CHAPTER 12: Fathers and Sons
Yara slept long that night, and woke without memory of dreams in the first light of dawn. The day before now felt as distant as any other part of her past, and her mind was clear and at ease. She took breakfast in her chamber, and then she went out to find Bilbo, to give him her letter.
She found him under the same tree as the day before, writing in his book. This morning, however, he was sharing his breakfast with the two dwarves, and seemed severely distracted from his work. Yara approached nonetheless, and Bilbo gave her big smile.
"Good morning, Yara," he said. "My friend Glóin of Erebor. Gimli, his son."
"It is a good morning," Yara returned, and then she bowed courteously to the dwarves. They stared at each other for a while, and then Yara remembered something. "Zai adshânzu," she said with a smile, but instead of the looks of surprise she had wanted to garner, the dwarves eyes narrowed intensely as they began to question Bilbo.
"Who is this elf?" Glóin muttered from below his jam-stained moustache.
"Who taught her our language?" Gimli huffed indignantly.
"I will have words with Elrond of this!" Glóin continued. "If he has been going around teaching his people our language…"
"Please, please," Bilbo interrupted pleadingly, "give me a moment and I'll try and ask her." He took a deep breath and gave Yara steadying glance. She looked thoroughly bewildered. "They ask how you learn dwarf words," Bilbo said.
"In battle," Yara answered. "I listened to the dwarves. I only know a few words."
Bilbo's eyes went wide, but he was not going to shy away from his role as interpreter. He turned again to the dwarves.
"She said she listened to dwarves while she was in battle, and picked up a few phrases."
"IN BATTLE?" Glóin roared, and stood up.
"You keep your murderous hands and stealing tongue away from us!" Gimli shouted as he stepped up next to his father, his battle-axe held firm by both hands.
Yara's mouth fell open as she backed away. She knew the dwarves were secretive about their language, but she hadn't expected to be attacked. Questioned, yes, but not attacked.
"I meant no offence!" she called to Bilbo, who was looking thoroughly distraught where he sat behind the dwarves.
"No need to translate, Master Baggins," Glóin shouted before Bilbo could even draw breath. "I will listen to no more of this she-elf's insults!"
"Get thee gone, witch," Gimli rumbled, "or you will taste my steel!"
Thankfully, they were not alone in the gardens of Imladris, and soon enough a small crowd of elves came to intervene. Melmeleth was among them, and she stood herself quickly in front of Yara, looking calmly upon the angry dwarves.
"What, pray tell," asked one of the elves, "has caused weapons to be drawn in the gardens of Imladris?"
"This … wench," Glóin muttered darkly, "brags about stealing our language and killing dwarves in battle."
The elves around them all seemed mildly surprised. Yara was feeling thoroughly confused where she was standing behind Melmeleth. Bilbo spoke up.
"Now, it wasn't exactly like that," he said diplomatically. "I'm sure Yara wasn't intending to offer them insult. There is a little bit of language barrier at play, you see."
Melmeleth nodded in agreement towards the elf who had questioned the dwarves. The elf sighed.
"Put away your weapons," he ordered the dwarves. "I suggest you do not draw them again, if you wish to remain in the city. Melmeleth, if you would explain the situation to your friend."
Melmeleth nodded and began to lead Yara away, but Yara remained in place.
"Bilbo!" she called over Melmeleth's shoulder, and waved the letter.
"Thank you, my lady," Bilbo said as he took it from her, and Yara gave him a wide smile before allowing herself to be led away.
"What happened?" Melmeleth asked once they were away from sight of the dwarves.
"I cannot say," Yara replied with a shrug. "I understood nothing of their shouting. I only came to bring Bilbo a letter, and when I saw he was accompanied by the two dwarves I greeted them in their own tongue. I know they are secretive about it, but I tried to explain I never actually meant to learn their language."
"Then how did you?"
"My uncles had many dealings with the dwarves, and they often passed through my father's land. I fought beside them in battle. One cannot help but pick up a few phrases."
"Ai Yara," Melmeleth sighed deeply. "They thought you had fought against them in battle, not beside them."
"What?!" Yara frowned. "Why would I have fought against them?" Melmeleth stopped and looked at Yara with a square expression.
"You really need to speak with Lord Elrond," she said. "People are beginning to talk, wondering who you are and why you are here. Inciting the wrath of our dwarven guests will not help, unless you want to be known."
"I do not care either way," Yara replied, but her eyes wandered listlessly. "I will speak with Elrond, but only because I have questions of my own."
Elrond was waiting patiently for Galdor to speak, but his on-lend advisor seemed hesitant. It was not until Elrond encouraged him with a raise of his eyebrows that Galdor finally took to words.
"My mind is not at ease," Galdor began. "I fear you are being too soft on Lady Yara, waiting for her to come to you when we should be pressing her for answers."
"I trust that Lady Yara will come to us, when she is ready," replied Elrond.
"What guarantee have you that she is trustworthy?"
"Guarantee?" Elrond gave Galdor a thoughtful smile. "Trust rarely comes with a guarantee, Galdor. Instead I say, what reason have we to doubt her?"
"I do not, as you might think, hold her peerage against her," said Galdor. "Neither do I distrust her because of her actions in the past. I only distrust the darkness and the shadow, and the fair disguises it takes.
"She has told us nothing of her purpose here, nothing of Mandos or Valinor. She tells us she remembers her death, but there was no one there, after that battle, to count and declare the dead. We cannot confirm it. She could have been taken alive."
"And been kept for seven-thousand years in what place? Under what power?" Elrond asked calmly. "Not even Sauron could survive unharmed all that time." Galdor pondered how to express his thoughts on this, and Elrond waited patiently.
"Morgoth's influence was not destroyed when he was cast into the Void. His powers remain in this world. If he had influenced Yara, and then released her…
"She speaks of a second father. He must have been a most powerful man, in order to fashion the singing stone, and yet his name is unknown to us. She has memories of a place where she says she has lived, but she told us nothing of it. Why would she keep such a thing from us, if indeed it was in Aman?
"And the stone does more than sing. You know this. She was using it in search of something, of someone. She has a purpose, but she does not tell it."
Elrond looked sternly upon Galdor, but not in a wholly unkind way. He did not want to simply dismiss these suspicions, for Galdor had good reason to ponder them, even if Elrond suspected the answers were much less ominous in nature than the advisor assumed. But Elrond was caught on that last edge of Galdor's argument, that Yara was there in a search. It might be, then, that Yara had every reason to be cautious and not to say too much to those she could not yet trust. But Elrond was spared the need to formulate an answer by a knock on his door.
Yara took a deep breath before entering Elrond's study, and she looked to Melmeleth to garner some strength. Her friend smiled warmly, and Yara pushed the door open.
"I think we will have to continue this conversation at a later time, Galdor," Elrond said, and he could not supress the glimmer in his eyes. "Yara, please, sit."
Yara remained standing until Galdor had left the room, and then took her seat opposite Elrond. She felt a little bit awkward, but at least his presence was not as threatening as the crowd of listeners she had had the day before. She pulled her lip a little as she decided where to begin, but in the end it was the most recent discomfort that pushed itself to the surface.
"A dwarf pulled his axe on me, just now," she said, and although she aimed for defiance her voice trembled with insecurities. Elrond's eyebrows shot up.
"Without provocation?"
"It was a misunderstanding," Yara conceded. "He believed that I said I had done battle against dwarves, when I intended to say I had fought beside his kin."
"Well, I am impressed that the dwarves have such extensive knowledge of ancient Quenya as to even be able to misunderstand something," replied Elrond, and Yara had a hard time figuring out if he was being serious or not.
"No," she frowned, "Bilbo was interpreting."
"Ah," Elrond smiled. "Well, he always was eager to show his knowledge. Most kind of him to try and help, even if it went a bit astray."
Yara frowned, growing a bit impatient with Elrond's circumflexions. The twinkle in Elrond's eyes settled.
"Relations between dwarves and elves are not what they were in your time," he said. "Even when speaking the same language misunderstandings and arguments are not uncommon. There are many relevant texts in the library, should you want to explore the history of our two peoples further." Yara pursed her lips a little.
"I think I have other matters more pressing," she said, and Elrond could see the hint of mirth playing on her face.
"Indeed," he replied, managing to look both playful and grave at the same time.
"Did Glorfindel tell you of our encounter?"
"He did," Elrond confirmed with a nod. Yara exhaled shakily.
"And what did he say about me?" she asked.
Elrond considered well what to answer. He did not want to betray the trust of his friend, and reveal more of him to Yara than Glorfindel himself had said to Elrond, but at the same time, he did not want to cause Yara undue worry. He was, after all, her kin – in heart, if not in blood – even though she did not yet know it.
"He told me of your friendship," Elrond said, "and that he was … unsettled by your presence here."
"Unsettled?" Yara questioned. Elrond looked into her eyes.
"Do you still hold it against him," he asked slowly, "that he did not help take the swanships of Alqualondë?"
Yara held Elrond's gaze while she searched within herself. She went past the anger of her friend not standing by her side, and looked deep into her reasons for drawing her sword on another elf. It had not been simply for loyalty to her father, or her grandfather. It had been in defiance of those who would not see the necessity of sacrifice. Had not her grandfather sacrificed enough, to preserve the light of the trees inside his Silmarilli, now stolen by Moringotto? She may not have sworn the oath, but she would gladly see it fulfilled.
"I do," she replied, her expression clear and honest.
Elrond's eyes darkened, and he moved them away from hers. He did not want to believe her. He wanted to find some reason why she would lie, or some source of self-deception from within her. Perhaps, he hoped, if she was made to remember her time in the Halls of Mandos, she could remember forgiveness.
"He forgives you," he said, "for everything." Perhaps it was not the right thing to do, to inform her of that. It may have been Glorfindel's right to do so. Elrond pressed his jaws tight. He had been overtaken by his own compassion, and he knew it.
"I do not seek his forgiveness," said Yara, and she knew that truth as it came out of her mouth. She knew it deeply, and fully. She did not regret what she had done.
And yet, there was that part of her that felt sorrow at her own words. For she wished, still, that she had never seen war. She wished that she had never been splattered with any blood, neither from elf, or man, or even orc – but it had never been her choice.
No, she did not regret.
Elrond closed his eyes over her statement. The pain of it weighed heavy on his heart. It echoed conversations from his past, ones he had not thought about for centuries, but for a trickling dream here and there, a shimmer of a memory on the foam of the Bruinen. He opened his eyes, and found immediately the deep brown of Yara's irises.
"I knew your father," he said. "I called him by that title too, for a time."
His statement was as a fist to Yara's stomach. That Elrond had known her father she had surmised, but that he would have the audacity to take her father for his own she could never have imagined. Yet in the midst of sudden jealousy she knew that Elrond would not have been allowed to call him such without her father's permission. Had her father, then, called him son? If they had been so close…
"What happened to him?" she breathed. "What end did he meet?" Elrond's entire frame grew heavy with sorrow.
"It is a long tale," he said, and even his voice was brittle and aged, "and its end is not known to me."
Yara's lips parted ever so slowly as she realised what he was saying.
"I thought for a time that he had perished in his last attempt to reclaim the Silmarils, but soon thereafter I heard him singing. I did not see him, but I heard his voice, and it is unmistakeable. Where he is now, if he is still alive, I do not know," Elrond ended.
"And my brother?" Yara pressed on instantly.
"Is dead," Elrond confirmed. "I never met him, but word reached me of his death before the end of the Second Age."
Yara's breathing was heavy. In a way it felt strange, that the fates of these people whom she had not known existed until the day before could garner such response. Yes, they were real, but they were also only memory, and memory is fleeting and intangible. Knowing now that one of them might still be walking the earth overwhelmed her, and the sorrow that one of them was not stung sharper than mere memory should allow.
"Everyone is lost," she breathed over the tears erupting suddenly. "All is lost."
Elrond looked gravely at her. 'Sister,' he thought, but he dared not say it.
"I have nothing," Yara voiced through trembling lips. "I thought, perhaps, that there was something here for me, some reason I was taken from my life in Sweden, in Syria… Ai, but it was bliss! It was bliss not to know this truth. Now I am doubly alone."
"You are not alone," Elrond whispered weakly.
"What do you know of it!" Yara cried. "Twice I have lost my mother to war, twice I have received message of my brother's death from afar, and two fathers have abandoned me in the end.
"I lived again, Elrond, in Syria I grew up to another family, a family who loved me just as strongly, and I them. I grew up in a city as beautiful and ancient as any in Middle-Earth, and it was ripped to rubble by war. I know no home, I know no love. I am alone."
Elrond was frozen and silent, but he could not stop the tears of compassion.
"Yara," he began, but his voice failed him. He swept forwards instead, and pulled her into a strong and steady embrace. Yara did not protest, but she did not return it. Elrond made nothing of it. It was not the first time he had given love unconditionally. After a little while, he felt her cheek on his shoulder, and he closed his eyes.
"Tell me of them," he said, his voice deep with sorrow but steady again. "Tell me of Sayid Haddad and his family, and I will tell you of Maglor Feanorion's fate."
And so Yara told him. She told him of growing up in Damascus; of the scent of oranges on her mother's fingers, of her brother walking her to school every day, of her father taking them to see all the temples and the ruins. She told him of the war; how her mother had disappeared suddenly without trace, and her brother had gone away to fight. She told him of fleeing with her father, of coming to strange lands and learning new languages, and finally, she told him how her father had died, leaving her alone among strangers.
Through it all Elrond listened with unwavering attention, sitting right in front of her, his deep eyes taking in every wave of emotion rolling across her as she spoke. Only when she fell silent after telling of her father's death did he speak.
"I do not purport to know the reason why any of this has befallen you," he said, "but I urge you not to forget it. Your tale, to my knowledge, is singular in the history of Arda. Never before has an elf come out of Mandos to be reborn to new parents. Where Syria or Sweden is I do not know, but I do not doubt that they exist. However it came to be, you are here now, and with your permission, I would call you sister. Nay! Do not answer me yet. Let me first tell you my tale."
Yara listened to all Elrond told, despite sorrow and fatigue. He relayed to her how he had been but a child when he had come into her father's care, abandoned by his parents, and how they had come to love each other, and both consider the other family. He shared the tale of the sinking of Beleriand, and of the defeat of Morgoth. He told her of the fear he had felt when his foster-father left to retrieve the Silmarils from under Eönwë's guard, and how he had mourned afterwards. He shared also the loss of his brother to the fate of all mortals, and how he still, sometimes, felt betrayed by his brother's decision. He bared his heart to her, and when he ended in tears with the departure of his wife to Valinor Yara reached forward and took his hand in hers.
"Sister I shall be," she said softly.
Elrond smiled softly at her, and she could feel the by now familiar feeling of warmth spreading from their touching hands. She smiled back, and felt a little bit less alone. They sat like that for a moment, and then let go.
"Even though I may call you kin," Yara said softly, "I still feel I should not continue to leech on your hospitality so blatantly. I should like to contribute to the running of this house in some way, if you would let me."
"Indeed," Elrond smiled. "You are welcome to seek out such tasks as might suit you, but a word of warning I will offer. Your language is still foreign – even to those who understand you you are marked out. It was very long ago now, that anyone was a Ñoldo or a Þindel, and while I understand you never learnt Sindarin, it is the language spoken among the people of this city, indeed, among all elves in Middle-Earth."
"Then what would you have me do? Lock myself in my room and speak to no one until I learn perfect Sindarin?"
"Certainly not," Elrond replied. "I simply wish to make you aware of the fact that you cannot hide your past. What you do with that knowledge is up to you."
Yara searched his face for a good while before submitting to the fact that it bore no hint of what he might think of it, one way or another. She shook her head mildly.
"I feel the mystery of my life in Syria to be far more troubling than my past here, if you can believe it," she said. "Here at least I am part of a bigger history, and I am not ashamed of it." Elrond gave her a queer look, but changed the subject.
"Do you know what kind of task you might set yourself while in Imladris?" he asked. Yara hesitated.
"I should like to dance for you again," she said softly, but Elrond could see the dangerous sheen in her eyes.
"Speak to Lindir," he said as he rose, and he held the door open for her. As she passed away down the hallway he took a deep breath. He had seen that sheen before, in her father's eyes, and it both excited and frightened him.
A/N: I stole the Neo-Khûzdul from Memrise: /course/1399741/200-everyday-neo-khuzdul-phrases/1/ . Should mean 'at your service'.
