"You will say the words wrong."
Tauriel said it the way she said most things she meant kindly — without softening.
She was sitting on the low chest at the foot of the bed in their rooms, with her hair half-loose down her back and the small narrow brush in her hand that she used at the end of the day. She had stopped using it when he came in. The brush was set on her knee, and her eyes were on him, and what she had just said was, for her, the warm version of a warning.
"I know."
"I do not want you to say them right."
"I know."
"I want you to say them as you would mean them in your own tongue if you knew none of mine. The form will be Sindarin. The meaning is yours."
He sat down on the edge of the bed. He took her free hand in his.
"Then I am as ready as I am going to be."
"You are not."
"I am not."
"Good. Come down."
They went down to the hall.
The hall was empty.
That had been by his arrangement — by both their arrangements — and the steward had been told that no business would be conducted in the hall after the ninth hour of the evening, and no message would be brought, and no door opened except to the one figure who had been told the time and the door.
Halbarad was sitting on the bench along the western wall.
He had taken the bench without being shown to it. He was in his ordinary coat, with the hood of it pushed back, and his hands folded over each other on the staff he had taken to carrying that autumn. The staff was the small one Aldric had had cut for him in spring out of a piece of holly from the orchard hill — light, plain, not a thing of office, a thing of practical use against the small unsteadiness that had begun to show in him on stairs and on uneven ground.
He had asked, three days ago, if he could stand witness.
He had asked it precisely that way, stand witness, with the small look that said he understood the form and was offering himself in his proper place in it. Aldric had said yes before Tauriel did. Tauriel had agreed an hour later, in the upper room, with no expression on her face and a small careful pause Aldric had read and not asked about.
He nodded, now, to Halbarad as he came in.
Halbarad inclined his head.
He did not stand. The staff sat across his knees, and his hands sat on top of the staff, and his eyes followed Aldric and Tauriel across the floor of the hall without a movement of his head.
They went to the centre stone.
The centre stone of the hall was the speaking-stone, the one slightly worn down by generations of speakers; it had been the place Tauriel had stood when she had addressed Halvir in the council, and it had been the place Aldric had stood when he had named the matter that day, and the council clerk had explained to Aldric three years earlier that the local custom marked the stone as a place where words said upon it were held to be said with weight. The custom was older than the council. It was older than the keep. It might, the clerk had said, be older than the country.
They stood on the stone.
Tauriel was opposite him, perhaps a pace away.
She held out her hand.
He took her hand.
In her other hand, she had a thin silver chain with a small simple pendant on it — a single oak leaf wrought in silver no thicker than a fingernail. He had given it to her two months ago, when he found it in the dwarven quarter's smith-stall after a meeting, because it had reminded him of the orchard. She had worn it under her shirt every day since. She held it now where she could see it.
In his hand he had the other token — a thin band of silver, a betrothal-ring of the Elven kind, the kind Aldric had asked Halbarad three weeks ago to procure for him through whatever quiet channel could procure such a thing in the north. Halbarad had not asked questions. The ring had arrived through a Ranger courier ten days later, with a small folded note that read, in the elder's small careful hand, from a friend of mine in Rivendell, who sends greeting.
Lindir's hand, Aldric had thought, and not said.
He held the ring in his palm.
Tauriel began.
She spoke the words first, because the custom had her go first. Her voice on the Sindarin was different from her voice on the Common — quieter, more interior, with a cadence the Common did not have. The words flowed from her without effort. She spoke them with her eyes on his and her hand in his, and when she reached the end of her phrase she lifted his hand slightly between them and waited.
It was his turn.
He had practised the words for two weeks. He had practised them at his desk, in the saddle on the eastern road with Halbarad's two-hour silence behind him, in the small hours of the night when sleep would not come. He had practised them out loud and under his breath and in the small movements of his lips alone. He knew them the way one knew a song one had been taught and never quite been sure one was singing right.
He spoke them.
He spoke them poorly.
He heard, in his own mouth, the place where his tongue caught on the second word of the phrase and turned a soft consonant hard, the way a man with a northern accent turned soft consonants hard. He heard the place where the long vowel in the fourth word came out shorter than it should have. He heard the small wrong stress on the verb.
He kept going.
He kept going because she had told him to, and because the meaning of the words sat above the words themselves — he was saying I give you my name and my hand and my house, for as long as the both of us draw breath in the world — and the meaning he had with him, and the meaning he meant, and he was saying it in her tongue because she was hers and not his and the gesture was the offering.
He came to the last phrase.
The last phrase was the hardest. It was a long sentence with a particular nested rhythm, and on the second night he had practised it he had given up and asked her, in their rooms, to say it once more for him slowly, and she had said it three times slowly, and he had got it on the third, and he had not been able to get it back since.
He started it.
He got two words in.
He stopped.
He did not stop because he had forgotten the words. He stopped because his throat had closed around the third word in a way it had not closed in council, in the hall, in any room he had stood in as a lord. He stood with her hand in his and the word in his mouth and could not, for a moment, push the word out.
Tauriel did not let go of his hand.
She did not speak for him.
She waited a beat — a long beat, generous, the kind a teacher gave a student who had only forgotten and not failed — and then, when his throat did not open, she said the third word for him.
She said it quietly.
She said it the way she would say it to a child to whom she had taught a song and who had lost the line.
He found the next word.
He spoke the next word. She spoke the one after that. He spoke the next one. They went through the last phrase together, alternating, each of them carrying what the other could not in that beat carry, and they came to the end of it together, with both their voices on the final word.
Silence.
Halbarad, on the bench by the western wall, did not move.
Tauriel lifted the ring out of his palm. She set the chain with the silver oak-leaf into his palm in its place. She put the ring on the smallest finger of her left hand — the Elven place, not the place of Men — and the ring fit, and the fit was the second thing Aldric had not known to ask about and would have asked about if he had been less ignorant. He saw her register it, faintly, with the briefest movement at the corner of her mouth.
He fastened the chain with the oak-leaf around his own neck, under his shirt.
Tauriel turned her head, then, to the bench by the western wall.
"Halbarad."
"Lady."
"You have witnessed."
"I have witnessed, Lady."
"Then by the custom of my people the binding is set."
Halbarad inclined his head.
He did not speak further. He inclined his head once, the deep version of his usual inclination, and the small acknowledgment in the room was the largest thing Aldric had seen the old man do without speaking in seven years.
That was the ceremony.
That was the whole of it.
There was no procession. There was no toast. There was no entry into the record — the entry into the record had been done in the hall a year ago, and what had happened tonight was not for the record; it was for her people's custom and her people's ear, and it would be carried south now by Lindir's hand when he next came, and Rivendell would know it had been done, and Mirkwood would, in time, know that Rivendell knew it had been done.
That was all.
[TAURIEL'S STUDY — LATER]
The study was small.
She had taken the room at the corner of the upper floor when she had first settled in the keep, because it had two windows facing different directions, and she had said that night that she could not sleep in a room with only one window. The room held a writing-table, a low cabinet, a stand for a bow, and a thick rug Halbarad had brought from somewhere in the spring of the second year and never explained.
He sat down on the rug.
She sat down across from him on the rug.
It was, he registered, the first time in the years they had been together that they had sat in this room across from each other on the floor and not at the writing-table. The change was small. The change was a thing he would, later, recognise as the form the evening had taken on the other side of the ceremony.
She had the ring on her left smallest finger.
She rested the hand on her knee where it could be looked at.
"You said it badly."
"I said it badly."
"It does not matter that you said it badly."
"I know."
"You stopped at cuiath."
"I know."
"Do you know why you stopped at cuiath."
"No."
"Neither do I." She looked at her hand. "Perhaps the word knew that it was being said by a man who had not said anything like it in his own tongue before, and the word held."
"That is not a thing words do."
"That is not a thing words do in your tongue. In mine, sometimes, it is."
She lifted his hand and put it on top of her hand on her knee, with the ring under his palm.
"Halbarad witnessed."
"Yes."
"He is not, by my people, a kin-witness. He is by yours."
"Yes."
"I am content with that."
"Are you."
"I am content with that."
She did not, then or after, say anything to him about her own kin who had not been there. She did not name her exile. She did not name her king. She did not name the people she had once stood among on the long terraces of Thranduil's halls during the bindings of others of her kind. She let those absences sit where they sat, and she put his hand on top of hers, and she let the evening hold what it held.
After a long while she said: "Tomorrow Lindir's courier is due."
"Tomorrow."
"He will carry the news of tonight back."
"He will."
"And after that we will know what Imladris does with it formally, rather than tacitly."
"After that we will know."
She lifted her hand with his on top of it.
She set them both back down on her knee.
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"There is a balcony at the east face of the keep. I should like, this winter, to spend some of our evenings on it."
"For what."
"To teach you something."
"What."
"The names of the stars."
He looked at her.
He nodded.
"Tomorrow night."
"Tomorrow night."
The candle in the corner of the room burned down a finger's width.
They did not, for a long time, get up off the rug.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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