[TAURIEL]
She came up the steps ahead of him.
She had always come up the steps ahead of him. The first time, on the night after Lindir's courier had ridden south, she had told him without quite meaning to that the count of steps from the second landing to the east balcony was forty-three and that the third step from the top was a half-thumb shorter than the others, and she had said it because in the dark on the third step from the top a man not paying attention would catch the toe of his boot and break the rhythm of his climb. He had not caught his toe that night. He had not caught his toe on any of the nights since. He counted the steps now, she could tell, by the small change in his breathing that came at thirty-five and again at forty.
The balcony was small.
It had been built, in the original keep, as a watchman's perch. It had no roof. It had no benches. It had, against the east-facing wall, a narrow ledge of stone wide enough to set a cup on, and that was all the appointment it had ever received. She liked it for exactly that reason. It was not a room. It did not pretend to be a room. One did not bring business onto a balcony with no benches, because one had nowhere to put one's papers down.
She set her cup of warmed wine on the ledge.
She did not look at him when he came up onto the balcony beside her. She had learned, over the long count of their evenings here, that he did not, at first, want to be looked at when he came up onto the balcony. He spent the first minute of every evening on the balcony settling — putting his hands on the stone, turning his face up to the cold, letting the day off his shoulders.
He set his own cup on the ledge beside hers.
He put his hands on the stone.
He turned his face up.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye and did not, by any movement, mark that she was watching.
The temple-grey in his hair was wider this winter than last. It had taken her a long moment, in the autumn, to register the change; her eye, accustomed to faces that did not change in a hundred years, did not catch in any single evening what the eye of a Man might catch. The grey had crept in over the year, a hair at a time, and she had only seen it whole when she had stood behind him at the writing-table in November and looked down at the back of his head and understood that he had aged a year and a year and now another year while she had been counting them as a single span.
She did not, by any movement, mark that thought either.
"Tell me Wilwarin again."
She had been waiting for him to ask.
This was the third evening, in the way Men counted evenings — there had been more than that in fact, but the form of the lesson was on its third iteration, where she had set out the same six star-names and asked him to name them back at her in their proper place in the sky, and he had named them back with the steady increase in correctness that she had come, in the autumn, to find restful in the way that few mortal habits were restful.
She pointed.
"There. Two fingers above the line of the chimney. The faint cluster with the wing-shape."
"Wilwarin."
"Wilwarin."
"It means butterfly."
"It means a thing that is not exactly butterfly. We do not have butterflies under the trees of my country. The word names a thing that flies in the day, with the wings that open and close. It can be a butterfly. It can be a moth in some lights. The word is older than the distinction."
"Butterfly."
"Butterfly will do."
He found the next one without being asked.
"Remmirath. The cluster."
"Yes."
"And below it, the red one — Borgil."
"Yes."
"And the bright one to the south of Borgil — Helluin."
"Helluin."
He turned his head to her.
"Now tell me one I haven't asked for."
She lifted her eyebrow.
"Aldric."
"Tell me one I haven't asked for."
"You will not use it for navigation."
"No."
"You will not use it to mark a watch."
"No."
"You will not put it on a map."
"No."
"Then why."
He looked back at the sky.
"Because I would like to hear you say a star-name without me asking you to teach it to me."
She looked at him.
She looked at him for what was, for her, a long beat, and a longer beat, and the small lift at the side of his mouth that came when he was waiting for her to do something he did not know whether she would do.
She turned her face up to the east.
She found, near the horizon where the winter constellations rose late, a single small steady point that was neither bright nor dim, neither close to a bright neighbour nor wholly alone. It was the kind of star one did not, ordinarily, name in a lesson. It was a star that her people had named because someone in the long ago had wanted it named and had given it a name out of affection and not utility.
She named it.
"Mírelen."
"Mírelen."
"Yes."
"What does it mean."
"It means the jewel-keeper."
"That sounds practical."
"It is not practical. The name comes from a song. The song is older than the country."
"What is the song about."
She stood for a beat.
She did not, often, hesitate before answering him. She had learned in the seven years to give him what he asked for in the form he had asked for it; he asked, she answered, and the small private things she chose not to name she chose not to name once and forever and he did not press. He had not pressed. He was not pressing now.
She was pausing on her own account.
"The song is about a child who has lost something and is looking for it." She said it carefully, picking the words. "The song says that the child cannot find the thing she has lost, because the thing she has lost has been taken into the keeping of the star. The star holds it for her. The star will give it back when she is old enough to know what to do with it."
"That is a strange song."
"It is an old song."
"You learned it as a child."
"I learned it as a child."
"From — who."
She did not say from my mother.
She said: "From someone who is no longer alive."
He looked at her.
He did not press.
She had thought she would not say more. She had been certain, in the small fraction of a beat between his asking and her answering, that she would let the answer sit at someone who is no longer alive.
She said more.
"My mother taught me the song. I have not, since she died, named Mírelen in any place where it could be heard." She drew a long breath. "It is not a name I have spoken aloud in five hundred years. I have thought it. I have thought of the song. I have not said the name."
"Tauriel."
"I am not weeping, Aldric. I do not weep, by Men's count. I am telling you the count of the years. The years have a count. The count is part of what the saying means."
"I know."
"You do not know. You cannot know. I am saying it anyway."
"I know that you are saying it anyway."
She turned the cup of wine on the ledge a small quarter-turn.
The wine had gone half-cold. The wind on the balcony was not strong but it was steady, and she had been talking, and the small heat that had been in the cup when she set it down had gone into the air.
"My mother told me that the song was a child's song and that I would grow out of it." She did not look at him. "She told me this when I was — small, by my own count, the way you would be small. She told me I would grow out of it the year before she died. I did not grow out of it. She is the one who left me with it." A small flat sound from her, not a laugh, the thing that took the place of a laugh when an Elf had been carrying a thing past laughing. "I have not, since, found a use for the star."
"And tonight."
"Tonight I named her star to a man who asked it without asking it for anything else, and I do not mind, for the first time in a long time, that I have named her star."
He did not, then, say anything.
He had become better, in the year past, at not saying anything when not saying anything was the thing.
She liked him better for it than she liked him for most other things he had learned in seven years.
After a while she said: "Tell me Wilwarin again."
"Wilwarin."
"Where."
He pointed.
"There. Two fingers above the line of the chimney. The faint cluster with the wing-shape."
"Yes."
"And Remmirath."
"Yes."
"And Borgil."
"Yes."
She let him run through the six she had taught him on the first night. He named them in their order. He named them correctly. He named Helluin with the small pause he always took on Helluin, not because he did not know the word but because the word had two syllables that wanted to be one and he had not yet made his mouth do the contraction the Elven mouth did with the name.
He came to the end.
He did not ask her another.
He turned and picked up his cup and drank the rest of the wine in it, and set the cup back, and stood with his hand resting on the stone at the edge of the balcony.
She watched the side of his face.
It was, by her count, a young face still. It would not be a young face for very much longer. The temple-grey would widen. The lines at the corners of his eyes would deepen. The shoulders that had begun to carry forward against the cold this autumn would carry further forward each year. She had not, in the year since the binding, allowed herself to think about it directly; she had allowed herself instead to think about it indirectly, in the corners of her looking, the way one thinks about a fact one will eventually have to face but which today is not the day.
Today was not the day.
Tomorrow Lindir's man would be on the road back from Imladris with whatever formal reply Elrond had decided to write. It would be a letter. Letters from Elrond were letters from Elrond. She did not know what would be in it. She suspected, by the small thing Lindir had said to her in the chamber a year ago, that whatever was in it would be kind in the form Elrond's kindness took and would not, in any letter, name the thing about the years that her own people did not name in letters.
She would read the letter.
She would tell Aldric what was in the letter.
She would not, tomorrow, name Mírelen to him a second time. She would let the name go back to being unspoken. She had taken it out tonight, and she would put it back tonight, and the putting-back was a part of the taking-out.
He looked at her.
"You are far away."
"I am here."
"You are thinking about the letter."
"I am thinking about the letter. I am also thinking about Wilwarin."
"Wilwarin."
"Wilwarin. The way you said it. The third time you said it. There was a wrong stress on the last syllable. I will fix it tomorrow night."
"Tomorrow night."
"Tomorrow night."
She set her hand on the back of his hand on the stone.
She left it there.
The wind moved across the balcony. A torch below on the wall guttered and recovered. Somewhere in the courtyard a man called once to another man and the second man answered and the call did not repeat, settled the way the dog-calls in the settlement settled, satisfied with whatever the exchange had settled.
In the east, very low, the small star she had named for him a half-hour ago burned at the steady not-bright not-dim level it had burned at for all the centuries she had known it.
She did not look at it directly.
She had said its name once tonight.
She let that be enough.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
Read more chapters for free in the public library:
unwrittenrealm.com
⚜ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚜
By order of the Crown.
The royal vault holds chapters the public throne room has yet to receive. Those who pledge fealty on Patreon may read ahead of the realm:
Noble — $7 — Twelve chapters ahead.
Royal — $11 — Nineteen chapters ahead.
Emperor — $17 — Twenty-six chapters ahead.
New chapters added weekly. Full schedule posted in the war room.
patreon.com/Kingdom1Building
Long live the Kingdom.