"Lift your chin."
The voice was Halbarad's.
Aldric lifted his chin.
The old man's hands — the whole one and the one missing two fingers — worked at the throat of his coat, fastening the small dark hook-and-eye closures that the seamstress had set into the collar three weeks ago for exactly this morning. The hooks were stiff. The eyes had not been broken in. Halbarad pulled the third one through and missed, pulled it through again, and made it on the second try.
"You will need to do this once and not think about it again all day."
"I will not think about it."
"You will. You will think about it the first time someone embraces you and your collar moves. Hold the hook with the thumb of your other hand for the morning hour. After that the linen will set."
"Yes."
"Now the cloak."
The cloak went on next. It was new — Aldric had not put it on his shoulders before this morning. It was the long dark coat of the Dúnedain wedding-form, with a single silver star on the collar at the throat and the smaller seven-star band at the inside of the right cuff that, by old practice, was the only place a Dúnedain bridegroom wore the seven-pointed mark of his house. Aldric had asked the seamstress for the band three months ago. She had taken the request the way she took most of his requests — without asking why — and embroidered it in dark silver on a darker silver ground, so that the band would show only when the cuff was turned the right way and only to the eye of someone who knew where to look.
Tauriel would see it.
Lindir would see it.
The rest of the company would see a cuff.
Halbarad stepped back.
"It is well."
"It is well?"
"It is as well as it is going to be, my lord. Stand at the door. I will go down."
"Halbarad."
"My lord."
"Do not fall down today."
The old man did not, often, smile.
He smiled now — a small dry close-mouthed thing — and inclined his head once.
"I will not fall down today."
He went out.
Aldric stood at the door.
He stood for the count he gave himself in the morning before a council, which was eight slow breaths from the diaphragm. He had been doing the eight breaths since the summer of the year Maeglin came back from the Misty Mountains. He had not, before that, needed them. He had not, today, expected to need them. He had been wrong.
He took the eight breaths.
He went down.
The courtyard had been swept.
It had been swept four times — once in the night by the regular keep-stewards, once at sun-up by the wedding stewards, once an hour ago by a small detachment of the second officer class who had asked to be assigned the work, and once just now by a single old woman from the southern Greenway compact who had not been on any list and had brought her own broom and had not been told to go away. The stones were a clean grey under the September sun. The morning was warm and the wind was light and the four hundred settlers were ranged along the long stretch of the wall on the south side and the long stretch of the wall on the north side and through the western arch where they could see the centre stone without crowding it.
The centre stone of the courtyard — the larger speaking-stone, set into the ground at the founding, the one Aldric had not known was a speaking-stone for nearly two years after he had arrived — was where the binding would be made.
A small dog was sitting beside it.
It was a mongrel of a dog. It had a torn ear and the brown-and-grey of a dog that had not had a settled house in some time. It sat by the centre stone the way it would sit anywhere — head up, tongue out a finger's width, eyes on the slow movement of the gathering people. Two of the keep-stewards had been told to remove it half an hour ago. They had attempted to remove it. The dog had not let itself be removed. The keep-stewards had reported to Halbarad. Halbarad had told them to leave the dog. The dog had stayed.
Aldric, crossing the courtyard, registered the dog with a small dry inward register and let it be.
The witnesses were ranged on either side of the centre stone in a half-arc.
Halbarad stood at the head of the arc on Aldric's right, in his Ranger coat, the holly staff between his feet. He was sweating very slightly along the hairline; the morning was warm; he had walked down the stair on his own, with no steward at his elbow.
Lindir of Imladris stood at the head of the arc on the side that would be Tauriel's. Beside him stood the eleven other Elves from Rivendell who had ridden in over the last week — slim grey-cloaked figures who held themselves at the standing-rest of long-living things, hands folded in front of them, hoods back. The twelfth Elf, who was not from Rivendell, stood a half-pace behind Lindir on the same side. He had come in the second day of the gathering, the rider on foot who had asked for the upper room, and Aldric had told him in the upper room that there would be a place for him in the wedding-arc if he wished it, and the Sindar — whose name he had given in the upper room and which Aldric had been asked, by him, not to speak in the open before he asked it for himself — had inclined his head once and accepted. He stood now in a plain travelling cloak. His hood was back. The morning light was on his face. Tauriel knew where he was standing and had not, since the second day, looked at where he was standing directly.
Nálin and his second stood at the dwarven place along the arc. Seven other dwarves of the resident quarter were ranged behind Nálin, with Grimgar at the centre of them. The dwarves had set the small braziers of incense-coal that they set at any binding of any kind among their own people, and a thin pale smoke was rising from the braziers and dispersing in the morning air with the smell of cedar and resin.
Dírhael and his Rangers stood opposite. Sixty Rangers, including the eight who had come in with him. Most of the sixty had ridden in over the wedding-week from postings as far south as Tharbad and as far north as the Misty Mountains' eastern foot. Aldric knew perhaps fifteen by name. The rest he knew by face from the year of the orc-coalition. Halbarad's kinsman — the canon Halbarad of the Grey Company — stood at Dírhael's right, with his hood pushed all the way back and his beard trimmed for the occasion.
Behind the formal arc, the four hundred.
Cathan of the southern Greenway stood with Mirren beside him. The Brackridge elder who had come on foot stood with his arms folded across his chest. The Bree-line representatives clustered together. The farming families of the eleven regions — eleven now, the small holding above the upper ford had asked to be added during the wedding-week, signed yesterday — stood with their children. The children were quiet because their mothers had told them they would be quiet. They would not be quiet for long.
Aldric took his place at the centre stone.
He stood facing east.
A bell rang at the western arch — a single high note, the wedding-bell, that the dwarves had paid to have cast for the occasion in the third month of summer.
Tauriel came in through the western arch.
She was alone.
She had refused, on the morning she and Aldric had agreed the form of the binding, to be brought in by an attendant. She had said, in the simple way she said most things she had thought about for a long time, I have not been brought into a room by anyone in seven hundred years. I will not be brought into this one. She came in alone. She walked with the long easy step she walked with in the forest. She was in a long pale grey gown of an Elven cut — not the white of a mortal bride, the silver-grey of a Sindar woman dressed for a binding — and her hair was unbound down her back, and she wore no flowers, and the small silver oak-leaf pendant Aldric had given her two years ago was at her throat on a longer chain so that it could be seen.
She stopped at the centre stone.
She faced Aldric.
She set her hand on the stone.
He set his hand on top of hers.
Halbarad spoke.
The witness-elder words were the words of the old Dúnedain form, kept in the country though the kingdoms that had used them had broken eighty years ago, and the Bree clerks had been able to retrieve only part of the proper text and had reconstructed the rest with Halbarad's help over the spring. Halbarad had memorised the whole. He had been quietly speaking it under his breath at intervals in the chamber for two weeks.
He spoke it now.
His voice was thinner than it had been a year ago. It carried. The settlers behind the arc fell quiet. The dog by the centre stone tucked one paw under itself and did not move. Halbarad reached the part of the witness-elder words that had given him the most trouble at rehearsal — the long invocation of the line of kings — and got through it without stumbling, with one small breath in the middle where Aldric saw, in the muscles of the old man's throat, that he was steadying himself, and the words came out cleanly and the line of kings was named and the witness-elder went on.
He reached the end.
He set the holly staff a fraction more upright between his feet.
"Speak the binding."
Aldric spoke the binding.
He spoke it in the Common, because the Dúnedain form was in the Common, and the Common was the language of the country and the witnesses. He had practised the words. He spoke them clearly and without flourish. He pledged his name and his house and his hand, in the form Halbarad had set out for him, to the woman whose hand was under his on the stone, for the length of his life and beyond it by such pledges as the line of his fathers had made and kept.
He stopped.
Tauriel spoke the binding in turn.
She spoke first in the Common, the same form, the same pledges, the small careful adaptation Lindir had helped her shape three weeks ago so that the Common words would carry the Sindar meaning. She made the pledges. She made them clearly. She did not, today, complete any phrase for him; she had completed for him on the night of the betrothal, and the binding today was the public form, and the public form was that each spoke in turn.
She finished the Common.
She switched, then, to Sindarin.
She spoke the single short Sindarin phrase that, by her people's custom, was the line that closed an Elven binding — the same phrase, in the same form, that she had been waiting eleven hundred years to speak in her own voice for her own choosing.
She spoke it.
Aldric, who had been taught the line phonetically over the summer, said the answering line.
He said it imperfectly. He had been told he would say it imperfectly. He said it imperfectly with the meaning carried entire, and Tauriel, who heard the wrong stress on the second syllable, did not, this time, complete it for him.
She lifted her hand from the stone.
He lifted his hand from the stone.
Halbarad set his hand briefly on the stone in his turn.
"Witnessed."
Lindir, opposite, set his own hand on the stone.
"Witnessed."
Nálin came forward. He laid his hand on the stone.
"Witnessed."
Dírhael came forward.
"Witnessed."
Cathan of the southern Greenway came forward from the four hundred — the only settler-witness who had been chosen, by lot drawn the previous evening, to represent the eleven regions at the stone — and he set his thick broad hand on the stone with the missing thumb laid carefully along the edge.
"Witnessed."
He stepped back.
Aldric and Tauriel turned to face the courtyard.
The four hundred —
The four hundred did the thing that no rehearsal could have produced and that the steward had told Aldric, three days ago, would happen and which Aldric had not, until this moment, believed.
They cheered.
They cheered the way settlers cheered when a thing they had been carrying for two years and a thing they had been waiting for since the year of the orc-coalition and a thing they had not, in the first year of the founding, expected ever to live to see came true on the stones of the courtyard they had themselves laid. They cheered. They did not cheer in unison. They cheered like a crowd, ragged at the edges, the children joining in late and louder than their mothers, the Bree-line representatives the loudest of all because Bree-line men were not subtle, and the dog by the centre stone, startled finally, jumped up and barked once and then stood with its torn ear cocked and its tongue out and watched the cheering as if it had been waiting for the proper moment to register that the thing had happened.
Aldric took Tauriel's hand.
He did not, on the centre stone in the sight of the four hundred, kiss her. The Dúnedain form did not include it; the Sindar form did not include it; the kiss in this country was a private form and would be a private form tonight in the rooms upstairs, and the public form was done.
He took her hand.
She took his.
They walked through the arc together toward the western arch.
The dog followed them as far as the arch and then sat down in the gateway, and the four hundred kept cheering, and the cheering did not stop until they were inside the keep.
[THE FEAST — LATE AFTERNOON]
The hall had been set with seven long tables.
Three for the council and the officers and the foreign witnesses. Four for whoever could fit. The keep stewards had drawn lots that morning among the families of the eleven regions for the open places, and the lots had been thrown again twice when men who had lost the first draw had asked for a second on the grounds of having ridden in from very far, and the steward, instructed by Tauriel in the second hour after dawn that no man who had ridden in for the wedding was to be turned away from a table, had let them throw again.
Aldric ate.
He ate badly. He had not had appetite all day and the small portion he took at the high table he took because Tauriel, sitting at his left, had put a piece of bread on his plate and looked at him until he had eaten the bread.
The hall was loud.
He let the loudness wash over him for the first hour and did not try to track it. Halbarad sat at his right hand. The old man ate small. He ate carefully. He drank one cup of wine and asked for water for the second. He did not, for the first hour of the feast, attempt to speak to anyone; he sat with the holly staff against his chair and the small folded napkin on his knees and looked, in the slanted afternoon light from the high window, like a man who had spent everything he had today on the seven minutes at the centre stone and was now, on the other side of those seven minutes, conducting the slow business of being still alive at his own lord's table.
He caught Aldric's eye, halfway through the first hour.
He did not say anything.
He inclined his head — the smallest of his inclinations, the one he gave most often, the one that meant I am here, I have done what I came to do, do not now turn around and worry about me — and went back to his small portion.
Aldric nodded once.
He turned to his left.
Tauriel was watching him.
She did not look away when he turned. She set her hand on the back of his on the table — not for show, not held there, the small light placement that her hand had learned in the year past to make where his hand was — and did not speak.
The Sindar from Mirkwood, who had taken the place that had been set for him further along the high table, between Nálin's second and one of the Brackridge elders, looked once at Tauriel and once at Aldric and once at the centre of the hall, and lifted his cup with the others, and drank.
Aldric leaned his shoulder briefly against Tauriel's.
The hall went on around them.
The cheering had stopped.
The feast went on. It went on past sundown. It would go on past midnight, by the schedule the steward had given Aldric that morning, and the regional representatives would stay in the hall as long as the wine held and would, in the small hours, begin the slow drift of departures to lodgings across the settlement. Aldric was permitted, by long practice, to leave the table at the third hour after sundown. Tauriel was permitted, by the same practice, to leave with him.
He would.
He looked at his hand under hers on the table.
The seven-pointed band on the inside of his cuff caught the light briefly and went dark again. Across the hall, the dog from the courtyard had got under one of the long tables and was being fed scraps by three of the Brackridge children. Halbarad had set his cup down and closed his eyes for a moment in the small respectful way an old man closed his eyes when he had been at a feast too long and was, very briefly, resting them rather than sleeping.
Aldric turned his hand under Tauriel's and laced his fingers through.
"It was real," he said. Quietly, only to her.
She did not answer at once.
She closed her hand on his.
"It was real."
The third hour of the evening was coming. The steward, who had been hovering at the post by the side door for ten minutes waiting to be summoned, caught Aldric's eye and inclined his head and Aldric inclined his head back and the steward went to make ready.
Halbarad opened his eyes. He saw the small exchange. He raised his cup one finger off the table — a salute, not a toast — and set it down again and did not, this time, look at Aldric a second time.
Aldric stood.
Tauriel stood.
They went out.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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