This land is gone. I can find no other words.`Only adverbs come to my tongue, warlike and coarse as any corsair.
Blackly, bleakly, brutally. Desolately, damnably, disenchantingly. Irreverently, irreparably, irretrievably.
If we cannot even arrange conjunctions and particles and verbs in a new order, how do we go about touching the grammar of lives?
I kneel at the cliffs' edge, parchments folded across my skirt, the wind spattering drips from my quill. Sea-mist surrounds me, nestling droplets in my tangling unbound hair.
Sometimes where we order words is as important as how. And how is only as important as why.
I am a writer, and I know this is truth. It is what I live.
Not that I know what else I live, but I know words. And war, but that's been mentioned already as redundant.
I've known fear and pain and scars and the grim consuming of impossible hope all my life, and suddenly the cause is gone. There is more to do than ever, but I do not recognise my duty in this world.
After so many have fallen, surely I survive for more reason than an unfair allocation of guards to Her Highness.
Ulmo, I hear your roar through me, beating this cliff again and again. What is to be my rock I beat upon? What will draw my strength back again and again? Where is my duty, that in following it I might find myself?
The parchments were delivered to my father after dinner, as my mother suggested a week ago. I watched his eyebrows work laterally as he made his way through my Sindarin.
"Fanciful, Lothiriel."
I nodded. Of course.
"Seven days of sea fog and wind seems to have produced little more than a- distracted state of mind in you. Or is it the stress speaking, now that you are finally resting?"
I stretched back in my chair, listening to the haze of noise my brothers were making in the adjacent room. "No. That is my true and honest seeking of direction, as you desired, and my true and unaddled results."
My mother lifted the stained and dampened sheets from under my father's arm. "Sweetheart," she muttered at the truncated tangle of script.
Through the open door Erchirion raised his voice in admonition.
"What's Amrothos done now?" I called. As Mother laid the parchment down again, I concentrated on how many patterns my thumbnail could make against the grooves of the table carvings. "Let me help," I say, determined, pulse battering just under my skin.
"Daughter. You have done an admirable work over the last years: freed up warriors to join the fighting, saved lives. You stood strong when you were called upon, but I release you from the call. It is ended, Lothiriel, and I want you to decide where you will go next."
He told me the same a week ago.
"This does not appear to be a decision," Mother said.
My even, careful statements went out the window. "I truly don't know!" I cried out. "Elphir is learning to take your role, Erch is dedicated to his Houses of Healing. Even Amrothos is excelling now in his coast patrol and training of young recruits."
Creasing his collar upright again, Father scraped under his chin and sighed. "It's impossible to word this any way that you won't misconstrue."
"You're a woman, Lothy. You are too young to think about marrying off, but that doesn't open pathways of equal responsibility as those you have become accustomed to, or those of your brothers. It doesn't necessitate that responsibility." Mother squeezed my hand across the table. "Try helping in the organisation with me. The charity work. The gardens."
"Mother, I have all the respect in Arda for your work, but I-" I stopped. I was the one who couldn't produce a list of aspirations. How can I explain the bigness of a soul, the miss of the match between what I truly yearn to achieve and what I am permitted to do? My writing of words is for that.
Erchirion's voice again preceded Amrothos' hasty return into the dining hall, and he pulled himself up in the chair next to mine. "So, busy, where are you off to?"
As he said the words it occurred to me like the music to the Ainur.
I cross my legs under my skirt and fork hair away from my temples with two fingers. "Rohan."
Amrothos nods, but a smirk slides across his face. "They're in tight times. I don't know if they'd love feeding a fussy besotted Southern princess."
"As a labourer." I square eyes with first Mother, then Father. "Let it be a symbol of goodwill, that though the North may send their brightest women into battle, the South will return their own in times of labouring."
"And if your own people are offended, state that the Princess Lothiriel is gone for the purpose of courting the great Northern king, having fallen desperately in love during a meeting in the stables of Gondor." Amrothos winked even as he guffawed at himself.
Mother smacked his ear with her fan. "Not the stables, you indecent sailor. A long and languorous dance at the Telcontars' wedding."
"I did see Lothiriel looking a little swoonish," Father said with a slight smile.
Elphir and Erchirion appeared in the lit doorway. "Lothy and Eomer? Surely not!" Elphir cries, and Erchirion has gravity folded from his forehead to his chin.
I fall forwards onto my arms crossed on the table. Brothers. Although I no such intentions whatsoever, my cheeks betray acknowledgement of attractiveness. He's far too old, but he is strong.
"We jest, my sons," Father said, and it seems to have calmed them before they declared war.
"But Lothy is set on travelling to Rohan, as labour in place of their fallen men," Amrothos added. "Isn't that clearly the result of a love-scrambled head?"
"I am good with horses, and not small for a woman. My reputation, even in affected courtship, would be safe due to the concentration of females I would work with. And- oh, let me go, Father, Mother."
Inside me the fields of the horselords filled with the longing of Valinor. Every search and prayer seemed to join in this offhand thought flying from my brother's erratic whirlwind of a brain. "Please."
Our parents rose from the table and clasped hands. "We will talk of it," Father said, nodding in decision.
Before Mother's gliding steps and Father's long-legged limp reached the door, Mother turned. "But have hope, daughter. We would do much to see you always lit with the life you just were."
"It remains to be seen whether labouring can be considered as resting. Or doing something you enjoy." Father muttered.
"Love can be," Amrothos whispered loud enough for Eomer himself to discern all the way to the Mark.
