but told me nothing! And now you!”

Nellas rocked Lalien, who had begun to yammer and stretched her arms out to her mother. She did no longer know what to say; it was only the latest among many such arguments since Melian’s coming weeks ago and a summons through a dream to the pool this afternoon. Nellas felt too fragile, still, from the knowledge that Doriath was fallen. She rolled her shoulders unhappily and directed Lalien’s attention to an untimely dragonfly that darted between the sedges at the water’s edge.

“She always asked me to care for you. And I did, I did all I did for you because I love you.”

Niënor made an unhappy noise low in her throat. “Then do not treat me as a child! I remember that my mother said similar things when we were in Menegroth, but I did not understand what she meant, because I had always been treated so; I was told it was for my own good and done out of love when they kept me from leaving the garth in Dor-lómin, but when will I ever be worth enough to decide for myself? If not now - when?”

“I will leave if that is what you would have me do,” Nellas replied quietly. “Leave you to your decisions and the joy of them.”

Niënor said nothing for a long time, and when she finally spoke it was with barely choked-back tears. Nellas knew the voice well. “No. I do not want you to leave, I only want you to… let me have my say, if I still can have it with fate so tightly woven around me - if there is indeed still a choice to make.”

“There is. There must be.”

A rush of air on the windless afternoon heralded some arrival. Both Nellas and Niënor jumped, and Niënor’s cool fingers wrapped around Nellas’ hand when Melian manifested through the shimmer in the air. She wore a paler grey now than she had in Doriath, the colour of mist in morning light, and there was nothing that even suggested opulence about her any longer. Nellas stomach clenched to see her this way - even Niënor’s dress, stitched around the hems with wreaths of ninglyr in green and yellow was more elaborate.

Nonetheless she knelt, never letting go of Niënor’s hand.

“There is a summons for you, Niënor, daughter of Morwen Eledhwen, daughter of Húrin, sister of Túrin Turambar and Urwen Lalaith. For the pains and tribulations that should never have been, and the bravery in facing them, the Aratar convened in Máhanaxar the Ring of Doom, and they are indeed giving you the choice you seek. To remain here as you are, beset with the afflictions of your mortal body, or to enter into Aman and there heal yourself, at the side of your family until the Last Battle, when the Enemy shall fear the sword of Túrambar and the hearts of the daughters of Morwen and Húrin. To your daughter the same choice will be given when she understands the stakes.”

Niënor rose, pulling Nellas and Lalien with her, twisting their fingers together more tightly.

“I do not know if I can face the lifetime of the world. But we plighted our troths here, and someone told me once that ninglyr were hard to rout once they have taken root. If Nellas may go with me - if she wishes - let us go.”

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Chapter End Notes

Well, what can I say? If Túrin canonically gets to fight Morgoth at the end of time in revenge, then Niënor of all people deserves to be along... and their survival in Aman is not even that far out of canon, depending on how you rate the Lost Tales. After all, in the Tale of Túrambar and the Foalókë they both get an apotheosis and happy ending - even if the fic doesn't quite describe the same mythical grandeur and Niënor ends up with someone else.

Credit where credit is due: Lalien is Elvie's character, but she gave me permission to write her a while ago. A handful of phrases about her and her naming are Elvie's as well, but it seemed to make sense to borrow them, given they're the rationale behind the choice of her name.

Many, many thanks to swampdiamonds and zeen for their lovely betaing work.