Speak No Sorrow by Elleth

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Chapter 1

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They were refugees now, Lady Glóredhel had said to the faces looking up at her high seat, all pale and weirdly colourless after the ruddy light of the fires, caked with dirt and ash that still ground between Morwen’s teeth. Morwen pulled the word around her like a blanket. If they were that, then surely they must have found a refuge, a place where they were safe and no one need die the way so many people had on the road through the mountains.

Rían whimpered in her arms, and Morwen absently stroked her hair. Although her cousin clung to her like a sack and nearly threw her off-balance with her weight, she forced her aching legs to move and stepped forward through the crowd when she heard the next question.

“Where are the heirs of the House of Bëor?”

“Here,” Morwen said, pushing to the forefront. “We are.”

* * *

A week in Amon Obel, and Rían huddled.

More precisely, she huddled in the corner of the bedchamber furthest from the window, under a messy cocoon of blankets half-hidden between the headboard of Morwen’s bed and the wall. She had pulled the bedding off everyone’s beds to hide beneath - her own and that of the three girls the Lady Glóredhel had taken in. In absence of her husband who had gone to fight on the marches of Brethil as their troth was to the Elvenking of Doriath, it fell to her to make that decision.

Lady Glóredhel had praised Morwen for her dignity, composure and resolve at such a young age - she was twelve, but Glóredhel had said she seemed much older than her years, and much wiser, and could be trusted to care for the other girls - Rían, Anneth, Gilthil and Ragnis - because they were, at that moment, among the last descendants of Bëor the Old, although none as close as Rían and Morwen herself. Almost all others had been hunted down, especially the male heirs, and the few boys who had made it to Brethil couldn’t sleep in the same place as the girls, everyone said. And she was the oldest. The people as a whole were her responsibility. She was the one who needed to preserve the dignity of the House of Bëor now.

Morwen didn’t need to be told that. She had seen her father and uncle and their men go off to fight, she had not seen them come back. The monsters had poured into Ladros like a river and the Lady Emeldir had given her a bread-knife and she had seen people - neighbours, even - fall defending the gates of their homesteads, and her mother and Rían's were lost in the confusion, and then they had needed to flee after all, from the fire that jumped the lower hills and burned the dried-out pines like torches after a near-snowless winter, and they had been lucky the Lady Emeldir had gotten them past pursuit and on the way to Brethil.

They had been even luckier to arrive - those who had lived, and who had not been burned or hurt in flight.

Rían hadn’t. Perhaps that was what annoyed Morwen so much about her huddling. There was no reason any longer for being scared. She was not scared. She did what needed doing to settle people, and she had only noticed that Rían was no longer with the other children in the hall when she was done helping the women card wool for more blankets.

And if she even failed to calm a little child, what would her people think of her?

Morwen put her hands on her hips and stomped on the wooden floor once. Her house in Ladros had had a mosaic floor, in the entrance hall at least, nothing like this, and there were tiles all the other rooms that warmed as if by magic if a fire was kindled in the basement. She knew it was only hot air through vents under the floor and that it was technology that the Elves had given them, but it had been much nicer than Brethil was. She wondered if her house still stood, if the tiles had survived the burning. If Amon Obel burned, nothing would remain of it but a pile of cinders.

Rían didn’t come out. Morwen cleared her throat, and Rían’s blanket-pile shook when she pressed further into the corner, but there wasn’t the smallest sound from her.

“Rían,” Morwen said, stepping closer. “I know you are there. Put the blankets back.”

Knowing she was discovered, Rían stilled. She even appeared to be holding her breath. Morwen counted to five in her mind until she heard the soft whoosh of Rían’s breath escaping, then knelt and pulled the blankets away.

Her cousin was only five. That thought came back to her seeing Rían’s wide brown eyes, and her face, which was red with heat and tears, so the fine curls of her hair stuck all over. She had crammed her thumb into her mouth and looked up at Morwen haplessly. Almost Morwen feared that Rían had wet herself and that was the reason for her hiding - all three other girls, though older than Rían, had done so and it had taken Lady Glóredhel’s explanation that that sometimes happened after coming through great fears the way they had done. Morwen did not like it at all either way, and after scolding them they barely spoke to her now unless they had to.

“Rían,” Morwen said with a sigh, and bent down to lift her out of the nest, “why did you hide?”

In answer, Rían burrowed her face into Morwen’s shoulder the way she had done so often on the journey to Brethil when no one else had been available to carry her. Her arms went around Morwen, fisting into the back of her dress. She was clean and dry, at least.

“Did something scare you?” Morwen asked. Without looking up, Rían nodded her head.

“But you know we are all safe here,” Morwen continued. “The Obel is well-guarded. You are not allowed to be afraid now, that is silly. I - we - must keep the dignity of the House of Bëor now. The people have their own cares to carry. You can’t do this. You must show no sorrow, and speak none, either.”

After a pause, she added, “If you are scared again, come to me.”

Rían clung to her more tightly, and nodded her head into Morwen’s shoulder. Morwen stroked her hair and swallowed hard around the lump in her throat.

* * *

Birdsong had broken into a belated riot of music.

They hadn’t sung earlier in spring, at least not - so some people said - not after the death of the High King of the Noldor who had ridden into the North like one of the Powers and nearly killed the Dark Lord. At the very least he had wounded him, that part all the stories agreed on. But in the end even he hadn’t managed much more than the sons of the King over the sea, his nephews, and that was to die.

Morwen tried not to think about it. If even the Elves had failed, then who would defeat the Dark Lord?

Instead she kept watching the way things changed.

The crowd of tents along the open spaces of the town had stopped vanishing - it had been some time since a refugee had died and been laid in one of the mounds atop the forest heights. Her people were settling into a routine. Spring was slowly fading into what promised to be a warm, bright summer with high blue skies above Brethil. The beech-leaves were slowly darkening, and the first strawberries in the woods were ripening. Some of Lady Glóredhel’s guardswomen had grown fond of the smaller children and took them into the wood to gather. The very thing that had scared Rían into hiding - the smell of smoke and ruin on the wind from the north - had faded beneath the scents of the forest.

But it was different to Ladros. There was no heather stretching to the pine hills in the distance here, and from her window Morwen could only see the mass of swaying treetops falling away to the river, which made her uneasy for a reason she couldn’t name. And none of the trees looked like her favourite climbing-tree in the heather, a single gnarled pine that stooped down on one immense limb like a grandmother leaning onto a walking stick.

Her own grandmother --- Morwen stopped the thought before it went any further, but not the image that came with it, and that was all it took for tears to bite her eyes. Crossing the space in front of Lady Glóredhel’s hall, she looked around furtively for Rían, who had come to follow her like a shadow, to the point that Morwen felt something must be amiss when the little girl was not dogging her steps. Then she remembered that Rían had gone into the forest with the other children, gathering strawberries, and relaxed. If there was someone who ought not see her cry, it was Rían.

“My lady,” one of the women of Ladros, passing her by with a basket of firewood - Morwen should remember her name, but at that moment couldn’t - stopped her with a touch to her shoulder. “Is all well?”

Morwen’s cheeks were burning when she answered, more embarrassed to be caught in a moment of weakness than to be addressed as a lady. That was what she was.

“All is well,” she responded, and pulled herself up straight. She’d grown in the two months they had been in Brethil, and the seam of her dress now brushed against her legs a little above her ankles. “Thank you,” she added belatedly. The woman shrugged and walked on.

Morwen couldn’t help the anger roiling up inside her, but she said nothing. Dignity did not allow anger, either. Speak no sorrow.

She settled down outside the hall, leaning against the wooden wall and closing her eyes into the summer sun to try and calm herself. Rían, she reminded herself again, had gone to gather wild strawberries in the woods. There was good reason she was not with Morwen. It was safe. There was no smell or smoke in the air, and the clash of weapons ringing from a distance came from the training field, not from battle. A lone cricket made its concert somewhere in the high grass at the edge of the yard. There were few other sounds; the town drowsed in midday stupor.

It disconcerted Morwen how easily she could believe that she might stay - or that the calm might last without being taken from her by some other night of sudden flame.

* * *

Three more weeks, and Rían had taken to singing again. Morwen remembered her gurgling precociously even before she had begun to speak, attempting to match her mother’s songs, and until Rían had picked it up again, Morwen had not registered that she had missed Rían’s little voice at all.

The songs left her with a pang of homesickness and longing for her father all the same - Rían’s favourite was a popular tune of Queen Melian hallowing the waters of Tarn Aeluin, and had become her most frequent one since she and Morwen had overheard tidings coming from Doriath. Queen Melian herself, the Elven messenger had said, had seen that a remnant of the House of Bëor was holding out on its shores, Belegund and Baragund among them.

With that knowledge, the prospect of leaving was hard on Morwen.

More than once she dreamt that her father and uncle would come marching up the hill-road to Amon Obel only to find the settlement implausibly empty, and all of them vanished without a trace.

Even with the other war-dreams that plagued her sometimes, the ones of her father were worst. She would wake with her heart pounding painfully, and angry with herself at such nonsensical dreams, and unless she had woken one of the other girls with her struggling against the blankets, she would sometimes slip into Rían’s bed in the darkness. Her cousin’s tiny warm body was a comfort, and Rían asked no questions after finding Morwen with her - indeed she seemed happy to have a comfort herself; often Morwen would find the little girl curled against her stomach like a cat in the mornings.

That was not the time to give credit to her dreams, she told herself. Summer, with its impossibly long days, was the safest time to travel. It was in summer that the orcs slept, or retreated into the north across the burned plain - they could not stand light, hated warmth - and it had become clear that not all the refugees from Dorthonion could stay in Amon Obel without, in the long run, exhausting the resources of the Haladin.

They needed to leave. This she had learned sitting the occasional council by Lady Glóredhel’s grace and insistence that she needed tutoring if she were to head the remnants of the House of Bëor at her tender age.

Morwen had bitten back an indignant reply, but with difficulty. Rían was a tender age. Morwen had turned thirteen not long ago, although her birthday had passed mostly unremarked-on because after so much loss it seemed wrong to celebrate such a little thing, although it brought her much closer to adulthood.

When asked, on the council, where she would take her people, she almost answered “home”. The fires had abated, after all. The orcs were, for the moment, gone. There had even been news that the Aglon-pass to the east of Dorthonion had been closed by the Noldor in the east, but she doubted that anyone would follow her if she could even find the way.

“Westward,” she said therefore, looking at Lady Glóredhel, who had often spoken of the wide lands of Dor-lómin and her kin there, and willed her voice to stay steady. “And our backs to the darkness once more.”

* * *

They would travel on Midsummer’s Day, so the plan went.

As soon as the decision had been made, the Haladin had sent out companies to clear the roads where that was necessary on the way from Brethil up the river Teiglin to the mountains called Ered Wethrin that bordered Dor-lómin to the east. They had, Morwen was told in compliment after compliment on the wisdom of her choice that brushed her by, even resisted the fire while Dorthonion’s hills had burned. There, a honour guard of the House of Hador, for no more would be needed, would meet them and escort them down into the plains where they might settle.

Morwen sat up straight when the journey was decided, in a chair only little lower than the high seat of Lord Haldir, the Halad, and Lady Glóredhel, as befitted the heiress of the House of Bëor for the time being - until she died or had a son to pass the title to.

If it still meant anything to an uprooted child whose people would perforce be scattered, she thought - a part of her people, many of the old and the weak who would slow them down, were to remain in Brethil and a larger part who could be trusted not to falter on the road was to move on to Dor-lómin. Word had been sent by Lord Haldir’s sister and Lady Glóredhel’s brother that there was ample room to settle and the rich soil would feed many, that they would be accounted friends as they had been ever since Estolad, and the King of the Noldor would receive them in exchange for their service, now that the lords of Dorthonion were no more. It would be no hardship, she was assured: Morwen’s kin had served the Elves almost since their coming to Beleriand, and their duties would not change.

The new King of the Elves, Fingon, the son of Fingolfin who had died, sent his greetings to her with the messenger from Lady Hareth’s and Lord Galdor, expressing his own admiration that a child of Men should be standing her ground as she did. Morwen would have liked to answer him that her decision hardly was a thing to do her credit, nor taken alone without advice from the Lady Glóredhel and Lord Haldir, and that she was acting as the customs of the House of Bëor best dictated her for the good of her people: They had always moved westward when there was no other way, and as of yet they did not have their feet in the sea, and might still find some of the light that they had of old hoped for.

Instead the voices of the council droned on and on, and she merely nodded her gratitude.

Morwen wanted Rían there, even though children were not allowed to the council, being disruptive. Her cousin would be babbling and singing and feeding Morwen the tiny, sweet strawberries she had gone gathering again the other day, even if that meant scrubbing stains from their dresses after, she wanted the Lady Emeldir with her warm eyes, she wanted her grandmother and parents and the view across the heath toward her tree and the hills. She wanted to huddle as Rían had done, even wanted to cry, and held the tears back by force of will. A leader should pay no heed to her own pain, just as the Lady Haleth had done, she had learned, and just like the Lady Emeldir had done.

Just as Morwen must do now, but she could not help thinking that the better her people became, and the surer their chance for safety, the worse she felt. It had been happening for a while, slowly and little by little, and that there was not a reason to it any longer was worst of all. She’d been assured that although in a distant place from their homeland, nothing much would change, as though that were good. Her life before had been good, but then she had learned how vulnerable it had been, and for that to remain so… anything she built with her own hands could be taken so easily.

By the end of the council, Morwen’s head was swimming with too many things, enough that pain stabbed up her spine all the way to the back of her neck and made keeping herself straight and upright harder than it ought to be. She had even promised that if she took a liking to a suitable candidate - perhaps one of the sons of Lady Hareth and Lord Galdor, in whose house she would stay until her own had been built - she would forge an alliance by marriage as soon as she was old enough to make that choice and make it binding, linking the Three Houses of the Edain. But instead she wanted to cast the chair aside, run from the hall, and go back to her arrival in Brethil when her hands had been busy and her heart and mind as cold as could be.

It would be easier than the feelings that wanted out now. Speak no sorrow, she reminded herself. It wasn’t befitting a leader, least of all of the House of Bëor. She drew that thought around herself the way she had clung to the idea of refuge in the beginning.

There wasn’t that.

There was only her.

All that remained then was to come from the hall. There’d be faces turning toward her when she’d lead her people to the place of assembly that had been carved into the hillside nearby, where they would proclaim who remained - a black pebble, in many infirm hands - and who departed - a white pebble. She already bore one in her belt-pouch.

And then the journey.