Bard rowed himself alone to the yew stand at Ravine. In the cold and the wind, he scratched a grave into the surface of the earth, just beside the small mound of stones that was older than Tilda, younger than Bain. The wet warmth of spring made the soil crumbly-soft, but every dig of the spade shuddered up through Bard's arms as if the earth were frozen solid. It took him all day, and he rowed himself back to Laketown and his waiting children with a weakness on him that owed nothing to hunger or fatigue.
The next day, the sun did not shine, nor did a drop of soothing rain fall. The sky was gray as lead, an oppressive canopy over the procession that followed the Sindra up to the mouth of the River Running.
None but Percy and Runild, Sorgen and Sally were brave enough to steer their boats up the Running. Runild held Tilda in her arms and cuddled her, and Sigrid and Bain sat mute beside her.
Grethe, shrouded in white linen and veiled with amaryllis, lay on a bed of woven pine boughs in the bottom of the Sindra.
Finally the three boats pulled up and tied. Bard and Percy carried the pine pallet between them, Bard at the head, to the little stand of yew trees. Grethe was laid gently in her grave—the amaryllis rearranged—the first spadefuls of dirt dropped onto her.
Runild, Percy, Sally and Sorgen began to sing a hymn. White-faced and trembling, Sigrid joined them.
Tilda, having squirmed out of Runild's arms, tugged Bard's coat until he stooped and picked her up.
"Sing, Da," she begged, white-faced and desperate. "Sing!"
Bard pressed his lips together and shook his head, the breath frantic and unsettled in his chest. He dared not open his mouth. Not even to sing.
Not even for her.
Every Spring, Bard visited the two lonely graves at Ravine. It was his most sacred ritual.
"I've taken to shooting again," he said in his first year. "Proper shooting. Goffried launches the targets and I smash them, every one. Do you remember when you asked me to show you, and I murdered a hay bale before your very eyes? Do you remember?"
Much later, he came to her again and said, "You'd be proud of me, love. I've slain a dragon, and it was with your name in my heart that I did it, your name and Sigi's and Bain's and Tilda's. He was the size of a mountain, and agile—the old tales don't tell of how agile a great lizard can be, darting hither and yon like a bat. Grethe, Grethe, how I wanted you after, to calm me and make me settle. I'm still not settled, and barely a winter now past. But the children are safe. Not children, even, for they've grown up more than I like to admit, more than any child ought in so short a time…"
When next Bard came to the lonely graves, his raiment was finer and cleaner than it'd ever been all the time he'd been alive. But the lines of his face were deeper, and he walked as if he dragged a heavy weight behind him.
"They want me for their King," he informed the mound which bloomed now with the vivid blue-black flowers of Widow's Veil. "I've headed up a sort of Council this last year, and the town's done well. They asked me last year, and I turned them away; but now the Steward of Gondor's sent an envoy, laden with gifts for the new King of Dale, and who do you think is the head of the envoy? None but Lanwyn, with Lisette and six bairns in tow. Lanwyn says he knew 'twas I shot the dragon, as soon as he heard it had been done; and he knew, furthermore, that if I survived I'd balk at being crowned, so he went to the Steward himself and convinced him to recognize me as king of a sovereign nation. What am I to say to him— to all of them? You, now, you'd have made a magnificent Queen, so wise you were always, wiser than me for all I was older. If I had you for my Queen I'd agree in a heartbeat, my love, for I know you'd steer me right. But how am I to do right without you? How am I to know right when I see it?"
His eyes downcast he thought silently, Will you steer me right, my love, as you've always done?
"Sigrid wants nothing of Queenship. She'd do it, as she's done her duty all along. But you know Sigrid: what she wants is to fly, not to be tied to a single place and a single way of doing. And now she's met a troubadour from the East. Jin, they call him, Jin of the Golden Throat. Lost his home and family to marauders as a boy; he's supported himself with his singing ever since, and journeyed as far southwest as Anorien. Lanwyn liked him so much he offered him a home at Carvain, but Jin refused."
Bard paused and, kneeling, pulled an errant weed from between the velvety blossoms of Widow's Veil. He thought of Jin, with his golden skin and hair as blue-black as a raven's wing, which he wore in a single braid down his back in the Easterling style. He thought of the way Jin held himself steady and straight in spite of his slight build. He thought of the slanted, earnest black eyes which announced intelligence but not arrogance; and of the way those eyes shone when they lit upon the tall, fiercely beautiful Sigrid. She might have married a lord, or a general, or a prince. At the very least, she might have chosen someone with more to his name than the clothes on his back and the song on his lips. Bard sighed.
"Aye," he said with a mixture of sorrow and pride, "she's your daughter, and no mistake. And Bain'll make a fine King."
"You're a grandmother, love," he announced jubilantly one Spring. "Silve's been delivered of a healthy lad: Brand, the future King of Dale. You should only see the way Bain goes about, a daze on his eyes like he's been struck upside the head, and smiling all the time. Brand's so wee; I'd almost forgot how wee they are, but as soon as I held him and looked on him, it all came back to me as if it was only last week that you were nursing Sigi for the first time. Speaking of, Sigi and Jin will be coming back in the summer, in time for the Flight Festival. It's hard, having her gone so much; but it could be worse. You remember that hatchling she cared for on Ravenhill, the one she fed and nursed when it fell from its nest? It travels with her now and sits on her shoulder, and sometimes flies back with a message or two. And she sends along the pictures she's painted, of far-off places the likes of which you and I can only imagine. They're far East now, travelling through Jin's home country. 'Tis a strange and mysterious place, if Sigi's paintings are to be believed. Oliphaunts are the least of it. Your daughter's a world traveler, my love, and your son shall be a King."
When clever, imperious Tilda was married to the crown prince of Dorwinion, Grethe was told. When children were born to Tilda, Bain and (finally) Sigrid, Grethe was informed of Bard's joy— and, sometimes, of his fathomless sorrow, at the stillbirths and the early deaths. Grethe learned of his pride in Bain's wisdom and discretion; of his delight in the radiant wit and humor of Tilda; of his deep pleasure in Sigrid's strange and mysterious journeyings and the talent with which she captured them on paper and in song.
There was more, now, to give joy than sorrow. And when Bard, gray-haired and weathered, dandled his multiplying progeny on his knee and sang them nonsense songs which he made up specially for them, he was filled with happiness. But a root of sorrow had taken hold in his heart long ago, never to be cut out. Perhaps it was that very root which gave such poignancy to his present joy.
One Spring Bard was late in coming. The snowdrops had died away and the roses were climbing over everything before he arrived. But this time, as never before, he did not come alone. Accompanying him were Sigrid and Bain and Tilda, and their own spouses and children and grandchildren.
Bain wore a crown of sapphires and gold.
Bard wore a shroud of silk.
Hymns were sung, ancient and grand, till the sun-dappled glade echoed with them. The first King of Dale was laid to rest beneath the yew trees, beside two humble mounds of river stones. No grand monument would the King suffer to be built here, no carven headstone announced the burial site. But over the first King's grave-mound his children, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren each placed a stone; and the pile of stones, by the end, was not small. In time, the small flowers of Widow's Veil which blanketed the other two graves would spread to cover Bard's.
When nearly all the mourners had gone, one last hymn was sung. It was neither grand nor ancient, and only three there knew it, for all they had not heard it in many years. It was a song their father had stopped singing a lifetime ago, but the thought of it came back now as childhood memories sometimes do to the old, and the singers did not falter, even to the last verse:
Who is my love in the eventide,
when at last we lay down together?
A lass, a maid, a mother, a bride;
our love, it shall live forever.
A/N: Thanks so much for seeing this through to the end, and as always, extra thanks to celestial1 for the headcanon, endless beta-ing and just generally being a cool cat who is good at words. Love you all!