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The Courtship
.
Seven
.
There she was again, slender form slipping without a sound onto the balcony, pale robes in the night breeze, starglow gathering against her hair. One hand raised to her face, brushing aside a few stray locks. At first, he feared that it had been his own pacing that had brought her out from the chamber, but her gaze was turned far-away, apparently unaware of his presence, and he could not see what was in her eyes. As if in a vision the moment stretched softly forever, while he held his breath in silence. Finally, she glanced down.
"Suilad, my lady," said Elrond with an incline of his head, hastily flung-up walls about his mind keeping back the questions.
Celebrían caught her breath, going tense and still for a single instant; she did not recognize me, he thought. But then the light shifted about her, flickered, and something changed in her eyes.
"Wait, please," she said quickly.
In a few minutes she was dressed and downstairs, her footsteps quiet along the garden path and through the patched shadows. She sat down beside him upon the wide smooth boulder. Next to them, a small fountain whispered, glossy with moss beneath the moonbeams.
"Do you never sleep, Master Elrond?" She was smiling, but he knew her far too well, even these days.
"And what of yourself?"
Celebrían did not reply, but merely shook her head, and Elrond pressed her no further.
"I must have inherited it from my mother, this sleeplessness," he said lightly, holding the internal walls in place. Her presence here by his side was solid and true. It was only an illusion but right now she felt close, so close that he could almost pretend that she had never been gone after all, and that all he had to do was reach out. "I've become accustomed to it."
"Your mother," asked Celebrían, voice quiet, "she is Elwing the White, is she not? And your father--Eärendil who sails the skies?"
He must have paused for rather too long a moment, then nodded with a grin.
"Has Lady Galadriel already given away all my secrets?"
"Oh yes, my mother did speak of you--when I was just a girl." Her eyes were agleam once more. "And she was not the only one. Loremaster and warrior, councillor to the King, scion of Lúthien the Fair: in truth I must have known your name, lord, ever since childhood days."
"Alas that you will soon also recall that the tales were all much exaggerated--"
He spoke laughingly, but Celebrían flushed a little.
"I feel a fool for not knowing from the first, Master Elrond."
"Just Elrond," he murmured.
"And although my recollections are few and incomplete still, I know you were there, with my father." She did not speak more of it but of course he knew what she meant. "Thank you."
"You've already thanked me years ago," replied Elrond without thinking. "I am only--"
Only your lover. Only the one with whom you shared a life. Only the one who was not there while you lay in that pit surrounded by orcs and dying slowly.
"Only glad that you are here with me, now."
She smiled. A real smile, neither guarded nor tentative this time.
"So am I, my lord...Elrond. And to know that I will remember you."
Was that a promise in her voice? Was that a promise in her eyes?
"What is it that you do remember?" he asked, before the chance to stop himself. "Not about me, or anything that happened afterwards. Just...tell me something. Please."
"Tell you something?"
"Please. Anything."
Celebrían mused briefly. "I was angry at you," she said. "The news that came to Lóriand was contradictory, and ill for the most part. I was disappointed with the King for not having ridden himself to the city's--and my father's--aid, and frustrated with my own mother for her insistence upon that hard and hopeless thing she called a greater duty. It seemed to me, then, that the King's herald had brought too little help and too late, and I doubted, for the first time I think, everything I had learned in my young life about the wise and the great."
"I see." He knew all this well, surely, as well as he had known his own thoughts. Yet despite himself he was startled, perhaps more by the evenness of her voice than by her words.
"But then other news arrived, and better, though not without many tales of sorrow and sacrifice. And then maybe I began to understand a little better. That much I knew."
"And then?"
Pause. "And then," she answered apologetically.
"I am sorry. I promised not to ask you for more."
"I must have wondered greatly about you, then."
"When I first met you," Elrond began. When I first met you I was lost. "You were extraordinarily kind."
"Oh." Her glance was questioning and familiar, too familiar. "Indeed?"
Elrond nodded. When I first met you I never imagined the world.
"Ah, that is good to hear." For a while they looked at each other, neither having the words. "I will think of this, when the past overcomes me," murmured Celebrían at last. As if sensing the conversation was at an end, she rose.
"Well, good night, then?"
The light of the stars flowed loose about her shoulders while she stood there. Speak no more as it was all for the best.
"Good night."
She turned to go. And then Elrond felt it: the tendril of a presence, a tiny shudder in the air. An echo out of a shadowy and unremembered dream. Don't let go of me. She could not have possibly been aware of it herself, and even he would not have sensed it but for his heart leaping suddenly before his wakeful mind, for it had been many years, five hundred and nineteen since that autumn morning, with the leaves just tinged with cool dew and the travellers already mounted in the courtyard, and her hands in his. It would be only a brief separation, beloved. I will return in spring.
"Celebrían?"
She stopped on the path.
"Would you like to come visit Lórellin with me, sometime? I have--there came to me, rather--the notion of taking a boat out onto the open waters, one of these days. Explore all those green islands, perhaps, and the waves. If my companionship is not uncongenial..."
He stopped, watching the expression of her fair face, heart hanging in the balance like the most foolish of youths.
"I would like it very much, my lord." Her reply came gently, almost shyly. "Elrond," she added.
"Thank you."
"Thank you. I would be honoured."
Elrond shook his head in amused self-deprecation. "Tell me, then, when you wish for it, my lady?"
"Oh, certainly. I will."
"Good night, then?"
"Good night."
"Rest well."
"And you also, lord," Celebrían replied, and he could have sworn the touch of tenderness in her words was no mere imagining of his. He watched her begin to walk away towards the house. But after a few steps she halted, and stood as if an invisible line drew her and held her still, framed beneath the silvery boughs that slanted over the path. Above, the house's windows were lit only with the reflections of the moon and stars. Celebrían hesitated, seemingly troubled and reluctant to return. Slowly, she turned around and faced him again.
"How about right now?" she asked.
Elrond grinned. It was a quick walk down the trail that led to the lake, and when it divided at the shore, they took the other branch, away from the woods. After a while, they came upon a little dock extending into Lórellin's bright mirror, where a few boats lay moored, bobbing in gentle rhythm. Celebrían chose a small skiff, the ropes were loosed, and the dark shores fell back behind them.
"Elrond?"
A pair of egrets, started by the sound of the oars, flapped away into the mist. The boat glided on, slicing through a rustling patch of new water lilies, and the heavens spread wide over their heads. Celebrían was the first to break their now companionable silence.
"Will you--tell me something of yourself?"
Elrond raised his eyebrows. There was something in that expression, the thought brushed across her mind, something there she could have come close to recognizing.
"It's my turn now, I suppose?" he asked mildly.
"Oh, perhaps." A bit sheepishly, Celebrían nodded with a slight grin. "Please."
Leaning back against the oars, Elrond considered.
"Up there," he said, pointing with one hand at a corner of the sky. "You know, whatever he saw on his journeys, my father would never say. I wonder if he's looking at us right now."
Celebrían, too, lifted her face.
"Eärendil...The brightest, jewel of the world."
"It is a mere speck, a pinprick in the darkness, yet in places the only light." The way Elrond spoke, it was as if he was reciting the words from memory, or maybe they were rising to him on their own. "My father said this to me once, when I first came across the sea to Aman. We spoke long into the night, that time. You see, he--" He shook his head, looking again across the boat at her. "He--and my mother, too, there were so many things they wished to tell me, to explain, but--"
After a while, she prompted in a gentle voice, "But?"
"But they never needed to explain any of it at all," answered Elrond very quietly.
Celebrían reached forward to touch him, then stopped herself in mid-movement. She turned her head. To the east, the sky was already fading, its edge pale-tinted with milky clouds.
"There," she said, hoping to cover her embarrassment. "Look."
The island, with its dark crown of forest, loomed before them suddenly, though they must have been approaching it for a while. The sky and waters were mingling in the half-glow before daybreak; reflections stirred and glistened as if just about to wake. Noiselessly, a flock of snowy-white birds burst from the treetops, and was gone.
They tied the boat to a willow bent over the water, and sat on the bank. As everywhere in these Gardens, there was a far-away hint of nightingales in the air. Elrond laid back, long limbs stretched out on the grass.
As she watched him, Celebrían could see the tension palpably leaving his shoulders. He was still, staring out into the distance, yet it appeared to her that he was also walking away from her, walking into another place. It must have been a place far in the past, she thought, for his eyes were warm with some fair vision that she could not glimpse.
And then there it was, the memory. She saw Elrond next to her on the little isle, Lórellin all about them vast and veiled in dawn, but at the same time the shore of the lake was the green slope of a mid-summer hill, and she saw him lying with his head against her lap, fast asleep. Somewhere, someone was humming a tune, low and serene and clear with joy. It was her own voice, she realized after an endless heartbeat. She gazed down at Elrond. His hair flowed away from her and spread black against the asters, and the glorious sunlight danced about his face.
He was smiling in his dreams.
Leaning over, Celebrían laid a hand lightly on Elrond's shoulder.
"Look," she whispered, "the sun is rising."
"Ríanna..."
The word came so softly that she might not have heard it. Elrond blinked, the focus of his eyes returning to her as he stepped out of distant paths and back to the present. He stood up, facing the newborn day.
He was a few paces away and so near that it made her heart flutter. It was just the same as what she had felt that first night they met, standing at the door of her chamber by candlelight: as if the waves of a hidden sea had suddenly welled up against her, almost within reach, pressing and calling. But of their words she could decipher nothing.
Taking the hand Elrond offered, she let him pull her up to her feet. Everywhere, the silence of the morning was ablaze with the songs of birds. Celebrían drew a deep breath. The time has come, a voice from nowhere said inside her head.
"Who are you, Elrond?" she asked.