"We came from another direction," Kíli said. "Last time we came, I mean."
Morwinyon watched as he shaded his eyes, searching the cliff face that ringed Imladris.
"From there, I think," he said, pointing.
"I have never been," Morwinyon confessed, and Kíli shrugged.
"It's pretty. I don't think they liked us much."
Morwinyon snorted. "Alia said there was a ford along the river but that we would meet guards and scouts first."
"I haven't seen any."
Morwinyon turned slowly in a circle, frowning. She had not seen any either, and usually she would have - or heard something, or smelled them. Something niggled at the back of her mind, not unlike Mirkwood or Erebor. No, Erebor had been more possessive than dark. It was Mirkwood that had always wanted her dead - this was still not the same as that. A warning,maybe.
But what darkness could lurk in Imladris?
It grew stronger down the river. "I want to look at something," she said.
Kíli shrugged and followed when she started walking. They walked for some time: the river's banks rose, and more trees lined the sides, with plenty of branches tangled together in the water.
"We're leaving Rivendell proper, you know," Kíli pointed out.
"We were not in Imladris proper," she retorted, but something caught her eye. It was a dead horse, a huddle of rags tangled around its feet, bumping gently against a large tangle of branches and leaves. The branches themselves looked fresh. Farther down there might have been a second tangle, and a second horse, and a second pile of rags. She slid down the bank to get a better look.
When she reached out to touch it, though, the something at the back of her mind that had been growing stronger flared. She flinched back just as Kíli said from above, "We're all friends here."
Morwinyon looked up and came face-to-face with an arrowhead. She stood slowly, boots sinking into the mud of the riverbank, hands held out at her sides. "We seek an audience with the Lord of Imladris," she said in Sindarin. "Alia of the Dunedain has sent us."
"And yet you travel south of Imladris, when you were nearly to the ford," the elf aiming his arrow at Morwinyon said. He, and the rest of their sudden company, wore hoods, but so did Morwinyon and Kíli. "That does not speak of a wish for an audience."
"There was a shadow in my mind," Morwinyon replied. It was what Alia's predecessor had called it, when Morwinyon tried to explain. It was as good a description as any. "I wanted to see what it was that might have threatened Imladris, when it should be a place of peace."
"This dwarf is not Dunedain," another elf said.
"What would you do if I claimed I was?" Kíli asked.
"He is my brother," Morwinyon said. "He lives with the Dunedain for my sake."
The first elf lowered his bow, but the four others did not. He held out his hand as if expecting something.
Morwinyon blinked at him for a moment before she remembered Alia's scroll. "It is sealed," she said, handing it over. "It should remain that way, until Lord Elrond lays eyes on it."
"Your braid, mistress," the elf said, though he accepted the scroll. Kíli made an annoyed sound, but Morwinyon slowly pulled forward her widow's braid. He picked it up and examined the clasp despite Kíli's protest.
"That is the height of rudeness," Morwinyon told the elf stiffly. It was not, of course, amongst elves, but to dwarves he might as well have been groping her. It had been rude just to request it, really.
"My apologies," the elf said, though he did not drop the braid for another long moment. "But I would hate to think someone married into the line of Durin - even a cousin - had turned to the dark."
He had been using the time to look her over, rather than the braid, then. He would know she was an elf, and yet he had said nothing scathing about her marrying a dwarf or calling one her brother yet.
"I am Mirwen," she said.
"And I Elrohir," the elf replied, and she managed not to react overmuch. This would be her distant cousin - she had met him once, when he and his siblings had ridden out to look for her mother, but she had been small then. She tried to see if he recognized her name, but she could not see under his hood well enough.
"They are friends," Elrohir called up. "Though late, if you intended to come to council with my father."
"We do not come to council exactly," Kíli said in slow but correct Sindarin as Elrohir accepted the hand of one of his people to climb back up the bank. Morwinyon used a tree branch.
Elrohir exhibited no surprise at a dwarf speaking Sindarin, though his fellows shifted a little.
"The clans have asked me to come and ask after Aragorn, son of Arathorn," Morwinyon said. "They wish to know what sort of man he is."
"And they sent you," Elrohir said.
In Quenya, to prove a point, Morwinyon replied, "The council decided I was the most qualified."
Elrohir laughed. "Maybe so," he said in the same language, to her surprise. "It is rare to find someone so fluent in the language as you outside my father's halls." He even softened his s's correctly, as she had been taught by her mother and brother and as so many people did not do.
Kíli, when she looked over at him, rolled his eyes ostentatiously. "Show off," he said in Khuzdul.
Morwinyon shrugged, and returned to Sindarin. "And then I felt the shadow, and I wanted to know what it was that could trouble Imladris so deeply that I could feel it."
"You see before you the remains of a mortal king," Elrohir said. "Or, rather, what he left behind. The stink of it will not leave."
"I'd suggest removing the dead horses," Kíli said.
"The land remembers," Elrohir continued. "The river does. As do we. Were it not for Glorfindel, all hope would have been lost."
Glorfindel? "As heroic as ever," Morwinyon said. A legendary hero dwelled in Imladris. She supposed she should not be surprised.
She had fought a dragon, she reminded herself. She was all but lorekeeper for a Dunedain clan. She had nothing to feel inferior about, except that Glorfindel had killed a balrog and she had only blinded a dragon.
Glorfindel had not survived childbirth, though. Glorfindel had actually died with the balrog, even if he had come back. Morwinyon felt better even if she knew it was petty.
Elrohir sent his people back out into the woods and beckoned for Morwinyon and Kíli to follow him.
Her first real look at Imladris was overwhelming. Her father's halls had been grand, all polished roots and torchlight, and Erebor had been full of vaulted halls and sweeping stairs, awe-inspiring in the sheer skill and effort needed to create it. Imladris glowed. The leaves of the trees that appeared to have grown and twisted themselves into dwellings showed all colors of leaves that could possibly exist: the deep, dark green of Mirkwood's towering trees, the reds she saw in autumn farther north, orange, yellow, spring green, every color in between except brown. The trunks themselves were pale and delicate looking even when they merged to form walls and halls and rooms, and the waterfalls that seemed to be everywhere lent a sort of bell-like backdrop to everything, as if music was forever playing. Nothing at all had any sharp edges.
The darkness was all but gone, too. Morwinyon felt only welcome, aside from the shadow sitting like a vanishing aftertaste.
"It's overwhelming still," Kíli said in Khuzdul. Elrohir did not turn, but she had no doubt he was listening intently, trying to puzzle out the dwarf language.
"Yes," Morwinyon agreed, also in Khuzdul, but she did not mean the beauty. The woods and downs of the north had their own beauty and their own welcome, but never had a place felt as if it wanted her to sit and rest and never leave. She was not sure what to make of it. It seemed too soft to be real.
"My father will be glad to see a representative of the Dunedain," Elrohir said, after allowing them a moment to absorb the sight. "He was saddened that they did not come to council."
"None?" Morwinyon asked, frowning. Surely some of the southern clans had sent someone?
"Only Aragorn," Elrohir said. "Gondor sent someone, of course, but the old blood does not run so strong there." She thought he wanted to add something else, but he did not do so.
"I heard that someone declared him," she said.
"He declared himself long ago," Elrohir retorted with surprising heat. "Only no one will come to him. Do you know why?"
Because of you, Morwinyon did not say. Because I am outsider enough, but still they trust me because I have lived and fought with them for nearly sixty years. Because they do not know him, however many times he has gone to battle with Rohan or Gondor. Because he returns so often to Imladris, where some of his kin dwell but not all. Because he has not seen his mother's people for an age.
And possibly because he has no close female relative to introduce him, save an elf they do not know.
"I do not know for sure," she said, lying only little. "I have been sent to know him better."
"For that you will have to speak to my father," Elrohir said, and led them in.
When Morwinyon was four years old and her mother disappeared, Elrond and his family had descended on Mirkwood in a storm of frightening competence and steely gazes. The children, Elrohir, Elladan, and Arwen, had not stayed in Thranduil's halls for long. They had taken a guide each and ridden out to search.
Elrond had stayed, though. For six months he had managed Mirkwood while Thranduil locked himself away with maps and plans and Legolas and Tauriel and Inwiel and Nurchon had gone farther and farther afield, searching for their missing queen.
Morwinyon could not say she had disliked him. She might even have liked him, at the time: She had been four years old, and he had been kind. He had not been her father or brother or mother or Tauriel, but he had been kind, and he had been able to find her when her other minders had thrown up their hands and gone back to other tasks. Many of the stories she knew of Laeriel had come from him, while he sat at a desk and kept her busy while he worked out accounts or written complaints. Then he and his children had left, and she had been alone but for Tauriel in all the ways that counted.
Before that, she knew he had come for a short time after she was born, to congratulate his cousin and make sure mother and child were well. She knew that Elrond had loved Laeriel, and that Laeriel had loved Elrond, and that sometimes people were surprised that they liked each other at all.
"She helped to raise me," Elrond said of Laeriel once, bent over a sloppily written missive while Morwinyon hid under the desk at his feet, arms wrapped around her knees. "I like to think I turned out acceptably, so maybe she was even good at it. Some people think her difficult, but, well. Some people think your father difficult too."
Maybe that was why Morwinyon had always thought of Laeriel a little bit in terms of Tauriel, even when evidence ran to the contrary. She knew now that stories were only part of the whole, and different people could do the same things for different reasons, and Laeriel, who would have chosen war, had hardly at all like Tauriel.
Morwinyon was not sure whether she should expect Elrond to recognize her or not, and she was not sure how she would feel if he did.
As Elrohir led them through the outdoor halls, Morwinyon wondered what they did when it rained. Maybe the sky was not so ill-mannered as to rain on Elrond's people? Out of curiosity she stopped to look out and up, thinking that maybe there was a canopy that could roll over the top, when she caught a glimpse of red hair below.
She always jumped at red hair these days. Even Alia, when Morwinyon was not specifically looking for her, was a surprise when she walked into view.
It was not Alia, obviously, and it was not Tauriel, just as obviously, but the owner of the coppery hair was not unknown to her.
"Kíli," she said, and Kíli followed her gaze.
She supposed they should have considered, when Elrond called a council of all the peoples of Middle Earth, that the dwarves would send someone as venerable as Gloin. He was, after all, a cousin off the direct line of Durin.
"Do you know Gloin?" Elrohir asked too casually, eyes on Kíli.
"Not well," Morwinyon said for both of them, as Kíli smiled tightly at Elrohir. "We know of him, of course."
"I am only curious," Elrohir said. "You do not seem to want to be seen, and you are cousins, after all. If only by marriage."
Morwinyon glared and said, "You were taking us to your father."
"So I was," Elrohir agreed. The rest of the short walk was tense but trouble-free, until Elrohir opened a set of doors with no fanfare and entered.
Morwinyon heard, "Back early? Is all well?" but did not pay attention to Elrohir's reply as she paused in the doorway itself.
Kíli said, "If I will be known you might as well be."
She stepped into the room.
"Welcome," Lord Elrond said, standing himself and coming out from behind his desk. "Forgive my surprise - we had no word of your coming."
"The Lady Mirwen came from the Dunedain clans to examine Estel," Elrohir said. He leaned a hip against the edge of the desk, arms crossed and hood down. She could see his typically Noldorin features now, along with his father's. She could also see his tilted eyebrow, as if he waited for a reaction.
"Mirwen," Elrond repeated, and shook his head. "I am afraid my foster son has departed, my lady. If you would like testaments as to his character-"
"From you?" Morwinyon asked before she could stop herself. She did not mean to be rude, but what exactly did Elrond believe the Dunedain wanted to know that he could tell them?
"From anyone in Rivendell," he said, and she realized he was speaking westron in an effort to include Kíli. "But, forgive me, what name of yours is Mirwen?"
She sighed. Mirwen was more common than Morwinyon, but not by much. She should have used something different, if she had wanted her disguise to last longer.
"My father gave it to me," she said, and reached up to push her hood back and let her hair free - or at least her braids. She should also have undone the braids if she wanted to look more elven, but it had not occurred to her until now. "My mother named me Morwinyon."
Elrond turned around and sat back in his desk chair.