[TAURIEL]
She had been awake at the third hour.
She had been awake before the third hour, in the long slow careful steady reading of the body she had been doing for the previous two days, but she had not, before the third hour, said anything to Aldric or to the keep women or to Arethil because the reading had not, until the third hour, become the reading that needed to be spoken aloud.
At the third hour she set her hand against Aldric's shoulder.
He was awake before her hand had settled.
He did not, in the dark of the chamber, immediately speak. He had been a husband long enough in this country to know the difference between the small careful hand that asked for a thing and the small careful hand that announced one. The hand on his shoulder, at the third hour, was the announcing hand. He set his own hand briefly over hers. He drew the slow breath that was the first preparation. He rose.
He went out to wake Arethil.
She lay back against the pillows.
She thought, in the small slow careful way of a woman who had been doing this work for the second time and knew it would, by the long account of her body, be different from the first time — she thought about the morning that was coming. She thought about it in the small private inner Sindar of her own. She thought about her mother. She thought about her mother under the star Mírelen in the night-sky over the long forest where her mother had been killed when Tauriel had been a hundred and four and the long-running orcs had come down from the foothills and had found her mother at the river by the small stand of birches.
Her mother had not, in the brief moment of the river, said any of the small Sindar words a mother said to a daughter at a long parting.
She had said one word.
She had said go.
Tauriel had gone.
She had, in seven hundred years since, gone in many of the small directions a Sindar woman went; she had not, in any of those directions, expected to be the woman she was at the third hour of a winter morning in a Mannish keep at the long northern edge of a country her mother had not known existed, waiting for the second child of her marriage to come into the world.
The first child had been Cael.
The first child had been the small careful uncertain work of a body that had not, in seven hundred years, done the work before; she had not, in the first child's long autumn and longer winter, fully known what the body was going to ask of her. The first work had taken — by Arethil's later counting — eleven hours. The first sound had been thin. The first hand had closed, by Aldric's count from his place beside her, on her finger before it had closed on his. She had held the first child against her shoulder for an hour before she had been able to register, in the small slow inner Sindar of her own, that the small dark head against her shoulder was a person and not an extension of her own carrying.
This work was — she registered now, at the third hour — going to be different.
Arethil came in at the fourth hour.
She set herself at the foot of the bed. She had her sleeves pushed back. She had her two attendants — the Elven one from Cael's morning, and the Mannish woman of the keep settlement she had trained over three years — and she had the small careful set of her shoulders that Tauriel had learned, over five years of being attended by Arethil, was the set of the healer who had read the morning's body and had judged the morning's work to be — by her own quiet phrase — easier.
"My Lady."
"Arethil."
"This one is being faster."
"I know."
"By my count at the second hour, perhaps four hours from now. Five at most."
"Yes."
"The Lord."
"Has gone to bring Gorlim from the lower chamber. Gorlim will, by the small private arrangement of last week, have Cael at the corridor when Cael wakes."
"Good."
Arethil inclined her head.
She set to her work.
The work was, by Arethil's count, four hours and a quarter.
Tauriel was, through most of it, in the small inward room she had been in once before in this chamber, the small inward room that the body went into when the body was at this particular work. She did not, in the small inward room, register much of what was being said at the foot of the bed; she did not register much of what was being held at her side; she did not, in the small inward room, by any specific reading of the time, know whether the hour she was in was the second or the third or the fourth.
She knew, at intervals, that Aldric was at the head of the bed.
She knew it by the small steady careful warmth of his hand against the back of her hand at the long inward breaths. She knew it by the small low voice he was using at the proper distances, in the proper intervals, in the small slow careful way she had been teaching him to use it through the previous autumn. She knew it, at the eighth bell, by the small reading she did of his shoulder at the head of the bed when she opened her eyes for a beat — the shoulder was set in the small careful steady way of a man who had been told three days ago by the lord's own healer that he would, this time, be at the head of the bed for the work, and who had been carrying the small private fact of being at the head through the three days without setting the fact down at any council table.
She closed her eyes again.
She went back into the small inward room.
She thought, in the inward room, about Mírelen.
She thought about her mother's one word.
She thought about the second daughter who was, at the fourth quarter of the eighth bell — by Arethil's small steady running count at the foot of the bed, which Tauriel could now follow in the small inward room without quite registering the words — coming.
She thought, briefly, about the small flat fact she had been carrying for seven months now: that this child was, by Arethil's reading of the small Sindar markers in the body throughout the late autumn, going to be — more of her line than Cael had been. Cael had been a half-and-half child by Arethil's first reading at the first quarter-hour after the birth, leaning slightly toward his father's side in the small bone-set of the lower face and the small steady set of the chest. This one — by the small steady careful reading Arethil had been doing through the long winter — would lean the other way. The ears would have the lift. The hand would have the slenderness. The eye would have the deeper grey. The carry — when she walked — would have, in the slow long Elven way, the line.
The line was the line.
The line carried, with it, the small far long thing every child of an Elven line carried whose other line was Mannish — the small far long fact that the child would, at some point in her years, be set the choice. The choice of Lúthien. The choice of Arwen. The choice that no parent of mixed line could, by any work of their own, lift from the child's hand and that the child would, by her own walk, eventually take up.
Tauriel had carried the small far long fact for seven months.
She had not, in seven months, set it on the table with Aldric.
She had not, in seven months, said it aloud in the chamber.
She did not — at the fourth quarter of the eighth bell, in the small inward room — set it now.
The daughter came.
The first sound was — Tauriel registered, with the small flat reading that did not need words — stronger than Cael's. It was thinner than a Mannish first sound. It was longer. It went on for the count of perhaps eight breaths and did not stop. It was the first sound of a child whose lungs were the lungs of a line that had not, in this country, been born for eight hundred years.
Arethil, at the foot of the bed, said: "A daughter, my Lady. A daughter, my lord."
She bent.
She wrapped the small bundle.
She brought it up.
She set it on Tauriel's chest.
Tauriel registered the small bundle against her chest in the small inward room first; she came up out of the small inward room some seconds later, at the small steady careful pace of a woman who had spent the morning in the small inward room and was, by the body's own slow careful timing, allowed back into the chamber.
She opened her eyes.
She looked down at the small face in the linen.
The face was very small. It was less red than Cael's had been. The hair — what there was of it — was very dark. The eyes opened, for one long beat, in the small steady opening of a thing not a quarter-hour into being a thing, and they were the deeper grey Arethil had named in the autumn. They were the grey of her mother's people. They were — in the small inward Sindar of her own — the grey of Mírelen in the night-sky over the small stand of birches at the river.
She did not, for the count of perhaps ten breaths, speak.
She set her hand under the small bundle.
She bent her head over the linen.
She said, very quietly — to the small face in the linen, in the inner Sindar of her own, in the form a Sindar mother said the name of a daughter at the first quarter-hour: Lúthien Tinúviel.
The two words did not, in the small inward Sindar, land on the chamber.
The two words landed on the small face in the linen.
The small face did not register them.
Tauriel registered that the small face did not register them.
She did not, on registering, mind.
She lifted her head.
She said, in the small steady careful voice she used in the chamber for the things that needed to be said aloud for the room, with her eyes still on the small face in the linen: "Lúthien."
The room registered.
Arethil, at the foot of the bed, inclined her head.
The Elven attendant, at her side, inclined her head.
The Mannish keep-woman, at the other side, made the small Mannish keep-form bow.
Aldric, at the head of the bed, set his hand against the side of the small dark head. He did not, on setting it, speak. He had said his own small private thing, at the head of the bed, in the small under-breath that Tauriel had heard from the bed and that no other person in the chamber had heard.
She had heard Another. Good.
She did not, now, comment on it.
She turned her head a small fraction on the pillow toward him.
She said, in the small low voice she reserved for the inner-channel exchanges between them in chambers: "Bring Cael in."
He inclined his head.
He went out.
Cael was at the corridor with Gorlim.
Tauriel had not, until Aldric came back through the door with the small steady set of a man who had been at a particular work for some hours and had been told to do a smaller work next, registered that the long corridor outside the door had a sound she had been hearing for some time without naming.
The sound was Gorlim's voice.
Gorlim had been at the corridor since the sixth bell, by the small private arrangement Aldric had set out with him a week ago. He had been at the corridor in the small chair the chamber steward had set there for him when his knees would no longer let him stand long. He had been at the corridor with Cael.
He had been, by the small reading Tauriel had not done until now, teaching Cael to count in Sindarin.
The voice in the corridor was Gorlim's voice on the small careful third or fourth count: ...nelde, canad, leben, eneg...
Cael's small voice, beside Gorlim's, was on the fifth: ...eneg...
The voices stopped at the seventh count when Aldric came through the door.
There was a small pause.
There was the small soft scrape of Cael's small bare feet on the corridor floor as he came up from where he had been sitting at Gorlim's knee.
Aldric came back through the door of the chamber.
He had Cael by the hand at his right side.
The boy was four years old now and going, in the small steady careful Sindar count Arethil had been keeping, through the long even-paced spring of the year. He had on the small wool tunic Tauriel had cut for him at the autumn fitting. His hair was longer than it had been at the spring fitting; the curl at the back had thickened. His small bare feet, on the chamber floor, did not — as they had three years ago at his sister's birth — move at the small bare pace of a small unsteady child. He walked. He walked, in the small steady careful way of a four-year-old who had been taught by his father over four years to walk at the slow careful pace of a person entering a room.
He stopped at three paces from the bed.
He did not, at first, come closer.
He looked at his mother.
He looked at the small bundle in his mother's arm.
He looked at his mother again.
He said, in the small steady careful voice he had been building over four years: "Is she here."
"She is here, Cael."
"Sister."
"Sister."
He took the next three paces at the same slow careful pace.
He stopped at the bedside.
He set his small hand on the long fold of the blanket at his mother's hip — the same place his small hand had been at the first daughter's coming three years ago; the body remembered the place.
He looked at the small bundle.
He did not, for a long count of breaths, do any of the small things a four-year-old might have done at the moment.
He studied her.
He studied her in the small steady careful flat reading he had been doing on the fence of the training-ground the previous autumn, on the four men on the left who had not been in the line. He studied her the way he had studied the third man on the brother-discipline. He studied her — Tauriel registered, with the small inward registering of a mother who had been watching her son read the small things in the world for four years — at the same height of seriousness he gave to any other small careful thing he had decided to read.
He did not, in the studying, smile.
He did not, in the studying, laugh.
After perhaps half a minute he said, in the small careful voice in which he had named the third man: "Eyes."
"Yes."
"Like Mama."
"Like — like the grey, Cael. Like the grey my mother had."
He turned his small head a quarter and looked at her.
"Your mother."
"My mother. She is — Cael — gone, for a long time now. Her name was Iseldir. She was — she was a person of my own line. The grey was hers. The grey is now also — your sister's."
He turned back to the small bundle.
He set his small hand a fraction closer on the blanket, so that the small edge of his hand was against the small edge of the linen at his sister's side.
He said: "Lúthien."
"Yes."
"Mine."
"Yours. Hers. Ours."
"Ours."
He did not, on saying it, take his small hand off the blanket for a long count of breaths.
Aldric, at the head of the bed, set his hand briefly on the small wool tunic at his son's shoulder. He did not, on setting it, speak. He looked down at Tauriel; she met his eyes once across the bed; she inclined her head a quarter, in the small private inclination that was the only thing the chamber needed from her at this beat. He inclined his head a quarter in return.
Arethil, at the foot of the bed, said nothing.
She had her hands at the small basin at her side. She had been finishing the small last work of the morning, which she would now — by the small steady careful pattern of her work — let lie for a quarter-hour while the family had the room. She inclined her head a fraction to her Elven attendant, who inclined hers in return, and the two of them moved out of the chamber by the small inner door at the side that the keep women had cut into the wall four years ago for the small private practical purpose of the healer leaving the chamber without crossing the bed.
The Mannish keep-woman set the basin on the long sideboard and went out by the same small inner door.
The chamber was empty of all hands but the family's.
Tauriel held the daughter.
Cael held the blanket.
Aldric held — at the head of the bed, with his free hand on Tauriel's shoulder, his small son's shoulder still under his other palm — the small full quiet of the room.
She said, very quietly, with her eyes on the small face in the linen: "Lúthien Tinúviel of Northwatch."
He said: "Lúthien Tinúviel of Northwatch."
Cael said: "Lúthien."
Outside the chamber, in the corridor, Gorlim was on the small careful eighth count of his Sindar numbers, in the small dry voice of a captain marshal who had been at the corridor since the sixth bell and was, at the small careful eighth count, by Tauriel's reading, holding the small careful waiting of an old friend who had not yet been called in to see the daughter and was — in the small steady careful Mannish way of a captain marshal — keeping himself counting.
She did not, yet, call him in.
She would.
In a quarter-hour.
For now the chamber was hers.
The daughter was in her arm.
The son was at the bedside.
The husband was at the head of the bed.
The morning's small first sounds, which had been going on for the count of perhaps the previous quarter-hour, went on.
The two words she had said in the inner Sindar of her own — Lúthien Tinúviel — sat where she had set them, in the small private place between her and the small face in the linen, and the small face in the linen, in the small slow careful inward way of the line that had been born for the first time in eight hundred years, registered them.
She closed her eyes.
She let the daughter's small steady careful breathing settle against her chest.
She held.
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